ABSTRACT
Describing themselves as “the multitude of workers of the creative industries” (MACAO 2012), hundreds of cultural workers marched through the streets of Milan on May 5, 2012 to a 31-storey abandoned skyscraper and occupied it. In the ten days prior to their eviction, the occupiers transformed the space into a site for autonomous cultural production, a bold collective move taken in response to precarious employment and financial austerity in Italy (Cultural Workers Organize 2013). Across Europe and North America, cultural workers are responding to similarly strained conditions by experimenting with organizational forms and collective activities. Emergent organizations in New York City, such as The Model Alliance, the Retail Action Project, and W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), are presenting new ways to address the precarity faced by flexworkers in urban centres that valorize creative industries despite insecure and often poor working conditions (de Peuter 2014). Globally, interns and their allies are forming groups like the Canadian Intern Association, the Precarious Workers Brigade in London, and Génération Précaire in Paris, filing class action lawsuits, and waging social media campaigns to oppose the rapidly solidifying norm that unpaid labour is a young worker’s ticket into the creative sector. These are just some examples of emerging labour politics in creative industries, where workers, often through new labour organizations that exist outside the bounds of traditional trade unions, are lobbying for social protections and higher pay and exerting collective pressure to reclaim autonomy over their crafts and their lives.
