The Steering
Committee of Zimbabwe Creative Civil Society, the body driving the
implementation of the Creative Civil Society’s Plan of Action for Arts and
Culture (NPAAC), along with the body of cultural workers of Zimbabwe, joins
workers of the world in commemorating this 1st May International
Workers Day.
Recognition of cultural workers
We call upon all
cultural workers in Zimbabwe to commemorate this day by dialoguing among
themselves and agreeing on ways of lobbying our government to recognize the
critical contribution of the arts and culture sector to national development. We call
for a national policy that articulates that cultural workers, who, in most
cases, work as small groups and individuals, receive government support towards
the establishment of appropriate infrastructure for viable production and
effective marketing of their cultural goods and services.
Necessity of social security schemes for cultural workers
Workers in the
arts and culture sector are not adequately covered by the existing labour
regulations, mainly because of the predominantly informal nature of their
sector. Social security schemes appropriate to the arts and culture sector need
to be developed.
We therefore call upon our
government to involve representative organizations of cultural workers in
considering social security schemes that could be introduced for workers in the
cultural sector, using international instruments such as UNESCO’s 1980
Recommendation on the Social Status of Artists and other related ILO
recommendations and protocols.
Levies and statutory payments by cultural workers
Cultural workers,
whose main occupation is the promotion of performance tours and festivals, have
expressed concern that various levies being imposed by different government
departments and public cultural bodies, as well as the statutory payments being
demanded, have not taken into consideration the informal nature and
irregularity of full time employment in the sector.
The levies and
statutory payments being demanded by different state institutions do not take
into account the absence of government support required to ensure the viability
and growth of cultural industries that offer employment to cultural workers.
These levies and statutory payments are administered in a manner that
discourages creative entrepreneurship in the arts and culture sector, as well
as in a manner that shows that the concerned government institutions do not
appreciate the enormous challenges being faced by the self-employed workers in
the sector.
We therefore
call upon the government departments and public institutions concerned with
collection of levies and statutory payments from cultural workers to engage
representatives of workers in the arts and culture field in a discourse in
order to appreciate the challenges faced by cultural operators.
Transnational mobility of cultural workers
As more countries
implement the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the
Diversity of Cultural Expressions, more opportunities become available to
cultural workers to travel outside their countries to take up short term
employment assignments and to cooperate in the creation, production and
marketing of their cultural goods and services.
And yet it is
clear that the need for cultural workers to travel beyond their borders in
order to broaden their scope of activities and to grow new and viable audiences
for their cultural products has not been recognized by many countries whose
immigration regulations are serious barriers to cross border mobility of
cultural workers.
We therefore
call upon all organizations of cultural workers the world over to
vigorously advocate to their governments and intergovernmental bodies and the
United Nations for freer transnational movement of cultural workers, not only
to find new audiences and exchange cultural experiences, but to provide for
more opportunities for cultural workers to undertake creative collaborations
that provide the world with more opportunities to consume a much richer diversity
of cultural expression and thereby create more sustainable employment for the
cultural workers of the world.
Statement issued
by Nhimbe Trust - the Secretariat of the Steering Committee of the NPAAC.
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