During the 2020 academic workers strike over pay, precarity, gender and racial inequality and rising workloads, striking DARH member Adriana Eysler held a picket line ‘teach out’ on why designers and cultural workers need a union too. She discussed this with a member of the Design and Cultural Workers branch of the grassroots union UVW, which organises workers in UK’s cultural and design sector, as well as with fellow striking design lecturers and supportive students who had joined the teach out. They talk about why designers are now unionising, what challenges they are facing in attempting to do so, what unionisation could do to address precarious working conditions, competition, low pay, unpaid internships, burnout and drop out, etc and why every design graduate should join a union.
Listen to their conversation here, from the beautifully noisy London College of Communication picket line, 4 March 2020: https://www.mixcloud.com/strikeradio/designers-need-a-union-too-teach-out-lcc-with-uvwdcw-from-the-ucu-strike-2020/
Resources we mention in the conversation:
Cultural Worker Unions:
– UVW Design and Cultural Workers: https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/design-culture-workers
– UVW Section of Architectural Workers: https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/saw
– Game Workers Unite UK: https://www.gwu-uk.org/
– BECTU: https://bectu.org.uk/
– Artists’ Union England: https://www.artistsunionengland.org.uk/
– PCS Culture Group: https://www.pcs.org.uk/pcs-in-sport-and-culture
Coops:
– Cultural Coops: http://cultural.coop/
– Broodfonds (Bread Funds): https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/sep/15/payment-insurance-co-ops-netherlands-uk-bread-fund
Texts:
– Architectural Workers ‘Collective Empowerment Through Sharing’. https://architecturalworkers.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/collective-empowerment-through-sharing/
– Precarious Workers Brigade ‘Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education’. Available to buy and as a free pdf: http://joaap.org/press/trainingforexploitation.htm
– Marisol Sandoval, ‘Fighting Precarity with Co-operatives – Worker Co-operatives in the Cultural Sector’ https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/nf88_04sandoval.pdf
– Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries https://createlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Panic-Social-Class-Taste-and-Inequalities-in-the-Creative-Industries1.pdf