Performers form a highly skilled, flexible, and mobile workforce. They often put up with demanding working conditions, including intensive rehearsal schedules, long and atypical working hours, frequent travel, unconventional venues, physically challenging moves, multilanguage environments and audiences, hampering props and costumes, etc.

Whereas some performers have permanent employment opportunities, most of them work on short assignments, for multiple and successive engagers/employers as well as on a production basis. Despite the fact that a subordinate relationship can clearly be established for an overwhelming majority of them, short-term contracts are often characterised as self-employment by engagers and are seldom challenged by performers who effectively find themselves working as service providers. Whilst self-employment may bring some tax benefits, it frequently snatches substantial labour protection from performers and dispossesses them of fundamental social rights. In addition, an overzealous interpretation of competition law may erode core trade union rights and seriously inhibit collective bargaining.