The labour process in production of television series: An analysis of live-stage workers' working conditions

Today there is a matter of dominance of main stream analysis in the labour process, meanwhile rise of the postmodern theories which represent the critical approaches. However the political economy approach is excluded both in political and intellectual practices with the idea which claims that political economy is unsufficient to understand the changes of the labour process in the information and communication technologies based society. This study claims that the political economy should be rethought in the labour process studies. Because it has the explanation power of the media, media production and the labour process of media production. Therefore the labour process of workers and their working conditions who work at the live-stage of televison series have been analysed in this study. The results of the study point the workers' negative working conditions in the environment of TV channels, production companies, advertisers and sponsors which are connected to each other via people meter/rating tool. The live-stage workers are employed for long hours, delayed wages and in a manner devoid of labor-job protection, health and safety precautions. The boundaries between working time and leisure time increasingly have been blurred. Although the live-stage workers request the negative work conditions to get better, there is a matter of division of labour organising in cinema-television sector. The labour organisations of the cinema-television sector have been downgraded and suffered loss of power. Regardless the fact that the workers' have demands which arise from the negative conditions, the power elites who control the production, television channels which broadcast in the frame of production relations of capitalism, production companies, advertisers and sponsors have the final word. Keywords: Labour process, media, television, live-stage workers.