Overqualified, Overworked and Un(der)paid – An Internshipping Forecast
When you send something by ship it's called cargo
When you send something by car it's called shipment
When you send someone to fetch you a coffee it's called an internship
Having worked as an unpaid gallery assistant and a number London galleries and other cultural organisations, whose names I will not mention for my own protection rather than theirs, I was motivated to write some speculations on the growing reliance of the cultural sector upon unpaid labour, its implications and the prospects for change. The positions that I held did in some fairness enable me to increase my experience of some aspects of the sector and put me in contact with several of my peers that I might not otherwise have met. They did not however provide me with anything beyond what one might expect from a paid position within the same industry, the pseudo-educational veneer was entirely superficial, this was labour and nothing but labour and hence was nothing but the work that would, could and should have been carried out be a paid, permanent employee. I was fulfilling the employees position and yet was not being paid a wage in the manner that was once customary for such an employee. I came to acknowledge that this was mere exploitation, pure and simple, and that simply calling something an internship or assistant position did not alter this fact.
My experience was not without value, however ultimately I came to the conclusion that whilst the individual institution was simply part of a far wider cultural economy that saw a race to the bottom in terms of pay and conditions, that they could not entirely absolve themselves from responsibility, on the other hand neither could I. I too was accepting the situation and undercutting fellow workers. Whatever happened to solidarity? It seems that without a global or at least national cultural shift it is hard to imagine the laws of market forces facilitating any major shift in practice away from such a model, it is after all an employers market. The arena is flooded by a huge excess of talented and motivated creative individuals seeking employment and therefore, as is widely noted, cultural institutions and successful artists have their pick of this pool of employees and are under no pressure from such market conditions to offer anything but rock bottom in terms of pay and conditions, often in fact literally rock bottom, zero.
In the 19th and 20th century when manufacturing labourers and the like were (often literally) two a penny, unions and collectives were formed in order to combat just such a situation. This solution seems inconceivable however within our own postmodern, anti-centralised, individual, competitive and compartmentalised situation. It is hard to imagine the unionisation of artists assistants or gallery interns within such a competitive framework: artists themselves are, unlike actors, notoriously un-unionised and true collectives short-lived and rare. The myth of the artist as romantic individual genius undoubtedly bears some share of responsibility, in setting aside as unique artistic labour, as it does, from other types of production. But if solidarity is not found to be the solution to this clear predicament then what is?
Perhaps the predicament is not so clear as I have claimed, there are those who would no doubt argue that the current situation is fairly positive: young creatives obtain access to a range of experiences and cultural organisations can run at lower costs, which in a sector often heavily dependent on public subsidy is seen to maximise funding to output ratios and cut taxpayer outlay. However this is incorrect in so much as firstly it is wrong to institutionalise free labour within a capitalist marketplace as this is clearly exploitation and if we are providing a service or labour for someone we have the right to demand payment in order to facilitate our continued existence and participation within said capitalist system. However, if we view this situation as a pseudo-socialist model, ie. if in publicly funded industries (like much of the arts) we are expected to work for free, are we then not carrying out the work of the State and as such have the right to access State services without cost? Clearly this is not the case either. What we have is a strange mixture of the two that results in the undertaking of work without recompense, a form of exploitation that is a form of voluntary slavery by any other name. This situation is unsustainable as it deprives those previously holding paid positions within these organisations of their jobs and provides no promise of employment for those that do undertake unpaid work. To have a model built upon unpaid labour clearly undermines the entire foundations of the cultural sector; how far up the ladder does the expectation to work without pay progress? could it ultimately lead to the internal undermining and collapse of institutions unsustainably constituted?
Beyond this argument is the one that visual arts should on the one hand largely be freely accessible to all at the point of use and yet the failure to adequately resource them to meet such an expectation. This results in such pressure on budgets that the arts must therefore demand unpaid labour (and let us not forget the attendant denigration of conditions – unpaid labour is often also a way to circumnavigate employment laws that are in place to protect workers). This view must be tempered by the fact that there is clearly an unjust disparity, as within most industries, between the top and the bottom of such organisations. Perhaps if directors could be persuaded, by regulation if necessary, to share out the financial benefits of their positions more equitably with entry level workers then unpaid labour would become unnecessary. Cultural institutions that turn profits and employ multiple staff may need to be forced not to rely upon unpaid work, for ethical reasons as much as for long term stability of the sector, and if they can not afford to do so then they will have to fold. There will be countless artists led initiatives, run by unpaid volunteers that will doubtless arise to take their place. It is one thing being part of an initiative that is run by passionate individuals on a more collective basis in which no one is paid and quite another for institutions to be turning profits, often charging audiences for access and paying multiple staff on higher wages to demand free labour from their entry level employees. Internships, imported, like so many other bad ideas, from the USA, offer nothing more than extension of the neoliberal exploitation of the workforce. This is simply an unjust system that appears to requires legislation to solve. Legislation however does not appear to be forthcoming, and with parliament itself largely run on the back of unpaid interns it does not look like it will be arriving any time soon. Party politics is in the thrall of the very interests whose furtherance would least be served by the ending of a culture of unpaid, disposable labour.
And so, if the hopes of unionisation, solidarity and legislation are not to provide us with a way out of this seeming impasse, we are left with the same dilemma that faces progressives across many disparate fields. With the traditional weapons of the old left ineffectual against the new cultural hegemony of globalised capitalism where do we turn for relief from an inherently unjust and dehumanising exploitation? It is a question that has troubled multiple philosophers and theorists and one that has yet to be utterly convincingly answered. Perhaps, as some would say, we must expose this hegemony in the hope that people may see beyond it, perhaps there is no beyond it; we are complicit in our own exploitation, hailed by the dominating ideology, interpellated. Perhaps there is no prior subject that might resist such forces, perhaps we are always already constituted by the discourse that contain us. Such depressing positions could potentially be tempered with conceptions of becoming, of singularisation or differing, all of which (in complex ways that I will not go into here) appear to at least offer some elements of hope. But how in practical terms might this be achieved? The answer is no doubt somewhat regressive, going back to the idea that at least if we can perceive the forces in operation we have a hope of, if not changing them, at least supplanting their pre-eminence within our own experience. If we accept that the situation of institutionalised wageless labour exploits us we may then begin to enter into this singularisation (I chose not to employ the term individuation as aside from its philosophical meanings also connotes economic terminology relating to specialisation and an increased efficiency of the division of labour, serving as a means for individuals to find comparative advantage in the marketplace – the opposite of what I am seeking to convey). Through such an understanding of singularisation we may come to experience our internship, or our status as an unpaid assistant, as a process of becoming, of differing from ourselves. It is within this process of singularisation that we might move our thinking beyond the reproduction of consensus and a collective ethical or knowledge framework with its inherent transmission of norms of behaviour, traditions and the like and come to a new conception of the relationship between the processes of individual and collective singularisation.
A position without conventional employment conditions, set apart from the wage slave model, as well as holding the afore mentioned problems, also allows this process of singularisation more latitude. We might operate in a sphere beyond the ethical normative bonds that conventionally tie employee and employer. If employers have no consideration for ethical responsibilities then there is likewise no obligation upon 'employees' either. Indeed it is incumbent upon those that find themselves in the position of the exploited to discover those methods by which they might fight back and hence by this individual singularisation constitute the collective singularisation that will result in cultural shift. This fight back may take the form of a counter-exploitation, the drawing up of a list of clear objectives that can be attained through the said position, unafflicted by ethical norms, that must be worked towards with all guile and determination. These experiences must be maximised for their links into other spheres of experience hitherto unreachable, their connections exploited, the knowledge that they purport to convey stored and turned against itself. The various significations encountered within these positions must be where possible détourned into alternative forms of knowledge, forms that can be used against the discourse that suppresses them. The assistant can become the perhaps unwitting agent of such psychic leaks, disseminating the unconscious of the organisation beyond its boundaries, they can be the weak link in its chain, the porous boundary that opens it up to the collective, social and relational sphere of wider artistic and creative practice that it by definition excludes or contains, setting boundaries against, to capture and exploit or else exclude and suppress. The assistant or intern can act in the fashion of the computer virus that infiltrates the heart of such complex systems, they can, through their very porosity and covert refusal of allegiance, affect a larger context by making the exploitation of wageless labour no longer a viable option for organisations seeking to shield themselves from such subversive practices. The question arises, just who is exploiting who? and the answer should be at least ambiguous, if not the reverse of what we might initially expect.
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