Festival work is an experience provided by experience-makers, framed by informal practical learning and ideas about gaining social capital. It is, however, also facilitated by institutions such as formal education and modern law. As this chapter hopes to demonstrate, their interrelations at the intersection with labor markets and work organizations contribute to the spread of nonprofit labor. I narrow my exploratory discussion to specific changes to higher education as well as employment and nonprofit law and the way they channel and regulate the value of volunteering. Higher-education institutions practically do so by re-organizing students’ curricula to the extent that volunteering in nonprofit organizations and internships in both business and nonprofit organizations emerge as regular elements in educational and occupational trajectories. I also address the law, which has been pointed out as a neglected in Reckwitz’s work, including not only law but more broadly, administration, state, and bureaucracy (Berthold Vogel in Soziopolis, 2017–2018).
My empirical analysis is limited to the scrutiny of English and German law to show how the boundary between a volunteer and a wage worker is drawn by legal-rational means.1 Remuneration is regulated by the law in various ways, as this chapter will demonstrate. An important tool is the ‘volunteer agreement’, which underlines commitment where a ‘contract’ cannot be offered. The literature on nonprofit organizations typically tackles the non-distribution rule for nonprofit organizations (the barring from profiteering) and the associational character when it comes to law. I continue focusing on the commitment-compensation nexus, exploring rewards and limits to exchange and gift-economic forms.2 I begin with the legal institutional environment, continue with policy-making on unpaid labor, and discuss higher education practices that shape the experience value of unpaid labor for future labor-market entrants. The last section of this chapter revisits the subjective meanings of volunteering in festival workforce (Chapter 8), exploring the correspondence
1 Legal Boundary-Making of the Volunteer and the Question of Compensation
At time of data collection for this chapter (2006–2008), Britain and Germany seemed particularly promising bases for the study of nonprofit law and remuneration because in both, public controversies on internships (in political bureaus and media-industry jobs in Britain, and more broadly across German industries) were held. The following discussion aims to show how a volunteer can work and thus become labor, without being recognized as an employee who by definition must receive compensation. This situation refers to formal volunteering and concerns a more general problem of nonprofit organizations that have been providing services in what is now commonly recognized as ‘mixed economies’ (Mitchell, 2006). Work legislation is, of course, much broader and more complex than compensation, including legal provision on things such as health insurance, old-age security, and anti-discrimination regulation. Regulation of remuneration is the most crucial question of labor in capitalism and the most basic form of tangible support which artists, creatives, and cultural workers pursue in economic life.
1.1 The Intern and the Volunteer in English and German Law
In Britain, a single piece of legislation, the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 (hereafter: nmwa), provides the legal frame by which interns and volunteers are approached as labor inputs for organizations (gov.UK, 2022). Section 1 of the nmwa states that an individual who is a ‘worker’ must be remunerated for her work at a rate equal or above the national minimum wage (hereafter: nmw). Therefore, legally speaking, unpaid working individuals in formal organizations such as film festivals are not regarded as workers. The nmwa exempts ‘voluntary work’ in specifically listed charitable organizations from this rule. It also exempts interns who work to obtain work experience, as long as this activity is required as component of a higher-education degree course.
The German law provides legally for two social forms equivalent to this particular intern regulation— ‘das Praktikum’ und ‘das Voluntariat’. A third form is ‘das Ehrenamt’, which during the last years of the Merkel Government has made a renaissance appearance in the management of refugee immigration. In German law, the two first forms, are legally provided for. The Praktikum is a special case of the Volontariat. The Volontariat’s development in the law, its
With respect to German law, voluntary aid or civic engagement (Freiwillige) is not a legal term, but commonly means the same as the Ehrenamt in terms of the practice (Eller, 2013). The legal profession’s commentary has little concern for these social forms (Sullivan, 2000). The increasing role of education as supplementary and as complementary, as sometimes argued, in those social forms has not only supported the capacity of nonprofits to become powerful actors in organizational fields. It also has proven as a game changer for educational institutions, which could redefine their relationships with economic sectors and firms—an important condition for the entry of festivals into intermediation positions. To make the legal complexity more accessible, I discuss the English followed by the German legal setting, and I start with volunteering followed by internship in both sections.
1.2 Volunteering and the English Law
The nmwa defines the ‘voluntary worker’ as a special case. Section 54 (3) of the act, where the term ‘worker’ labels a person who holds an employment contract, the law implies that unpaid work is legal only when there is no contract of employment.3 This situation enables two different contracts for work in the same organization and in similar (if not identical) work roles. One is the employment contract regulated by national law, the second the ‘volunteering agreement’, which is a common formalized relationship observed in many film festivals across the world. Remuneration serves as the boundary, which volunteers can quite easily and unknowingly cross, as legal and court-decision discussions on workplace disputes and their respective litigation for English charities have brought to light (European Volunteer Centre, 2005, p. 5). The
The tripartite test defines whether a contract which can be considered as legally valid exists, which in the positive case would grant certain rights and duties under the employment provisions. The test includes three conditions necessary and conjointly sufficient to declare such a contract to exist: firstly, an ‘offer and acceptance’ leading to an agreement; secondly, the ‘contractual intention’; thirdly, the requirement of a ‘consideration’. The consideration is the reason of a contractual relationship to exist, constituting quid pro quo; but even mutual promises by the involved parties lead to the assumption of a contractual relationship. If all three conditions are found to be present, compensation must occur. This underlines that a volunteer agreement is a non-contractual proposition which cannot be enforced legally.
I’ve sacked about one person a year and I’ve only ever sacked them in the Audience Awards or Audience Reports [work—a.v.] areas because
British festival personnel managerI can afford to lose them there and it would be, for example, someone who never came to either of the two training’s […] and then turned up for the next meeting which included a film and a bit of a social and when we said to him ‘You didn’t come for the trainings, I’m sorry, you know, you’re sacked’. He was really upset because he had never understood the, just […] coming to the trainings, and, that spoke volumes as well. But I mean also, perhaps I hadn’t communicated it seriously enough, but, and he was, he was pleading with us that he would do everything right after that, and I said ‘It’s only eleven days and we can’t …, the only evidence I have to go on is this’ and he was really, he couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t believe you could sack a volunteer!
I think we are a means to an end and they’re gaining from us someone to work for free and we’re gaining from them, what one has to do, if there’s no real training from it.
British festival intern
Reciprocity, as Kenneth Boulding writes, “tend[s] to slip over into exchange and very frequently is formalized as exchange, in which case it often loses its integrative aspect” (1972). This boundary between a labor-market exchange and a ‘gift economy’ must be maintained, and in the UK’s nonprofit law, the ‘consideration’ as third condition of the tripartite test in English contract law responds to this problem as it concerns “any benefit received on one side or any cost suffered by the other side of a relationship” (European Volunteer Centre, 2005, p. 7). This element of the test covers more than pecuniary value and includes items which, by observation, many film festivals provide routinely for
Furthermore, in English law, there is also a ‘voluntary worker’ which as an exempted case comes under a separate section of the nmwa, i.e., Section 44. The first condition is that the individual must be employed by a charity, a voluntary organization, an associated fund-raising body, or a statutory body which is listed by the law-maker. Once again, we find a regulatory feature that prevents reciprocity to slip into exchange. This second condition refers to the voluntary worker having a highly restricted range of expense reimbursements, in-kind benefits and /or subsistence payments (nmwa, pp. sec. 44 (41–43)). With this exemption, the English law defines a hybrid subject, someone who is employed in a charity, compensated but not waged, and presumably charitably motivated or exposed to such values as part of organizational membership.
1.3 Volunteering and the German Law
About ten years ago the volunteer was not a legal phenomenon, which is peculiar in the context of Germany’s lively associational tradition. According to this legal situation, as long as the parties in a volunteering relationship act without a contractual intention (or an exchange intention), the relationship is licit—yet, falling outside regulation. Should dispute between a charity and a volunteer arise, German legal experts can potentially draw on three specific situations that the national law considers, leading to potential arguments. The first is ‘doing someone a favor’ (Gefälligkeitsverhältnis); the second is that German law equates ‘contractual intention’ (one of the conditions of the English law’s test) with the existence of a legally binding contract. And, also contrasting with English law, the German law does not see the ‘consideration’ a prerequisite for a contract. However, ‘consideration’ does influence the interpretation of the type of contract.
German law provides for contracts as single-sided obligations or incomplete reciprocal contracts (Palandt et al., 2006). An example of such a contract is the mandate, or ‘Auftrag’, in which one party of the contract authorizes and obliges the other party to execute a task on its behalf (Beuthin, 2000). The mandate is the legal foundation of the Ehrenamt, literally an ‘honorary office’. Like the typical altruistic volunteer, the authorized party of the mandate does not receive remuneration for time and effort spent. German Civil Code,
Like in English law, the German Civil Code, specifically § 611 Sec. 1, regards the employment contract as an exchange contract, with the contractual party obliging herself to remunerate in exchange for the services of the contractual party (Bundesministerium der Justiz, 2022a). Like English law, German law does not consider the reimbursement of exact expenses as a ‘remuneration’ (see Eller, 2013, p. 896). In Germany remuneration also extends to any payment. Thus, volunteer rewards as a common practice in festivals is legally problematic in both countries. Minimum wage was introduced in Germany only in 2014. Prior to that, there was no similar entitlement for the German volunteer even where a contract of employment existed—which, however, was pointless as there was no general floor to remuneration in the German system. The judiciary merely takes corrective action in exceptional cases of wage agreements considered as unethical by the plaintiff, such as in cases when a wage offer appears to be extremely low when compared to the wage level that typically is an outcome of tariff negotiation.
This leaves those in unpaid charitable work with the positive formulation of a volunteer as altruist in Germany’s legal code. German law has a more flexible contract law which provides indirectly for the social form to prosper, but it can be speculated that the absence of a clearly regulated volunteer work form may be a source of undervaluation of the volunteer in Germany. A British nonprofit organization that engages volunteers is restricted by a set of vague and complex rules when drafting an agreement, whereas a German organization is left with far more room to find appropriate case-by-case solutions to engage volunteers and stay within the law. In the British case, regulation of volunteering has increased, possibly in form of re-regulation to address complaints. But the effort to rule out that (regulated) charities bypass the Section 44 of the nmwa also narrows the opportunities for charities to reward their volunteers. This discussion underlines that the German volunteer as legal form is not in the scope of employment legislation. What is interesting about this situation is the immense spread of volunteered work in countries with starkly different institutional settings (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001).
1.4 Internship in English and German Law
Internships are common across public, nonprofit, and private business contexts. Compensation matters for interns are straightforward in the English law. According to the nmwa, regulation 12 (8), (National Minimum Wage
The classical case is a business owner’s son being sent to a friend’s company to gain knowledge before entering the family business. This provision defines the ‘Volontär’, who engages in voluntary activities in order to gain experience, which was not considered as requiring remuneration. In 1969, a federal-level vocational training law, the ‘Berufsbildungsgesetz’ (‘BBiG’), came into being normalizing the ‘Volontariat’ as a matter of trade skilling into a few sectors, including some of the early cultural-creative industries like publishing and the media. This law, supporting the cultural elites in creating access to desirable work positions, is also the legal font of Germany’s unique dual vocational training system. The current flurry of volunteering needs to be reconstructed from this legal source to provide a foundation for the discussion of creativity ideology, educational facilitation of practical experience, and the legal framework for the expansion of arts/cultural nonprofit work worlds.
In Germany, the aforementioned BBiG regulates the trainee (‘die Auszubildende’) and overwhelmingly industry-specific craft skills for legally recognized trade occupations (‘Fachausbildung’) which require a final exam. Unlike the Voluntär, the trainee acquires formal occupational education. German internships take the form of either Voluntariat or Praktikum. Because the Voluntariat is legally speaking not an employment relationship, the convention in legal practice is to apply the BBiG to the internship definition. In this sense, BBiG applies broadly to someone working to acquire occupational knowledge without undertaking formal education and without the agreement of an employment relationship (Section 26 bbg; Schaub et al., 2004, p. 126; Schmidt, 1971, p. 622). Stressing the educational aspect in the Volontär, who seeks for herself practical experience, the BBiG requires her to be reasonably compensated for her time contributed in form of an allowance. The Praktikant is a different case, as she is required to complete practical training as part of her occupational or academic degree qualification (Rischar, 2004, p. 281 and 288; Schmidt, 1971, p. 622). The BBiG applies generally to the Praktikant and the Praktikum (Section 26 bbg), but because the actvity is considered formal training, additional laws come into play. Because education is regulated at the state level in Germany, state law takes priority over federal-level vocational training
The unpaid Praktikum reflects broader societal changes to employment patterns and work organizations, and a broad uptake in such work roles in many industries. This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of ‘Generation Praktikum’ have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007; Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010; Vallas, 2015).
2 Volunteering as Policy Instrument and the Higher-Education Interest
Oh yeah, absolutely, I also post [the vacancies—a.v.] at some schools, the [public relations] School actually does posting for us, and then we ask for a resume or a statement of interest with relevant experience and then we actually interview people for these positions which, when I moved here, I was blown away by that, I was like, you interview for non-paying positions? But the festival has grown and has earned such a reputation that sometimes for certain positions there’s like five people that are interested, and what do you do, you’ve gotta meet them if their resume looks good, then a lot of them stay on, you know, year after year. Some of them don’t, we always contact them first to see if they’re interested, the ones
American festival directorthat stay on the most are house managers, that’s a short time span. You know they work a lot during the festival, a couple of weeks before, they do trainings and stuff.
My line was always, if they need labor, talk to me and I will find students to do whatever they want, an excellent opportunity for students to get some experience in arts administration, but also simply to get themselves known around town and [finding out] how … culture works at the institutional level.
Australian film school professor
Such a deal would involve university-side provision of insurance for the students but also the year-round production of a festival newsletter by the students to garner the attention of industry, government, and the public. My observations in a prestigious Chinese film festival revealed hundreds of students from English-language departments being deployed for subtitle production regarding films screened during the event, which is run annually with nearly one-thousand volunteers and just over twenty staff on annual contracts. The festival hires routinely entire student cohorts and has done so for well over fifteen years. The festival subsidizes these students’ transportation and meals via basic allowances and gets them as rewards T-shirts and a certificate recognizing their ‘hard work’, as the manager conveyed. She also told me that ‘we acknowledge them in a volunteer list published in the newspapers thanking for their help at the film festival’ (interview transcript).
Well, as with all government agencies, it takes some time to understand what they are on with their initiatives. It took me ages to understand. I think what we would like to be is an official training entity and these are the areas that we said we can do. […] I was just trying to save money because they would pay people to work here. Probably only three or four people. But I also feel very strongly that we are an absolutely strong resource to the industry in terms of training.
Yes, no, what I mean is that being here is an enormous training process. People learn about the film industry, not just about seeing a movie, and saying I want to be a producer, a director, want to be a writer. The traditional wannabees. And they come, if they get a job, they learn about that other things exist. They learn about the relationship between these things, they learn about all the imperatives about the industry, it makes people freak out, they learn about what’s very important, and that helps them learn about the business of film.
British festival manager
The inspection of volunteering as a confluence of interests broadly defined by industry, employment, education, and the law demonstrates that practical work experience has left the semantic realm of traditional craft and trade skilling which would lead to firm membership in a group that is identifiable by its occupational trajectory and mechanisms of self-representation and social closure. Volunteering and internships have evolved as an experience format, which is normalized in the intertwined discourses of global civil society, active citizenship and a new labor market-oriented agenda of higher-education management that aggressively touts the notion that academic training is incomplete unless complemented by practical work experience. In the cinema field, the outcome of such confluences show in the evident structural links between for-profit and non-profit enterprises.
Furthermore, the role of government must be elucidated, as the nonprofit subsidization of for-profit organizations is part of a discursive structure which interlinks civil society politics with employment politics. To provide just a few pointers, under the UN’s Global Compact (United Nations General Assembly, 2001) and—as far as Europe is concerned—under regional policy strategy volunteering has been encouraged. In Europe, volunteering has been recognized as remedy to youth unemployment and regarding academic unemployment, for slowing down the excess supply to creative labor markets. A European
Volunteers can accumulate important experience and knowledge which is in demand in the labor market and build up a network of contacts … volunteers can also acquire key competences and knowledge in areas like publicity, communications, self-expression, social skills, management and vocational training. They have the opportunity to try out various social roles, to learn to make the right decisions, to solve problems, to assimilate a work culture and to demonstrate their sense of justice and leadership qualities. Voluntary activity can form an important part of a person’s cv and career. Voluntary activities are thus an important instrument of non-formal and informal learning that complement formal learning, education and training. They may also enhance employability, particularly of young people.
European Commission, 2006, p. 11
‘Experiential education’ has speedily become a curriculum component across the global higher-education sector (Leonard et al., 2016; Mayer & Solga, 2008). In the UK, the coalition government of 2010–2015 created volunteering opportunities when promoting the ‘Big Society’ agenda in the wake of the privatization of public services (Dean, 2016). These policy goals have been met with criticism. British protest, for example, focused on internship conditions in the UK Parliament as well as in the media industries (Blair et al., 2003; Blair & Rainnie, 2000; Dex et al., 2000). Similarly, the ‘intern economy’ of the ‘glamour industries of media and politics’ in the US (Frank, 2003; Frederick, 2003) was revealed.
It was the legal literature on uncompensated student workers, however, which shed light on a dimension additional to ‘mission creep’ in higher education. As David Yamada discusses with available US figures from the 1980s, college-graduates’ internship numbers jumped from 1 in 36 to 1 in 3 (2002, p. 217). The ‘intern economy’ was fueled by the steep rise in tuition and subsequent loan debt which resulted in demand for internships with low pay offered. This causal chain is also prominent for at least the United Kingdom. In Germany, where tuition does not exist, higher-education institutions have emulated the model of the intern economy in another way, as they have substantially replaced workforce with student workers who staff many important technical units of the universities (as do citizens who, similar to museum volunteers, help keep research libraries open on the weekends). While these initiatives can be read as laudable policies to foster the active citizen and
More generally, however, there has been evidence from several countries that pay attention to the spreading of social inequalities in the wake of such fundamental structural interlinkages between labor markets, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions and what can be broadly considered ‘the democratization’ of the volunteer experience. The latter is not a mean feat by elites in light of the historical alignment of charitable work with care work and can be interpreted within Reckwitz’s theory as partial incorporation of charitable forms into the creativity dispositif as well as participation in the production of singularities. This ‘alliance’, which provides only for positive connotations of the work experience, masks what some have detected as matters of unequal access to opportunities and unequal socialization into a philanthropic habitus (Dean, 2016; Freeman, 1997; Johnson & Mortimer, 2011, p. 1243), revealing that the volunteer ethos is more likely fostered by parents with middle-class background, compared to lower-class parents. In a study of environmental nonprofit work, Pauline Leonard and co-authors (2016) observe that in times of lesser labor market opportunities nonprofit organizations disproportionally invite more elite students to the jobs and ‘show off’ with their volunteer intake to the funders of the organization.
Clare Holdsworth and Jocey Quinn (2010)’s study of English student community engagement provides the valuable insight into the close link between social policy, specifically the shift of welfare provision away from the state to non-statutory agencies and individuals, nonprofits and higher-education institutions in communal and regional development. They observe that it squeezes out political activism, because students emulate a language that de-emphasizes social conflict and inequality. This type of service learning is prevalent in the entire UK, Australia, the United States, Kenya, South Africa and many other countries. Holdsworth and Quinn point out that students replace what could be communal jobs and jobs for those who live in the area, that higher-education institutions make service-learning mandatory in curricula and therefore challenge the notion of volunteered contributions as well as argue that this cause-related volunteering also has the potential to normalize young people to social inequalities. The fact that a national framework for youth action and engagement (2010, pp. 113–114) provides for incorporation of this kind of work and the work form into economic regeneration projects
3 The Experience Value of Unpaid Festival Work
The information presented in the following pages was collected in European and Australian film festivals, probing into the utility of the festival from the workers’ perspective in the institutional contexts inspected above. Using the responses to an open-ended question about the benefit of the experience ‘in the long run’ and a question specific to the perceived relationship between the engagement and future gainful employment, the responses can be seen to fall into three dominant patterns of perceived value: networking, skills, and arts and pleasure. What could not be partitioned out fully in this exercise is the understanding of the art experience as a craft versus a public experience (owing to my failure of clarification during interview). Therefore, the analysis cannot separate arts from pleasure, or ‘serious art’ interest from art for leisure consumption. The data in the following table are summarized by using the ‘career directness’ measure introduced in Chapter 8.
Australian and European festival workers’ understandings of benefits derived from volunteering, n = 69 (author’s research)
Networking for job opportunities |
Work experience and portfolio addition |
Arts, pleasure, and social relations |
Row totals |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
By age group: |
||||
19–24 |
2 |
13 |
11 |
26 |
25–34 |
6 |
10 |
14 |
30 |
35 and older |
2 |
3 |
8 |
13 |
Column totals |
10 |
26 |
33 |
69 |
By career directedness: |
||||
Film/arts careerist |
5 |
13 |
9 |
27 |
Experimenter |
2 |
10 |
9 |
21 |
Non-arts careerist |
3 |
5 |
8 |
|
Drifter |
3 |
10 |
13 |
|
Column totals |
10 |
26 |
33 |
69 |
[Q: Do you think that volunteering will help them get a better job in the paid-work world?] They do. Especially with art jobs, they get connections, they meet people, and they know people. Which is very important, because it’s, uh, the structure of the art jobs is not like other jobs, were you have advertisements in newspapers, they are looking for someone. Many, many of the jobs are just connections.
German festival manager
[Q: Do you think that volunteering will help you get a better job in the paid-work world?] On top of that, you don’t get anywhere without experience and if you can’t get a job due to lack of experience, how can you get experience if you don’t volunteer. —Intern in a British festival
Uh, I think it’ll help me get, get me in my first job, and then, once I’ve got that, it’ll be the jobs that I’ve had, but I think that definitely, well, fingers crossed anyway, for getting my first job it’ll be good that I’ve had this experience.
Intern in a British festival
[Q: Why do you think that this time spent volunteering at the Film Festival will help you in the long run?] I just love films and I love the fact that I’m able to actually, you know, that social connection, meeting with people, the fact that there is a variety of films of different countries and I like the sense of togetherness here, when people from different walks of life [come together] and share the same interests. For me, that’s just great. —Australian festival volunteer
Well, you see some famous faces and stuff… I don’t know. I’ve really enjoyed it.
British festival volunteer
[Q: Do you think that volunteering will help you get a better job in the paid-work world?] I do, yes. I think in the US it definitely affects more, I’d say, like people respect volunteer jobs more. I think that’s something that I’ve noticed that if you have … As I was saying I think a volunteer job in your resume weighs more in the US than here. [Q: Is that just Finland do you think, or Europe?] I have no idea. I’ve haven’t worked anywhere else [in Europe] or I don’t know the culture, but here I’d say it’s more, well somehow, it’s not regarded as important, but I do put my volunteer jobs in my resume as well, it kind of gives a sense of my orientation in a way, what I’m interested in. But it says more about my orientation than the fact that I’m a volunteering person or a person who likes to do volunteer work.
Finnish volunteer
It shows it’s something you really want to do if you’re willing to.
Intern in a British festival
US American-British volunteer in a British festival
[Q: … How do you think this will help you in the long run? Just because people keep asking you?] I mean, I think they keep asking, just to get to know, what kind of personality, what kind of person you are. What have you got inside—apart from all your studies, because you might have ten PhDs, or something, but you’d still be a bad person. So, I think it’s more than that, to dig inside you, and get to know your character. I mean volunteer, that’s the fashion … but I mean, if you say, I’ve been volunteering for this and this and that, it shows your character, what you are willing to sacrifice, to help. Or what you are willing to do in order to make people happy. You never, you don’t get your pay, because some people, they are just like the donkey, following the carrot: if I get paid, I do it, otherwise, I won’t. All right, that’s fine, that’s fair enough, but some people are no, I just want things happening.
Because it’s an investment in myself. The stuff they’re letting me do is more than I would be getting for a paid job […] And I didn’t know, before I started, that that’s what it would be, but it’s better to be working somewhere you want to work, even if it’s for free, than working somewhere you don’t want to work, or moving kind of backwards.
British festival intern
[Q: Do you think that volunteering will help you get a better job in the paid-work world?] Well, my volunteer experience gave me access to offices, and computers, and phone systems, and equipment, and work structures, and situations … it’s just nothing was … when I wanted to get into it, I felt familiar with it as an environment. It gave me a sense of knowledge and a real understanding of what a creative industry meant, what kinds of people actually get paid to make things in the arts happen, and what they were expected to do, and whether or not that’s what I wanted to do.
Formerly volunteering British festival staff
[Q: What would you recommend to somebody who wanted to get into arts administration, would you recommend they volunteer at the Film Festival, or not?] Yeah. I’d probably, yes I would because that’s as fast-paced as you’re probably gonna make it, as you’re gonna get it, really, I think. I mean that’s with no, not much sort of background experience really on that, but I think, yeah, it’s, you get to meet people as well, which is another good thing, especially in the job that I did, that was another reason why I quite liked the job that I did, [as information coordinator across offices].
Formerly volunteering British festival staff
Festival work comes with clearly structured subjective meanings for festival volunteers and interns, especially resonating with those who have been successful after their experience or who have not yet been disappointed. There is a general avowal of non-bureaucratic, non-formal work (as far as so perceived), which is providing trials to test oneself nonetheless. As one would expect from the discussion of national differences in legal contexts of volunteering, variation in evaluation of the promise of the experience for labor market success is discernible. But at the same time, the primary data and the literature on volunteering and internship show that both are global phenomena which do not need much local translation.
4 Conclusion
Policies on civil society, higher education, labor markets as well as employment and charitable law provide an institutional ‘web’ co-conditioning the expansion of flexible forms pertaining to work activities. At this historical juncture, internship and volunteering are forms circulating as desirable forms of socialization in a wide array of industries associated with both core and periphery of the aesthetic economy. The socio-legal analysis illustrates the adjustment of nonprofit organizational requirements to labor markets, examines the role of policy-making in the creation of volunteer and internship culture, and valuation in economic terms. The chapter contributes insights about the interlinkages between public policy and cultural-economic policy goals, thereby adding to previous research on film festival governance (e.g., Cheung, 2009), albeit from a work-sociological perspective. The chapter contributes tentative findings on the role of law in the creativity dispositif.
The English legal provisions discussed in the following also apply to the devolved countries of the United Kingdom at the time of writing. I thus draw on English and German law for British and German ‘socio-legal realities’. The chapter presents the situation of German law before the country approved Minimum Wage in July 2014.
In Part 3, ‘compensation’ always means financial rewards for labor (mainly wages and salaries, but also bonuses, social security contributions).
The legal term ‘employment contract’ is standardized neither within nor across the European Union’s member-countries as well as in the United States where, as noted by Rubinstein, there is no single national definition of ‘employee’ (2006, p. 170). In the US, the Fair Labor Standard Act determines when volunteering requires compensation and when volunteers may claim against unfair labor practice in specific circumstances.
In the cultural industries, initiatives instead of regulations such as the guidelines on British tv industry pay, aim to “help […] distinguish between workers and volunteers” (Government News Network, 2007).
Where duties necessitate expenses in a technical sense, the law exempts them from being a ‘consideration’.
Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the substantial contribution by Katharina Möser, Birmingham Law School, to the conference paper, presented at the Law & Society Association International Meeting at Humboldt University Berlin in July 2007, which subsequently led to this chapter.