Why Romania’s efforts to legally recognize freelance cultural workers were doomed to fail
In April 2023, Romania launched a landmark programme: the Professional Cultural Worker Law.
This promised to be a lifeline for the country’s 100,000 independent cultural workers – artists, curators, managers, dancers, writers, freelancers – all of whom operate without social protection, stable contracts or specific legal recognition of their status.
Beyond creating a new type of employment contract for cultural workers, with certain tax advantages, the law was meant to offer such workers access to social insurance, unemployment benefits, seniority accumulation and collective representation rights. (In order to qualify as a cultural worker under the scheme you have to get at least half your income from cultural work – not including royalties from copyright – and not currently be working with a permanent employment contract).
The law was also, its architects hoped, an act of validation: a mark of recognition from the state that culture is not a hobby, and that those who sustain it deserve to be seen.
But a recent investigation by Scena9 reveals a damning statistic: nearly three years on from the law’s introduction, only 11 people are legally recognized as professional cultural workers in Romania. Reporters Daria Radu, Șerban Barbu and Maria Angele investigate why a new framework so useful in theory is, currently, a failure.
“We’ve been stamping our feet for so long about having no status, no protection,” bewails Mihai Ivașcu, a writer. “And yet when this opportunity is offered – which may not be perfect, but it is at least improvable – just six of us show up, when in fact we are thousands, or more.”
Ivașcu was the second person to register, after coming across the law entirely by chance. Believing it was the solution he’d been dreaming of, he registered with enthusiasm. Why didn’t more people do the same?
For the first two years, signing up to the register was only possible in person or by post, and this was itself a deterrent to many. But even after the process became digitised, it remained deeply bureaucratic. Scena9 journalists tried it out and ended up spending four hours and 19 minutes completing their own application, with two friends drafted in to help. Iulia Popovici, a critic, researcher, and policy expert who worked with the Ministry of Culture on the law’s adoption, puts the absurdity plainly: “The stated intention of the law is to cut through the bureaucracy. But now we have both the law – and the bureaucracy.” She refers to the tendency of the Romanian state to protect itself through ramparts of ever-multiplying paperwork.
Another significant oversight has been the lack of information extended both to those who might benefit from the law, and those who might be called upon to implement it. No one seems to know much: not cultural workers not accountants, not even staff at ANAF, the national tax authority. The Ministry invested almost nothing into outreach and promotion.
“The fact that there has been no promotion of the law, that there are no information meetings, that no registration assistance is offered,” Popovici notes, “suggests that the Romanian state has no great enthusiasm for the law.”
Rather than acknowledging the failure, the Ministry declared the results “exceeded expectations” – on the basis that the original funding for the programme only required that the law exist on paper, rather than it actually work in practice.
All of this sits within a broader picture: Romanian culture receives just 0.07 per cent of GDP in government funding, and the Minister of Culture’s response to the sector’s precarity has been to urge artists to think more “entrepreneurially”.
As the article points out, governments in other countries have shown what genuine commitment to cultural work looks like. In Ireland, a pilot programme gave 2,000 cultural workers €325 a week to pursue their practice. After finding that every euro invested in culture returned €1.39 to society, the pilot programme was made permanent. Germany and Austria have long-established social insurance systems specifically for independent artists. Romania could learn from these examples.
For those who did register, the law has delivered one tangible benefit: the ability to issue invoices legally under a new type of contract. But the sense of community and broader recognition the law might have provided have not materialised. Sara Pongrac, a 25-year-old theatre graduate and artist, speaks of the false hope: “I thought it could be like a kind of community.”
It remains, for now, a promise unmet.
The original article ‘Cum a eșuat Statutul lucrătorului cultural: 11 înscrieri la 100.000 de profesioniști’ (’How the Cultural Worker Statute Failed: 11 Registrations for 100,000 Professionals’) by Daria Radu, Șerban Barbu, and Maria Angele was first published in Romanian by Scena9 on 26 March 2026.
It is available here.
Scena9 is a Romanian digital culture and society magazine covering arts, ideas, and everyday life, with a strong focus on independent journalism and social issues. It is supported by BRD Groupe Société Générale.
Summary by TMH