A Comparative Analysis of the Economic Sustainability of Cultural Work in the UK since the COVID-19 Pandemic and Examination of Universal Basic Income as a Solution for Cultural Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns across the world have greatly affected an already vulnerable cultural economy and the structural precarity of many cultural workers. After documenting the impacts of the pandemic in the cultural sector and the effectiveness of governmental responses in the UK and in Europe, the article focuses on the visual arts and explores calls for reforms of the cultural economy. While the UK government’s recovery plan went against the country’s cultural policy tradition due to the plan’s interventionist and financially generous nature, it disproportionally benefitted organisations rather than individuals working in the sector, especially in England. The study, conducted on visual arts workers in the UK, shows that many were unable to access these financial recovery schemes and fell through the cracks of the complex criteria set for these funds. This article informs the current debate on measures that are potentially more economically sustainable and wellbeing protective than those currently in place for cultural workers, such as Universal Basic Income. Its applicability is explored with reference to the historic French and recent Irish examples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".