High-level round table on the working conditions of artists and cultural workers
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12/11/20253 min read
On the 8th December 2025 AVTE was present at the high-level round table on artists’ working conditions, represented by its co-secretary, Estelle Renard.
Many thanks to the European Commission for the opportunity to speak on behalf of audiovisual translators, under the very attentive ears of Roxana Mînzatu, Executive Vice President for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness, Glenn Micaleff, Commissioner responsible for intergenerational fairness, youth, culture and sport, European parliament Committee Chairs Li Andersson (Employment) and Nela Riehl (Culture)!
We were more than 20 European organisations, representing all sorts of creative professions, from writers to performing artists, from directors and architects to composers, conservator-restorers, visual artists, translators and many more, showing the variety of talents and competences across Europe when it comes to art and culture. We were all different, but all sharing both passion for what we do and the many difficulties plying our trade: invisible work, idle time, difficult access to social protection and training, remuneration lower than actual minimum wages, collective bargaining that is still illegal in many countries, lack of harmonisation as it is the case regarding authors’ rights for audiovisual translators, and of course, the all-pervading generative artificial intelligence.
The European institutions have been working for some time now to identify these problems. Some tools are already there, like the guidelines on collective agreements for solo self-employed. So our stance was a hands-on one: the fact is, individual artists and authors, and sometimes even organisations, are extremely remote from all this precious information, all the initiatives and resolutions issued at the European level. So how can they have an impact? How do we connect the dots between individuals and the European institutions? We need strong intermediate bodies, robust organisations like AVTE. But let’s face it, associations that defend the rights of freelance artists operate on meagre funds and rely on volunteer work, time taken away from our daily work, from our families and personal lives.
So, our 3 points on this:
-We need a strong support from European institutions to travel, to meet, to organise workshops, to disseminate all the relevant information, to launch studies, to lobby. A kind of support that is not tied to any particular project and can alleviate our burden so to simply allow us to function. Especially in our field, where our clients are often globalized companies that have their seat outside Europe, we need extra legal protection.
- We need in-depth specialised workshops to teach us how to navigate the complex world or European institutions.
- And above all, we need an ombusdman, a mediator or a coordinator, an office that would serve as a focal point between all kinds of European artists’ and authors’ organisations and the European institutions. Our needs are manifold, and span from legislative to intellectual property rights, collective bargaining questions and many more, so we need to know on what door to knock!
To the question of what is needed for a resilient cultural ecosystem in Europe, we stated that there won’t be any healthy nor resilient ecosystem in our field of media translation as long as generative artificial intelligence is imposed on us. A recent study by Ana Guerberof shows: in translation work, and even more in creative translation work, AI is the exact reverse of creativity. The machine serves us pre-translated text which we then have to “correct”. And this type of correction, called post-editing, is the most brain-numbing, the most draining of tasks, paid half the (already low) remuneration. The Commission, maybe unknowingly, has been fostering this type of degradation of translators in funding Arte in six languages, requiring the implementation of workflows including AI. The result: subtitlers’ remuneration has been crushed, divided by two.
If the aim is to defend a resilient, healthy ecosystem, we must invest in people, in talent, in diversity, not gamble on Large Language Models which are, as a plethora of study now show, irremediably and dangerously biased and an absolute contrary to cultural diversity.
But there, last Monday, on the mythical 13th floor of the Berlaymont building, we started building together a better future for artists, authors and creative workers. And it is only the beginning!