Trajectoires des intermittents du spectacle indemnisés

Professional pathways of French entertainment salaried workers Workers holding a recurring status in the field of live performance and audiovisual sectors can benefit from a specific social protection scheme which allows them to receive unemployment benefits (technicians are covered through the so-called annex 8 and artists through annex 10). Those workers can sign an unlimited number of contracts with a pre-determined duration with several employers. Following a reform of the unemployment benefits scheme in 2003 and up until 2016, they had to declare at least 507 hours of paid activities for a specific period, being 10 months and a half for technicians and ten months for artists. The 2003 reform led to a situation with fewer workers with recurring statuses who did perceive unemployment benefits, yet they became more and more numerous as from 2006 and this increase became even more acute when the existing system to enroll for those benefits was changed in 2016. In the year 2018, 127 000 intermittent salaried workers in the performing arts and audiovisual sector have received unemployment benefits for at least a day. A longitudinal study based on monthly register data (compiling 132 months between 2005 and 2015) from the French entity responsible for unemployment issues in France (Pôle emploi) enables to observe the professional pathways for those workers and to know more about the characteristics of their professional lives in terms of social protection. It clearly identified six groups: on the one hand those who can be called the ‘well-established workers' gathering a third of all technicians and artists for whom there is a form of steadiness regarding the volume of their activities with a high number of worked hours, and on the other end of the scale the ‘temporary workers' (17% of technicians and 8% of the artists)