In a political landscape in which rising costs of living and attacks on work conditions confront a union movement hamstrung by spineless leaders and bureaucracy, it’s easy to forget what it looks like to really fight. In Australia today, despite the best efforts of rank-and-file activists, mass working-class struggle is on the ebb. For a generation of young workers, this means that it is not a matter of forgetting what real, militant unionism looks like, so much as never having experienced it to begin with. 
In this context, Melbourne activist and artist Sam Wallman’s new comic book Our Members Be Unlimited: A Comic about Workers and Their Unions is a rare and vital thing. The book charts a selected history of union organising, dispelling myths and citing all manner of lessons along the way. 
A member of the Workers’ Art Collective, Wallman has produced an impressive body of work for use in many union and activist campaigns. It’s no surprise then that his first book is equally practical, outlining a real argument for rank-and-file union activity at a time when it is sorely needed. This argument is presented so dynamically, and is grounded so securely in Wallman’s own experience of attempting to organise at an Australian Amazon warehouse, that the call to action is impossible to ignore.
There is a sense in Wallman’s illustration style that nothing is static. Each panel is laden with faces that are caught mid-crease with relief or exasperation, and everything is outlined or underscored with the curvature of constant motion. The result is a compelling dynamism that allows Wallman to move with ease between the personal, individual and momentary, and the political, collective and historical. Given the narrative content, this is not simply a technical feature of the work. Rather, it is an evocation of a politics that frames things within a bigger picture, a picture that the book fundamentally seeks to change. 
One particularly effective instance of this is in an autobiographical sequence in which Wallman’s character talks to a fellow Amazon worker about the way that they both picture themselves as figures from Greek mythology to make it through their mind-numbingly dull shifts. Wallman’s character relates the myth of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill over and over again. The boulder is first depicted as product being ferried around the warehouse aisle, but as the metaphor is elaborated, Wallman becomes the Sisyphus of ancient Greece, who begins to look at the boulder he’s been pushing day in day out, only to see cracks he’s not noticed before—cracks that suggest another world beyond this drudgery is possible. The barrier to workers seeing these contradictions for what they really are then materialises as the DING! of the Amazon handsets yanks the character from this moment of inquiry to drag them back to the deadening monotony of warehouse work. 
The book’s strength is in its refusal to indulge this sense of alienation and nihilism. Wallman’s aesthetic and observational choices allow him to draw out the humanity, not only of each individual worker who populates the panels and margins, but also that which is expressed organically, by the characters as a class. There is a sequence in which Wallman reflects on the sensory elements of the warehouse work—the sound of rain on the roof, the light reflecting off the polished concrete floors—which in its insight and tactility stands in pointed contrast to the soulless detachment that the workplace is designed to imbue in its workers. 
Then there are the stories of workers collectively organising. Amongst them are Bangladeshi garment workers leading nationwide protests, and Deliveroo drivers staging wildcat strikes. There are British workers fighting fascists and builders labourers in Australia uniting against homophobia. All this is tempered by Wallman’s own experiences of applying the basic lessons and tactics of union organising in his own workplace. Each of these anecdotes is rendered in the same bold, wobbly linework that, even when relating victories, suggests there’s still more latent power contained in the mass of united workers. Though this propulsive feeling of restlessness is lost somewhat when the illustrations become more abstract to accommodate large chunks of text, Wallman never flags in his depiction of workers’ capacity to enact meaningful change. 
After this selected history of union struggles and workers’ resistance past, a ghostly figure asserts that the telling of these stories is not simply wallowing in nostalgia for the good old days. The character says, “My views about work are governed by nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being”. Yet the specific expression of hope that Wallman locates in past struggles the most moving and the most prescient aspect of Our Members Be Unlimited. Because it is not a passive hope that things will get better down the line. It’s the defiant kind of hope that, though forward looking, heeds Walter Benjamin’s claim that it is not some imagined future liberation, but a real concrete history of suffering and sacrifice and resistance that spurs the working class on and that lights the way towards a better world. In this way, the book begins with a list of wins from past struggles, followed by the often brutal penalties incurred by those who dared to fight. This is not to dissuade readers from organising, but to inspire them. 
In the midst of a period of little class struggle and massive crisis, this inspiration, and the patience and fortitude that Wallman pairs with it, are necessary. 
Early in the text, a character browses the books they’re packing at the Amazon warehouse, and comes across a Stephen Jay Gould passage: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”. To this end, though it is a useful political resource and potted history, Our Members Be Unlimited is also a reflection of our luck. Because Wallman’s talent has, perhaps miraculously, not fallen victim to the desperation and drudgery of capitalism. Moreover, it is a small but very welcome victory over this barbaric system that he has devoted that talent to fighting for our side.
Our Members Be Unlimited is published by Scribe.

Elyssia Bugg

Review: ‘Our Members Be Unlimited: A Comic Book about Workers and Their Unions’

The sculptural silver exterior of the Frank Gehry-designed <a href="https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/the-building">Guggenheim Bilbao Museum</a> is notable for its monumentality and architectural significance. For one hour last December it was also notable for the 12 members of museum cleaning staff standing silently at the top of the enormous staircase in front of the Museum’s entrance. Wearing t-shirts with the question “Is everyone’s work equally important?” printed on them, the workers were collaborating with artist Lorenzo Bussi and the <a href="https://www.artbuildersgroup.com/">Art Builders Group</a> on a performance piece about their exploitation as employees of the Museum.
The protest-performance was part of a long-running dispute. Thirteen members of the cleaning team had been on strike since June 2021 over their paltry pay of as little as €5 an hour (equivalent to around $8), and working conditions which include hours that massively exceed those stated in their contracts.
Public disputes about labour rights in international museums have gained increasing coverage in the arts media over the last few years. The prominence of reporting on unionising efforts, staff pickets, and managerial backtracking suggests a modest shift in how these institutions are perceived publicly. Reports of overwork and underpayment are likely familiar to anyone who has ever held a gallery or museum job. But until recently, labour issues in major arts and cultural institutions have tended to be obscured by an image centred on their role in “educating and enlightening” the public.
To the extent that there has been serious political controversy, criticism and protest centred on such institutions, it has focused more on their capacity to reputation-raise and whitewash otherwise unsavoury images, rather than their labour practices. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/28/national-gallery-of-victoria-dumps-wilson-security-over-offshore-detention">cancelling of the National Gallery of Victoria’s contract with Wilson Security</a> after artists and activists drew attention to the security firm’s role in detaining asylum seekers in offshore prisons is an example.
In 2019 the collective <a href="https://decolonizethisplace.org/">Decolonize This Place</a> led a sustained campaign of protests, stunts and speak-outs in New York that resulted in Warren Kanders, the CEO of tear gas manufacturer Safariland, <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/07/25/whitney-museum-vice-chairman-warren-kanders-steps-down-after-months-of-protests">stepping down as vice chairman</a> of the Whitney Museum board. In 2018 artist Nan Goldin founded <a href="https://www.sacklerpain.org/">Prescription Addiction Intervention Now</a> (PAIN), which has since staged actions in major museums around the world in protest against museum donors the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma’s <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02686-2">complicity in fuelling the American opioid epidemic</a> for profit. Closer to home, in January artists and pro-Palestinian activists led a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/aboriginal-solidarity-palestine">boycott campaign</a> of the Sydney Festival for accepting a $20,000 grant from the Embassy of Israel to fund its programming. 
The practice of “art-washing” is the key point of contention for activists and commentators in many of these instances. Indeed, the fact that the ruling class uses the progressive gloss gained via patronage of the arts as a means of doctoring its moral and political balance sheet is both unsurprising and appalling.
However, the takeaway here shouldn’t be that these galleries, museums or festivals would in fact be pure bastions of cultural inquiry and artistic achievement if only the big bad capitalists (or, as was the case with the Sydney Festival, state actors like Israel) kept their funding dollars to themselves. The role of these institutions as “image managers” for their donors is only one way in which they are enmeshed with the antihuman politics and policies of big business and the global elite.
Major cultural institutions are part of the global arts and cultural marketplace, and as such, just like all other institutions under capitalism, are themselves sites of class struggle. The wealth generated by these institutions—whether directly via the charging of entry fees for exhibitions, performances and so on, or indirectly through their role in maintaining the prestige associated with art and cultural products, and thus boosting their value as assets on the art market—is ultimately dependent on the daily exploitation of workers who hang the paintings, scan the tickets, write the catalogue copy, restore the artworks, staff the gift shops and sweep the floors.
As was the case with other industries like retail and hospitality, the disruption to the “business as usual” of art and culture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic served to highlight the fundamental inequality that structures the sector. Online arts magazine <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/660625/aamd-2021-salary-survey-shows-widening-income-disparities-at-us-museums/">Hyperallergic reported</a>, in July 2021, that while thousands of arts workers in America were furloughed during the pandemic, and museums cried poor and threatened to sell their collections, museum directors raked in an average annual salary of US$320,600.
Job insecurity has also intensified in some of the most hallowed of modern and contemporary art meccas. In April 2020 the Museum of Modern Art in New York disgracefully <a href="https://www.artforum.com/news/moma-and-new-museum-among-ny-institutions-cutting-jobs-to-curb-deficits-82681#:~:text=Within%20the%20course%20of%20a,were%20unable%20to%20work%20remotely.">sacked its entire museum educator team,</a> citing budget shortfalls. The Guggenheim New York furloughed 92 employees during the pandemic, and the New Museum’s union <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/08/10/union-accuses-new-museum-of-discriminatory-layoffs-and-furloughs">reported in August 2020</a> that every member of its bargaining committee had been laid off.
These circumstances have been met with resistance by workers on a number of fronts with pickets, open letters and public statements drawing attention to layoffs, wage theft, hostile contract negotiations and union-busting. As artist Jessalyn Aaland—author of <a href="https://jessalynaaland.com/Organizing-Power-2019">Organizing Power: Unionizing Your Workplace for the Arts/Nonprofit Worker</a>—says, “the pandemic is really the match lighting the tinder that’s been building up for years”.
Perhaps most significantly, unions have sprung up in institutions where previously there were none. Workers at major museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Portland Museum of Art have all recently voted in favour of forming unions. This kind of collective action has long been absent or marginal in an industry where passion and ambition are frequently translated into free or cheap labour, and both hustling and suffering are characterised as virtues vital to one’s success.
The pandemic has revealed the prevalent narratives of endless upward mobility, individualism and exceptionalism to be a farce, and brought the class divide to the attention of many people for whom the fact of being an exploited worker has long been masked by abstract-sounding job titles and a sense of idealistic commitment to their work. As Dana Kopel wrote in her <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/against-artsploitation-kopel">September 2021 article in The Baffler, “Against Artsploitation”</a>, in the US at least, arts workers are increasingly rejecting “the toxic myth that ‘if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life’”.
Though these public organising efforts have largely, to date, been limited to high profile institutions in the world’s cultural capitals, it’s a reckoning waiting to happen across the art and museum sector globally.
Following the cleaners’ protest, the Guggenheim Bilbao <a href="https://www.artforum.com/news/guggenheim-bilbao-cleaners-protest-low-wages-precarious-working-conditions-87426">released a statement</a> attempting to distance itself from the dispute raised by the workers. It claimed that, “regarding the strike by 13 workers out of the 18 who provide cleaning services at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Museum would like to clarify that this is part of a conflict that goes beyond the Museum itself, as it concerns a sectorial dispute—the office cleaning sector—in the entire province of Biscay that affects around 2,000 workers”.
Contrary to what the Guggenheim’s management seem to believe, however, this statement does not show the Museum’s innocence in the matter. It instead points to its complicity in the widespread practice of outsourcing labour—a practice that enables such institutions to wash their hands of any responsibility to the workers who run and maintain them. Elite museums and galleries, so the story goes, don’t deal in mundane, everyday matters like the pay and conditions of mere cleaners. Their concern is with the higher realm of art and culture.
Yet, in December, there were the Museum’s cleaners, standing on the steps outside the main entrance, making art—the subject of which was their oppression as workers in the Museum. No amount of PR-speak could conceal, in this context, the role of the Guggenheim as an active participant in, and proponent of, the thoroughly crass and material exploitation of workers for profit.
The Guggenheim’s management are right about one thing though: the conflict does go beyond the Museum itself. The problems faced by workers in the Guggenheim, just like those faced by the many thousands of other art and museum workers in similar institutions around the world, can’t be solved via small wins here or there. The system of capitalism, of which these institutions are part, depends on exploitation for its survival. To overcome this ultimately requires the coming together of workers across all industries in joint struggle against that system.
The more arts workers feel themselves to be part of that struggle, rather than buying into rhetoric about art and culture as existing in a world apart, the better.

Review: ‘Our Members Be Unlimited: A Comic Book about Workers and Their Unions’

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