WORKFORFREE.RIP currently gathers pay data from work exercised in France, Italy, the UK. Each country is represented by a worker-led platform to steward the data and connect the platform to its political, economic, and legal context.

Concretely, each partner is responsible for collecting and validating entries, ensuring alignment with local frameworks, providing translations, and offering on-the-ground support. Maintaining a hub requires roughly 5–8 hours per month. If you would like to add your country, email us at workforfreerip@proton.me.

Initiated by Jeunes Critiques d’Art, WORKFORFREE.RIP grew out of CASH!, a discussion series held in Paris from April to June 2025 on the ways we can collectively leverage grassroots-level currencies and resources. This series was initiated in the context of the national movement Cultures en lutte — a coalition of cultural workers from three of the major labor unions in France, which emerged in response to significant budget cuts by the French Ministry of Culture. Across discussions among art workers, activists, and organisers on strengthening our demands, a repeatedly identified obstacle was the art world’s overall inability to speak openly about money — and how that silence keeps workers atomised and disempowered.

We acknowledge the expansive work of activists, researchers, and collectives who have exposed the precarious conditions of art workers, notably through salary repertories and surveys such as Industria’s Structurally F-cked by Industria, the Wages for Wages Against volumes, the Art/Museum Salary Transparency spreadsheet, Towards an International of Art Workers and Beyond symposium by La Buse, and fee resources published by W.A.G.E., among others. We stand in solidarity with the many international platforms that have emerged in recent years, actively linking with unions, defending worker rights, and resisting institutional abuses and censorship. We see this as an important moment to continue these efforts through tool and knowledge exchange across contexts, expanding opportunities for both mass participation and local relevance. Joining forces with Industria and Art Workers Italia, WORKFORFREE.RIP is underpinned by a shared long-term commitment to art workers’ rights, our aligned positions on the role of art workers in responding to the Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, and a common understanding of the political stakes of cultural labour.

WORKFORFREE.RIP invites a resident every quarter to build on the political and material issues surrounding financial compensation, situating the discourse on pay transparency within a broader examination of work and capitalism as a system of social organisation — and exploring how workers can concretely leverage the data for actionable change beyond wage demands. Not only: how can we get paid better? But also: what do we do if we are paid better? What does a post-work future look like, or how can we use our collective power to move toward a world where capitalism and the wage no longer structures life?

Our fight for fair wages is inseparable from recognising work and the wage as an oppressive system structured by capitalism, which demands extraction, exploitation, the hidden labour of enslaved and undocumented workers, the dispossession and marginalisation of communities, and the enormous daily unwaged work of social reproduction. “Post-work” doesn’t mean the absence of activity, creativity, or contribution. It refers to a future in which work is no longer the primary structure organising value, access, or survival. In a post-work horizon, livelihoods aren’t tied to employment, and people are free to participate in culture, care, and community without precarity. By necessity, this involves building mass working class organising against the terms set by capital. For art workers, imagining post-work and building this capacity to organise starts with questioning who benefits from our labour, why artistic and cultural production is undervalued, and how collective power might help move us toward systems like universal basic income/salaire à vie, redistributed resources, or decommodified cultural infrastructures, and the possibility of creative lives for all. In practice, this means organising for and beyond conditions where workers have the security, time, and autonomy to participate in culture without being exploited by it; where access to a good standard of living is decoupled from job titles; where redistribution replaces competition; and where collective power — not individual hustle — shapes the future of cultural production.

The term “art worker” includes artists as well as those who facilitate the production, display of, and engagement with artistic work – from workers maintaining gallery buildings, to those working front-of-house jobs, to technicians, to educators, and curatorial staff. This platform focuses specifically on work in the contemporary art world: the network of institutions, galleries, foundations, and public arts infrastructures that contribute to the shape of labour, value, and circulation within this specific context in relation to the broader structures of capitalism.

While creatives, musicians, DJs, film workers, theater workers and other cultural actors face similar issues of worker isolation, pay inequity and abuse of power, they generally operate within different institutional structures and professional networks. Although there are often overlaps, this platform mobilises its resources with the goal of strengthening the possibility for coordinated action within the contemporary art field specifically. If you are interested in organising a database for any other sector of workers, we are happy to share our code base, documentation and any other resources — email us at workforfreerip@proton.me.

WORKFORFREE.RIP is neither a callout space nor an authoritative database that intends to rank pay; it is a solidarity-driven tool, where the utility grows as workers share information in service of collective knowledge and bargaining power. When people know what their peers are paid — when we engage in a project of workers’ inquiry — competition dissolves and solidarity becomes materially grounded. Transparency challenges the myth that we “earned” our wages individually, reveals structural discrepancies, and helps interrogate the systems that determine the ease or friction with which we move through the art world and its economy. We encourage contributors to share as much as they feel comfortable to, using their own experiences as a resource for others.

While the project begins with data on pay, its deeper aim is to strengthen worker power across intersecting alliances that enable more sustained and weighted collective action. Beyond decent working conditions, our collective bargaining power can pressure against censorship, extractive practices, and institutional complicity — including demanding divestment from regimes of occupation and violence. Submissions may surface geographic patterns in worker data, creating stronger conditions for coordinated organising and collective leverage.

The platform thus hopes to serve 1. a concrete tool to help art workers better understand and negotiate remuneration, and 2. a transnational foundation of support for art workers to organise deeper discussions about working conditions and ways for art to exist outside dominant economic frameworks, ultimately reinforced by on-the-ground organising, relationships, unions, and local spaces.

Many organisers volunteered their time to contribute to the making of this project! The slow, unremunerated care work of organising ourselves is a necessity in bringing about the material conditions we are demanding. The line between volunteering and working for free is often blurred by the rhetoric of “passion”, which especially exposes workers in the arts, nonprofits, activism, and academia, along with the contextually specific understanding of art as a “labour of love”. A key question to ask might be: who benefits from your labor?

If the work ultimately generates financial, social, or cultural capital for someone — including an institution, a boss, or even yourself — it may be considered working for free. We understand organising and volunteering instead as driven by your own political commitments and community interest, offering something you have (time, skills, an audience, care) toward shared goals where the value produced is communal rather than captured by an individual or institution. By contrast, doing something you love “for free” under the guise of opportunity — where the value exchange is framed as future benefit (“this will be good for you later”) rather than immediate remuneration— seeks to mask a power imbalance: someone else gains from your work while you absorb the risk. Working for free is dangerous not only because it exploits the worker in the moment, but because it perpetuates an art world that runs on clout, scarcity, and structural inequalities that define who can afford to work for free and who cannot. In all contexts, whether a situation is genuinely voluntary or constitutes unpaid work, what we are able to give is determined by our material and social conditions.