'Poignant to see how a lack of decisiveness, clarity and leadership - at both the Utrecht municipality and the management of the KLA - could lead to a split and even fracture among staff.' Karin Boelhouwer of the Arts Union is stuck with it, and she has a point.
The Utrechts Centrum voor de Kunsten (UCK) recently officially went bankrupt. A large part of the staff (self-employed and freelance) have now re-established themselves and continue working as their own company, with a subsidy from the municipality and in the same building, but without the protection of the old KLA. The fresh and old ZZPs love it, the salaried employees who are out on the street without severance pay are furious.
Guilty
In such a situation, it is always nice to assign blame, and usually it is with the cheering party. That cheering party, that's not just the restarting workers who are now their own bosses. The Municipality of Utrecht, which had wanted to get rid of the top-heavy institution for about 15 years, is also cheering. The Kunstenbond, which has to represent not only the interests of workers but also those of the ever-expanding group of self-employed workers in the arts, cannot make a single fist now. They have to cheer along with the self-employed, and campaign with the salaried workers.
Of course, the Arts Union has a point when it argues that the bankruptcy of the KLA, followed by its relaunch as a zzp cluster, is a fine example of the local government's abuse of power. There could, as Boelhouwer rightly points out, be talk of 'Transfer of undertaking' and that means that the new foundations set up by the self-employed must assume the obligations of the predecessor in full. That means that those foundations, just starting out, can immediately file for bankruptcy again. At least if the Arts Union decides to go to court.
Big Capital
But the KLA is not Hudson's Bay, and big business is nowhere to be seen. This is the construction chosen by the restarting theatre and art teachers themselves. To a slightly lesser extent, this applies to the older music teachers, because they are the ones who transferred from the municipal music school to the subsidised KLA with a semi-official contract in the late 1990s. Their legacy and security has been thrown out onto the streets by the bankruptcy: they are the ones hit hardest, and were also the ones who made it difficult for the indeed not too decisive KLA management to take any decisions.
So the dilemma for the Arts Union is clear: if you go for your traditional constituency, you will make a lot of enemies in your new constituency. The problem for the drafters of the fair practice code is also immediately clear with this: if a sole trader in the arts feels she is getting ahead because of a measure that may not be entirely fair, she will not make a problem of it. Then the rules of trade and the market apply and neoliberalism rules. Everyone poor with the (fictitious) possibility for the few to become very rich. We are fiercely against it but we are also all caught up in it. And boy do we love it!
I would not want to be a union leader in these times.
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