The Artist’s Union and the Political Organisation of Precarious Workers

Artists are the archetypal precarious worker. Artists are by-default self-employed and juggle multiple projects in an industry without a collective labour agreement or structural entitlements such as paid sick leave, holiday or old-age pensions. This reality is stark when you consider the significant capital flows within the industry—sales on the global art market reached a staggering 61 billion euros in 2023—the majority of practicing artists cannot survive on the income from their artistic practice. Across the world the average income of artists is very low, especially in comparison to other fields where a tertiary education is the norm.

In recent years trade unionism has begun to recapture the imagination of left-leaning workers. In the Netherlands we have seen large trade union organised strikes by essential workers in transport and distribution centres. In the US—for the first time in decades— workers of multinational companies such as Amazon and Starbucks have formed new grassroots trade unions. The recent uptick of unionisation campaigns has also reached art institutions in the United States, with art workers forming trade unions at the New Museum, the Guggenheim New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, among others. Trade unions were the prime mover in winning concessions from capital and the building of social welfare states in the twentieth century, but what are the possibilities and limitations of the trade union model in the globalised context of contemporary art? In an economy increasingly reliant on precarious, project-based labour, there is fertile ground for artists to organise alongside other self-employed workers to improve their shared working conditions, and lives.

The mode of production of art differs from the capitalist mode of production. Artists are not hired and paid a wage to create their art, and in this way the mode of production of an artwork creates no surplus value for a capitalist. The mode of production of art is a productive process that is more similar to a pre-capitalist mode of production, that of patronage or the simple commodity production of hand-made goods sold by their maker. This is the explanation of something artists understand intuitively, that the way we work often speaks in a different language to the economy that we exist within, and that it is very difficult to make a living from our practices.

Making the position of artists even dicier, when a work is sold on the art market, the economic value of an artwork cannot be rationally assessed by calculating labour time and cost of materials. A quick sketch by a renowned artist can fetch millions of dollars, while a laboriously constructed sculpture by a recent graduate can sell for less than was spent on producing it. It is due to this that artist and academic Dave Beech claims that art is priced independently of value, and is instead reliant on non-market mechanisms, namely discourse and the accumulation of esteem and reputation in the art world.

The economic value of a work of art is determined by a reputable record; bibliography, exhibition history and sales record and the evaluation of the artist’s body of work in academic, critical and theoretical debates all contribute to its valuation. The market function of the professionalisation of artistic labour is to encourage artists to see themselves as productive workers, so that they ‘invest’ in their career by amassing student debt, professional development opportunities and to ultimately continue to compete within the marketplace. Art historian Angela Dimitrakaki claims in her text What is an Art Worker? that “it is only out of competition among artists that some of them will eventually create capital. In this way, artists must continue to self-identify as economically active and compete en masse in order to achieve ‘productive labor.’” It is thus in the interests of capital accumulation that artists view their work within the limits of the existing capitalist economy despite the non-standard specificities of the industry.

However, it is also the case that in the context of a financialised economy, the capitalist market is itself less reliant on standard modes of production involving wage labour, meaning that an increasing number of workers are in a similar position to artists – in an insecure position qua work and encouraged to seek credit in a system highly dependent on reputational politics. We see this trend particularly in the growth of the gig economy such as Uber drivers, Fiverr freelancers and food delivery riders who rely on customer reviews and algorithmic monitoring to gain further work. Dimitrakaki suggests the use of classifying artists as workers for the neoliberal state, with the position of artists providing a justification as to why

a group of people cannot make a living despite participating in the economy . . . The artist is interpellated as a worker upon recognition that unemployment and underemployment, casualization, and so forth are trends of the job market overall, and that all workers should expect to be affected and to live out these trends.

Dimitrakaki asserts that the art worker is not necessarily a productive worker, but art workers are and highlights that it is only in the “collective body of artists that the possibility of productive labor arises.” Due to the monopolistic nature of the art market, it is only a handful of artists that will ever produce capital directly. This is why it is essential that any demands made on behalf of artists be done so collectively, on behalf of artists who do sell work and receive opportunities and those who don’t. The capitalist economic base and art’s non-capitalist mode of production are conditions that require organised solidarity across art workers, waged and unwaged, productive and unproductive, in order to delineate any power strong enough to make political and economic demands.

Contradicting the stereotype of artists as shameless individualists who are notoriously difficult to organise, artists have played crucial roles in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Paris Commune, the socialist government that controlled the city for two months in 1871, contained a significant Artist’s Federation among its revolutionaries. One of the main principles of the Artist’s Federation Manifesto, which was read aloud to a delegation of 400 artists during the Commune, was the “independence and dignity of every artist taken under the protection of all through the creation of a committee elected by the universal suffrage of artists.” After the Commune was crushed by the National French army, ten thousand of those convicted for their participation were artisan and design workers. Artists also played a decisive role in 1917 October Revolution and its aftermath, with many Russian avant-garde artists, such as Wassily Kadinsky, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, occupying positions in its administration of the new Bolshevik state, creating arts policy and reorganising the art education and museum system.

In 1933 a group of radical artists and writers formed the Unemployed Artists Group (UAG) in New York City, later known as the Artists Union. This group organised demonstrations and campaigned for local, state and federal programs to create work for artists during the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Less than a year later the government created the Public Works of Art project, a six-month work-relief project commissioning artists to create public artworks, later expanded into the Federal Arts Project.  From then on, the Artists Union’s main objective became to make permanent and expand publicly-subsidised work for artists. The Artists Union became the “de facto bargaining agent” for the thousands of artists employed by the Federal Arts Project. When the programs began to be curtailed at the end of 1936 and mass layoffs were expected, the Artists Union fought vigorously to retain their jobs, believing that government subsidised wage labour was the key to economic and creative freedom for artists. As they stated in their manifesto:

The State can eliminate once and for all the unfortunate dependence of American artists upon the caprice of private patronage.

The Netherlands is one of few countries which retained a government-funded social policy for artists throughout much of the twentieth century, namely the Visual Artists Scheme/ Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling. The Visual Artists Scheme existed in some form from 1949 to 1987 and provided a social safety net for artists in the form of a basic income in return for works of art once or twice a year. Substantial pressure for collective social provisions for artists had come from the Professional Association of Visual Artists/ De Beroepsvereniging van Beeldende Kunstenaars (BBK) which formed in Amsterdam in May 1945 from artists’ groups involved in resistance movements during the German Occupation of the Netherlands, including the Socialist Artists’ Circle, Union of Artists for the Defence of Culture and the Committee for Artists and Intellectuals. The BBK was crucial in the defense of the Visual Artists Scheme, leading the opposition against proposed cut-backs throughout its existence; their protest actions included weeks-long occupations of the Rijksmuseum in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Despite their resistance, the Visual Artist’s Scheme was eventually cut under the government of Ruud Lubbers, as a part of his neoliberal restructuring of the Netherlands through his ‘Grote Operaties’ and was finally terminated in 1987.

In these examples from history, we can see both the world building capacity of artists, not just in the symbolic realm of their work, but in real world political organising. These artists’ groups faced problems then that we are facing now, including precarious work and hostile government policies, and expressed themselves in the language of solidarity, with the understanding that artists require a level of collectively organised support to make their work.

In the nineteen eighties neoliberal politicians had a key objective to crush the power of trade unions in order for their deindustrialisation and labour deregulation policies to be implemented. Labour unions were fiscally encouraged to release their militant stance as the site of working-class bargaining power and instead provide educational and motivational programs to encourage their members’ lifelong employability. This led to a significant shift of the scope of union work to that of service provision, for example, providing business or legal advice, professional development opportunities or insurance packages, which has come to eclipse the representative and regulatory roles of trade unions. In order to rebuild a union movement capable of making demands, socialist writer Shaun May proposes a shift in focus to the life of the working class and not simply the workplace, which he terms the social union. A social union pivots away from exclusively representing the interests of the increasingly dwindling section of the working class who are in full-time stable employment, and instead focuses on representing the interests of the class as a whole, including casual, freelance, precarious and unemployed workers and broadening the scope of struggle to outside the workplace, such as welfare, housing and healthcare. The structure of the social union would initially be based on a coalition of different trade unions, organisations and campaigns, supporting each other and coalescing around mutual demands.

With the source of economic growth and capital investment increasingly fixed in financial markets, union strategies such as the ability to wage-bargain and the threat of withheld labour through strikes decrease in effectiveness. Writers Alice Martin and Annie Quick argue that the union movement is essential to rebuilding the power of workers but that new tactics are required in the age of financial capitalism. Potential strategies include mobilizing the “whole bargaining unit”, meaning engaging subcontracted and outsourced workers, leveraging shareholder power through reputational sabotage and collectively utilising the power of withholding payments to finance capital, such as debt strikes and rent strikes. Michel Feher in his book Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age  terms these strategies “investee activism” stating that:

…today’s activists will have to inhabit their condition as investees in such a way as to match their opponents’ skills in the art of speculation. In short, investee activism must be about altering the conditions of accreditation. This means fostering the appreciation of alternative projects, both by promoting different evaluative criteria and by working to discredit the type of endeavours that financial capitalists are spontaneously inclined to appreciate.

The idea of a social union, which broadens a unions scope outside of the workplace to broader struggles of the precarious working class, and investee activism, which joins the dots between the debt economy and the reputational politics which dominate our working and non-working lives, provides a renewed framework with which to reconsider the future of working-class struggle and ultimately, what constitutes liberation.

How could artists contribute to a social union? The potentials of investee activism could be rich in the arts, taking forms in the domains of art institutions, education, housing and gentrification or the art market.

Notable examples of successful artist-led movements which have leveraged reputation against art institutions include the boycott of the 2014 Biennale of Sydney due to its major funding by offshore refugee detention centre contractor Transfield and the campaign and boycott of the 2019 Whitney Biennial against board member Warren Kanders, owner of Safariland, a manufacturer of tear-gas used by law enforcement agencies against protestors in the US.

In art education this could look like a collective of art students' tuition-fee striking or collectively refusing to make student debt payments in order to change policy or in solidarity with their tutors’ demand for secure and better paying contracts. An example of recent student social unionism has been the student and staff organised university protest actions and encampments in solidarity with Palestine, which demand ties be broken with Israel. The Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (KABK) student union succeeded in getting their demand met for the KABK to break ties with Bezalel Art University in Jerusalem. This achievement demonstrates the power of organised students to force the hand of institutions and shape political narratives that reach far outside of campus politics.

In terms of housing, artists and galleries have a well-documented complicity in the process of gentrification. Organised artists can therefore mobilize as a crucial ally in struggles over affordable housing. The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement in Los Angeles, is a coalition of tenant’s unions and artist groups who agitate to have galleries leave Boyle Heights to prevent gentrification and retain the cultural and class composition of the area.

Ideas to transform the art market include the introduction of a generous royalty system in which collectors would need to pay artists a fixed percentage of the resale value when reselling their works, or the idea put forward by The Art Workers’ Coalition, in 1969, of “a system of universal wages for all artists, to be paid out of a fund generated by the resale value of the art of dead artists”.

These are just some of the shapes that an artist's political organising can look like. To seriously fight precarisation and improve the working lives of artists, it is essential that art workers make their voices heard in the network of organisations, collectives and unions that in time could become a movement, a social union, strong enough to make transformational demands that could improve the lives of both artists and the broader precariously-employed working class.