by Sarah Jaffe
IT WAS LATE JANUARY 2020 WHEN I CRISSCROSSED IRELAND WITH KATE O’Shea, hopping trains and buses from Dublin to Limerick to Cork and back again to meet a collection of the artists with whom she works. In Dublin, we had breakfast and tea with Marie Brett, an installation artist who, like O’Shea, specializes in creating spaces where people can interact, and for whom O’Shea was project-managing an upcoming installation. From there we caught a night bus to Limerick to stay with Kerry Guinan and meet one of O’Shea’s printmaking mentors as well as Ciaran Nash, an artist who had collaborated with Guinan and others to make an alternative currency to celebrate the anniversary of the Limerick Soviet (a time in 1919 when the workers of Limerick turned a general strike into a takeover of the city). From there we went to O’Shea’s home of Cork, to meet Eve Olney and to visit the bank where O’Shea and Olney had built their installation, titled Spare Room.
The space, which was an iteration of Olney’s practice as Art Architecture Activism, was designed to be open to the public—not just for the appreciation of art, but to be a social and political space where people came together for workshops. These ranged, O’Shea said, “from the banking process to feminist economics to printmaking.”
They took over the vacant TSB Bank on Main Street, near the city center, “to pinpoint at least one building and show this could be used to multiple purposes and it is practically a crime that it is not being used,” Olney explained. But once the project began, it snowballed beyond their expectations. It turned into thirteen exhibitions from artists as well as social organizations, including the Cork Women’s Travellers Network and the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland. There were twenty-six workshops, and in between those O’Shea pulled together her “People’s Kitchen” to feed the people who came in. They hosted a radical library in the bank’s old vault. But the point, they stressed, was to create new organizations that would last beyond the period of the exhibition.
Figuring out how her print work fitted in with the work of creating the spaces was at one point a challenge for O’Shea, but the bank project helped her to understand how the art could “create a space visually that can hold activism,” she explained. The art served to make the space accessible, to draw interest from people who might never attend a radical political meeting, to get people in a space with others with whom they might never have spoken on the street. “My work is people, in a way. It is whoever is in the space at that moment [and] is creating whatever part of the revolution they are creating.”53
For O’Shea, and the artist community to which she belongs, organizing is a part of their arts practice. Yet she is quite aware of the way that art trends can veer toward or away from a particular kind of political art. It is what keeps her doing different types of work, from the prints to publishing to the spaces and the People’s Kitchen. And it is also what keeps her and her community aware of the need for political organizing that goes beyond political art.
Kerry Guinan, whose art is often in fact about labor, nevertheless said, “Ultimately, I don’t think it’s possible to interrupt or go outside capitalism through art. I do think it’s possible through organizing.” Her art is about, she said, “trying to test very particular aesthetic techniques and, I suppose, test the boundaries of the artistic encounter. Whereas organizing is a completely different field altogether and it has limits in itself.”
The organizing that O’Shea and Olney and Guinan do has a range of impacts—from the small-scale, organizing with other artists to improve their working conditions—which does in its way open up space for funding for more political art work—to the long-term aim of challenging the capitalist system. “One of the reasons why I want to start an artists’ union, it’s not even so much as fighting for better positions for ourselves. I just don’t think that the arts will be truly accessible until we create better working conditions for those that are in it,” Guinan explained. “I don’t think working-class people and marginalized communities will ever be as represented as we want them to be in the arts if we don’t fight to change the field so that it is not so precarious and it’s not so underpaid and doesn’t rely so much on unpaid work.” The art world’s typical solution, of finding a few artists from diverse backgrounds to uplift, she noted, is still “an art solution to a structural problem.”
Guinan launched the artists’ union as part of yet another collective art project. In Dublin, the A4 Sounds art space—a gallery, workspace, and community—was hosting a yearlong series of exhibitions and events around the theme “We Only Want the Earth,” a line from Irish socialist and trade union leader James Connolly. Guinan used the moment to start a concrete campaign with a winnable goal for collective action. “We are not going to go looking for millions more in arts money, because we won’t achieve that in a month,” Guinan said. “But if someone has an invoice that hasn’t been paid, we might collectively decide to approach the gallery or whoever it is and win that battle for them. What I want is for members of the artistic community to go away feeling what winning feels like and, also, how hard it is, how hard it is to even win a small battle, because that will make you realize how little power we actually have right now.” The artists’ union also held a campaign around arts funding from the government during the coronavirus lockdown.
I suggested to O’Shea that, in a way, all of these collaborations and mutual support projects were themselves the beginnings of such a union. When I told the A4 Sounds crew about Natasha Bunten’s workers’ center, they reacted by saying, “Wow, that’s kind of what we are. An art workers’ center.”
A4, too, began from collective exhibitions and grew into a collective artists’ space, where politically minded artists in wildly expensive Dublin can work. “This year is the first year that we had a funded program. In the past we have been doing things like the residency on a shoestring which basically meant we could give in-kind stuff to artists so they can use the space,” explained Donal Holland, one of A4’s founders. That program became “We Only Want the Earth.” Consulting artists like O’Shea and Guinan would serve as mentors for less established artists, giving them access to material supports rather than just gesturing at an acknowledgment. The virus closed the studios down for a while, but the programming was going ahead as Dublin reopened.
“I just love connecting all these things,” O’Shea said. “With ‘We Only Want the Earth,’ I have a small part, which is exciting because I am then part of a bigger team, and I will be working with the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland.” They would be creating an award for someone seeking refuge in Ireland. The whole idea behind “We Only Want the Earth,” O’Shea said, is “a redistribution of wealth,” taking arts funding that A4 gets and using it to support marginalized artists. “It is all about building the movement of the artists—it is like slowly working and building an army. We joke about that now. When we meet someone we are like, ‘They would be good for the army.’”
CHAPTER 7
HOPING FOR WORK
Interns
CAMILLE MARCOUX’S FIRST EXPERIENCE AS AN UNPAID INTERN WAS while she was studying for her bachelor’s degree at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She was preparing for law school, but as an undergraduate, she interned at a nonprofit community organization one day a week for a whole year, while a full-time student.
The internship, like those done by so many students (and graduates) in Quebec and around the world, was unpaid. “The organization basically runs on interns during the school year,” she explained, as for many students an internship was mandatory before graduation. Then, during law school, she was required to do another internship for six months. That time, she got lucky—she got paid. But that wasn’t a requirement. “Obviously, the kind of law that you went into had an influence on whether you were going to get paid, but the obligation to pay or not is the same for everyone. Even if you worked for the biggest firm in the city, you could work for free.”
She had to apply for her internship just as one would a job, but, she noted, since
the internships were mandatory, if students were not accepted at the workplaces of their choice, “it could happen that you were forced to work somewhere.”
The variety of internship experiences struck her, early on, as unfair. “The different internships have different value. The people that were doing internships in corporate law—and obviously it was more men—during the summer, got paid and got more academic credit for that internship. While I was doing one day a week during a whole year, I couldn’t get paid and I had less credit at the end of the year.” The way this was weighted in practice meant these men could graduate faster with more cash in hand; student protests changed the weighting practices a little bit, but pay rates (or lack thereof) remained the same.
Marcoux and a growing number of other interns also noticed that internships were required in certain disciplines and not in others. While more fields were demanding students complete internships, fields like education, social work, and nursing—fields dominated by women—led the way. Meanwhile, in engineering and other male-dominated disciplines, internships were paid and protected by labor law. “The labor law, for it to apply, you have to have a wage,” Marcoux, now a labor lawyer, explained. “What is in the labor law regarding internships is that when the internship is mandatory in your curriculum, the labor law does not apply to you, so the employer is not forced to give you a wage. But when you get a wage, you are an employee.” When you don’t get a wage, you are not an employee—and that means that protections against abuses on the job—against sexual harassment, for example—don’t apply, either. Unpaid workers could thus be doubly or triply exploited.
Professional organizations had some sway over the internship process, which was the reason that engineering interns were paid, she explained. “They actually said to the schools, ‘We are not going to recognize the internships that are done if they are not paid.’ In those conditions, the labor law applied to those types of students because they were automatically paid during their internship.”
During her undergraduate internship, Marcoux said, the interns often felt they’d been thrown in at the deep end, expected to know how to do the job from the beginning. There was little oversight or training as they learned through doing—the opposite of the on-the-job education internships are billed as. Marcoux worked for a community organization providing a variety of services: “We gave consultations about social services, about tenants’ rights, but also about financial aid. Sometimes it was very sensitive information, a very delicate situation, and it was very difficult to just work without any discussion with our colleagues, with our boss, about how we were supposed to do that work.”
The interns were kept out of staff meetings, she explained, which could create or exacerbate messy situations. “Sometimes people had very difficult experiences with certain service users and we didn’t have any space to discuss it, either with the school or with our internship environment.” They worked alongside paid staff, and were expected to do much of the same work, but the interns did not have the same power.
There was little help to be had from the university. “The school, they don’t have any idea what we do during our internship. For them it is a complete mystery,” she laughed. And yet, because the internship was required for her degree, she received a grade from the university for the experience. “It is still a little bit difficult to understand how they can actually grade us because they don’t understand what we do,” she said. Even though her direct supervisor at the nonprofit provided an evaluation to the university, she didn’t think that gave the university enough insight to grade her, let alone provide a constructive evaluation or any real oversight of her working conditions. This, too, was a common complaint among the interns.
As the internship programs expanded, they became more demanding, requiring more hours of the students, longer commitments, and more sacrifice in order to do the unpaid work. Even lower-level students, at Quebec’s CEGEPs (institutions that provide pre-university education for university-bound students as well as technical programs for those learning skilled trades), are required to do internships. Students in programs from cosmetology to nursing to administration are doing longer internships, despite the fact, as Marcoux pointed out, that their degrees do not usually lead to particularly high-paying jobs. “This shows that it is a very classist issue, because we are expected to do free work during our training,” she said, “but it is not going to lead us to a more valued job and something with good work conditions that are going to help us pay back our loans.”
The expansion of unpaid internships in the public and nonprofit sector in Quebec, Marcoux said, has helped to make up for years of budget cuts to the government—budget cuts that students have fought against over and over again. As nonprofits expand into doing work that the state used to do, the work of volunteers, and now interns, helps keep those organizations afloat—and making those internships mandatory provides a steady stream of cheap or free labor. The nonprofit sector in Canada, as in the United States, has expanded greatly in recent decades, and relies on the dedication of workers who often take pay cuts out of a commitment to the cause—or, in the case of the interns, take no pay at all.1
“Very early on during our education, we learned to help to compensate for the budget cuts,” Marcoux explained. “We are learning what is expected of us, and then we go into our workplace and we see our colleagues and they are all doing free labor. A lot of them are working extra hours that they are not getting paid for because they are all working with vulnerable populations and you cannot just say, ‘Now it is time to go home. Goodbye.’”
She added, “I feel like they are training us for exploitation.”
WHAT IS AN INTERN?
Unlike most of the workers in this book, the intern is not defined by the kind of work she does, but by her status in the workplace. She can be a law student, like Camille Marcoux, on her way to a middle-class profession but laboring in a community organization one day a week. She could be an assistant on a film set, fetching coffee and checking lists in hopes of breaking into the industry. She could be a young journalist, as your humble author was, fact-checking pieces by big names she’s long idolized and eagerly pitching pieces to the editors who occasionally breeze by her cubicle. She could be an Ivy League student putting in time at an investment bank, or she could even be serving cotton candy at Disney World or assembling iPhones at Foxconn’s massive factories.2
She might be paid, but probably isn’t.
Interns are not technically workers at all. Instead, they are assumed to be students first, learning on the job and making their way toward eventual (and eventually, perhaps, lucrative) careers. One researcher defined an internship as “any experience of the world of work from which a student can learn about a career,” which is both vague and as specific as it is possible to be.3
What really defines the intern, after all, is hope. Communications scholars Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan coined the term “hope labor” to apply to “un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow.” Hope labor is a snake eating its own tail, and the intern is the hope laborer par excellence. Working for free in order to one day get one of those jobs that are worth loving, the intern is the vehicle by which the conditions of contingency and subordination that are common to low-wage service work creep into an increasing number of salaried fields. Justified by the meritocratic myth that the best interns will get jobs, the internship actually drives down wages by introducing a new wage floor—free—into the system, allowing companies to substitute interns for entry-level workers. The interns replace the very employees they hope to be.4
Hope labor, and the internship, is a problem of power. The intern is the least powerful person in the room; interns are there to do what is asked of them in such a way that it inconveniences no one while drawing the positive attention that might lead to the ultimate prize: a real job offer. The internship turns a job into some
thing to be lusted after, dreamed of, all while justifying today’s grunt work as “paying one’s dues,” “networking,” and “making connections”—the key to getting an opportunity to work in the brave neoliberal economy. The idea, of course, is that it will be different once you get the coveted job. Once you get a real job, the story goes, you’ll get not just pay but respect and equal treatment; you will no longer have to scrape and hustle. Yet what the internship really does, often, is give the intern a glimpse of the messiness and ugliness of the real world of work, particularly the lack of control that they will have over their conditions—and that lack of control often continues even when wages are introduced. The internship, in other words, naturalizes lousy—and gendered—working conditions. As Kuehn and Corrigan wrote, “we lack agency, so we hope.”5
Flexibility is the primary trait demanded of interns, and it is the main condition of their work. Interns must learn on the job but have demonstrable skills; they must be willing to do whatever is asked and do it with a smile. No matter which industries they are in, they are in the position of service workers, having to smile and say, “Yes, whatever you need,” to whoever asks. The connections made on the job are the most important thing to interns, as those connections might build a network for future employment. Thus the actual work they do is secondary. But, as the internship has spread into more and more parts of the working world, more and more workers in turn have job experiences that are more like internships. Flexible, temporary work has spread; employers have less responsibility for their employees; and the employees are more concerned with making connections with which to jump to the next, insecure, position. The internship, and the casualization of the workforce more generally, requires the would-be worker to demonstrate love just to get a job in the first place.6