Unionization!
Out of context: Reply #25
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- adamfinger0
ribit (and others)...
I am not defining anything. It's not my personal decision to do so. However, unions, as worker's organizations, naturally exclude company owners and managers. Profit, which is the product of our mental effort (even if enjoyable), is appropriated by owners. In return we receive a wage. But because it is not we who have ownership titles and therefore economic and social decision-making rights within the company, we must organize to counterbalance this lopsided social relationship. This has nothing to do with the generosity of certain bosses or the greediness of others. Nor does it have anything to do with our own talents and education. It simply has to do with the objective relationship to social production. One group creates wealth and the other appropriates it.
Depending on the structure of the workplace, however, some supervisors are often permitted in. This is not a black/white issue. In a larger design agency, for example, where the directors are largely divorced from the bulk of designers and who serve mainly to discipline the workforce, than this director would more than likely not be welcome into the union. In a smaller place, however, where the director serves a necessary role within the production process, than he/she would be welcome. In small studios where the owner also serves as creative-director, ownership status would, I assume, preclude him/her from joining.
Freelancers are different. They are technically owner and worker, but because it is only themselves whom they exploit (a tricky concept, one perhaps better left to another discussion), than there is no reason that they shouldn't benefit from unionization. Again, they sell their labor-power to clients who act as their boss, even if only temporarily.
I don't see any reason why any "sort" of designer should be excluded from unionizing. But this doesn't mean that all designers will fall under the same union -- commercial designers may decide to join the Communication Workers of America whereas film and game animators may fall within other unions (I'm unfamiliar with unions in other parts of the world).
More important than these questions, I think, is reversing the anti-social and cut-throat mindset that has been instilled in us by business, whereby we must compete against other designers not for some ethereal advancement of design as some abstract concept, but simply to earn a decent income.