Iceta gives a period of one year for all the measures of the Artist Statute to come into force

The Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, chaired this Wednesday the first meeting of the Interministerial Commission to address one of the major pending accounts in the sector: the Statute of the Artist, delayed since 2018 after unanimous approval in the Congress of the Deputies. "The plan establishes that the measures are approved on December 31, 2022, which requires a significant effort," said the politician about the 76 points of the project that most of them wait to be validated.

Even so, although there is a deadline for the approval of all the measures, Iceta has clarified after being asked at a press conference by elDiario.es that they are not "going to wait for an Artist Statute that contemplates everything down to the last detail ", but they will" be operating according to the urgency and severity of the problems. "

The minister has indicated that this Interministerial Commission will be divided into four working groups: fiscal, labor, social security and education, each of them coordinated between the Ministry of Culture and each of the ministries that are responsible for the matter. That is to say: Finance, Work and Education.

One of the great demands of the cultural industry is the protection of vulnerable groups with seasonal unemployment, such as sound technicians at summer music festivals. When asked by this newspaper if any concrete measure has been studied to solve the problem, the Minister of Culture has indicated that it will be one of the issues indicated by the representative of the Ministry of Labor and that it will be undertaken in the working group of labor legislation. "What I cannot commit to is a date," he concluded.

With all this, Iceta has pointed out that from the ministry they want to "attend to the needs that have been transmitted to us and that can be satisfied through cultural industries with strength and adequately protected".

The commission's objective is to address the different creative and productive peculiarities of workers in the sector, such as the compatibility of copyright with the retirement pension, the temporary nature or the economic crisis of the sector derived from the sanitation. "The year 2022 will be the year of cultural rebirth. There has been a pandemic that has weakened us precisely when many have found refuge in culture," the politician stressed.