From gnarled hands to murder: the show exposing the world’s worst workplaces

On my way to Hard Graft, a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, I sat beside an employee with a lanyard round her neck like a chain whose exhortatory instruction read, “straightforward, purposeful, collaborative behaviours” – but to what end I had no idea. Jobs come with added sententiousness these days, as employers burden workers with the requirement to be “passionate” about whatever job they apply for. Pret recruitment says: “We hire passionate people and teach them to make sandwiches.” When I worked in a primary school kitchen outsourced to a catering conglomerate, every wall was posted with an instruction: “Always happy, never sad.” Your labour is not enough. They want your passions too.
That spirit of oppression infuses Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights. Wellcome shows stand out for blending new art with social, welfare and scientific explorations, melding forms and themes. This one shines a harsh light on physical work, with a wealth of artists’ symbolism beside graphic realities about the effects of hard labour on body and mind. Here, too, are chronicles of resistance to servitude, stories of revolt by oppressed workers. This turns a history of undervalued work and undervalued workers into tales of human defiance. Brief rebellions may not change much, beyond the protesters themselves, but artists here celebrate those upstart moments.
The world of work is often neglected in the realms of art. Although toil to earn a living consumes an average 35 hours a week in Britain (not counting wearisome commuting), which amounts to 3,515 entire days, it’s hidden away, less visible than it once was. Most days we work more than we sleep, giving labour more hours than leisure.
Since it reaches into the depths of us, far beyond mere time, work deserves more attention. “What do you do?” asked of a stranger reveals much, with clues to class, power, attitude, skills, income and social status. Unjustly, you are what you do for a living. Although what people do is often a mystery, as working lives are grossly under-reported. Look at commuters packed like sardines in a train heading for a workplace or office – to do what complex task under what title of impenetrable job-speak?
Art overlooks the mundane earning of a living more than it once did, since offices are not as picturesque as harvesters scything in the corn fields or miners hewing at the coalface. Washing machines lack the muscular physicality of women wringing out clothes at the river, as romanticised by painters who didn’t toil or wash.
Cindy Sissokho, returned from co-curating the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale, has assembled a powerful narrative of the harshest work from across the world, with artists from Brazil, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Sudan, Peru, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico and the US bringing working imagery to show beside items from the Wellcome’s own remarkable archives.
The work is clustered according to three broad themes. The Plantation is about slavery and beyond, the turning of humans into machines of production. The Street is where working falls to its lowest degradations of night soil clearing, sweeping and sex work. The Home is where paid and unpaid drudgery goes uncounted in national tallies of productivity. Trafficked women end up on the streets or as domestic slaves. Migrants are imported to do work others won’t. Women are the focus here, the powerless. Yet outbreaks of hope and resistance are the thread running throughout.
A monumental centrepiece is Lindsey Mendick’s remarkable recreation of a sex workers’ rebellion in 1982. She has recreated the frame of the Holy Cross church in what was then the red light district of King’s Cross in London, when it was occupied for 12 days to protest against their criminalisation, police harassment and official indifference to their frequent rape and murder.
At her studio in Margate, Mendick talks of her reluctance at first to take this on: her sphere tends towards women and the domestic, and she feared “the risk of salaciousness”. Showing the 61 clever ceramics she has created to put inside the church structure with its stained glass windows, there is no hint of erotic titillation. She was also uneasy about the never-ending feminist dispute over whether sex workers are free women or exploited victims. “I never had to choose,” she says. “The point is that they are poor, most are mothers, when low pay and benefits are below what you can live on.”
Reading from archives of the English Collective of Prostitutes and the stack of books about workers’ protests on her shelves, she has drawn on the symbols and slogans of campaigns that caught the public eye with their wit and ferocity. Her large ceramic coyote bays at the moon: Coyote was the Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics campaign. After the show, she is selling all these artefacts to raise money for Swarm, the Sex Workers Advocacy and Resistance Movement.
Photographs, posters and ephemera from the Wellcome archives give a history of sex workers, their persecution and diseases alongside their advertisements. Here, too, are the collection’s earliest social documentary photographs of other street life from the 1870s: stark scenes of precarious hand-to-mouth working, alongside Henry Mayhew’s 1851 record of conditions and earnings of workers on the London streets.
The Plantation starts the exhibition with slavery, tea plantations in China and coffee plantations in Brazil; reminders of past and present abuses of workers as productivity-timed machines, disposed of as soon as weakened by over-work. Descendants of US enslaved people work still along the Mississippi, where plantations that oppressed their ancestors have been replaced with three dozen oil and chemical refineries built over forgotten slave cemeteries, belching out cancer-causing gases at those communities in Death Alley. Forensic Architecture’s films and installations tell the story, joining science, art and social campaigning in the Wellcome’s familiar blend. Forced work in jails, with treadmills and prison hard labour, echo the plantations. “Jail is just a kind of warehouse for poor people,” is one artist’s take.
Lubaina Himid, the Turner prize winner, takes texts from health and safety manuals for her metal handkerchiefs: bright squares of working implements – a screwdriver, a hammer, a chisel, a rudder. The saw bears the text: “Allow for short breaks.” (Tell that to Amazon warehouse-workers). This juxtaposing of the documentary and the historical with the new shows how the artist’s eye brings other dimensions of looking and feeling and thinking.
The Home, the domestic realm, begins with Femme Maison, one of a series by Louise Bourgeois. A woman’s body is the place, her head lost inside a house, her naked torso exposed in a way “that feels or doesn’t feel safe”. The 1970s Wages for Housework campaign rises again, failed and yet even in its failure important at the time. One of its old badges preserved here reads: “Every mother is a working mother.” I had to remember its meaning, challenging the assumption that only paid work counts, domestic toil nugatory.
Domestic workers here get their due: the bleak maid’s room in Johannesburg, the migrant domestics trapped unseen, and the Paris Ibis hotel cleaners’ strike. Kelly O’Brien photographs her mother and grandmother, both cleaners with mops, best captured in one picture of a worn body with an old bra-strap broken by straining. That’s what art adds to Wellcome’s science and sociology.
No one seeing Shannon Alonzo’s Washerwoman sculpture will forget it easily. There she is, symbol of everywoman, with no head – just those wrinkled, gnarled knuckles from a lifetime’s labour, scouring real sheets in gallons of real water. This familiar figure is the essence of domestic work, both with and without nobility in never-ending scrubbing, swollen skin damaged down the ages.
It’s impossible to do justice to this great eclectic gathering of the old and new, of history and now, the real and imagined with artists using all forms to interpret ideas of work. May it stir other artists and writers to examine how work is represented, if at all. There is no better time than now, as the new government’s plans for working rights come under attack from the right for abolishing worst practices – zero hours, fire and rehire – and giving unions new powers to recruit and organise.
Most contentious is the “right to disconnect”, to turn off employers’ constant demands outside working hours. That carries a deep significance, of freedom from an overseer’s expectation of perma-available, all-hours servitude. Send any recalcitrant bosses here to contemplate how they use their great power over their workers’ lives.