Get Up, Stand Up? Theorizing Mobilization in Creative Work

Neil Percival,David Lee

doi:10.1177/1527476420969909

Abstract

This article concerns individualism, collective awareness and organized resistance in the creative industries. It applies the lens of John Kelly’s mobilization theory (1998), usually used in a trade union context, to “TV WRAP,” a successful non-unionized campaign facilitated through an online community in the UK television (TV) industry in 2005, and finds that Kelly’s prerequisites to mobilization were all present. It explores previously unpublished questionnaire data from a 2011 survey of over 1,000 UK film and TV workers, which suggests that such prerequisites to mobilization are still present in the TV workforce. Finally it examines recent and ongoing mobilization by video game workers as a modern comparison, updating the relevance of Kelly’s theory to explore and consider potential models for a new politics of resistance in the digital age.

Highlights

Over the last forty years, British film and television industries have moved from a highly unionized labor market to one marked by a lack of workplace representation, insecure labor conditions, and precarity (Banks 2017; Lee 2018; Percival and Hesmondhalgh 2014; Saundry et al 2007)
Labor in the sector is increasingly oriented around freelance project-based work, in independent film production (89% freelance workers) and independent television production (52%) (Creative Skillset 2015)
In doing so we propose a rediscovery and re-application of Kelly’s theory to precarious modern settings, and an opportunity for activists within and beyond trade unions to develop a toolkit for worker mobilization based on the evidence of Kelly’s prerequisites at work, and the outcomes achieved, both in TV Workers’ Rights Advocacy Petition (TV WRAP) and in video game worker campaigns

Summary

Introduction

Over the last forty years, British film and television industries have moved from a highly unionized labor market to one marked by a lack of workplace representation, insecure labor conditions, and precarity (Banks 2017; Lee 2018; Percival and Hesmondhalgh 2014; Saundry et al 2007). The petition was suggested in an online forum, and those who responded positively to the idea became the loose group of half a dozen organizers that formed the campaign’s “leadership.” Online connectivity, in the absence of a workplace, made it possible for such a small number of people to mobilize such a large sector—since at the time, in the earliest presocial media days of discussion boards, the TV Freelancers website was the only place where such voices were being heard.

Results

Conclusion