When, in 2015, Raising Films was formed as a community and as a campaign for parents and carers in the UK screen industries, we had a clear aim: to make parents and carers visible and audible throughout the industry. In 2020-21, we have seen just how high the stakes are for incorporating caregiving and work – yet we have also seen how far there is to go before employers, contractors and the government understand and respect caregiving.
As we reported in our COVID-19 study ‘Back from the Brink’, across the board in the UK, severely disabled people (37%) and parents and carers (39%) were most at risk of redundancy during the 2020 COVID-19 restrictions (Citizens Advice Bureau), while mothers were 47% more likely than fathers to have lost their jobs, or to have resigned from their jobs, and they were 14% more likely to have been furloughed (Mayor of London’s Office). This has exacerbated existing inequalities at the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity and disability.
Yet the majority of research into the impact of COVID-19 on work focuses on people in permanent employment, rather than those who are in precarious labour. Raising Films’ 2016 survey, ‘Making It Possible’, showed that parents and carers in the screen industries are twice as likely as non-parents and carers to be freelancers – and people working across the screen industries are already twice as likely to freelance as those in other industries.
As our sister organisation, Parents in Performing Arts, reported, 80% of respondents to their 2020 COVID-19 survey were wholly or partly self-employed, with many failing to qualify for SEISS, frequently due to maternity leave, which is why Raising Films’ current survey takes a close and urgent look at ‘How We Work Now’.
As Adrian Lester’s piece reflects and details so carefully, when we think and research about working parents and carers in the screen and cultural sectors, we are looking at what it means to be freelance, often facing unlawful employment legislation and practices, as reported by Dr. Tamsyn Dent in our 2017 study, ‘Raising Our Game’.
These are exacerbated by legislative issues, such as the extraordinary cost of childcare in the UK compared to the cost in most other European countries; the lack of support for professional carers, leading to the formation of the worker and migrant-led Nanny Solidarity Network, the UK’s first nanny union; the inability of freelancers to declare childcare as a tax-deductible expense; and a broken benefits system that, among other punitive issues, militates against freelancers taking short-term contracts.
At their best, freelancing and being self-employed provide the freedom and agency that are compelling to parents and carers, particularly where creative work is concerned. In order that freedom and agency be available to all, substantive support mechanisms such as an HR hub are needed (Creative Industries PEC).
What we’ve learned from our community is that the best practices are already happening, across so many families and workplaces: we just need to amplify them, which is why we have centred interviews and testimonials since Day One, even though 79% of parents and carers told us that their caregiving responsibilities had a negative impact on their work in the screen industries. As Lester’s and Chakrabarti’s story exemplifies, even though parents are out there ‘Making It Possible’, it could certainly be made easier.