Culture and creative business in Germany
Educational Background
Germany is well-known for its dual education system, which combines apprenticeships in a company and vocational education at a vocational school, which takes altogether three years. The education is controlled by the chamber of commerce and it´s the only education system in Germany, which doesn´t differ from one federal state to another. During your education, the apprenticeship is paid, depending on the year of your dual education system. You earn more in the third year than in the first year. There are about 500 different profession to learn in this system. In ze tripartite German school system, it was necessary to install a possibility for the pupils of the Middle School and the General School to learn a profession and the theoretical background, combined with economic knowledge.
Around the year 2001, the professions event manager, event technician (among others) were new established by ze German Government, the guilds and the chambers of commerce, to professionalize and also industrialize our culture. This is the professional background, why we have such a lot of venues, festivals, concerts on all levels. A lot of festivals in Germany, like "Stoned from the Underground", "Freak Valley", "Wacken", Summer Breeze", "Rock Harz", "Full Force", started or got professional around the year 2000. We have four different levels of sound engineering; study in a university, study in specialized high school, dual education system or private schools. Not to mention the mostly studied promoters and media agents.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veranstaltungskaufmann
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachkraft_für_Veranstaltungstechnik
In 2018, 1.2 Mio are employed in the culture and creative industry, plus 256.000 freelancers and employers. Shocking is the amount of additionally around 520.000 employed people who earn less than 450€/month with no social security included. The average wage in the creative industry is around 2100€/month gross! That means, that the employed earn 2950€/month, gross. No social security paid, no taxes.
The wages didn´t rise throughout the years, just the prices for the tickets. So, we have the same putting-out system here: a lot of sub-contractors tearing out the money for consuming. Throughout the years, it was a booming industry, which had a lot of slavery works to maintain the possibility to consume a lot of culture, sometimes as a background.
I mean, this industry struggled before the crisis, with a lot of unpaid hours of work, with low wages and no political lobby. It is obvious that there will be no help for lower-income group, although they pay a lot for our social system in Germany. Financially said, the culture and creativity industry are - along with transport and logistic - the German white trash.
