The ‘Creative Labour Sustainability Framework’: developing a governance-oriented risk assessment for harm prevention in the creative industries

Extant literature demonstrates an increased prevalence of mental distress and suicidality among those working in creative and media industries, including the music industry, acting/film/television, video games and journalism. In response, a range of creative industries-specific mental health interventions have been formulated. However, existing approaches focus either on individual wellbeing outcomes or ethical commitments offering limited utility for risk management or decision-making for organisations. In response to this lack of a creative industries-specific, governance-ready assessment method this paper develops and introduces the ‘Creative Labour Sustainability Framework’ (CLSF). This is an empirically grounded methodological framework designed to support the assessment of organisational maturity, risk, and duty-of-care conditions in creative labour markets through observable organisational conditions rather than individual outcomes. The framework introduces and justifies five domains of organisational maturity informed by empiricism from the sociology of work, public health, psychosocial research, and organisational studies, alongside a structured, non-clinical assessment rubric designed for use in auditing, governance, risk, and policy contexts. In doing so, this paper contributes towards research which focuses on organisational perspectives in the creative and media industries vis-à-vis harm reduction, and scholarship interrogating the challenges of governance in the creative industries.