The labour market for jazz musicians in Paris and London: Formal regulation and informal norms

Abstract

This article examines the normative expectations freelance jazz musicians have about the material conditions of live performance work, taking London and Paris as case studies. It shows how price norms constitute an important reference point for individual workers in navigating the labour market. However, only rarely do they take ‘stronger’ form as a collective demand. Two further arguments are made: first, that the strength of norms varies very widely across labour markets, being much stronger on jobs where other qualitative attractions (such as the scope for creative autonomy) are weak. Second, in the Paris case, an ostensibly solidaristic social insurance mechanism (the Intermittence du Spectacle system) had the seemingly paradoxical effect of further weakening social norms around working conditions. Workers’ individual efforts to meet the system’s eligibility criteria often disrupted the emergence of collective expectations around pricing, and in some cases the existence of formal regulation itself was stigmatized as stifling creativity.