How to Move Things with Unions?: Labor Organizing of Art Workers in Post-Yugoslav Context

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Art II: Charting Liberation: Insights on Art from Yugoslav Socialism and Post-Socialism I

Abstract

The paper will discuss art and cultural workers’ labor organizing and unionizing attempts taking place in the post-Yugoslav context, Slovenia and Croatia in particular, after the global COVID-19 pandemic. Considering the legacy of Yugoslav socialism and transformations of labor regimes that brought on the fragmentation of the labor force and intensified precarity of art workers after the destruction of SFRY, the contribution will investigate the role of unionization in the field of art and cultural production. Despite the invisibilization of artwork, the dissolution of the labor identity of creative workers since the late 1970s as well as a decline in union membership in the post-Yugoslav context, there are signs of revived unionization efforts exemplified by two recent examples of unionization of freelance workers in Slovenia and Croatia. The paper will analyze obstacles related to self-employed workers’ labor organizing and collective bargaining as well as effective methods and models of unionization. Finally, the paper will tackle the issue of class relations effecting the potential for unionization in the field of cultural production and the ways in which class positions of art workers effect variegated forms of exploitation in cultural/creative sectors that continue to perpetuate the invisibility of labor and a hyper-individualized attitudes toward creative work.

Author

• Katja Praznik, SUNY Buffalo