Resisting the Shame and ‘Unemployed by Choice’

This chapter explores the practice of people who voluntarily receive unemployment benefit while they pursue careers in creative professional fields. They state that they use the unemployment benefit as ‘entrepreneurial support’. In many ways these people refuse the sticky category of unemployment even though they formally adhere to this group. The chapter builds on notions from the previous chapter, identifying how some unemployed people disidentify with the unemployment category and conduct themselves as freelancers. In the chapter I zoom in on what I refer to as ‘unemployed by choice’ and I delve a little deeper in terms of exploring the practice among artists and cultural workers as well as I aim to identify the understandings and values that support such practice. The term ‘unemployed by choice’ indicates the tension between the way they actively choose to follow this path but at the same time the choice is not free; it is largely determined by the working conditions shaping the labor market for artists and cultural workers. Inadvertently the Danish welfare system enables this practice; however, the practice comes with an affective price. Creative people are aware that they are not doing what they are supposed to and that causes ambivalence and anxiety. The chapter explores the various ways that people who are unemployed by choice conduct themselves and how they deal with the tensions and struggles they face. Submerged in an alternative community their practice presents an alternative value system. According to this alternative value system paid work does not equal dignity or status which opens us a space for negotiating a new understanding of the social hierarchies of belonging in society. While the group focused on here is a particular segment, I discuss the possibilities of these notions spreading to other parts of the labor market as well.