Pay Backs are finally happening - and a new campaign is launched to help interns claim their wages

VOGUE on 31 May 2012 reports:

“ARCADIA - the company that owns Miss Selfridge, Topshop, Topman and Dorothy Perkins - has sent former unpaid interns retrospective payments up to year after placements were completed. Following an “internal review” of Arcadia work experience, interns who worked at the company’s head office were recently sent cheques for their labour.

“We’ve done everything we think we’re supposed to do,” Arcadia boss Philip Green told the Guardian. “We think we’ve been leaders in education in the fashion retail business. We’ve built an academy. We’ve got 700 kids working. We try to encourage other people. We’ve done our job. We’re not interested in getting into a running debate with the Guardian about who said what to who and this that and the other.” SEE THE HMRC’S INTERN TREATMENT RULES

The news comes after the HMRC warned fashion labels in December 2011 against exploiting their interns and treating them as employees but without pay.  Compliance checks were carried out earlier this year to make sure that working over 21-year-olds must be paid at least £6.08 - the national minimum wage legislation. The move is wholly supported by the British Fashion Council. “The fashion industry provides access and opportunities to many young people, and the BFC aims to ensure that these valuable opportunities can continue in a legal framework,” a BFC spokesperson said.”


The Guardian reports more in depth about just what kind of ‘learning experience’ the interns were getting: “Wong, a 23 year-old graduate of Royal Holloway, University of London, said she and other interns spent their four weeks there photocopying, scanning images, sending clothes to journalists and organising clothes that had been sent back. They also tidied the fashion cupboard, which she described as a walk-in, windowless wardrobe stuffed full of clothes. She said the company gave her only travel to cover zones 1-6, though she commuted from Worthing, West Sussex, five days a week, and £2.50 a day for lunch.

Wong, who received a cheque for £851, added that she found the experience a waste of her time and that interns were excluded from any serious meetings or learning experiences. She also told the Guardian that interns would be left to their “menial” tasks without much supervision and then go on to train other unpaid interns who would arrive at head office. She said she met 10 other interns in the PR department during her time at Arcadia.

“At the time, I agreed to work at Arcadia for free in the hope that it would lead to a paid job. However, since then I’ve done several more internships - mostly paying expenses only - with other companies and I’m now furious about the whole intern thing,” Wong said. “I’m glad Arcadia have finally paid me – but they should have done it at the time, not a year later. They should never have allowed me to work for free. As I now know, the minimum wage law says that anybody who does the job of a ‘worker’ must be paid at least the minimum wage for their labour,” she said.

Wong said she complained to HMRC about her lack of pay and the Guardian understands that HMRC has received other complaints about unpaid interns.”

New Campaign ‘INTERNS FIGHT FOR JUSTICE’ launched by Graduate Fog and Intern Aware: 

“Have you interned for a well-known brand, celebrity or a high-profile MP? Then we want to hear from you! This historic campaign will see the big name employers who use unpaid interns taken to court and forced to admit that what they’ve been doing is unethical, unfair – and illegal. This will ensure that in future all interns are paid a fair wage for their work.

Calling that person an ‘intern’ is red herring. This is really about unpaid labour, plain and simple. That these jobs are done by young people at the start of their careers is irrelevant. Whatever your age, every citizen is entitled to be protected by the law.

We’re lucky to have secured pro bono access to an experienced employment law barrister. He has agreed to help us – and you – fight these cases all the way, and he won’t charge a penny for his time.

Will we win? Quite simply, yes.”

Migrant ‘Bust Card’ launch event Sat 2nd June

La migra esta descontrolada! STOP RAIDS, DETENTIONS AND DEPORTATIONS!

We will be launching the Spanish version of the migrant bust card on Saturday 2nd of June, 2-5pm, at South Bank University, 100-116 London Road, SE1 6LN (Elephant+Castle).

Join us to chat and workshop, bring food, drinks and your ideas to share - all welcome!

For more information about the Anti-raid campaign please see http://www.theprisma.co.uk/2012/05/28/antiraids-campaign-in-london/




El sábado 2 de junio se llevará a cabo el evento de lanzamiento y celebración de la ‘bust card’. La ‘bust card’ es una ‘tarjeta’ que explica los derechos que tenemos y lo que podemos hacer ante las preguntas de un oficial de inmigración, y en el caso de llevados a un centro de detención.

El evento incluirá el lanzamiento de la ‘tarjeta’, así como una representación teatro-taller. 
Fecha: Sábado 2 de junio 
Hora: 2 a 5pm 
Lugar: Southbank University 
Dirección: 100-116 London Road SE1 6LN (Elephant and Castle). 
Traer: Comida y bebidas para compartir (opcional). El panfleto abajo es para que lo distribuyan a sus contactos, puestos de trabajo etc.

www.lawas.org.uk

 

next drop in session: “It’s for a good cause” - Unpaid work in the charity sector

Our next informal drop-in session will be on Thursday, 24 May, 7pm at the India Club BAR (1st floor), 143 Strand, WC2R London.

The theme of the evening will be “It’s for a good cause” (Unpaid work in the charity sector), but of course this is also an opportunity to find out about PWB’s campaigns, exchange experiences or just say hello!

All welcome!

Solidarity with Blockupy Frankfurt

                                     

“In the periphery of the EU we are experiencing the extreme effects of politics pushed for by the governments of Germany and France and enacted by institutions representative of global capitalism: the ECB, IMF, EU, and their imposed technocratic governments. Millions of us have been impoverished and driven to misery by austerity and structural adjustment programs, the denial of labor rights and the slashing and privatization of public services, such as education, healthcare and welfare. We are experiencing the looting of human and natural resources by supposedly democratic institutions! (…)

A broad coalition of organizations, initiatives and networks are mobilizing to diverse days of action in Frankfurt from May 16th to 18th . The central element of the protest choreography is mass blockades on May 18, taking place after the take the squares action on May 17 and before the mass demonstration on May 19. The goal of our action on this day is to effectively disrupt the normal business activities of European Central Bank and other central actors in the financial center in Frankfurt. The parties responsible for the global politics of crisis and impoverishment are to be confronted directly in front of the doors of their decision-making headquarters with imaginative blockades and creative forms of civil disobedience.”

http://17to19m.blogsport.eu/

Training for Exploitation? Towards an Alternative Curriculum. A Resource Pack

After months of research, meetings and debates, we have finally put together a first version of the resource pack “Training for exploitation? Towards an alternative curriculum” for use by students, teachers and cultural workers to address free and precarious labour in the arts, design, education and the creative industries.
Download it, read it, use it, spread the word and feed back to us! (click the image to be redirected to the document)

Join us for the Radical Makers Workshop, part of StudioSTRIKE’s Towards Common Ground



Join Precarious Workers Brigade and Enemies of Good Art on Sunday 29th April from 11am-1pm, when we will hold a Radical Makers Session on strike action for the precarious worker (cultural workers, artists, mothers, undocumented migrant workers, temporary contract workers and many others who share the ever increasing conditions of precarity). This is an opportunity to air your views on the issue of strike action inside the home and in the work space. We will be asking ‘what it means to strike for the precarious worker and mother’, looking at personal strikes within the home, sex strikes, strikes on domestic duties and parental strikes.

This is an open workshop in the Bandstand on Clapham Common. Children welcome.
Click here for the MAP. 

This event is part of Towards Common Ground, and the The studioSTRIKE | Bread and Roses Film Festival marking the centenary of the 1912 “Bread and Roses” textile workers strike. Towards Common Ground is curated by Amy McDonnell and Ying Tan.

Are you a designer? Take part in this inquiry into the socio-economic conditions of designers today (closes May 20th)

Designers’ Inquiry investigates the social profile of designers today.

In the form of a questionnaire, it wants to capture and reflect on the complex and often precarious condition that characterises the experience of working in the field of design.

It is an open inquiry and there are no right or wrong answers. The information you are sending us (anonymously) will be included in the analysis as well as in the presentation of the results.

For our research it is important to also gather personal voices, so please feel free to comment questions throughout the questionnaire.

Thank you!

In English http://designersinquiry-en.questionpro.com/

In Italian http://designersinquiry-it.questionpro.com/

Precarity and housing politics in austerity London - with reference to PWB workshops

Precarity and housing politics in austerity London, UK

by Mara Ferreri, Queen Mary, University of London http://antipodefoundation.org/2012/04/16/precarity-and-housing-politics-in-austerity-london-uk/

On 27 February 2012, London’s Occupy LSX was evicted, as was the School of Ideas. At the time of writing, only the protest camp at Finsbury Square remains. Justifiably, much of the subsequent issue of the movement’s paper The Occupied Times focused on the rise of homelessness in the capital, touching on the thorny but fertile never-ending debate on the difference between occupying as a gesture of political protest and squatting as a direct action response to housing need (see The Occupied Times 2012). Thanks to the highly mediatised events that surrounded Occupy, much has been written about the embodied politics of collectively reclaiming space and their powerful and emancipatory potential. All too often, however, these reflections conflate spatial politics with the ‘public’ gestures of outdoor protests, leaving aside the crucial ‘private’ politics of living, i.e. the cost and availability of decent housing. Even when homelessness is debated, housing politics remain significantly marginal in the organising language and demands of the many movements that currently preoccupy British cities***.

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Ethics Code (April 2012 draft)

The document below is our code of ethics, a kind of collectively edited compass that helps us orient, define and do our work as a group and network. This is a document that will always be in draft form, since our considerations on ethics evolve with time and different experiences. This is not law but rather constitutes an attempt at instituting our practice/s with view to consistency, and generate a space for reflection on our collective processes.

PWB: THE BIGGER PICTURE. WHY ARE WE HERE?

  • We want to be an organising group, working with people in the education and cultural sectors, in solidarity with other groups working on issues of precarity.
  • We operate a critical analysis and invent resistant practices to neoliberal capitalism and the different ways in which it produces precarity.
  • We want to develop a differentiated approach to (self-)‘organising’ that neither consists in ‘organising others’ nor in just reflecting on ourselves.
  • We want to bring new people into the group and campaigns when appropriate.
  • We want to be in solidarity and collaboration with other groups.
  • We make use of creative and analytic training to engage in direct action and campaigns towards concrete change.
  • We engage in consciousness-raising (but not in circumstances in which we know that everyone is already conscious but inactive).
  • We want to strike a balance between organising work on the ground (eg. campaigns, demonstrations, etc.), administration and the ‘representational’ (eg. writing texts, giving talks, workshops, etc.) and organising aspects of our work – whilst recognising that they are not necessarily separate activites, but inter-connect.
  • We would like to ensure that roles do not get fixed and that work is recognized and valued within the group.
  • We operate both as a group and a network, and try to find different modalities of participation between these.

Our main organisational platforms

1. Mailing List The mailing list is conceived more as a space of communicating across the network, also with people who are not at our meetings regularly. It’s for circulating invitations to events and ours as well as other meetings and sharing info about ongoing campaigns.

2. Online platform Cr*bgrass is a working space for PWB as a group of groups. Here we discuss and work internally. (Not publicly accessible.)

3. Meetings

//// Meeting protocol We conduct meetings by rough consensus. At each meeting we rotate roles including: the chair, the scribe, the timekeeper, the affect thermometer. Points are carried from one meeting to another via the agenda. We encourage people to send apologies and confirm attendance at meetings. Agenda points are collected on crabgrass previous to meetings. At the fortnightly meetings, we each give £2-3 to someone who volunteers to buy food for the next fortnightly meeting.

//// Meeting routine We meet fortnightly. Working groups may chose to meet in the intervening weeks. Every once in a while (when we want to invite new people into a campaign or project that can accommodate them) we hold open meetings or drop-ins.

AREAS OF OUR WORK

Decisions

Decisions are made in face to face meetings (not on email). They are made by discussion in relation to our aims, commitments and the conditions of work to which we have agreed (see below). This is especially important in the case of invitations to write or participate in events. This will sometimes mean explaining to those who invite us, that we require time to deliberate. If this time is not given, we will have to say no. Pending decisions on invitations should be announced on email or crabgrass prior to our fortnightly meetings. Decisions are made by those who attend. When decisions are taken at smaller meetings, they are announced on crabgrass and everyone is given 1-2 weeks (up to the group to chose) to consider them. If people want to object to the point of blocking a decision, they themselves become responsible for setting a date for a next meeting to re-discuss (and they have to be there themselves). Otherwise we take there to be rough consensus.

Skill Sharing

We value the educational possibilities of our work in direct action and campaigning and whenever possible we will take the opportunity to teach and learn from each other. We want to ensure that roles do not become fixed and that people are able to develop new skills.

Working Groups

Our work is organized through working groups, some of which are ongoing and others of which are ad hoc. They include: different campaigns, press, education, working conditions, ethics, etc. These groups appear as ‘committees’ on crabgrass. Working groups have their separate communications via email and sms. If someone expresses interest in a working group, they are included in those communications, even if they don’t always join meetings. Working groups try to keep each other updated of important meetings (cr+bgrass).

Solidarity and Collaborations with other Groups or Institutions

When we engage in a collaboration or solidarity campaign with others, we make sure there is at least 2 people in the PWB who are willing to form a delegation that takes this on. Communications work via email or sms between people wanting to be part of the delegation. In engaging with other groups, we take ourselves seriously as PWB, and interact with them as a collective, not just as individuals.

Administration

Administrative tasks such as blogs, email lists, bank accounts will be undertaken on rotation and discussed at the administration meeting. We log all pending tasks on the crabgrass ‘tasks’ page: every once in a while we check this, and if we find that we have a lot of things to catch up with, we dedicate the next few working sessions to this and take on no more new tasks/work until some of the old tasks are done.

Authorship

Our work is produced, signed and presented collectively involving at least two persons. This means we don’t sign with individual names, or appear as individuals on behalf of the group.

Money

The money we earn as a collective goes into our collective bank account (there are 3 treasurers/signatories). No one earns individual money via PWB. We put our money into: - campaigns and direct action (printing, props, …) - reproductive activities: food for meetings tbd, occasional collective leisure activities, dinners, drinks after a meeting - paying for travel etc especially for people in financial difficulty

Tools

We want to strike a balance between inventing new tools and using the ones we have already developed. We will archive the tools that we use in re-usable formats i.e. toolkits to share with others. Tools/infos such as:

-The counterguide to free labour (eg. sample contracts, fake references, letters to intern employers, … ) - Direct Action/Agit Prop ideas - Pre-protest organising and workshops: building a carrot block - Ethics code - Pedagogical tools for workshops - Info box at the end of publications - Time/work mapping - Alternative curriculum - How to run an internship fair - How to make a Peoples Tribunal - Sexy statistics

MINIMUM CONDITIONS: WHEN WE SAY YES AND WHEN WE SAY NO

The below criteria is to help deal with invitations and opportunities. It is not meant to be bureaucratic but made so that we do not waste our time, creative power, resources or focus. It can be used as a checklist.

We say yes when:

  • There are at least two members willing and interested in working on it and it is realistic for them to do so.
  • The opportunity does not take significant time away from our goals for that period
  • When accepting an invite, we not only require 2 or more people to drive the work but we also evaluate how long this process will last, how much time and resources it will involve, and if other PWBers will have to come in at a later stage.
  • There is an opportunity for action/organization in relation to one of our campaigns or the issue of precarity
  • There is a pedagogical opportunity to raise awareness: in this case we are more careful about accepting. If invited to give a talk or workshop in an institution, we make sure to 1.)get fair pay 2.)have a trusting connection with someone in the institution who can carry the work around precarity forward there: we do the groundbreaking, opening conversations so others can continue.
  • There is something new for us to learn
  • Gives opportunity for older and newer members of the group to work together
  • There is a fee for more than one person (unless a grassroots political meeting)
  • Travel expenses are covered for more than one person (unless a grassroots political meeting)
  • The opportunity supports a copyleft or non-proprietary circulation of work
  • The group reaches rough consensus on the value of the opportunity.
  • The one delivering the invitation is willing to publish a box containing the basic working conditions that went into the project. Or in the case of an event: we present this information live every time.

WE say no when:

  • The opportunity is for profit and/or there is public funding involved and there is no fee.
  • The opportunity is for profit and/or there is public funding involved and there is no travel covered.
  • The opportunity is for profit and/or there is public funding and does not support participation of at least two group members.
  • If these requirements are not fulfilled we will explain why.

PRECARIOUS WORKERS BRIGADE DROP-IN SESSION! This Thursday 12th April, Bread and Roses Pub, 7-9pm.

PRECARIOUS WORKERS BRIGADE DROP-IN SESSION! This Thursday 12th April, Bread and Roses Pub, 7-9pm.

  • Are you unsure what job you will be doing in three months?
  • Do you freelance but don’t feel free?
  • Has the carrot you were promised gone off?
  • Do you feel increasingly precarious even if your job is relatively secure?

If your answer to these questions is yes, come this Thursday 12th of April to the Precarious Workers Brigade precarity drop-in!

It will be an informal occasion to meet and share solidarity in this climate of instability and enforced austerity among precarious workers struggling to make a living in the cultural and educational sectors, and beyond.

We’ll be around for a couple of hours from 7 till 9pm to meet new people, explain what we do and how to join us, share information on existing campaigns and thoughts about precarity. All welcome!

When: Thursday 12th April, 7-9pm

Where: Bread and Roses Pub; 68 Clapham Manor Street London, Greater London SW4 6DZ; Near Clapham North and Clapham Common tube stations as well as Clapham High Street Rail station.

“Bread and Roses Strike” Photo Courtesy: Kheel Center, Cornell University

Get your money!

Doing an unpaid internship or working for free? No problem - stick it out, then call the Employment Tribunal to make a violation of national minimum wage legislation claim and get your money!

n.b. claim needs to be made within 3 months after work has ended. Unfortunately charity organisations are exempt from NMW and can exploit all they want.

The Devil Pays Nada - protest against unpaid internships

Friday, February 17, 2012
9:30am - 11:00am

As you might know unpaid internships are rife within many industries - especially those which are already incredibly competitive to get in to - such as fashion.

London Fashion Week is having a press conference to launch the event on Friday 17th February at 09:45am at Somerset House (central London, near Covent Garden) and LSESU will be joining with Intern Aware and other Students’ Unions to go down and remind them that unpaid internships are not only ethically and morally wrong, they are also illegal.

We will be meeting at 9:15am in the Sabbs office - the theme is fashion victims so feel free to dress as outrageously as you fancy. For more information please email Alex on su.generalsecretary@lse.ac.uk 

 

Cambodian workers hold ‘people’s tribunal’ to look at factory conditions

H&M and Gap criticised for not agreeing to attend hearing next week investigating pay, working hours and ‘mass faintings’

Sarah Butler, The Guardian, Thursday 2 February 2012

Workers in Cambodia will hold a “people’s tribunal” next week to investigate pay and conditions at factories working for fashion brands including H&M and Gap.

An international panel of judges will hear evidence from workers, factories and multinational brands including Puma and Adidas. H&M said it would not attend but would supply information about how it was addressing wages at its suppliers’ factories in the country.

The two-day hearing aims to raise awareness of low pay and long working hours that workers say are partly responsible for a series of “mass faintings” involving hundreds of workers at factories supplying H&M, Gap and sports brands.

Up to 300 workers will give evidence about the fainting incidents and about living conditions resulting from low wages.

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It is my human right not to work for Poundland: Graduate who faced losing benefit sues ministers

  • Cait Reilly has been looking for work since graduating in the summer
  • She volunteered at a museum until ordered to accept two-week placement
  • Her lawyer says the ‘forced labour’ breaches her human rights

By Andy Dolan and Lynn Davidson Daily Mail Online, 12th January 2012

A graduate made to work for her jobless benefits as a shelf stacker in Poundland is taking legal action against the Government under the Human Rights Act.

Cait Reilly, who studied geology at university, had been unable to find a job in her subject area and was claiming unemployment benefit while volunteering in a museum in the hope it would lead to a job in that sector.

But the 22-year-old had to give up the placement in order to work in the budget store under a Government scheme designed to encourage the long-term unemployed back to work.

Work experience: Cait Reilly said she had to sweep up and fill the shelves at the Poundland store in Kings Heath, Birmingham

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How to Find a Better Life? Nina Power reviews ‘Are you working too much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art’

How to Find a Better Life?

Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood eds., Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art. Sternberg Press, 216pp, £10.95, ISBN 9781934105313

reviewed by Nina Power, Review 31

The notes at the back of this latest e-flux collection state that one group of contributors, the Precarious Workers Brigade, ‘have a policy of including information on the context in which their work appears.’ To this end, they detail the dates when the piece was written (March - April 2011), the number of people involved in writing it (nine), that their text is also available online for free and is licenced under a Creative Commons licence, how they spent the $750 they were paid for the article (‘collective investment’) and the fact that e-flux journal employed two interns to work on the journal the article appeared in.

How much were these interns paid? $0 an hour. This single line sums it all up: the ‘work’ of the art world, and the increasing tendency of all work, is predicated on the fact that those at the bottom (and increasingly the middle) will do everything for nothing. But why, ask the editors, ‘should so many talented and hyper-qualified artists submit themselves willingly to a field of work … that offers so little in return for such a huge amount of unremunerated labor?’ Why indeed? The editors talk of the combination of structural exploitation and self-exploitation that characterises the ‘pseudo-professionalism’ of work in the art world (and we could include in this description not only artists, but curators, art writers, and all those at the less glamorous end of the gallery/museum/art fair spectrum). This unhappy situation in the art world (and the rest of the world) is the crux of the collection at hand.

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