Written and collated by the Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB) this workbook is a critical resource pack for educators. As a tool, it emphasizes employability and work-based learning as core aspects of an educator’s ongoing ‘professional practice’.
Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education | London/LA/Leipzig: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press | 2017
For many years the members of the Precarious Workers Brigade have been developing insightful analyses, tools and actions questioning wageless and other exploitative forms of labour in the arts and education sectors. With a shared commitment to developing research and actions, this collaborative political project involves developing tactics, strategies, formats, practices, dispositions, knowledges and tools for making this happen. They seek approaches that are practical, relevant and easily shared and applied.
This publication provides a pedagogical framework that assists students and others in deconstructing dominant narratives around work, employability and careers, and explores alternative ways of engaging with work and the economy. Training for Exploitation? includes tools for critically examining the relationship between education, work and the cultural economy. It provides useful statistics and workshop exercises on topics such as precarity, employment rights, cooperation and solidarity, as well as examples of alternative educational and organising practices. Training for Exploitation? shows how we can both critique and organise against a system that is at the heart of the contemporary crises of work, student debt and precarity.
The PWB is a UK-based group of workers in culture and education whose employment and existence is ‘precarious’ – calling out to those also struggling to make a living in the climate of instability and enforced austerity.
Design: Evening Class
Foreword: Silvia Federici
ISBN 978-0-615-59011-0