The Future of Work

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A leaflet from the Wages for Housework Campaign featuring campaign text and a drawing of a woman sitting down, inside her is the sillouettes of workers and a factory'.

Wages for Housework 1974 poster

A campaign leaflet for the Brooklyn fraction of the Wages for Housework campaign. Featuring campaign text and drawings of placards that say 'MONEY IS CHOICE' and 'LOVE DOESN'T PAY THE BILLS'.

Wages for Housework poster

A campaign leaflet from the Wages for Housework campaign, featuring text that include 'Housework - Unpaid work. The crime against women internationally'.

Wages for Housework, New York branch

Hookers against Hardship, 2022

In May 2019, SWARM hosted a three day festival to celebrate ten years of organising. This included panel discussions across a wide range of topics that impact on sex workers, and which connect and intersect with sex worker rights organising as well as broader struggles for justice. The conversations and discussions from that festival lay the groundwork for the Decriminalised Futures project.

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The Future of Work (May 2019)

How do we understand work? Our beliefs around what constitutes work and what kinds of work are valued are ever changing: whether it be the ways care and sexual labour are regarded, the role of exploitation and criminalisation, or imagining what a post-work terrain could look like. Broader social and labour struggles, as well as unionising movements, have brought us here, but where do we go next?

Full Recording

Transcript

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Speakers: Katie Cruz, Selma James, Layla-Roxanne Hill, Chloe (SWARM), Molly Smith, Will Stronge (Autonomy)

Credits: Composition and mix by Sherry Ostapovitch, edit by Tamara Schreiber and Radio Ava, recording by Hollis Robin.

The Future of Work is the 13th panel discussion of the SWARM 2019 Festival of Resistance.

The topics included:

  • Imagining Feminist Futures

  • Radical Transfeminist Activism

  • Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe: When Survival Is Made Criminal

  • Sex Work and Migration in Europe

  • The Impact of Austerity

  • Sex Workers of Colour Roundtable

  • (Resisting) Systems of Violence

  • Sex Workers on the Nordic Model

  • Artists Talk Bodies, Visibility, and Violence

  • Radical Histories: Exploring the Archives

  • Aesthetics vs Ethics: Expanding Definitions of Feminist Porn

  • How Do Disability and Sex Work Intersect in the UK Today

  • The Future of Work

  • Technology, Surveillance and the State: How We Resist

  • Examining Anti-trafficking Measures: Academic Perspectives

  • Researching Sex Work

  • Strength, Resilience, and Healthcare

  • A Decriminalised Future

Year: 2019
Type: panel discussion
Series: swarm festival of resistance
Subject(s): work labour rights class decriminalisation care women marxism