How Artists Tackle Labour Rights and Precarious Employment

In a September 2021 episode of the engineering disasters podcast Well There’s Your Problem, about Bucharest’s Palace of the Parliament, guest Adam Something recites a joke about the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the transition to liberal democracy: ‘We always knew everything the Party said about communism was a lie. Unfortunately, we now know that everything they said about capitalism was true.’ Of course, it’s easy to see that with hindsight, more than three decades since the USSR and Yugoslavia broke up, leaving little but economic shock doctrines and violent nationalism at home, and the narrative that history had ended with the triumph of the global free market.

Today, perhaps as a counterpoint to the nostalgia for the communist period that surfaced within ten years of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a wave of artists, filmmakers and writers are addressing labour conditions and class relations with a rigour and fervour rarely seen since the 1970s, even if they are nowhere near as embedded in socialist parties and trade unions as their predecessors were 100 years ago. To ask why and how artists have become so interested in precarious and unsafe employment – particularly for women – I want to look at works by three practitioners from different countries. Although varying hugely in form, style and tone, their works share thematic affinities if not obvious political affiliations.

Radu Jude’s most recent feature, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), is a complicated film about precarious working conditions, globalization and corporate responsibility, as well as the uses and limits of filmmaking. It shares the theme of the gig economy, and a bleak sense of humour, with Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You (2019) but eschews the veteran British filmmaker’s social(ist) realism in favour of multilayered metatextuality and caustic surrealism. Its first half follows Angela Raducanu, an overqualified, underpaid production assistant for an Austrian company that makes information films with people who have had workplace accidents. It draws some of its plot and footage from Lucian Bratu’s Angela Moves On (1981), made in Bucharest’s Uranus district just before Romania’s nominally communist ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu levelled it to build his Palace.

Like her filmic namesake, Angela is also an Uber driver, working a second job to make ends meet, endlessly being confronted by the corruption, racism and creeping fascism endemic in 21st century Europe – not least in a scene where she picks up one of her employer’s senior executives and tries fruitlessly to engage them in conversation about the company’s role in destroying Romania’s forests. Her main outlet is making TikTok videos in which she adopts an aggressively right-wing persona for laughs, using a filter that replaces her face with that of Romania’s most notorious resident since Ceauşescu – far-right influencer and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate.

Today, artists are addressing labour conditions and class relations with a rigour and fervour rarely seen since the 1970s.

Jude’s work fizzes with ideas, not least about image production in the age of the smartphone and social media. In a recent interview with Jacobin, Jude said he was inspired partly by his experiences in advertising – with its long hours and contemptuous attitude towards viewers – but more by his entry into filmmaking. He described this as a ‘service industry’, with a ‘lot of foreign productions […] shot in Romania because of cheap locations’ and ‘cheap labour’, organized by local production companies in an exploitative way, which Jude and his colleagues saw as emblematic of the ‘new system’ Romania embraced after Ceauşescu was deposed in 1989. This invocation of the lack of protections after the smashing not just of trade unions but of the very concept of class solidarity runs throughout: the second part is a single, long take in which Angela’s company film a man who is now in a wheelchair after being injured at his factory. They manipulate his words to serve the interests of his employers, who want to avoid paying to improve working conditions, or the prospect of being sued when their cost-cutting inevitably results in disaster. With perfect neoliberal logic, it is the man rather than the system that is blamed. Fearing the loss of her income, even Angela – the only character who criticizes the glorification of cut-throat individualism, often through her extremely caricatured TikTok persona, ‘like Charlie Hebdo’ – does not object to how her company treats him or, indeed, her.

In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Jude cuts from Angela discussing a dangerous road that has been neglected for years to a montage of homemade crosses for those who have been killed on it. This feels like an inversion of the extensive traffic pile-up scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) – there are references to the French auteur’s assisted suicide, which happened as Jude was filming – because Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World contains none of Godard’s revolutionary fervour, instead being full of the disappointment and pessimism that its title implies. The lethal stretch of highway is a microcosm for the whole: there won’t be a bang or even a whimper, just the erosion of rights and public services and the seemingly inevitable rise of fascistic political movements.

The Employees (2020) grew out of a companion text Olga Ravn wrote for Lea Guldditte Hestelund’s 2018 installation, ‘Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present’, at Copenhagen’s Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art. Subtitled ‘A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century’, Ravn’s science-fiction novella, unlike Jude’s film, offers at least a glimmer of hope for the future. Her fragmentary text is structured as a series of brief witness statements compiled by a workplace commission looking into how the employees of a fictional spaceship relate to their colleagues, and to the objects around them. Linear and focused, it covers an extraordinary amount of philosophical and political ground in its brief 130 pages.

Unlike Jude’s iconoclastic crudeness, Ravn uses distant yet beautiful prose-poetry, which becomes more harrowing and heartbreaking as the divide-and-rule approach to the ship’s human and humanoid crew brings mounting conflict. There are tropes that will be familiar to science-fiction fans – malfunctioning or malevolent AI, androids that develop emotions, alien objects whose function cannot be determined – and it’s hard not to recall the cliché that nothing is as of its time as a vision of the future. Ravn’s characters repeatedly ruminate on what it means to be human, whether they declare themselves so or not, but what anchors the novel so firmly in the present is its exploration of how having a life subordinated to work and to the constant, often internalized demand to be productive is individually and collectively ruinous.

The Employees explores how having a life subordinated to work is individually and collectively ruinous.

Ravn’s employees live in a permanent state of longing ‘to be assimilated into a collective, human community’ where they might ‘move in with someone, get married, bake cookies, push a pram, learn to play an instrument, dance a waltz’ – in short, live. It’s unclear, however, where the spaceship’s workers might have come across this concept: after a further century of the tech industry striving to automate all creative processes so that people can devote themselves entirely to labour, no leisure will be possible for anyone, inverting the original promise that machines would free people from work. It becomes clear that the employees’ statements seem cold and distant because they are physically and psychologically alienated: literally detached from the Earth, they are split not even into human and humanoid but into organic and inorganic workers; the company does not permit any of them to be human. What breaks the mission is the crew’s burgeoning relationship with the objects around them, with even a childlike exploration of how things taste or smell forbidden by the management as an intolerable distraction. Under these conditions, the eternal ‘life’ available to some of the crew is decisively not worth living, and the novel ends not just with acquiescence to the conditions, but in oblivion.

The artist Doruntina Kastrati was born in 1991, the year that Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and the country broke up in a series of brutal, nationalistic wars, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia that led to Kosovo becoming independent in 2008. Kastrati – who works in sculpture, film and installation – grew up in Kosovo’s second city, Prizren. Her exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale, ‘The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin’ (2024), which was awarded a Special Mention, chronicles the experiences of women – especially those who have suffered physical injuries or been disabled – working at the Turkish Delight factory in Prizren after the Kosovo War, during a period of increased US presence and rampant privatisation.

In 2022, the artist was included in Manifesta 14, held in Kosovo’s capital, where she now lives. Her project for that exhibition, Rings the Bells my Land (2017/22), saw Kastrati transform a room in the dilapidated Grand Hotel Pristina – one of several impressive futuristic buildings dating from the brief period when Yugoslavia granted Kosovo more autonomy, but which became the site of a mass grave ten years later and remains a potent symbol of the failure of both Yugoslav communism and Serbian imperialism. Kastrati took the corporate utopia­nism of the 21st century – the idea of an escape to Mars, but only for billionaires once they have extracted so much from Earth that it becomes uninhabitable – and showed what they would leave behind: animals trawling across smashed bricks, a post-human environment as bleak and sad as that of Ravn’s The Employees, in which every building will look like the war-scarred remains of the Grand Hotel.

Kastrati’s previous film, When It Left, Death Didn’t Even Close Our Eyes (2020), takes its title from a line in Roberto Bolaño’s poem ‘Godzilla in Mexico’ (1995). Sharing a theme with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kastrati’s film might even be described as a good-faith version of what Angela’s production company are doing with their interviewees. Meticulous in her research, Kastrati looked at institutional statistics, NGO reports and trade-union statements to sense the sheer number of industrial accidents in Kosovo’s construction industry, contrasting them with testimonies from those who survived, often with serious injuries. The workers – whom one can imagine working on Ravn’s spaceship, or SpaceX’s rapidly disassembling rockets – are amongst the lowest paid in Europe, some earning as little as EU€150 a month. For them, escape is impossible. One worker who fell ten storeys and was in a coma for three months tells Kastrati: ‘If only I knew people to help me leave this place, I wouldn’t stay another hour […] There is nothing here [and] we are dying.’ The film was shown at the National Museum of Kosovo, taking its interviewees’ searing criticisms of post-independence capitalism close to the centre of power. ‘What rights are there to speak of?’ asked one of the injured, unbound by the kind of filters that the production company placed on those in Jude’s film. ‘Here, there is nothing, no laws. They only profit for themselves.’

One of the most vital tasks for artists is to remind people that working conditions are artificial and impermanent.

In The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, Kastrati aims to bring the experiences and words of female factory workers to the world’s attention through two sculptures modelled on the walnut shells used to make Turkish Delight and two modelled on prostheses used for surgical implants. It comes as no surprise that her interest in the women workers of Prizren sprang partly from her own experiences as a woman marginalized in the art world. It makes sense for artists to identify with workers on zero-hour contracts, often expected to toil for long hours to tight deadlines for little-to-no pay – an exhausting and unsustainable state of affairs set out in Polish writer Kuba Szreder’s book The ABC of the Projectariat (2021).

Szreder does not offer many solutions that have not been suggested before, such as joining a union, but he does reiterate that working conditions many have now accepted as normal are, in fact, artificial, and as impermanent as the gains made by left-wing parties and unions before the 21st century. One of the most vital tasks for artists in a time of political instability is to remind people of this, laying out the horrors that lie behind statistics about pay, injury and death to encourage their audiences to fight for a better world. Despite varying widely in style, form and tone, Jude, Ravn and Kastrati all do just that. I expect we will see many more artists following their lead as conditions worsen for anyone struggling to make a living

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘A Vision of the Future’

Juliet Jacques’  The Woman in the Portrait is published by Cipher Press

_{Main image: Doruntina Kastrati, Walnut and Cracked Nut I, II, 2024, cast aluminium and copperleaf, 183 × 153 × 82 cm and 235 × 197 × 115 – 223 × 146 × 135 cm. ‘The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin’, Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo, 60th Venice Biennale. Courtesy: the artist and Eugster || Belgrade; photograph: © Lorenzo Palmier}