Report: Creative Labour and the Role of Intellectual Property
Ned Rossiter
Communications and Media Studies, School of Political and Social
Inquiry, Monash University
This report is based on the survey I conducted for the fibrepower
panel initiated by Kate Crawford and Esther Milne – ‘Intellectual
Property-Intellectual Possibilities’ (Brisbane, July 2003). I wanted
to explore in some empirical fashion the relationship between intellectual
property and creative labour. Why? Largely because such a relationship
is the basis for defining what is meant by creative industries,
according to the seminal and much cited mapping document produced
by Blair’s Creative Industries Task Force (CITF). Despite the role
IP plays in defining and providing a financial and regulatory architecture
for the creative and other informational or knowledge industries,
there is remarkably little attention given by researchers and commentators
to the implications of IP in further elaborating conceptual, political
and economic models for the creative industries. There is even greater
indifference towards addressing the impact of exploiting the IP
of those whose labour power has been captured: young people, for
the most part, working in the creative and culture industries. Angela
McRobbie’s work is one of the few exceptions (see also Gill, 2002).
At a different level, I was curious to see how a mailing list might
contribute in a collaborative fashion to the formation of a research
inquiry in which the object of study – creative labour and IP –
is partially determined by the list itself. Finally, after leveling
critiques at various times and occasions against what Terry Flew
(2001) identifies as the ‘new media empirics’, I thought it necessary
to engage in a more direct way with this nemesis-object: what, after
all, can a new media empirics do and become when it is driven through
what I have developed elsewhere as a processual model of media and
communications? (Rossiter, 2003b) I will address this question in
the concluding section of this report.
As I noted in an earlier paper (Rossiter, 2003a) posted to the
fibreculture mailing list: The list of sectors identified as holding
creative capacities in the CITF Mapping Document include: film,
music, television and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure
software, design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts,
crafts, arts and antique markets, architecture and advertising.
The Mapping Document seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist
of ‘... activities which have their origin in individual creativity,
skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job
creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property’
(CITF: 1998/2001). The CITF’s identification of intellectual property
as central to the creation of jobs and wealth firmly places the
creative industries within informational and knowledge economies.
In posting the survey questionnaire to the list, I was interested
in ascertaining the following:
1. The extent to which respondents perceived their primary activities
(i.e., activities other than eating, sleeping, watching TV, having
sex, substance abuse, etc. – though I guess many would argue that
they are indeed primary activities, and perhaps also creative ones!)
to correspond with “creativity”, however that term might be understood
(n.b., the survey synopsis clearly framed creativity in relation
to the Creative Industries discourse, so the latitude for interpreting
the term creativity was relatively circumscribed).
2. Whether a very partial mapping of the fibreculture network produced
results similar to the sectors identified in the CITF Mapping Document.
Whatever the results, I was interested in what they might then say
about national, regional or State manifestations of the creative
industries: are Australia’s Creative Industries the same as the
UK? Is there a temporal factor at work? That is, given the time
of development, incubation, etc., would a mapping exercise produce
different results depending of when and how it was conducted? In
other words, how does the stability of the empirical object – creative
labour – relate to the contingencies of time? This is as much a
methodological question as it is a question of politics and ethics.
3. To establish whether respondents perceived or understood an
extant relationship between their labour and intellectual property.
4. To find out whether IP in the workplace makes work a political
issue.
At the time of the survey, the fibreculture list had just over
700 subscribers (June, 2003). All responses came on the same day
I posted the survey, most within a few hours of it appearing on
list. This in itself perhaps says something interesting about the
“attention economy” of email lists and the time in which any posting
may receive a response: i.e., while the Stones could sing about
the redundancy of newspapers after a day, do list postings have
a life of three or so hours? Not so bad actually, though it’s probably
much less – more like seconds, depending on whether a post is read
or not.
Of the 700 or so subscribers then, I received seven responses.
That’s 1% of all list subscribers, a lovely sample to be sure. One
of the respondents provided a follow-up response as well. There
was one other query from someone asking whether they could do the
survey even though they thought they weren’t a creative worker;
they were a copyright lawyer – a category Richard Florida assigns
to “creative professionals” – ‘business and finance, law, health
care and related fields’, as distinct from the core Creative Class:
‘people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education,
art, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create
new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content’ (2002: 8).
Curiously, there is no mention – at least in this initial definition
– of the role intellectual property plays in constituting a “creative
class”.[1] No
doubt there are national-cultural and socio-political explanations
for the differences between how creative workers are perceived and
constituted in the UK and North America. To my knowledge, there
is yet to be a study that inquires into the different national and
regional formations of creative industries, classes, economies and
cultures. One could argue that OECD research papers and reports
along with those by neo-conservative, libertarian think-tanks such
as Demos and the Cato Institute do such work; however, while they
certainly compile statistics and bring a dual mode of commentary
and hyperbole to such figures, they do very little by way of historical,
political, economic and cultural analysis of the variable conditions
that have led to the emergence of creative labour and its attendant
industries across these geopolitical regions.
Reflexivity and Empirical Research
While the sample I am drawing on is most certainly small, it is
not insignificant. Indeed, I think its minutiae corresponds to larger
patterns of creative labour in Australia, and most probably elsewhere,
as I extrapolate below. Interestingly, I’m told by a psychologist
friend researching the formation of depression in migrants that
current, more reflexive literature on quantitative, empirical research
argues that the fuss over sample sizes (i.e., the need to have a
large sample if the claims and results are to have any scholastic
purchase on the phantasm of veridicality) is problematic in all
sorts of ways (see Edwards, 1997; Silverman, 2001). For instance,
at what point can one say a sample is representative of the community,
user-consumers, demographic, socio-technical network, etc. under
analysis? As Pierre Bourdieu (1973) argued so acutely and with such
verve, public opinion does not exist. What exists, for Bourdieu,
is the discursive form of the survey or opinion poll, the interests
that drive it, and the ends to which it is put. Of course my own
survey is not immune from the sort of critical, theoretical and
political interests I bring to the analysis of responses.
Then there’s the whole pseudo-scientific language of “observation”,
as though there might have ever been some sort of impartiality underpinning
the process of enacting the survey. Scott Lash associates such a
paradigm with “reflective modernisation” and the work of Giddens,
Habermas and Parsonian structural functionalism and linear systems
theory: ‘The idea of reflective belongs to the philosophy of consciousness
of the first modernity.... To reflect is to somehow subsume the
object under the subject of knowledge. Reflection presumes apodictic
knowledge and certainty. It presumes a dualism, a scientific attitude
in which the subject is in one realm, the object of knowledge in
another’ (2003: 51). In contrast to a reflective first modernity,
Lash posits a reflexive second modernity and non-linear systems
of communication and risk comprising of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects
and their theorisation by the likes of Luhmann, Beck and Latour,
along with Castells’ network logic of flows:
Second modernity reflexivity is about the emergent demise
of the distinction between structure and agency altogether....
Second-modernity reflexivity presumes a move towards immanence
that breaks with the [ontological] dualisms of structure and agency....
The reflexivity of the second modernity presumes the existence
of non-linear systems. Here system dis-equilibrium and change
are produced internally to the system through feedback loops.
These are open systems. Reflexivity now is at the same time system
de-stabilization. (2003: 49-50)
The extent to which reflexive non-linear systems wholly dispense
with or depart from a constitutive outside in favour of a logic
of immanence is a problematic I have begun to question with other
fibreculture members in an earlier posting to the list (Rossiter,
2003a). [2] Like
the question of and tension between new media empirics and processual
media theory, it is a problematic I will return to in my concluding
remarks.
I think one reason I received even seven responses had much to
do with prior knowledges and trust established between myself as
“observer” and the “participants” in this survey: i.e., I had either
met or knew very well six of the seven respondents. Here, it is
worth turning again to Bourdieu, who frames the concept of reflexivity
in particularly succinct terms: ‘What distresses me when I read
some works by sociologists is that people whose profession is to
objectivize the social world prove so rarely able to objectivize
themselves, and fail so often to realize that what their apparently
scientific discourse talks about is not the object but their relation
to the object’ (1992: 68-69). Put in terms of non-linear systems
theory, the on- and off-line relationships, trust and symbolic economy
I had established largely through an online network operated as
a feedback loop into the call for interest in and responses to this
current survey. Obvious as it may sound, this very historical and
social dimension to a communicative present actively destabilises
any rhetorical claims that I might attempt in the name of conducting
a survey that follows the scientific principles of objectivity and
impartiality and methodologies befitting quantitative research.
The only thing that is remotely impartial about this survey is the
anonymity of the respondents as I present them here.
Feedback loops further destabilise the very object-ness of this
report as a discrete posting to a mailing list insofar as anyone
who responds to this report breaks up components of the report by
way of selective quoting or paraphrasing and interjecting their
own critiques or comments. [3]
Many of us do this when we reply to an email,
separating the sender’s text from our own; in so doing, we are translating
or mimicking the effect of dialogue. Such a process is also registered
in a material, symbolic form in the partially dissipative, non-linear
structure of discussion threads as the user recombines and shifts
between postings, disrupting what otherwise appears as a condition
of equilibrium within the linear organisation of the archive. Further
registration of feedback loops are made in the googlisation of this
combinatory knowledge and information formation, where any particular
posting has the potential to move up the vertical scale of “hits”
depending on the key words used in the user’s search, the online
links made to the posting, and the popularity of the posting: in
short, the coding of the google software program plays a determining
role in the hierarchisation of information that is then further
shaped by the interests and habits of users. The economy and architecture
of the google search engine has been subject to considerable debate
and discussion in lists such as fibreculture and nettime, along
with many other online fora, print and electronic media. If the
posting of this report, for example, were made on any number of
web conferencing systems, collaborative text filtering sites or
blogs, such as slashdot.org, indymedia.org, makeworld.org or discordia.us,
then a very different information architecture of feedback loops
would prevail. Okay, time now to get to some substance of the survey.
Creativity – What’s in a Name?
When I asked respondents what creative activities they engaged
in, a list of 4-6 fields, practices or sectors of creativity by
any one person was compiled. These included writing, performing
and producing music; writing academic and policy papers (considered
by one respondent and assumed by others as ‘creative endeavours’);
photography; design (interactive, information, education); publishing
and editing; new media arts (dv, net.art, print, electronic music);
painting; and creative writing. Three things stand out for me here:
1. Irrespective of whether or not respondents went on to identify
themselves as part of the Creative Industries project, however that
might be understood, the range of creative activities any single
person might undertake suggests that diversity rather than specialisation
is a defining feature of creative workers. This isn’t to say that
specialisation doesn’t occur in any particular idiom of creativity
– I think it’s safe to assume that it would, but rather that respondents
were not limited to one particular set of creative skills, trainings,
or passions. Thus these respondents are clear exemplars of the so-called
fragmented postmodern subject, traversing a range of institutional
locations and socio-cultural dispositions.
2. Many of the respondents are engaged in academic work either
on a full-time, continuing basis or as sessional, casual teachers.
In both cases, university related activities and non-university
related activities were understood as holding creative dimensions.
If nothing else, the diversity of creative activities identified
by respondents indicates the complexity of labour in the contemporary
university, further suggesting that: (a) the university cannot accommodate
the diverse interests and economic necessities of its constituent
labour power, and/or (b) that individuals wish to distinguish between
the kind of work they do at university and its concomitant values
and the kind of work they do outside the university, or (c) that
there is zone of indistinction, if you will, between the university
and its so-called outside, given that all sectors of cultural production
and intellectual labour are today subject to market economies. The
extent to which tensions exist between these realms, or whether
they are better characterised as a sort of zone of indistinction
that cannot be reduced in such a manner, varies, I suspect, according
to the contingencies of time, interests, values, labour conditions,
age, class, gender, etc. of individuals as they are located in different
institutional settings. Each of the above possibilities corresponds
with the economic and labour conditions peculiar to the creative
industries operating in the UK, as McRobbie explains:
Those working in the creative sector cannot simply rely on old
working patterns associated with art worlds, they have to find
new ways of “working” the new cultural economy, which increasingly
means holding down three or even four “projects” at once. In addition,
since these projects are usually short term, there have to be
other jobs to cover the short-fall when the project ends. The
individual becomes his or her own enterprise, sometimes presiding
over two separate companies at the same time. (2002: 519; see
also Beck, 1992: 127-150; Bauman, 2001: 17-30)
3. There is much overlap between this list of creative activities
and the CITF’s list of creative sectors, with the exception that
traditional arts and crafts and antiques do not figure in the former;
this comes as no surprise, given that the survey was conducted on
a listserve for critical Internet research and culture. As for how
this list relates to Richard Florida’s composition of the Creative
Class in the US, there is an obvious absence in my survey of engineers
and scientists. Again, you might say this should come as no surprise;
one could, however, describe software programmers, “codeworkers”
and game designers as computer scientists or information engineers
– though no doubt there would be some disciplinary and perhaps ontological
dispute over this.
Having established that they all are engaged in creative activities
of one kind or another, there were then considerable differences
amongst respondents as to whether they perceived themselves as engaged
in the Creative Industries. Two respondents said they didn’t – one
being a bit hesitant as to whether they did or not, the other indifferent,
implying the term was no more than a ‘tag’ associated with ‘official
places’ and ‘certain faculties’. Four respondents stated that they
did associate their activities with the Creative Industries, some
more emphatically so than others. One of those responded by writing
that ‘Yeah, but I’m a special case :)’, indicating that creativity,
at least for this person, comes with a sense of individuality, difference
and exception. Yet such subjectivities carry more baggage than this.
As Angela McRobbie notes, ‘Individualization is not about individuals
per se, as about new, more fluid, less permanent social relations
seemingly marked by choice or options. However, this convergence
has to be understood as one of contestation and antagonism’ (2002:
518). Much of this report seeks to unravel various tensions that
underpin labour practices within the creative industries.
A seventh respondent took a more reflexive, marxian and historically
informed position, choosing to problematise and open up the question
in the following way: ‘All industry is creative; all human activity
creates something; and nearly all human activity is subsumed under
industrial imperatives (including the consumption of media and other
products). Therefore I think this is probably a question whose answer
is presupposed in the historical facts of its own terms’. On these
grounds, then, irrespective of whether respondents did or didn’t
identify their creative activities with the Creative Industries,
there is a sense amongst these respondents – perhaps unconscious
– that there is an “idea” of what constitutes the creative industries,
and any particular respondent’s identification with those industries
is based, perhaps, on whether one meets the criteria or fits into
the discursive boundaries, categories, or ethos of the Creative
Industries, as established in part in the survey’s preamble.
Intellectual Property and Creativity
The importance of intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks)
as a source of income was met with a mixed response. For one person
it was important, for the rest it wasn’t, at least in an exclusive
sense: labour was paid for on an hourly basis or IP was assigned
to the company or publisher commissioning the work; in other instances
remuneration from IP contributed to a respondent’s income, but wasn’t
relied upon as a primary source of income. Creative workers were
thus primarily alienated from their intellectual property in one
form or another. Such responses clearly signal a tension and power
relationship between creative workers and their employers with regard
to the CITF definition of creative industries as those activities
that have ‘the potential for wealth and job creation through generation
and exploitation of intellectual property’. Thus despite all the
rhetoric around informational and creative labour consisting of
“horizontal” and “fluid” modes of production, distribution and exchange,
clearly there remains vertical, hierarchical dimensions within the
“New Economy”. If IP is to function as the mainstay of capital accumulation
within informational economies, it doesn’t take much imagination
to foresee industrial, legal and political dispute focussing on
the juridico-political architecture of IP. The extent to which workers
are able to mobilise their potential power in an effective manner
(i.e., in a way that protects and secures their interests whilst
inventing new political information architectures) depends, I would
suggest, on their capacity to organise themselves as a socio-political
force. I will address this issue in relation to the problem of immaterial
labour in more detail below.
Respondents found IP a source of tension not only at the level
of financial remuneration; a tension prevailed around the concept
of IP as well. In response to the question of whether intellectual
property is important as a principle – that is, as a system or framework
consisting of rules and beliefs that enables the transformation
of labour into legal, moral and potentially economic values – one
person stated that they found it of no importance at all. All others
found it was, though the response, as expected, was mixed: ‘Yes,
but in a negative sense. The whole structure of IP has turned into
a perversion of its intended principles: namely, that alienation
rather than one’s inalienable rights in one’s own work is the guiding
principle of IP law. Put differently, rights are seen to exist only
so that they can be sold. That is a function of capital, long since
dead. I would prefer a rights structure that existed to ensure the
free flow of ideas’. In a similar vein, though without the libertarian
overtone, another respondent writes: ‘It is important to me as a
principle to be critiqued, developed and (in some cases) rejected.
The arm of IP is extending in several directions and in many industries
– and it’s that reach that needs to be reviewed with some urgency’.
A third respondent strongly rejected the idea that IP might be
understood in terms of principles: ‘No’, they write, ‘It’s important
to me as a discursive field!’ By my reading, such a statement suggests
that the respondent understands principles as holding some kind
of unchanging, transcendental and universal status, while a discursive
field is historically and culturally mutable and holds the potential
for local intervention by actors endowed with such capacities. (A
similar distinction is often made in philosophy between the universality
of morals and the contingencies of ethics.) The idea of IP as a
discursive field rather than a principle is also interesting in
relation to the second response tabled above, which implies that
limits need to be established with regard to IP and the extent to
which it governs areas of life previously outside a market economy.
Current debates around patenting the human genome, database access
to DNA information on sperm and embryo composition and their relationship
to insurance premiums and future employment possibilities (see Gattica
for the filmic version of this scenario), and the pressure on developing
countries to import GM food coupled with uneven, neo-colonial trade
agreements along with clientelistic conditions imposed by the World
Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment and debt management policies
are the most obvious examples that come to mind here (see Hoogvelt,
2001).
Intellectual Property and the Labour Contract
The tension associated with IP was further extended to the workplace,
with all but one of the respondents noting that they had heard of
and in some instances personally experienced conflicts over IP issues.
If such accounts are the norm rather than the exception, this clearly
signals a need for much greater attention to be given to the role
of IP in the workplace, and the status it holds as a legal and social
architecture governing the conditions of creative production, job
satisfaction, employer-employee relations and thus life in general.
While only two respondents reported of losing a job or contract
for refusing to assign IP to their employer, many commented on the
problems of such a condition – as one person noted: ‘This is common
in film music now: if you don’t sell your rights to the film maker,
you are not given the contract’. Another highlighted the legal and
institutional distinction between private and state sectors. Addressing
the Australian situation, this respondent notes that government
bodies such as councils and departments ‘are exempt from recognising
author rights under the current copyright act – therefore to refuse
to hand over intellectual rights in these cases is to refuse to
work’.
Here is a curious and paradoxical case in point in which the call
to a ‘refusal of work’ – a political concept and strategy derived
from radical workers’ movements of the 1960s in Italy – is jerry-wired
into the system itself, albeit with a significant proviso of political
proportion. The Italian autonomists seek to liberate work from relations
of waged labour and the capitalist State, to unleash ‘a mass defection
or exodus’ and in so doing subtract the labour-power which sustains
the capitalist system, affirming the ‘creative potential of our
practical capacities’ in the process (see Hardt, 1996: 6; see also
Virno, 1996b: 196-197). There’s a bit of a different rub, however,
in a capitalist logic of post-Fordist flexible accumulation, whose
modes of social and political regulation set the scene for our current
informational paradigm. While the worker within Fordist systems
of assembly-line mass production and mass consumption conditions
the possibility of, to refer to the classic example, the assemblage
of motor vehicles that, ideally, are then sold to the leisurely
consumer who built the vehicle in their eight hour working day,
the case of IP and creative labour operates in substantially different
ways.
Within an informational paradigm, the appropriation of labour power
by capitalists does not result in a product so much as a potential.
This potential takes the “immaterial” form of intellectual property
whose value is largely unquantifiable and is subject to the vagaries
of speculative finance markets, “New Economy” style. Thus, in the
case of government institutions that don’t recognise an individual’s
IP rights, there is nothing to ‘hand over’ in the first instance.
That is, the right to a refusal of work is not possible; or put
differently, the creative potential of work, as registered in and
transformed into the juridico-political form of IP, is undermined
by the fact that such a social relation – the hegemonic form of
legitimacy – is not recognised. As noted by another respondent:
‘I don’t think you “lose” a contract for refusing to sign IP over
... it’s more like you never had it in the first place if you do
work for hire’. Instead, one does not so much refuse to work as
decline to provide a service, whose economic value as wage labour
– that is, labour separated from its product (Marx in Harvey, 1990:
104) – bears no relationship to the potential economic value generated
by the exploitation of IP. In effect, then, “creativity” goes right
under the radar. Prostitution functions in a similar manner. One
does not buy “love” from the prostitute, one acquires a “service”
in the form of an orgasm, or “little death”, with no value in and
of itself. The prostitute’s love does not figure in the relationship;
love is off the radar. Like intellectual property, the expression
of the orgasm in a given form – sperm, for the male who appropriates
the labour power of the prostitute – nevertheless holds the potential
to translate into economic, social, political and biological values
if its eruption is arranged under different conditions – the normative
ones peculiar to heterosexual couplings living in advanced economies,
for example.
A couple of respondents, both now working in the higher education
sector, had mixed responses to the kind of conditions such a setting
enabled vis-à-vis labour and IP. Respondent 1: ‘I would always give
in [and sign over IP] when I was self-employed, now I only take
jobs where I’m happy with the IP arrangements’. Such a position
is possible when, as noted earlier, producing IP for others (i.e.,
employers/clients) is not the primary source of income. Interestingly,
the other respondent anticipates conflicts over the assignation
of IP within university settings – Respondent 2: ‘as i continue
to collaborate in university settings, the problem will arise’.
The problem of job security arises where IP policies can vary substantially
from university to university and at an intra-university level depending
on the kind of contract an individual is able to negotiate with
management as universities undergo increasingly deregulation toward
a system that destroys the legal concept fought for by unions of
collective wage agreements. At my own university, to take a typical
example of someone working in the higher education sector, the subject
materials I produce are the intellectual property of the university.
These educational materials will often incorporate parts of articles
I have written or am in the process of writing. (They will also
include lists of references to articles and debates located in open-access
online repositories, as found in the fibreculture and nettime archives,
for example.) And here, a curious institutional tension over IP
emerges: depending on the publisher, the IP of articles and books
I write belongs to the publisher. One of the respondents noted how
this problem of proprietary rights of academic IP has been dealt
with in recent legislation in Australia: ‘the new IP rules (e.g.,
the one which came into effect on 14th March) gives the university
ownership of all IP created by staff (with a “scholarly work” exception).
This creates major problems – for example, academics moving to different
universities who intend to use educational materials they have developed
previously’. Thus the extent to which IP functions as an architecture
of control is and has always been dubious at the level of the everyday.
Just think of what happened with the appearance of the xerox machine
in university settings – in effect it became a free license to appropriate
the property of writers, with myriad staff and students reproducing
the pages of otherwise copyright protected materials.
Even if the legal aspects of IP are frequently difficult if not
impossible to regulate, there are important symbolic dimensions
to IP that have implications and impacts at the level of subjectivities
and their degree of legitimacy within institutional and national
settings. Here I am thinking – yet again – of that rather chilling
line in the CITF’s definition of the Creative Industries in which
IP is not only generated, but more significantly, it is exploited.
The exploitation of IP is not simply a matter of extracting the
potential economic value from some inanimate thing; the exploitation
of IP, let us never forget, is always already an exploitation of
people, of the producers of that which is transformed from practice
into property, which in its abstraction is then alienated from those
who have produced it. While there are clear problems with such a
system, IPRs are not necessarily a bad thing. As I have argued elsewhere,
to simply oppose IPRs is not a political option (Rossiter, 2002).
Individuals and communities must look for ways in which IPRs can
be exploited for strategic ends. Such a political manoeuvre is possible,
for instance, in efforts to advance Indigenous sovereignty. To return
to the relationship between the exploitation of IP and the political
status of subjectivity, it should be noted that QUT holds a policy
in which students retain control of all IP they produce, with some
exceptions.[4]
Such a policy initiative seems to be the exception within an environment
of “enterprise universities” (Marginson and Considine, 2000) whose
economic viability depends upon obtaining the maximum leverage possible
within a political economy of partial deregulation.
Intellectual Property and (Dis)Organised Labour
Most of the respondents corrected the assumption in my question
on the relationship between collaborative production and the difficulty
of assigning IP rights to individuals or joint-authorship. Respondents
noted that corporations own the creative efforts of both individuals
and collaborations, since the corporation has paid for that work.
This brings me to the final component of the survey – the relationship
between IP and the problem of disorganised labour. It seems to me
that unions are among the best placed actors to contest the seemingly
foregone conclusion that corporations have an a priori hold on the
appropriation of labour power. As Castells has noted in a recent
interview:
... with the acceleration of the work process [enabled by new
ICTs], worker’s defense continues to be a fundamental issue: they
cannot count on their employers. The problem is that the individualization
of management/worker relationships makes the use of traditional
forms of defense, in terms of collective bargaining and trade
union-led struggles, very difficult except in the public sector.
Unions are realizing this and finding new forms of pressure, sometimes
in the form of consumer boycotts to press for social justice and
human rights. Also, individual explosions of violence by defenseless
workers could be considered forms of resistance. (Castells and
Ince, 2003: 29)
However, there is an impasse of paradigmatic proportion to the
potential for unions to assist workers – particularly younger workers
– within creative industries or knowledge and information economies.
The so-called strategy of consumer sovereignty is a relatively weak
one, and only further entrenches the problem of individualisation
inasmuch as the potential for a coalition amongst workers is only
further sidelined in favour of that mantra urged on by our politicians
who are so keen to protect “the national interest” – yes, the national
economy is fragile, so enjoy yourself and go out and shop! There
is a general perception that unions and their capacity to organise
labour in politically effective and socially appealing ways are
a thing of the past. To address this issue I will first table comments
from respondents. I will then move on to the thesis of “immaterial
labour”, as presented by Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri, and argue why
the condition of “disorganised labour” more accurately describes
the circumstances in which labour finds itself within an informational
paradigm.
Three of the respondents stated they did not belong to a union,
one with perhaps a degree of ironic self-affirmation characteristic
of what Lash and Urry (1994) term ‘reflexive individualization’:
‘Nope’, writes one person, ‘I’m a manager and self-employed :7’.
In his book on globalisation, Ulrich Beck identifies a nexus between
those who work for themselves – a mode of coordination he attributes
to “life-aesthetes” in particular – and their desire for ‘self-development’.
He goes on to suggest that such dispositions lend themselves to
‘self-exploitation’: ‘People are prepared to do a great deal for
very little money, precisely because economic advantage is individualistically
refracted and even assigned an opposite value. If an activity has
greater value in terms of identity and self-fulfilment, this makes
up for and even exalts a lower level of income’ (2000: 150). Voluntary
and service labour by many artists within the cultural sector would
also fit this condition of self-exploitation.
Richard Caves prefers to explain the condition of non-union labour
in more economic terms. Citing the example of independent filmmaking,
Caves notes that ‘30 to 35 per cent of production costs [can be
saved] by operating a nonunion project’ (2000:133). In productions
involving union labour, most of these additional costs are a result,
so Caves claims, of inefficient and interventionist management practices
and regulations by unions, which sees workers being paid for standing
around doing nothing. Caves casts unions as manipulative entities
who have a propensity to “hold-up” production unless their wage
demands are met (132). Certainly, the militancy of unions has long
been a staple of news narratives structured around a binary logic
that has little time for articulating larger contextual forces and
values that give rise to particular actions. Irrespective of whether
the political form is union or non-union, issues of creative governance
are always going to have local or national peculiarities, and will
vary from industry to industry. In every case, however, the challenge
for creative workers is, it seems to me, to create work that holds
not only the maximum potential for self-fulfilment and group cooperation
on a project, but just as importantly, creative workers need to
situate themselves in ways that close down the possibility of exploitation.
The other respondents belonged to various unions or professional
organisations: NTEU (2), MEAA/AJA (2), the College Arts Association
(USA) and APRA, ‘which is not really a union, but it primarily concerned
with IP’. All these respondents were aware of their union’s policy
on IP issues, though one respondent held a high level of cynicism:
‘I’ve never heard a union take a credible position on IP’. The follow-up
question on the efficacy of unions in instances of dispute with
management over IP elicited further cynicism from another respondent:
‘Unions are too stupid to do this properly. They are as much a part
of the problem since they agree to perverse work relations. Unions
are corporations’. Others noted that disputes of this nature were
‘an ongoing battle on many fronts’ and that ‘the MEAA/AJA newsletter
often has such stories. Most of it is so thoroughly covered in case
law that the major players don’t bother to buck the system. The
case of US freelance journos seeking payment for new media republication
of their stories is seminal’. The Tasini et al. vs. The New York
Times et al. case which this second respondent refers to is
notable for the successful class action filed in 1993 by the National
Writers Union (NWU) on behalf of freelance journalists against The
New York Times, which had resold and republished articles electronically
from their print archive and were refusing to pay freelance journalists
for republication on the grounds that there was no difference in
form between a print, microfilm or microfiche archive and new archival
and storage media such as online newspapers or magazines, electronic
databases such as LexisNexis or CD-ROMs. [5]
Despite the US Supreme Court ruling in favour
of Tasini in 2001, The New York Times refused to compensate
journalists and decided instead to delete all freelance written
articles from their electronic archival media.
The Tasini vs. The New York Times case prompts two
key issues that I will only flag here: firstly, material previously
part of common repositories of knowledge such as public libraries
becomes subject to litigious society within the political economy
of a digital age, resulting in the erasure of what would otherwise
be a digital commons (see Frow, 1996); and secondly, while freelance
journalists – i.e., those who belong to the class of creative labourers
– obtained some success in this instance, the Tasini vs. The
New York Times case foregrounds the continued importance
the nation-state and its domestic legal regimes hold for any analysis
of information societies. While digitally encoded information has
the capacity to transcend borders of the nation-state, we are again
reminded of the socio-political forces which shape our understanding
of and relationship to media technologies. Further, the socio-technical
condition of all communications media is always already situated
within specific discourse-networks; the media situation in turn
gives rise to the problematic of translation for media-culture and
its attendant labour practices and modes of creation. To put it
simply, while the Tasini vs. The New York Times case set
a legal precedent for how media corporations are to go about republishing
the work of commissioned freelance journalists, such a ruling has
no legal bearing outside the US in terms of how some of the very
same transnational media conglomerates conduct their business practices
in other countries.
To summarise: while the majority of respondents did belong to one
or more unions, a good proportion of these respondents did not seem
satisfied with or have any great faith in the efforts of unions
to negotiate disputes over IP in the workplace.
Multitudes and the Exploitation of Network Sociality
The final question in the survey asked respondents if they thought
there was a need for workers in their field to become more organised,
particularly around the impact that IP has on their potential income.
One person said ‘yes’, and two others didn’t know or weren’t sure.
The remaining four respondents took the opportunity to register
more developed responses. One person stated that ‘Musicians need
a militant union. That said, the old divisions of labour in what
are generally considered “the creative industries” (really the cultural
industries) have broken down because of technological changes’.
Interestingly, this respondent correlates the convergence of different
media technologies with the demise of the previous markers of class
distinction premised on the vertical organisation of labour within
the culture industries. It has been commonplace since the late-90s
to hear stories of musical entrepreneurs who simultaneously engage
in the previously separated activities of production, distribution
and consumption. Yet such horizontal organisation isn’t without
its own class distinctions that continue to operate in symbolic,
economic, and political dimensions.
While the old divisions of labour may have been cast away, at least
within the advanced economies, this isn’t to say that new divisions
of labour haven’t taken their place. Indeed, the task of identifying
new divisions of labour within the creative industries and informational
economies has been one of the key underlying interests and motivations
behind this report. Such divisions are invoked by another respondent:
I think the issue is broader than the impact on our “potential
income” as individual workers – perhaps this is already too close
to the commodity rhetoric that has permeated the creative industries.
Part of the problem is that we are taught to respond to our projects
as personally-owned intellectual products that must be protected,
so that we can drain the maximum profit from their use. This disguises
several processes that go into creative work. Open source programming
networks, for example, reveal other ways to interpret and develop
our intellectual labours.
Here we have it then, the return to the classic debate over closed
regulation vs. open flows within a field of new ICTs. But there’s
more to it in this instance. This respondent rightly observes that
creativity is irreducible to the generation and exploitation of
IP. Herein lies a key tension that proponents of the Creative Industries
face with a potential constituency that in the majority of instances
resides outside the institutional borders of the university or a
government department of creative industries. This tension concerns
the relationship between discourse and identity formation. Just
as the success of governments operating within liberal democracies
depends upon getting the right spin, so too does the capacity for
the Creative Industries project to obtain a purchase with a variety
of actors that include politicians and government departments, university
officials, students, academics, industry managers and creative producers.
In other words, within a discursive regime of neoliberalism that
grants hegemony to those with greater institutional, political and
economic purchase – e.g., industry managers, government departments,
and university professors – there remains a constitutive outside
of creative and service workers with little or no political representation.
Such a condition of “invisibility” is symptomatic of the dependency
of capital on the commodity value of labour-power. It was on the
basis of this relationship between capital and labour-power that
Italian radical leftists in the 1960s and 1970s such as Mario Tronti
would observe that ‘Labour is the measure of value because the
working class is the condition of capital’ (cited in Wright,
2002: 84). Within the workers’ movements of the 1960s, the class
function to supply capital with labour-power and produce surplus
value was seen as the condition for dismantling and disarticulating
the reproduction of capital (see Wright, 2002: 84-85; Moulier-Boutang,
2003). As noted earlier, the technique for undertaking this action
was referred to as the ‘refusal of work’ – a radical intervention
which unleashed the creative capacities of workers and affirmed
their ‘right to nonwork’ (Virno, 1996a: 20; see also Tronti, 1980).
Recognising the political limitations of the unitary concept of
class within a post-industrial, post-colonial era, Hardt and Negri
(2000) have spearheaded the internationalisation of the Italian
autonomist concept of “the multitude” – the movement of movements
that goes beyond the traditional working classes who have established
political representation within the institutional structures of
trade unions and social-democratic parties. Developed out of the
activities Negri and others have with officine precarie (non-unionised
precarious, unpaid workers), the multitude is a political, “post-representational”
and in some instances ethico-aesthetic expression of those seeking
to actualise another possible world – ethnic and social minorities,
women, exploited workers, activists, leftist intellectuals, etc.
According to Paolo Virno, the multitude is opposed to the Hobbesian
concept of “the people”, which ‘is tightly correlated to the existence
of the State and is in fact a reverberation of it’ (1996b: 200).
Against the political unity and will of the “the people”, the multitude’s
‘virtuosic’ heterogeneity – or ‘ensemble of “acting minorities”’
– ‘obstructs and dismantles the mechanisms of political representation’
(Virno, 1996b: 201). Redefining the position of the multitude, Negri’s
oral intervention at a meeting of officine precarie in Pisa
earlier this year is apposite on the correlation between exploitation
and creative labour,
Author's Biography
http://www.nwu.org/tvt/tvthome.htm
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