Theorizing cultural work

Question from the editors

The cultural and creative industries have always been discussed as a global sector, even though there are undoubted variations and inequalities between and within different countries and regions, and contrasts in specific policy rhetorics. What would you see as the distinctive aspects and issues around cultural work in the US at present?

Andrew ross

In the United States, these industries tend to view themselves as global market leaders, and there are government agencies that promote their positions in the global market through all kinds of trade policy initiatives, most conspicuously in the strong-arming efforts to protect intellectual property and enforce intellectual property licensing overseas. The wave of creative industries policy making in other countries in the 2000s was often presented as a catch-up initiative, especially again in a bid to grab a chunk of the fast-moving economic landscape around IP [intellectual property]. This situation gave rise to the illusory perception that the US does no policy making in this sector, which is complete nonsense. Ever since the US became an IP exporter, government officials have been in the business of looking after, and assisting, the rent-seeking of corporations in the culture business.

From the point of view of employees, the situation is more mixed. The traditional media and entertainment industries are still heavily unionized, or have craft guilds that protect pay scales and workplace standards, though they cannot and have never been able to guarantee steady work. At the other, deregulated, end of the spectrum is the burgeoning urban freelancing sector, where independent employees subsist from project to project, navigating digital pathways to the attention economy. Customarily, this divide reflects whether your work is below or above the talent line. The line is reflected in other ways in adjacent industries, such as telecommunications, where the landline infrastructure is maintained by union employees, while the workforce for mobile telecom is non-union.

Q

Given this variety, how far do you think the idea of ‘cultural work’ continues to offer an identifiable or appropriate object of intellectual discussion? Has the global financial crisis and economic recession changed the way we should think about cultural and creative industries?

AR

176The recession has been so long and its impact so deep that patterns of employment generated by the shortfall in economic activity may well have turned into more permanent shifts or transformations of work mentality. This is perhaps more noticeable in the sector of cultural work, broadly defined, because of the intensification of precarious labour conditions endemic to that sector. In particular, I think we have seen an upsurge in unpaid, or token-wage, work. Indeed, a cynic might well conclude that ‘working for nothing’ is the latest high-growth jobs sector, and a substantial portion of that economic activity might be classified as cultural in nature.

Some of these forms of unpaid labour are new, and are occurring as part of the ongoing transfer of work to digital platforms. Others seem to be upgrades of existing patterns, or they entail the conversion of formerly paid positions to unpaid ones, as is the case with internships. Still others rest on the industrial uptake of amateurism and volunteerism as the price of entry into the cultural marketplace of rewards for youthful effort.

Q

What is the role of the digital in this particular context?

AR

In the realm of digital labour, I have in mind the following:

The establishment of free online media content as an industrial norm. This has taken a predictable toll on the pay scales of professional writers, and we hear a lot about it because these writers have ready access to the platform to broadcast their complaints.

The extensive data mining from social media platforms like Facebook, which takes advantage of amateur users’ aspirations to build, polish and ‘market’ their online identities.

E-lance programs like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which allocate micro-tasks that may take no more than a few minutes to perform but which can add up to a minor source of revenue for taskers.

Crowdsourcing, especially of creative or interesting work, and the evidence shows that the more creative the request, the more obliging the crowd in coming up with free solutions.

A host of other sophisticated digital techniques (involving the use of personalized algorithms) for extracting rents from user/participants.

These are all forms of ‘distributed labour’ that tap the use of the Internet to mobilize the spare processing power of a widely dispersed crowd of discrete individuals. None of them comes close to any definition of non-standard employment used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet they are sources of sizable revenue and profit to knowledge firms. You need only look at the ratio of earnings to employees of leading information services firms like Google and Facebook to see one very influential model for the future of capitalism – each firm posts billions of dollars of profits, while maintaining a very small paid workforce – their astronomical earnings rest on the unpaid input of users.

Q

177Concerns about unpaid internships have begun to receive political attention in the UK. Do you think the trend towards their use has peaked?

AR

Internships have become near-obligatory in the cultural sector, and increasingly they are unpaid positions. My students are more familiar with the ubiquitous phrase ‘internship opportunities’ than they are with ‘job opportunities’, and somewhere in the back of my head I am hearing the immortal words of The Clash: ‘Career opportunities are the ones that never knock’. Internships are no longer a rite of passage into the professional service sector. For many, they are becoming a terminal limbo, not unlike the time spent by graduate students in teaching, which is no longer a term of apprenticeship, but, practically speaking, the end of their teaching career. In the last few years, unpaid internships have become the norm, and, according to Ross Perlin’s estimate from a few years ago, cumulatively provide a $2 billion subsidy to employers in the US alone. As the market for internships develops, these unpaid positions are being openly sold, with the more sought-after placements generating large returns that will surely amplify this subsidy in the near future. Much of this labour activity does not get officially recorded, and a goodly portion of it is illegal. Financing an unpaid internship, or a series of them, is usually only within the reach of families with wealth, and so there is a clear class divide opening up between those who can afford to graduate from the unpaid positions into the prestige institutions of cultural workers and those who cannot. Conservatives are increasingly on solid ground when they carp about the ‘cultural elite’.

Q

Class is certainly one issue, but in the UK, at least, the possibility of entering and securing a position in the cultural and creative industries – whether through internships or otherwise – has become more, rather than less, difficult for women and ethnic minorities. What are your thoughts on why this has become such a prominent failing of the sector?

AR

The evidence is that the unpaid internships are disproportionately occupied by females, so that’s a significant obstacle, and surely that pattern feeds off the assumption that women are more socialized in the customary ways of doing sacrificial work. Nor is there any labour market without a gender pay gap. The pay gap by race has narrowed because of greater access to college education, but in recent years the mounting student debt burden has complicated that pattern. Minorities, as well as women, are disproportionately impacted by student debt, so, unless they are from prosperous, middle-class families that can see them through the unpaid internships, they are less likely to enter the cultural/creative workforce than white males from the same economic background. To the degree that any livelihood in this sector requires a debt-financed degree as an entry credential, then it will hold back the more indebted. Of course, this applies to many other professions, but none of them draws on the longstanding tradition of feast-and-famine livelihoods that cultural work does.

Q

178For those without internships, or the facility to support one, there is always the possibility of one’s own talent being recognized and cultivated, but why is this belief so prevalent when the chances of success are so slim?

AR

Contestant volunteering has transformed many sectors of the culture industries into an amateur talent show, with jackpot stakes for a few winners and hard-luck schwag for everyone else. The talent show/reality TV model has rapidly become an industry standard and, given the industry’s influence among young people, it is becoming the normative work mentality for a generation of youth, with uncertain economic consequences. It used to be that the stars were in their own orbit, beyond reach. Now youth can see how quickly and easily fame can be achieved – with a little help from YouTube, you could be Justin Bieber too – the pathways are more democratic, and this has made the model of the talent contest all the more glamorous and seductive. For those who are persuaded to play (and it doesn’t take much), the wages of industrialization are being replaced by the affective currency of attention and prestige – working for exposure – and their amateur labour buys them the equivalent of a lottery ticket in the livelihood sweepstakes. Is this emergent norm a significant shift beyond the more traditional use of ‘auditioning’ as a workforce entry model? Has the ‘casting call’ been industrialized as a more extensive mode of cultural production, relying on a free labour supply?

Q

Thinking in terms of the labour process, and the extent to which it has changed, there is now a well-established academic field that discusses cultural work in terms of its post-industrial ‘individualization’, ‘precarity’, ‘immateriality’ and ‘self-exploitation’, and so on, often with a strong emphasis on suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects that is somehow formally distinguishable from earlier periods. Does this emphasis on novelty still seem appropriate to you, or would you see more social precedent in current conditions?

AR

Yes, I do think that new work mentalities emerge under the conditions you are describing. ‘Working for nothing’, if it is emerging as an industrial norm, is a shift beyond the varieties of ‘temping’ that have characterized job casualization over the last few decades. It’s also different from the fitful, lumpy or spiky income profiles that have long been associated with artists and other self-employed creatives. Precarity, as it was described by many scholars in the years before the financial crash, is being succeeded by an even more tenuous contractual relationship. Many of the new arrangements leave little trace of employment, and certainly nothing to implicate an employer in any legal or regulated network of obligations. Nor is the musicians’ profile of ‘gigs’ any longer adequate as a label writ large for intermittent work. The patterns of expropriation may be more systematic than they are intermittent.

Yet, even at the core of the new, there are always echoes of earlier ways of making a living. Take, for example, some of the arrangements I have described that are driven by the self-promotion of ordinary, unpaid 179individuals, attracted toward the entrepreneurial path of securing a niche in the attention economy. In some ways, this kind of conduct is more typical of a pre-industrial era, when the careful nurturing of attention from wealthy and powerful names or institutions were sources of considerable value and social mobility. So, if this is a move beyond temping, it’s also a throwback to before the routines and standards of industrialization.

Q

What you seem to be suggesting is that there is some kind of re-traditionalization, even re-feudalization of the workplace – a return to a pre-modern mode before professional, waged artistic and creative labour, and to an economy of patronage and prestige? Is that what you’re suggesting, and if so what are the wider implications?

AR

Feudalization might be pushing it, if only because feudal relations require some obligations on the part of the master, but there are premodern aspects to the lines of patronage and prestige. The difference, of course, is in the sheer mass of those competing for attention, and also that the patrons who bestow the attention are often quite ordinary audiences, and not executors of elite taste. Boosters will say that this represents a democratization of the process of ‘getting ahead’, and a more authentic form of talent market than one driven by nepotism and old boy networks. Critics see a debasement of cultural product through pandering, and the degradation of work standards by the ceaseless time and energy required to make useful contacts.

Q

In current conditions, projective talk about the cultural or creative economy is now considerably quieter, though still occasionally audible. What are your own expectations and hopes or fears for the sector, and for the workers of today and tomorrow?

AR

Clearly, the hype, in the 2000s, about creativity was not likely to be sustainable. Urban managers, for example, were very interested in the turnaround economic potential of Richard Florida’s creative class paradigm, and rushed to promote their metro areas as creative cities, but much of that wilted along with the housing crash. After all, they were primarily interested in how the presence of creatives would boost rents and land values. Creative industry policy making, also distinctive of that period, has become both more routine and more fractious because of the copyfights over intellectual property. The struggle waged by artists’ communities against neoliberal bureaucrats has sharpened – the ham-handed efforts to establish Creative Scotland is a good case study of this – and it continues to generate critical debates about the public function of culture and the livelihoods that culture supports. These debates might not have taken shape in a more complacent environment but they have received a good airing because of the conflict.

One of the outcomes is that cultural workers are much more conscious of their labour conditions and their serviceability to corporate and political elites than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Much more likely to stand up for their rights not to be exploited or showcased without compensation. 180In that earlier time, there was more attention to the culture wars, and the conditions of expression as they related to traditions of artistic freedom. When bureaucrats carved out the ‘cultural sector’ and the ‘creative industries’, they made creatives more conscious of themselves as workers. There are some virtues to this, in my view. Creatives are less likely to see their labour as exceptional (in line with the legacy of the Romantic cult of the artist), and more inclined to see their livelihood as fully worldly.

Q

One concern for Anglo-American academics recently has been the extent to which cultural and creative work has provided a model for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ work, including through the supposed promise of self-actualization. At this point, what are your thoughts on the nature of ‘good work’ and the range of potential ‘goods’ available to workers?

AR

On the one hand, we have seen how the gratification that comes with creative work is a double-edged sword. Everyone should have access to passionate, fulfilling work, but we also know that this pleasure is seen as a bonus for which the worker pays through discounted compensation. In some respects, this is a form of wage theft – since employers will factor in workplace gratification as a reward in and of itself, built into any compensation package. For those who are able to get by, the trade-off is acceptable, it’s one they can live with, on an individual basis – though let’s be clear that the class profile that accompanies this choice is a genteel one, traditionally speaking. When the cultural discount becomes an industrial principle, however, then it is more flatly exploitative, and is often experienced as such. By industrial, I mean the norms that are established throughout a sector, even one with participants that are widely distributed and spatially disaggregated. The ‘goods’, or advantages, for those who can access and enjoy them fully, are the freedoms of the independent worker, over her schedules, choice of revenue sources, clients, workplace locations, not to mention the recognition that rewards well-turned work. However, we also know that these goods are trapdoors that open onto the vast pools of obligations and responsibilities that come with high-stress, self-directed work, and that those who don’t have the ‘right stuff’ will be underwater for much of the time, with little chance of sharing the spoils equitably. The more free that work is, the less just it is likely to be.

Q

You’ve referred to the ‘goods’ associated with cultural work, yet ‘ordinary’ or non-cultural work has always had its goods too, including, to varying degrees of course, pay, social contact, life-anchoring routine, and the stimulation and satisfaction that can follow from expertise and accomplishment. Why do you think it happened that the goods of ordinary work seemed to fall out of the limelight at a particular historical juncture and cultural work came to seem so desirable by comparison?

AR

Promoters of the good side of post-Fordism always made the case that ‘craft’ was being reinvented and revalorized as part of the shift toward the provision of value added goods for the high-end consumer market, but you don’t have to look very far to see evidence that younger people 181are learning and, in some cases, resurrecting, artisanal work: skills in farming, for example, and food preparation for the more choosy corners of the food movement; carpentry and metalwork; clothing design and fabrication; not to mention the whole new world of digital know-how and selfapplication. Most of these areas are ‘ordinary’, and not usually classed as ‘cultural’, and they are flourishing, primarily as pursuits of the educated middle class who are making an art out of the production of basics (William Morris would approve!). The masculinist side of this has been celebrated in books like Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, while the wave of domestic craftivism has been embraced by feminists like Betsy Greer around the Etsy network.

As for the continuing production of mass goods, we know how that story is playing out in offshore locations in Central America, Eastern Europe and North Africa, and especially in East Asia, where we have seen industrialization in high Fordist mode, with all the attendant toll on substandard working conditions and alienation of the human spirit.

Q

To return to the present, what kinds of politics are appropriate for intervening in the current moment? Are there connections between the politics of cultural work, the precarity movement and those of occupy? What kinds of impact are the financial crisis, recession and austerity having on politics in cultural work?

AR

A variety of semi-organized initiatives have sprung up to counteract the erosion of fair labour standards in a few of the areas I mentioned. Some of the remedies are aimed at bringing unpaid labour practices into line with existing laws and workplace regulations. Others are focused on pioneering and setting new standards for independent workers. Few of them fall within the traditional orbit of the trade union movement, though some of them may well spark new forms of worker protection and organization, along the model of workers’ centres, or pioneer alternatives such as the Freelancers Union, which is the fastest growing union in New York and Los Angeles, with offshoots beginning to appear in cities like Toronto. Even in the most unlikely sectors we are seeing these initiatives – the Model Alliance here in New York, which is pushing labour standards and protection for vulnerable young women in the fashion industry who are subject to child labour violations, sexual abuse, and who are often paid with only the clothes they model.

Within Occupy, I have been very active with anti-debt organizing initiatives (see www.strikedebt.org), and so I tend to see many things now through the lens of debt. Now that more and more of our basic social needs are being debt-financed, our level of indebtedness has become a major factor in how people prepare for employability, and in how they choose livelihoods. Borrowing, especially of education debt, is increasingly consuming our futures.

In the course of industrialization, the conflict over wages emerged as the central organizing principle for labour. In societies like ours, which 182are heavily financialized, the struggle over debt is increasingly the frontline conflict. Not because wage conflict is over (it never will be), but because debts, for most people, are quite literally the wages of the future.

For folks going into the cultural work sector, an increasingly larger share of their income is going to servicing the debts incurred simply to prepare themselves for employability and to meet the basic mental and physical requirements demanded for modern work. Debt service, in that regard, is a form of indirect wage theft on the part of the finance industry, and for those who will be paying off their student loans for their entire working lives, it is a form of indenture – going into debt in order to labour is the essential principle of indenture.

Our work has been to encourage debtors to seek relief for themselves – legislators are not going to do this – and we favour debt resistance in the form of organized, public strikes. Many of the people with whom I have been organizing the Strike Debt initiative are drawn from the Arts and Labor working group of Occupy Wall Street. They came into the movement because they see a direct relationship between their cultural work and the politics of debt.

Q

Do these or other initiatives lead you to retain any optimism or positive feeling about the future of cultural work?

AR

Well, it looks like there is going to be more, rather than less, cultural work, so I suppose that’s good. If the trends I’ve outlined are accurate, much of that work will be beyond precarious, which is to say barely compensated, unless the organizing initiatives gain strength and clout, which I also expect to happen. So I am optimistic about the organizing part, notwithstanding how challenging it will be.

Second, just as the mergers and acquisitions continue among multinational corporations, concentrating more and more ownership of culture in fewer hands, we will also see a steady move towards the ‘commons’ among younger folks involved in arts and culture. If social democracy continues to erode, then the anarchist outlines of an alternative economy, based on mutual aid, will emerge – indeed, that is already the dominant mentality of progressive youth. That doesn’t mean the state won’t come back into the picture in some form other than its current neoliberal one; it will just have to be reinvented before young people will connect to it.