The Global Staffroom

In April 2020 the University of Edinburgh Art Collection created a series of three commissions, inviting artists to reflect upon their personal experience of COVID-19 and to respond to broader themes associated with the period of enforced physical distancing.

Manual Labours have used the commission funds to further enhance an existing project, The Global Staffroom live podcast, and to enable the production of the fifth manual in their ongoing series. Manual #5 will bring together the research and ideas born from the podcast and surrounding discussions, producing a long-lasting resource and set of activities which can be used in teaching and research. All podcast episodes will join the University’s Contemporary Art Research Collection (CARC) holdings in August 2020.

The CARC was initiated in 2015 and is a strand of the University Art Collection which takes Globalisation as its central theme, setting a specific focus on women's experience and the contribution of feminist thought. It encompasses work across a broad range of media; moving image, print, performance documentation, and sculpture. Artists represented include Kate Davis, Jesse Jones, Petra Bauer, Melanie Gilligan, Shona MacNaughton and Alberta Whittle

What does ‘staff room’ mean to you?

The Global Staffroom stems from our research into in the disappearance of collective and communal spaces for workers within the workplace such as the staffroom, common room or worker club. These spaces for rest, care, socialising, eating lunch or organising around working conditions were free places to get together and meet others from your own and different fields of work. However, like the workplace itself, they are/were not without their problems of exclusion and structural injustice cut across gender, race and class. The Global Staffroom hopes to propose an itinerant staffroom space of collectivity for isolated and individualised workers.

In light of the current global health crisis, and limited debate concerning the inequality of those who are most affected by this crisis, we wanted the podcast to respond to this situation and be a virtual space where we could meet inspiring folk and hear about their research, activism and practices. We hope this regular radio show will give us that space to think carefully, critically and collectively about the intersectional impact Covid-19 is having on changing physical and emotional relationships to work. We want to explore issues such as the gendered and racialised experiences of lockdown, sick pay, emotional labour of care and health workers, and the architecture of home-work.

The Global Staffroom launched on Monday 20 April, 12noon BST via Twitch.tv and is broadcast every Monday at 12 noon during the Summer term 2020.

Join the staffroom by clicking on the above link and listening in, commenting in the chatroom or emailing manual.labours@gmail.com

More about the project

The Global Staffroom seeks to build a conceptual common staff room for workers of the world that places social reproduction at the heart of how, what and where we work.

We are all workers. Paid, unpaid, in the home, at the workplace, on site, at the office, on the commute, on the sofa, on social media, on benefits.

Social reproduction is the care and maintenance of life and what every form of life is dependent on to survive to the next day. It is often the invisible, unpaid, or poorly paid.

The staff room can represent the time and space in-between work, whilst at work, to rest, eat, love, exercise, cook, clean, play, read, do the crossword, regroup, nap, plot, plan, gossip. This time and space is needed in order to keep on working. It is the site for social reproduction.

Not everyone has a staff room. Maybe your bedroom is where you eat your lunch, or the local library is where you rest during work.

For those that have a staffroom it might be inaccessible, it might reproduce exclusions based on hierarchies, gender, race and class.

Not everyone has official work colleagues. May be you work online, on the road. May be you have colleagues that you never get chance to speak to.

There are multiple official and unofficial sites where social reproduction takes place (e.g. bedroom office, cigarette break, WhatsApp group or staff toilets).

Spaces of social reproduction become extended sites of struggle crucial to the reproduction, maintenance and care of the worker.

Supporting social reproduction at work has been capitalised and instrumentalised throughout history from the factories of Bournville to the current dogma of wellbeing at work programmes such as yoga during lunch breaks and massages at your desk.

Not everyone performs all aspects of their social reproductive work. Some - who have the resources - outsource their social reproduction work to others.

Experiences of where, when and how social reproduction take place vary massively. The maintenance and care of workers is often reliant upon a whole body of often invisibilised,

precarious, racialized and gendered workers who clean your workplace or home, prepare your lunch, take care of your relatives, welcome you to your gym.

The Global Staffroom hopes to bring together a transnational, often fragmentary workforce who are intimately connected across material and labour relations but who are prevented from meeting and connecting.

The Global Staffroom hopes to connect atomized complaining bodies to explore unofficial aspects of self and collective care at work and where these might lead.

The Global Staffroom hopes to be a supportive space where solidarities between workers can form, beyond physical work environments.

The Global Staffroom explores the structures of work and productivity in terms of broader economic and social structures which promote and work to maintain consumer capitalism.

The Global Staffroom investigates alternative co-operative structures which are underpinned by care and maintenance.

The Global Staffroom hopes to connect workers at different stages of the capitalist production line including invisible labours of maintenance and infrastructures of care.

The Global Staffroom discusses the future of work and co-dependency between global workers in the context of both global warming and advances in AI.

The Global Staffroom hopes to connect up with existing labour unions to provide time and space for members to share experiences and concerns with their social reproduction at work, creating connections and threads between wellbeing and illbeing and the possibilities of collective complaints. The Global Staffroom starts from a place of difference and values and acknowledges all types of experience