The mere fact that the artist is generally employed in his or her own artistic work does not preclude receiving employment benefits. If the employment is full-time, the person is not entitled to unemployment benefits when registering as a job-seeker.

Employment in one’s own work is deemed to be full-time when the workload required by the activities is so large that it prevents the person from accepting a full-time job. Part-time employment does not prevent eligibility for benefits.

Near the beginning of operations, artistic work may be so small-scale that it can be considered parttime. The TE Office can consider artistic work that started after the artist was left unemployed to be part-time if the small scale of the work can be identified from a lack of income.

Income received or lacking from artistic work does not have direct significance in the assessment of the amount of work. Even weakly profitable or loss-making operations can involve being employed to such an extent that accepting full-time employment is not possible.

Artistic work can be considered part-time on the basis of the artist’s work history if the gainful employment and artistic work were simultaneous. In practice, activities are considered part-time work when the person has been carrying them out in parallel with gainful employment for at least six months or has met the work requirement by, for instance, working part-time.

Artistic operations can be proved to be part-time also by, for example, the existence of full-time studies that have progressed at the normal pace and continued for, at a minimum, six months during the artistic work.

The artist’s income can come from various sources – for instance, partly from work carried out as an employee and partially from his or her own artistic activities. The proportion of these forms of employment can vary. In addition, it is quite common (for example, in teaching work) for the working hours at least for some weeks to remain below the time that one must accumulate in order to meet the work requirement.

If the artist is continuously employed partly in gainful employment and partly in his or her own artistic work, the nature of the artistic work must be considered part-time if there are regular breaks in the salaried employment for professional reasons. Such breaks include interruptions caused by fixed-term temporary teaching posts or holiday periods at adult-education centres.