The Government shows the light at the end of the tunnel to approve the Statute of the Artist
The Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, and the Second Vice President of the Government and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, have appeared this Wednesday at a press conference to take stock of the work being carried out by the Interministerial Commission for Development of the Statute of the Artist. "Our laws are designed with a generalist nature and it is time to introduce that specificity into our legislation," said the head of the culture portfolio before giving way to Díaz to compile some of the elements discussed at that meeting.
Among other aspects, the Minister of Labor has pointed out that the first measure will be to modify Royal Decree 1435/1985 that regulates the special employment relationship of artists in shows to adapt it to the new ways of fixing work in the digital environment, combat abuses of temporary hiring and false self-employed workers. The commitment is that in January 2022 there will be a draft text whose content will be discussed with the entire sector.
The plan establishes that the measures of the Statute of the artist are approved before December 31, 2022, but in the meantime, according to Iceta, certain measures of an urgent nature were going to be approved. Asked about this by this newspaper, in order to know what regulations will be the next to be approved, the Minister of Culture has stressed that "the revision of a royal decree of 1985 is the most relevant" and that there is a correlate of this measure that are the consequences that they have at the level of social security for artists. "It is difficult for me to say what will be prioritized because it seems that other issues will be forgotten, but labor and social security aspects are probably the most urgent," added Iceta.
Díaz has pointed out other elements addressed in that Commission. For example, adapting the concepts of public shows to new forms of performance and the digital market, providing greater security for workers in public shows, delimiting legislation to avoid the proliferation of false self-employed workers (with special mention of public administrations) or the expansion of the SEPE training catalog in relation to the demands of the cultural sector. These are just some of the 75 points of the Statute that are mostly waiting to be validated. The next Interministerial Commission will take place in February and is expected to detail progress on these issues.
The Interministerial Commission to which the minister refers is divided into four working groups: fiscal, labor, social security and education, each of them coordinated between the Ministry of Culture and with the ministries that are responsible for the matter. That is to say: Treasury, Social Security, Work, Universities and Education.
The formalization of the Statute of the Artist has been suffering delays since 2018, after its unanimous approval in the Congress of Deputies, as Yolanda Díaz herself recalled at the beginning of the press conference. All this despite the fact that, according to Rodriguez Uribes, former Minister of Culture, it was "a compromise" of his legislature.
The arrival of Miquel Iceta to the ministry restored hope to a sector, that of artists, which has seen how their demands have been aggravated by the coronavirus crisis. If it was already urgent to address aspects such as the compatibility of copyright with the retirement pension, the temporality or the economic crisis, after the pandemic these have become a matter of first necessity.
