Arts and culture workers in the pandemic
Occupation-based statistics from the Canadian Labour Force Survey
Yesterday, I posted about the situation of arts and culture workers in 2021, including lots of information about the strengths and limitations of data from the Labour Force Survey.
Today, let’s look at pandemic-induced changes in arts and culture employment and self-employment.
What are some of the impacts of the pandemic on arts and culture workers? Are there differences between employed and self-employed workers? In 2021, the overall labour force returned to pre-pandemic levels, with a high job vacancy rate. What’s the situation for arts and culture workers?
I’ll repeat a couple of important notes to keep in mind:
1. This is a very “big picture” view. The definition of arts and culture workers includes 50 occupation groups, including heritage occupations (e.g., librarians, museum workers, archivists), cultural occupations (e.g., designers, editors, architects), and artists (e.g., musicians, visual artists, writers, actors, dancers).
2. The LFS information is available only for the full group of 50 occupations, not for subsets or individual occupations. We cannot use this data request to understand pandemic differences between workers in the arts, heritage, and cultural industries.
For further details, you can always look back at yesterday’s post (if you’re a paid subscriber).