Pearle* welcomes the opportunity to provide input on the future Fair Labour Mobility Package through this Call for Evidence. As an international sector, the live performance is one of the most mobile cultural sectors in Europe, characterised by frequent, short-term, cross-border engagements that involve a wide variety of employment statuses, contracts, and legal regimes. Recent Eurostat figures estimated about 2.03 million cultural enterprises active in the ‘creative, arts and entertainment’ sector, whereas 78% of EU workers were employed by micro-enterprises with fewer than 10 employees.   

Its experience offers a concrete test case for identifying obstacles to labour mobility in practice. Despite the European Union’s core principle of free movement of workers and services, despite the strategy for a single market published last May 2025, and despite its efforts to harmonise and coordinate rules, mobility is still hindered by diverging national interpretations, fragmented implementation, disproportionate administrative burdens, and high compliance costs. If mobility remains restricted, this not only undermines the free movement of workers and services but also weakens the cultural and economic vibrancy of Europe as a whole and its economic and social potential. For the live performance sector, mobility involves a wide range of challenges when employing people, often to be addressed at the same time, including social security, posting of workers, cross-border artist taxation, visas and work permits, as well as business-related cross-border issues. 

These challenges are further evidenced by an internal survey of Pearle* members conducted between September and November 2025 on cross-border mobility. While identifying the applicable rules already requires navigating several layers of complexity, 27% of respondents indicated that the main burden of labour mobility lies in having to complete the entire chain of administrative requirements. A further 20% pointed to the time spent by internal staff or costly external service providers. Lengthy procedures involving multiple authorities across different countries ranked third, followed by managing final payments (or tax credits, where applicable).

Download the full paper to read our further comments on this Call for Evidence