Very excited to see the recent unionisation by designers/cultural workers, archictectural workers and game workers - and, that they are organising in solidarity with all workers in the sectors and amazing unions. Check out and join them!
UVW-Section of Architectural Workers (UVW-SAW): the first ever trade union to organise everyone in the architectural
sector, including assistants, cleaners, students, admin staff,
technicians, sole traders, and architects. https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/saw
Game Workers Unite UK branch of the IWGB: a worker-led, democratic trade union that represents and advocates for UK game workers’ rights. https://www.gwu-uk.org/
A solidarity letter for Macao from Precarious Workers Brigade
We are a collective of activists who have
been campaigning for over ten years against the growing deployment and
normalization of free labour within the cultural sector. We wish to share this
open letter in solidarity with Macao, to emphasize its importance in the
international context. To explain why we, who live ‘abroad’, need Macao.
Macao is one of the most lively and
important experiments in creating cultural institutions that are daring and
sustainable at the same time. Its significance for contemporary cultural
production extends beyond Italy and it is studies and followed with great
interest by a number of practitioner’s networks and local governments. This is
not just our evaluation of the many cultural projects and experimentation with
different kinds of production hosted there. For us, who live in the ruins of
Cool Britannia, the slogan used by the Tony Blair government to introduce the
policy of its lefty-neoliberal ‘Creative Industries’, Macao offers a different vision
for a future economy, one based on cooperation rather than competition. What is
more, Macao is a much needed example of another model for organizing culture
that is inclusive and democratic without becoming populist, without relying on
a mix of self-exploitative free labour, mandatory internships and voluntarism.
There are very few other cultural
organizations in the international landscape that have been experimenting with
models of internal governance that directly remunerate reproductive labour,
striving to equally redistribute care and maintenance functions among those
involved. Not many other organizations consciously dedicate part of their
energies, time and resources to actively support other campaigns and political
processes beyond their immediate interests. Very few creative hubs keep an open
structure of governance, based on assemblies and working groups, that is able
to both remain open to new proposals and welcome new actors, while at the same
time invent effective methods for running such a diverse number of projects and
activities. Almost no other is experimenting with a basic income and
alternative currencies engaging such a great number of participants.
We believe that it is responsibility of the
Municipality of Milan to do all that is in its power to support and regularize
the important ecology of practices that found a shelter in Macao. This starts
from having the courage to interrupt the course of action that was recently set
in motion with the sale of the Viale Molise buildings to a banking group such
as BNP Paribas. The space of Macao can and should be kept into public hands as
a great asset. It could - and should - become a pioneering example of a
cultural institution governed as a common.
Antiuniversity 2018: Roleplay a Coop! 10 June 2018, 11am - 6pm
Fed up with your precarious working conditions as a cultural
worker? Come and join us for a day of collective learning and fun
discovering how to set up a co-op and roleplaying one. In the morning,
we will be reading and discussing materials on how to set up co-ops; in
the afternoon, we will split in groups to roleplay setting up and
running a co-op. This will include a game of Co-opoly, the cooperative
version of Monopoly. We will finish with a plenary session where we will
share the different sets of rules established in each group, the issues
encountered during our roleplay and the solutions that we found. Important: If you have had experience with radical co-ops in the 1970s and/or 1980s we really want to hear from you!
Organised
by Precarious Workers Brigade + Friends, a group of cultural workers
that met at the encounter “Culture + Work at Point Zero”, organised by
Precarious Workers Brigade in April 2018. Tired of our precarious
working conditions, we are interested in learning about co-ops and
exploring their possibilities as a way to a better and happier
professional life.
* This event is part of the Antiuniversity Now festival, 9-15 June 2018. See the full programme on www.antiuniversity.org
By
signing up to this event you will be added to the Antiuniversity
mailing list. To opt out please email antiuniversitynow@gmail.com
On ethics, solidarity, working together: a collective conversation
Based on a collective Skype conversation between Janna Graham and Precarious Workers Brigade, 11 June 2016. Published in ‘Una Ciudad Muchas Mundos’. Madrid: Intermediae (forthcoming)
Janna Graham (JG): Dear Precarious Workers Brigade, I was recently in Madrid with Manuela, at a session where
groups came together to work on this code of ethical practices – to guide their embedded work as
artists in local communities, working on issues like gentrification, bodies and mobilities and child
care.The scene as I walked in was very familiar and would be to all of you: groups were sprawled across
the floor with large pieces of paper and coloured marker pens, intently working through the various
dimensions of what ethics could mean. From the outside it appeared like the moment when we
came all together in 2010, a moment in which we were preparing ourselves for the joys and
struggles of the fight against austerity, knowing little of what was ahead, how much we were to
come together and learn and how much we would lose. But of course this moment in Spain is very different from that one we experienced. The intelligence
gained from the mobilisations in the squares is palpable. Questions about how to cope with the
institutionalisation and the ‘becoming hegemonic’ of social movements gaining political currency
(can you imagine us facing this question now in the UK?), with how to maintain the accountabilities
but also the intimacies and personal proximities of direct democracy while engaging with the
governmental bureaucracies, how to make movements stronger and not weaker by the various
moments in which movement activists are defeated by the apparatus they have only recently come
to inhabit. With this in mind, we can maybe read this ethics document and reflect on our own experiences of
questioning the ethics of our work…. One of the first points we might want to discuss is that we
have never described what we do as Precarious Workers Brigade as embedded practice, (in the UK
they usually call this kind of work ‘socially engaged’, which tells you something about how
normalised conditions of non-embeddedness are in the art world here i.e. is art not always socially
engaged? is it not always embedded, just usually to indulge ruling elites?). Despite this, in other aspects of our lives and work in the arts, many of us do intensive work in and within particular
contexts. Do you think the two practices are related?
Lola: It’s funny this question, as it’s true many of us make our precarious livings doing ‘embedded’
art or research projects. The rehearsing of questions of ethics within the PWB group was very
important to many of us in this. Not because it gave us strategies for working with those groups
necessarily, but because it de-centred us as individual or solo practitioners and allowed us to think
of ourselves as part of larger collectivities.
Carrie: Yeah, it took the emphasis off the genius, the artwork, all the things that an art world that
cares very little about ethics places at the centre. Instead, we built our power, our own collectivities,
our accountability to another mode of valorisation in which ethics was a central component.
Martha: It’s true, as a group, though we made things and ideas all the time, we never called
ourselves artists. This meant and means that when we do enter into this other art world (the one that
does not place ethics at the centre) - whether as individuals or as different versions of the
collectivities formed in PWB - we felt more powerful to negotiate and to demand different terms
and conditions for ourselves but also for and with our collaborators from outside of the art world.
Our meetings, places for sharing experiences of oppression in and through cultural organisations
and finding ways to work against them, produced a different kind of configuration of the artist/social/community, one that was based in radical social aims and in practices of solidarity.
1 week until: Culture + Work at Point Zero (14/15 April, Limehouse Townhall, London)
Only 1 week to go to our 2 days of militant self-education, conviviality and strategising:
Culture + Work at Point Zero, 14 + 15 April 2018, Limehouse Townhall*, 646 Commercial Rd, London E14 7HA Come join us to collectively take stock, self-educate, make new alliances, and plot what is to be done about the state of cultural labour at this critical moment. Here is the facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/207235243342932/
And: below a more detailed schedule of the two days
*Unfortunately the space is not fully accessible. Please get in touch if you have access needs and we’ll do everything we can to enable your participation!
—————————————————————————————-
SATURDAY 14 April:
11am - 11.30am Coffee
11.30am Welcome by PWB + Limehouse Town Hall and intro to the day’s working theme:
- Life on Zero Hours - The Impossibility of our Conditions: This will cover things like working conditions, anti-racist (labour) organising, coming automation, post-work solutions, universal and unconditional basic income, universal credit, pensions, the nexus between gentrification and our precariousness…
12noon - 1.30pm Working session part 1 - in this part we will map: What are our observations/ analysis/practices in relation to this topic? What are the issues/concerns/gaps? What question(s) do we want to put on the table?
2.30pm - 4.30pm Working session part 2 - in this part we will move from mapping and analysis to proposals, plans, potential actions, collective statements, …
11.30am Welcome and intro to the day’s two working themes:
- Cultural Democracy: Examining current and past initiatives that try to develop a blueprint for what truly progressive and comprehensive cultural policy might look like, including issues of governance, budgeting, decision-making, evaluation, collective ownership and administration of cultural spaces, and so on.
- Cooperativization and Commoning: Considering and getting each other up to speed with most recent concrete proposals being put forward/experimented with around building different forms of organisation, including co-operativisation, mutual aid/mutual societies, unions, circular economies, crypto-currencies and so on. How do we organise in ways that place care and reproduction at the centre?
12noon - 1.30pm Splitting into working groups Working session part 1 - in this part we will map: What are our observations/ analysis/practices in relation to this topic? What are the issues/concerns/gaps? What question(s) do we want to put on the table?
2.30 - 4.30pm Working session part 2 - in this part we will move from mapping and analysis to proposals, plans potential actions, collective statements, …
CULTURE + WORK AT POINT ZERO: 2 Days of Militant Self-Education, Conviviality and Strategising, 14+15 April 2018
Precarious
Workers Brigade (PWB) invites you to a two-day assembly to take stock,
self- educate, make new alliances, and plot what is to be done about the
state of cultural labour at this critical moment.
Almost ten
years ago, PWB was formed from the skin of the Carrot Workers Collective
to examine and transform the conditions of unpaid and precarious labour
for cultural workers. Today we again feel the need to reflect, learn
with other collectives and campaigns and decide how and in which form
to deploy our energies in the years ahead. Because things have gotten
worse.
How can we discuss cultural democracy in increasingly
post-democratic conditions and rising fascism? In the context of
‘post-work’ and increasing automation, how do we organise and imagine
different forms of mutuality, commoning, cooperation and basic income
beyond the wage? How can we reclaim the right to cultural activities as
common spaces of joy and pleasure against the imposed austerity and
accelerated gentrification?
We are calling cultural workers,
artists, cleaners, activists, educators, students, and all those who
have a stake in these questions to join us. In these two days, we will
hear from each other, we will share short provocations on core issues to
prompt collective discussions, build common agendas and take action.
Dates + times: Saturday, 14 April: 11-6pm, followed by dinner Sunday, 15 April: 11-5pm
Location: Limehouse Town Hall 646 Commercial Rd, London E14 7HA Nearest tube: DLR Limehouse or Westferry
Childcare provided Unfortunately
the space is not fully accessible. Please get in touch with us if
you have access needs and we’ll do everything we can to enable your
participation! Email: precariousworkersbrigade@aktivix.org
Photo: Still from Zero for Conduct (Zéro de conduite), dir. Jean Vigo, 1933.
Precarious Workers Brigade supports the Women’s Strike called for the 8th March 2018 across the UK and we invite all of our allies and friends to join too! The Women Strike is impossible. This is why it is necessary.
The following interview with the Precarious
Workers Brigade (PWB) reflects on the theme of collaboration in relation
to work, the creative industries and Higher Education. As the PWB
outline in their book Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability & Reclaiming Education,
a resource for students, teachers and cultural workers, exploitative
labour conditions in the arts are often obscured by claims that
celebrate autonomous and independent work. As we discuss below,
‘collaboration’ might very well operate as a term that ostensibly
redeems various forms of exploitation in the cultural sector and higher
education. Describing new forms of post-Fordist labour relations,
‘collaboration’ simultaneously valorises them as expressive of an
affectual co-operation.
In its conflation of labour and community,
‘collaboration’ tends to perform as a social good while its politics go
unacknowledged and unexamined. ‘Solidarity’, as PWB offer below, might
be a term that offers a more critical position from which to organise
and intervene in the prevailing political economy. In practice it
foregrounds affinities, to help one another create more just and ethical
conditions for work and life through collective transformation. But,
as PWB helpfully underline below, terminology requires ongoing
attentiveness.
The Common House is a radical community-building space in East London, which we and many other fantastic groups, initiatives and activites have called our home for the last 4 years. It needs urgent financial support to stay open (more info below)!
The Common House is an experiment in building a commons – a space
that is organised and structured by collective activity, not by money or
property rights.
In a city where social space is increasingly private, we have been
carving out a common space shared by a wide range of groups and
projects. It is a space where individuals and collectives can meet, come
together to share skills and ideas, support each other, heal, grow, and
use our shared experiences to support political action for social,
economic and environmental justice in East London and beyond.
The Common House also provide a space for groups with little or no resources, operating on the basis of mutual solidarity.
We have hosted over 7000 hours of community action at the Common House since September 2013 - including over 500 meetings, 350 classes and workshops,120 complementary healthcare sessions, 80 reading groups, and 110 film screenings. In other words, we have supported activities on a full-time basis for nearly four years through voluntary collective effort.
What would you be funding?
As no one is paid to run the Common House, your money would go
towards securing the space and keeping the lights on while we source
more sustainable, long-term funding. In doing so, you would be
supporting all those that use the space - the following is just a
snapshot of the kind of work the space has helped to facilitate over the
past four years:
Accessible and affordable healing and community support: Common Hair haircuts, queer friendly yoga, community massage and Common House acupuncture clinic.
Collective learning and doing through projects like: Riso Club – learning about and making Risograph prints; x:talk
– a sex worker cooperative supporting peer to peer ESOL classes for sex
workers; Autonomous Tech Fetish – hosting workshops on topics such as
encryption; biometrics and health policy, Babels Blessing - running affordable classes in Yiddish, Arabic, Hebrew and Sign Language; Antiuniversity; In Sight Theatre - a collaboration between learning disabled and non learning disabled actors; Sex Worker Opera; and the Radio Ava Project - a radio station for and by sex workers.
We, the undersigned, stand united in struggle with the residents of
Boyle Heights in their resistance to the gentrification of their area.
Since summer, 2016 they have staged a number of public protests against
contemporary art galleries that have moved into their locality.
While it may be true that a number of these galleries did not take up
residence in the area with the intent to facilitate its gentrification,
their failure to take action in response to the residents demands make
them complicit with this process. Boyle Heights has been home to
Latina/o migrants and other migrant and working class communities since
the start of the 19th Century. In recent years, the movement of
contemporary art galleries into their area has symbolised the incursion
of a hegemonic art world coded as white, middle and upper class. This,
as in many other neighbourhoods around the world, has signalled to
developers that this is an area ripe for development resulting in
rocketed rent prices, and housing projects aimed at high earners and the
ultimate displacement of Boyle Heights residents.
This process is by now so common that it is often portrayed as manifest destiny.
The narrative of manifest destiny echoes the violence of colonial
expansion: violent both in its waging of war against and displacement of
indigenous and poor communities, and in consistently erasing their
rights, voices and cultures. What the Boyle Heights residents are
shouting is that this process is not inevitable, that local groups can
and do fight to take back ownership over their area.
We extend our solidarity and support to them.
While everyone knows the arts and artists are catalysts in the process
of gentrification, the arts community is often seen to be an innocent
bystander or victim of this process. While this can certainly be the
case (artists are sometimes among those displaced), the arts are not
innocent. It is often through the arts that the cultures of existing
resident communities are undermined legitimising the violence of their
forced departure. It is common to hear, as we have in much of the
reporting on the Boyle Heights situation (https://www.theguardian.com/…/artwashing-new-watchword-for-…),
that art galleries and good coffee bring ‘culture’ to an area, as
though the years of local residents’ production of their own culture,
their own businesses, their own fabric of sociability and support is of
no value unless it can be re-packaged and re-branded for more affluent
communities.
Increasingly it is not only the presence of
galleries but the involvement of artists in all manner of ‘engagement’
in the development process that signals it as the ‘better option’ than
existing culture. Artists, often young, hungry and naive to such
processes, are asked to help citizens to ‘vision’ (https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com/…/empowerment-for-sur…/)
futures that developers and governments have no intention in realising
with them. They are asked to document, ’celebrate’ and memorialise local
cultures before they have even left and as though their disappearance
were inevitable and not the site of an existing and very current
struggle (http://www.metamute.org/…/art…/pyramid-dead-artangel-history).
They are also asked to work with the police and government agencies to
‘solve’ social problems (begging, sex work etc) that are articulated by
those who support the gentrification process rather than by residents
themselves.
The arts organisations in Boyle Heights have said
that they are there to support the residents, that they are on their
side. But the residents have expressly indicated on a number of
occasions how they would like this support to manifest itself: in the
departure of art galleries from the area. Uninterested in showing this
kind of support, the galleries are aligning themselves with the police
(who claim to be mediators) and other forces to protect their interests
and those of the property developers and would be residents that are
indeed their patrons – exposing exactly the network of interests in
which they are a part.
This is not to say that artists cannot
play a role in local communities. Indeed many within the resident groups
demanding the departure of galleries in Boyle Heights are artists. They
are artists and residents with a stake in their local area, willing to
listen and work in solidarity with their neighbours.
They join a
growing group of artists and cultural workers fed up with the role of
the arts in the gentrification process. These artists quit when they see
that their work is being instrumentalised by the forces of displacement
and development, get involved locally, hand their galleries and
organisations over to direct governance by local communities who
generate uses and aesthetics that challenge those of the visual and
cultural hegemony of the marketised contemporary art world. They make
work with residents in support of local struggles to be used by those
struggles rather than conceived purely as material for circulation on
the international art market.
These artists and galleries take a strong stand against the violent war waged on victims of the gentrification process.
We implore the galleries in Boyle Heights to join them and depart from the area.
In solidarity,
Southwark Notes (London)
Precarious Workers Brigade (London)
no.w.here (Artist run project space, London)
Design Action Research Hub, London College of Communications
Our new critical workbook ‘Training For Exploitation? Politicising
Employability and Reclaiming Education’ is now available internationally and as a free download through: http://joaap.org/press/trainingforexploitation.htm
This
96-pages workbook is a critical resource pack for educators teaching
employability, ‘professional practice’ and work-based learning. It
provides a pedagogical framework that assists students and others in
deconstructing dominant narratives around work, employability and
careers, and explores alternative ways of engaging with work and the
economy. Training for Exploitation? includes tools for critically
examining the relationship between education, work and the cultural
economy. It provides useful statistics and workshop exercises on topics
such as precarity, employment rights, cooperation and solidarity, as
well as examples of alternative educational and organising practices.
Training for Exploitation? shows how we can both critique and organise
against a system that is at the heart of the contemporary crises of
work, student debt and precarity.
'For many years the members of Precarious Workers Brigade have been
developing insightful analyses, tools and actions questioning wageless
and other exploitative forms of labour in the arts and education
sectors. ‘Training for Exploitation?’ is no exception. As an educator I
support the effort the book makes to provide the analysis and the tools
needed to challenge the conversation, now predominant in the classroom,
concerning ‘employability’. As a feminist I recognise many of these
tools from past and contemporary practices of consciousness raising.
They are effective and I encourage readers to use them’. - Silvia Federici
Written by PWB, Foreword by Silvia Federici Published by Journal of Aesthetics & Protest (JOAAP) Designed by Evening Class, Printed by Calverts 96 pages, black and white with color cover
The
book is an open invitation to both educators and students to use and
build on. We’d love to hear what you make of it!
With a foreword by Silvia Federici and published by the Journal of
Aesthetics & Protest Press, 'Training for Exploitation?’ is a
critical resource pack for educators teaching employability,
'professional practice’ and work-based learning. Pre-order the book here: http://joaap.org/press/trainingforexploitation.htm. Free download available soon.
“For many years the members of the Precarious Workers Brigade have
been developing insightful analyses, tools and actions questioning
wageless and other exploitative forms of labour in the arts and
education sectors. 'Training for Exploitation?’ is no exception.As an educator I support the effort the book makes to provide the
analysis and the tools needed to challenge the conversation, now
predominant in the classroom, concerning 'employability’. As a feminist I
recognise many of these tools from past and contemporary practices of
consciousness raising. They are effective and I encourage readers to
use them.” - Silvia Federici (from the Foreword)
This publication
provides a pedagogical framework that assists students and others in
deconstructing dominant narratives around work, employability and
careers, and explores alternative ways of engaging with work and the
economy. Training for Exploitation? includes tools for critically
examining the relationship between education, work and the cultural
economy. It provides useful statistics and workshop exercises on topics
such as precarity, employment rights, cooperation and solidarity, as
well as examples of alternative educational and organising practices.
Training for Exploitation? shows how we can both critique and organise
against a system that is at the heart of the contemporary crises of
work, student debt and precarity.
PWB Press Release: ‘Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education’. A forthcoming publication by PWB due out January 2017
Foreword by Silvia Federici. Published by Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press. £5/10, available online for free. For further information see below, to reserve a copy email editors@joaap.org or precariousworkersbrigade@aktivix.org
“Power was trying to teach us individualism and profit… We were not good students.”
Compañera Ana Maria, Zapatista Education Promoter
Training for Exploitation? is a resource pack for educators teaching employability and
work-based learning. It provides a pedagogical framework aimed at assisting students
to deconstruct dominant narratives, develop their critical faculties and explore
alternative ways of engaging with work and the economy.
Work related learning is ever more prevalent in higher education– be it through work
placements, industry projects or career advice sessions. You can’t walk in to a
university these days without seeing the word employability: prizes are given for the
most employable student; employability workshops cover topics such as networking
and personal branding; and many work placements end up being little more than a
way for companies to cash in on free labour disguised as training. But while offering to
provide students with necessary skills and experience to make her more readily
attractive and employable to the labour market, employability also taps in to and feeds
individual insecurity, nurturing the sense of having to continually prove one’s worth
and update one’s skills. The increase in student anxiety and mental health issues are
often related to feelings of insecurity about the future and how to flourish in an
increasingly competitive and insecure labour market.
This 97 page pack in workbook format includes:
tools for critically engaging with education’s relationship to work and the economy
ideas for topics and exercises
a bibliography of related texts
useful statistics and workshop exercises on topics such as precarity, employment rights, cooperation and solidarity
examples of alternative educational and organising practices, alternative economies and other ways of working
Published by the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest (http://www.joaap.org/)
Designed by Evening Class
For further information or to reserve a copy, please email: editors@joaap.org or
precariousworkersbrigade@aktivix.org
Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB) is a UK-based group of precarious workers in
culture & education. We call out in solidarity with all those struggling to make a living
in this climate of instability and enforced austerity.
PWB’s praxis springs from a shared commitment to developing research and actions
that are practical, relevant and easily shared and applied. If putting an end to
precarity is the social justice we seek, our political project involves developing tactics,
strategies, formats, practices, dispositions, knowledges and tools for making this
happen.
Design by Evening Class. Evening Class is a self-organising design education experiment; flexible environment
where participants can cultivate common interests, develop their research and
collectively shape the class’s agenda. Participants reflect on their practices in wider cultural, social and political contexts
and work closely with London’s different landscapes. They create their own audience,
learn from it and engage with it. The process of the group’s evolution is transparent and publicly observed. Evening
Class intends to make the programme’s materials and references accessible to a wider
audience. The curation of the classes is expected to take many forms and explore different themes. Speakers
and mentors are invited bi-weekly in relation to the current programme.
