The National Union of Romania's Stage Performers (UNITER) is challenging the Culture Ministry's plan to standardize working hours in national theaters, calling it a bureaucratic, destabilizing measure that devalues art and undermines artistic creation.
"When everyone becomes interchangeable in a cultural system where artistic work exists only if brutally standardized, the future of our artistic community is at risk. This cultural annihilation has the gravity of a theatrical coup," the UNITER Senate writes in an open letter.
The Union argues that imposing fixed working hours on artists, based on a Court of Auditors directive, ignores the very nature of creative work: "The Ministry wants to measure the immeasurable: grace, research, doubt, emotion, which all together or separately make the foundation of artistic creation."
UNITER warns that in a sector already weakened by shrinking budgets and institutional instability, such measures further discredit performance institutions and divide the artistic community. The proposed 1,800-hour annual workload, including 900 hours of rehearsals, is described as proof "of a profound misunderstanding of artistic labor".
The Union calls the approach "immoral", especially as many institutions lack the funds to produce shows: "Regulating minimum quotas of activity under these conditions is an act of cynicism. Cultural administration should create conditions for culture to thrive, not micromanage theaters through standard forms and weekly schedules," it argues.
UNITER likens the proposal to rigid industrial management: "These instructions read like texts written by someone who spent years in an office building and began to hate theater".
The letter also recalls the pandemic, when artists "saved our souls", and warns against a return to the bureaucratic excesses of the 1980s: "Not even during communism were working hours for artists regulated so rigidly."
The Union rejects the Ministry's terminology such as "annual fund of working time", "distribution of hours", "functional structures", as evidence of a bureaucratic mindset that erases the essence of art.
''We demand an administration that recognizes - at the very core of the field - that art cannot be reduced to tables and time units. We demand an administration that understands the humanistic, formative and symbolic value of art, a value that cannot be subjected to industrial logic or mechanical accounting. We urgently demand an administration that trusts artists and cultural institutions, that respects the decision-making autonomy of those who lead them, and that understands that the artistic act is grounded in freedom, responsibility and vocation, not in suspicion, control or administrative constraint. Without this understanding, any regulation risks becoming not an instrument of good governance, but a force of deterrence, uniformity and, ultimately, the degradation of cultural life, education and society," the artists state.
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The Ministry of Culture recently published a set of ''Instructions on the unitary organization and recording of working time for executive positions in public performance and concert institutions", a measure introduced following a recommendation from the Romanian Court of Auditors.
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