I told my parents I joined the Union

That day, we were seated around our old dining table. Heavy dark-laminate wood, ugly metal legs. We’ve had that dining table for as long as I can remember. That dining table was at our first flat that my parents rented in St. Albans when I was a toddler. My family and I are migrants, my father moving here in the mid-1990s and mother and I following shortly after. My parents are university-educated but after arriving here, realised that their qualifications didn’t quite hold up. With a mouth to feed, my father took up a job in a postal warehouse and my mother started as a cleaner before eventually moving into factory work. They coordinated alternating shifts –Dad worked at night, Mum worked during the day, so that there would always be somebody to watch me. I don’t remember much about that time. Train handovers at 6am, being passed from the platform to the carriage, my parents tell me. Drawing with crayons in an office at 10pm, being watched by warehouse staff because they understood. Mostly I remember the in-between moments when we would all be home —naps in the lounge on Sunday afternoons, my mother patiently buttoning up my Bananas in Pyjamas raincoat so that I could play in the puddles pooling outside in our uneven driveway. I remember crying and chasing my dad’s car down with my plastic tricycle when he’d leave for work. As I got older, their efforts began to translate to sleepy school drop-offs, disposable income being funnelled almost exclusively into books, and only seeing my father at the dinner table. I couldn’t have understood the significance of their sacrifices back then.

Like many other migrant families, my parents came here to give me a better start in life than they had. Everything was poured into my education. As one of the greatest barriers they had faced early on, they held that this would be my key. If I had a good education and excelled in it, then I would never have to suffer. This was taught to me as my first tool for survival. My first high school was a private school. I rode through on a scholarship for two years in a row, overachieving for a perfect record to continue to be able to attend. It was closest to home and I would eventually learn to walk to and from there in order to give my parents a proper sleep after their shifts. I eventually moved to a government selective school in the city and found a job at a train station to help supplement my textbooks and expenses. Naive and fourteen, I envisioned that whatever money I earned was money that my parents could save.

Now here I am, tertiary-educated and qualified to do more than they could, and my parents couldn’t be prouder or more worried. And so that day, we were sitting around our old dining table that we’ve just never gotten around to replacing, my father and I having a discussion about my financial situation. I was contemplating leaving my second job to find more secure part-time work as my father attempted to convince me to leave the arts entirely and work full-time elsewhere.

I know I chose to be an artist. But I didn’t choose to be poor.

My father laughed, shook his head slightly. I know.

I know, I told him.

I asked my mother if she was disappointed. Pearly strands of hair, lines folding into her face, and I remember the calluses on my father’s hands and the caves beneath his eyes. All of that was work so that I wouldn’t have had to. We’re not disappointed Bea, pero siempre nagaalala kami.[1]

I feel guilty. I fell into the working-struggle trap my parents precisely worked hard to keep me out of. Whenever I would feel like giving up, my father would tell me, tiaga at tiis lang, Bea - “patience and perseverance” through the pain. His parents taught him that. Sacrifice runs through the blood of my family. Sa utang na loob [2]. I would learn later on that my birthright to sacrifice would be my inheritance to labour.

Built upon exploitative labour practices and precarious funding structures, the moral economy of the arts industry devalues the very thing it creates and the people that create it. Kept running largely by contractors and casual workers (and for many institutions, volunteers), the over-casualisation of our sector has left a multitude of workers with no sick pay, financial stability, or any sort of job security. Not to mention the overwhelming accounts of burnout and impacts on mental health, all the pandemic did was make what already existed worse [3]. Put through some of the most intense lockdown measures of the world, we were quick to watch the structures and systems many of us took for granted crumble. Suddenly forced into a complete shutdown, the insecurities and precarities of our working conditions moved to the forefront of discussion. Deep into our lockdowns we spoke energetically about “care”, “community”, connection, self-care, ethical labour relations, sustainable ways of working, it goes on. It was disappointing to return to an ecology where it seemed none of these methods and/or ways of being were put into place.

Our economy of labour is incongruous to a practice of care. Like many other artists, I learned to juggle plates. I am an arts worker, working a casual job at an institution and sitting on volunteer boards, rotating through periodic projects whilst attempting to sustain my own curatorial and artistic practices. We are all tired. If our current system which organises labour remains inherently unable to adopt care, then the talks and hopes we shared during the pandemic will not progress any further.

THE HUSTLE

Bearing the worst brunt of my burnout, I began thinking most intensely about my work and labour during the Victorian lockdowns of 2020. Time flattened then, folded like a sheet of paper. Freshly graduated from art school, I was suddenly staring at a demolished arena. The preparatory culture within art schools designates that cultural capital is your weapon against the industry’s competitive nature. You’re not necessarily told this, but you certainly feel it to be true, reinforced through the well-intended “say yes to everything,” to volunteer, to establish networks (though let’s be honest, communities over networks). And so, realising it without understanding it, I sought to gain my own cultural capital however I could.
I did not see rest during the Melbourne lockdowns. I don’t know if many of us actually did. Confronted with the precarity of my position, I took on any project I could for any amount that anyone was able to offer. The neo-liberal hustle culture ingrained within me (or which I unknowingly embraced) during my time as a student flowed effortlessly into how I would approach the beginning of my career.

While I was still a student, like many arts workers, I began volunteering at an art institution. I volunteered there for two years before being accepted for a casual position as an invigilator. Already, this widely-accepted condition sets the art world up to sit perfectly beneath the seat of capitalism. If you believe that your labour must earn its worth, you’re willing to give it away for nothing. We would later learn that those of us who had been hired had all volunteered for about the same amount of time. The cohort who were hired before us were the same. I have now been working there for almost four years. Noting, on top of the two years I had already spent volunteering and slowly being trained over time at no cost to my employer.

NON-ESSENTIAL WORK

During the pandemic, Lilly Lai’s ‘Working at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This is what happened to me. It does not exist in a vacuum’ was released and circulated like wildfire throughout the invigilation team at my own workplace down in Naarm/Melbourne. Moved to work from home but with no security of income, we read Lai’s article from our computer screens, touched and angered as it collectively resonated through us. We had just presented a letter to management asking how they were planning to support us as we waited to hear about our JobKeeper outcome. Believing our wages to be accounted for in the multi-year funding we had just been successfully granted – and that our gallery’s trading hours weren’t predicated on profits – it felt like an unnecessary anxiety. I asked our director at the time for some transparency on the budget. As we waited for money that would pay for our basic necessities, another email pings through with links directing us in the interim to individual government funding streams and Support Act counselling sessions.

Following a messy first attempt to return to work a year later, we wrote a second letter to management detailing our concerns after the initial rounds of JobKeeper ended. Lack of transparency, problems with communication, and no support –the list continued on across four pages. Though our working conditions became more unstable, the current exhibition proved to be very successful as back of house staff continued to work from the safety of their homes. An onslaught of on-again, off-again lockdowns later, we re-emerged in what Victoria was celebrating as the last lockdown. Around Melbourne, people everywhere were catching COVID, sick calls were consistent, some of us were trapped interstate, others needing to isolate, until eventually, the team was whittled down to a small number of staff rotating through what had now become skewed into a high demand for work and a low supply of labour.

 PRECARITY

Earlier last year, NAVA gathered arts workers from across the country to discuss the Australian Government’s development for the new national cultural policy [4]. What emerged were many overarching areas of concern and common ground of financial struggle. Funding is never enough, artists aren’t compensated accordingly for development (and how to measure this compensation is another debate), debt among artists (and among the greater population at large) is only increasing [5], with many of us finding a mangled UBI in the form of minimal Centrelink payments. With funding a constant rationale for the precarity of arts workers, two points emerge: that this enables the declassification of arts work as work and subsequently, the industry becomes its own self-destructive system. Working within conditions of economic precarity, arts workers are left to rely on income from other jobs, community fundraisers, and free labour[6] in order to keep their practices and spaces alive.

The question of funding goes back many arts generations. In the past, one response to this situation was a form of creative positive gearing within the system, with the establishment of alternative artist-run spaces in the 1970s being a notable example. Still comprised of mostly-volunteer boards, the DIY self-management culture of the local artist-run scene was a way to do what you could with what you had. Moving forward in our capitalist condition of hyper-individualism, the emergence of the gig economy and increased financial precarity[7], we now see that it is no longer enough to move against our system from within it, but rather against the system from outside of it. If change cannot happen within the system then the system must be changed.

Though really finding its momentum during the Coronavirus pandemic, the Care discourse has been present since at least the 1990s with Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto’s Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring. Emerging into our own sphere, optimistic and notable texts include The Care Manifesto published in 2020 by The Care Collective and Tian Zhang’s A manifesto for radical care or how to be a human in the arts released in early 2022. Zhang aptly writes how “the pandemic has highlighted cracks that were always present in our systems. In times of crisis, it becomes clear what is valued and what is expendable - and who. […] And who is actually doing the care work to try and get us out of this mess.” The argument towards care-ful structures built on collaboration and community has been heard and slowly actioned, with a large majority of us setting our own boundaries, being more transparent with capacities, and walking towards working slower. Thus, interdependent care is born. But what of systemic care? 

The proposed ethics of care fails to take into consideration the underlying moral economy of labour—the logic of love, sacrifice and duty that sustains our participation as workers within a capitalist society.  Jacqueline Doughty writes in her exhibition essay for State of the Union (2018), 

“One of the most damaging outcomes of the severing of art from life is the largely unarticulated assumption that creative labour is not work, is unquantifiable, and as such, not eligible for standardised conditions or remuneration. Add to this the difficulty of collectively organising for practitioners who, for the most part, work as individual ‘sole traders’, moving from project to project, employer to employer, in a market where supply outstrips demand, and you have an industry that provides textbook conditions for the exploitation of labour.” 

The clearer our situation becomes, the more I begin to understand that although we spoke so urgently and earnestly of care labour, Who is actually doing the care work and the question of responsibility has yet to be addressed. Inexplicably, institutions somehow seem incapable of extending care beyond the artists that they will be exhibiting –but what of the artists who keep their doors open? [9] Care cannot be recycled, it must be generated. Nurtured so it may be renewed. If institutions are not generating “care-ful” enough, kind enough, sustainable enough spaces, then the care will only burnout.

I like the idea of a care where “there is no top: rather it gathers where it is most needed” (Zhang, 2022). But at the same time, “care relations are often relationships of inequality” (Tronto, 2013) and navigating its inherent power relations is a necessary component to the practice of care. During the pandemic, I would hear ‘care with’ as an alternative to ‘caring for’ –often proposed as a means to talk about care in a horizontal or rhizomatic (two words sometimes falsely interchanged) way, to dismantle and disseminate power. But we cannot disseminate what is not ours. Omitting to care for someone or something only erases your ability and  responsibility to do so.Amongst the overworked and underpaid creative community, we are doing our best to disseminate care across us, but as care becomes more abstracted, the work ethic propelling most of the arts will only continue to fuel this as it is simultaneously destroyed by it.

Two years later and I firmly believe that institutions are the most ill-placed to practice care and that perhaps we should stop asking them to. By now, almost all of the front of house team have unionised at work. This seemed to start around the time that management had singled us off into one-on-one meetings to discuss the latest letter we had collectively presented, along with our more recent request for part-time conversion. Ironically the institution’s attempt to break our momentum apart only brought all of us together. In failing to find care within our institution, care became mobilised through our unionisation. 

Employment relations are care relations. As I write this, we’re attempting to enter into bargaining for more stable hours and a pay increase to match invigilator wages from other arts organisations. When first proposing the idea of an EBA [10] at work, a union delegate relays they were told that bargaining was only for when “things are really bad.” 

But things are that bad, they tell me. 

But they don’t see it how we see it. 

What we need now is industry-wide bargaining. 

I didn’t think enough of it at the time (mostly because I didn’t understand enterprise bargaining much then) but it makes complete sense. If our galleries/workplaces were under an industry-wide arrangement, talks could occur across multiple arts institutions to address common issues. But the idea of like-minded organisations gathering to change our working conditions is optimistic. If bargaining is predicated on meeting the needs of the employees to meet the needs of the employer, this process can often become tense or stagnate if employees, and by extension their needs, are seen as expendable. And we have mostly seemed to begrudgingly accept this broken ecology, as if it is an unchangeable condition of the industry. 

But a crisis never fails to show the malleability of society.  As we move into our ‘post-Pandemic’ condition, what we are now finally seeing emerge are actions culminating at the collision of the two conversations of Care and Labour. With a rise in union movements and workplace negotiations in Australia, as we speak more openly of the working conditions we want to see shape the world, we are now also learning how to ask for them. Early last year the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre voted for a new collective agreement which includes a 2% wage increase, while Sydney Opera House voted for a two-year rollover of their agreement which includes protected working conditions and pay rises. In the midst of their own negotiations are Adelaide Festival Centre, Western Australia’s Arts and Culture Trust venues, Sydney Theatre Company, and Arts Centre Melbourne [11]. Meanwhile elsewhere, union movements have surfaced or resurfaced at places such as Cinema Nova, Sydney Festival, and Sydney Biennale, as well as a multitude of bookstores: Better Read than Dead (whose new EBA sets a hopeful precedent for the publishing industry) [12], Penguin Random House, Hardie Grant, and Readings[13] .

After months of meetings and non-meetings, we’ve finally received an email response on whether we are going to enter into bargaining or not. Something that appears to be recurrent across unionisation is how long they tell you it’s going to take. The pushback of employers and boards, the rationale that your demands are unaffordable even before any cost analysis has been done. They tell us they can only begin bargaining after February 14 of 2023, with many full-time staff away on leave and the remainder of their efforts going into our next funding application to take us from 2025-2029. That’s not our problem, another delegate tells me after the meeting. I agree. But I tell them I don’t think management understands that the stakes are much higher for us. That we’re not just negotiating wages, we’re negotiating our livelihoods.

My parents came to visit before Christmas. This time we were seated around my dining table, second-hand IKEA thrifted off Facebook Marketplace.

Kamusta ang trabaho?

I want to tell my parents that I’m going to be okay, but I can’t. Sitting in between casual work and the gig economy, I never know where I’m going to be too far into the foreseeable future.

You look tired, anak.

My mother checks in on my mental health (a new development I feel very grateful for). They express concern that my union involvement will cause my unemployment.

But they can’t do that. We have rights.

My dad laughs. I know what he means without him having to say so, but I stay firm in the decision –we’re sick of this shit. As I update them on how work is going, worry carves itself deeper into my mother’s face and my father asks again if I don’t just want a career change. I tell them I’m not sure it’s much better anywhere else.

I try to explain that we’re just trying to make things better, and that maybe this change will be a part of a bigger change. Small drops into big ripples. Everyone’s talking about change but no one knows how to do it. We sit at the table talking about pathways that could give me more financial security until we reach the same conclusion we always do. I should probably leave the arts, but we know that I won’t. My mother hugs me tightly before they go.

I love my parents. I feel guilty whenever they worry –they’ve already spent so much of their lives worrying. My mother texted me a week after they visited, telling me she’s paid off my car insurance for me and I tell her that’s my Christmas gift sorted. Alongside supermarket gift cards, my parents have begun to gift me the most practical of things: insurance, car repairs, home-cooked meals to last me weeks. The mirror to my parents’ sacrificial work ethic is their love (and worry). I told my parents I joined the union in hopes they would worry less. I want them to know that they didn’t work for nothing, that I remember how they gave me everything.

A/N after a back-and-forth email thread between management and our industrial officer on whether the gallery is willing to enter into bargaining, a hard deadline finally requesting a firm decision on this was issued as the rest of us prepared to take the matter to the Fair Work Commission. As I am about to send this article in to be published, I receive an email notification from our acting director that the gallery has finally agreed to begin EBA negotiations. After a lot of dedication from our union rep, the other delegates, and the team at large, I am quite pleased to be ending this article on a more optimistic note. 

When I first conceived of the idea for this text, I had initially planned to engage in a letter series across both metropolitan and regional art spaces to reflect on the intersection of labour and care – to locate our differences, and within that, find common ground. However, emerging out of the pandemic with the intensification of my own precarity, it only felt right to begin with where it all begins for me –with my family and what they have taught me about care and labour.  

Living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, I recognise the metropolitan focus that this article takes as I speak to labour from my own situatedness. I respectfully note that not every single landscape of labour is the same. I hope to extend this piece into a broader conversation with regional arts workers, and across a wider range of institutions and localities, to build a dialogue where we can begin to more openly discuss (and build) the sustainable art world that we hope to live and work in. I encourage anybody else who is in the midst of their union battles, particularly those from regional art spaces, to reach out.