Privileged precarity: Working freelance in the TV industry

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the television industry’s freelance labour market, little is yet known about how workers interpret and manage the instability, intermittent employment and organisational ambivalence that characterise these skilled contingent careers. This article investigates the lived experience of freelance television work through qualitative interviews with practitioners in the UK and Australia. It maps the recurrent cycle of employment, unemployment and job seeking that defines working life in the sector and analyses the strategies and resources required to navigate it. The analysis critically revisits two widely used but imprecisely applied concepts: precarity and privilege. By tracing their intellectual lineages and examining their empirical manifestations in television work, the article demonstrates how persistent insecurity coexists with structural advantage. Privilege does not negate precarity; rather, it enables freelancers to endure it – at least for a time. The article advances the concept of ‘privileged precarity’ to articulate this distinctive feature of skilled contingent labour in television production, with implications for understanding similar dynamics in other areas of cultural work.