Creating Policies to Support the Sustainability of Welfare and Work

CREPOW is an ambitious, interdisciplinary international research project. Its main goal is to provide an innovative way of understanding how the labor markets and economy of cultural and creative industries (CCIs) works and through this knowledge make new foundations for effective policies to both improve the economic sustainability of the CCIs actors and to disseminate best practices and values of the CCIs for the good of other industries – where unstable work conditions and small incomes are prevailing – and welfare state structures at EU, national and local levels. Through our studies on CCIs we search for new kind of alliances between private production, public funding, welfare system and substantial value creation of creative work in order to improve the work life resilience and economic sustainability of the sector, other sectors and future economies in large. We study practices and mechanisms, which reduce negative individual fragmentariness. We provide knowledge and examples for the CCIs actors , interest organisations, cultural institutions and public administrators to improve precariat labor conditions and improve the economic productivity and sustainability of the sector. The results are used for outlining new models for economic and labor policies, which, in addition to straightforward economic productivity factors, take other values of work and production into account. Those values, including social, educational, cultural and environmental, are needed in the near future to increase the welfare, egalitarian and sustainability impacts of economy. We study the future of work, labor markets and economy in relation to welfare policies in Europe through the case-studies of cultural and creative industries (CCIs). CCIs are an ideal type of exemplary to study, because they are at the edge of the current developments and changes of economy, productivity and labor force.