Against Outsourcing: Collective Tools for Worker Organising

QC 20261027

Abstract

Against Outsourcing: Collective Tools for Worker Organising is a practice-based PhD research project that examines the effects of and collective resistance against the expansion of outsourcing in Sweden and the UK. Emerging in the 1980s, the term outsourcing describes the contractual restructuring through which an organisation, institution,or workplace externalises the social reproductive labour necessary for its everyday functioning from core operations. Rather than employing workers directly, activities such as cleaning, catering and care are subcontracted to external firms. In doing so, outsourcing shifts essential work onto workers employed in low-paid, insecure, and often exploitative conditions, while enabling contracting organisations to distance themselves from direct responsibility for their working conditions. It is a manoeuvre that mystifies the privatisation and subordination of care and maintenance work while deepening the racialised, gendered, classed, international and ableist divisions of labour. Many engaged in outsourced work have been uprooted from their own familial and support networks, migrating to other countries or to urban centres to work in underpaid and precarious jobs. By structurally isolating workers and denying them access to vital care infrastructure – such as holiday and sick pay, regulated wages and shared physical spaces – outsourcing actively undermines the time and material resources required for worker organising.

The art field is not exempt from the problem of outsourcing. This is evident in the shift of production of artwork in geographies where labour costs are lower, in the outsourcing of cleaning and catering services in art spaces, and in the expansion of temporary contracts,particularly within educational programmes and community engagement. Through an intersectional feminist curatorial methodology that shapes collaborative and collective methods of research, this thesis argues that it is only by listening to workers’ expressions of living through outsourcing – which are largely absent from dominant policy literature on outsourcing – that we can come to understand its full effects and ways to work against it.  

Investigations into outsourcing are developed with many others through three distinct, long-term collective practices: listening with members and organisers of the worker-led Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and their campaigning against outsourcing; Manual Labours: The Global and Multiplying Staffroom (2019–ongoing), a collaborative investigation with researcher Sophie Hope into the outsourcing of workplace care infrastructure; and Vård och Värde (Care and Value) (2020–24), a practice initiatedwith researcher and writer Gunilla Lundahl and Stockholm care workers which examines the effects of working within an outsourced care system. Each of the three practices studies outsourcing in its different dimensions, at the levels of contract, infrastructure andpublic policy. Collectively, they demonstrate that outsourcing is more than a contractual relation; it is a logic that permeates society-wide structures, facilitating a global, necropolitical partition of workers whereby some workers have access to care infrastructure and time to reproduce themselves while others do not.

To confront the way outsourcing systematically fragments workers’ capacity to meet, communicate and organise, the thesis argues, curatorial practice can intervene by creating temporal, spatial and communicative infrastructures that rebuild encounters and relations between workers necessary for worker organising. A key concept emerging from this research is ‘against-ing’, which proposes that to respond to outsourcing is not only to resist or refuse its exploitative logics, but to institute structural change that expands collectiveaccess to care infrastructure, allowing us to reproduce ourselves differently and expanding capacities for worker organising.  

Academia and the art sphere aspire to be spaces for critical and collective research, yet both are built upon individualised modes of production and reproduction. As such, this collective research is published as a compendium, designed by interdisciplinary designer and artist Johnny Chang, and written using the method of polyphony to speak to the different contributions and forms of expression that have shaped, influenced and developed research into and against outsourcing. The compendium is intended as a resource for workers wishing to organise and challenge their working conditions. To serve this role, it also shares four Tools, each of which has been honed through the different collective practices to expand capacities for worker organising against outsourcing.

Link to DiVA