Workers in the Entertainment Industry: An Advantageous but Questionable Unemployment Insurance Scheme

The unemployment insurance agreement that came into force in France on 1 April 2009 will expire on 31 December 2010. It will, therefore, become subject to renegotiation in November. Given particularly poor current levels of employment and the potential impact of pensions reform on the national unemployment insurance scheme, that renegotiation is like to spark some lively controversies. One of these will no doubt be over the highly advantageous insurance arrangements enjoyed by workers in the entertainment industry. These latter in fact represent O.8 % of employees in the overall scheme, 3,4 % of persons indemnified and 5,9 % of the scheme’s costs. After reminding us of these data, Bruno Coquet freely acknowledges the exceptional dynamism of the entertainment industries and the fact that, contributing as they do not just to entertainment, but to culture and education, they are worthy recipients of state aid. However, Coquet is critical of two oddities in this situation: since state aid takes the form, in this case, of unemployment benefits, it has a great impact on the financial equilibrium of the unemployment insurance scheme and is detrimental to the workers in other sectors of economic activity. While very dynamic, the entertainment industries abuse the fact of their employees being very advantageously indemnified during periods of unemployment to create great numbers of insecure jobs without due consideration for the consequences. Coquet thus shows that the highly favourable unemployment scheme for these workers represents an unsuitable form of financial assistance to the culture industries, is a source of unfairness and has significant unintended consequences. He concludes that this atypical insurance system is harmful and that it would be better to replace it with a proper subsidy for cultural production.