WORKFORFREE.RIP is a platform for art worker solidarity addressing the conditions of labour and compensation through [1] a public transparency index and [2] a rotating digital residency.
[1] WORKFORFREE.RIP is a transparency index that invites art workers to turn their pay data into public knowledge. By documenting and sharing real figures, it challenges the manufactured scarcity and competition that keep us isolated — recognising that the taboo protects bosses, not workers. Transparency not only exposes the often invisible labour behind cultural production, but becomes a shared basis for worker solidarity: to support informed negotiation, and to hold institutions, galleries, and organisations accountable.
[2] WORKFORFREE.RIP is a digital residency that invites subjective readings and interventions on those numbers, building upon the political and material issues surrounding financial compensation. Transparency may offer radical access, but data is never neutral; it carries biases rooted in the power dynamics that structure the working conditions, institutional practices, and systemic disparities of the art world. The residency unfolds through quarterly interventions each centered around a set of questions, making space for collective reflection and critique on work as a social infrastructure. We invite residents to unsettle the authority of data toward other grammars of value, where labour and resources circulate beyond capital and work.
WORKFORFREE.RIP currently gathers pay data from work exercised in France, Italy, the UK and the Netherlands. 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 organised in the context of the national movement Cultures en lutte — a coalition of cultural workers from three of the major labour 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, theatre 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 as:
- a concrete tool to help art workers better understand and negotiate remuneration;
- 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 labour?
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.
An account allows you to submit and edit your entries. You only need an email for a magic link — no personal info is required, and your account is completely anonymous. Having an account helps maintain the integrity of the data and allows you to manage your entries.
All entries are anonymous by default. The platform stores only the email address used for authentication and the content of user submissions, and these datasets are kept separate. There is no mechanism for linking an email address to a specific submission, and the association between your account and your entries is visible only to you.
Sessions are temporary and managed on the server, so no identifying information is stored on your device. Access logs are anonymised, and no personal data is retained in session data. All stored data is encrypted at rest using industry-standard encryption.
That said, certain combinations of information could theoretically make someone identifiable. Only share what you’re comfortable with: most fields are optional, and others allow you to choose from predefined categories to avoid providing specific details.
Submissions are manually approved before appearing in the index, but your identity remains anonymous. You can check the status of your entry (pending, validated, or rejected) in your dashboard. We review submissions and only remove clearly false or malicious entries.
Yes — you can edit or delete your entry anytime through your account dashboard. Edited submissions will be re-submitted for manual validation before appearing on the public index.
If you encounter information that you believe to be inaccurate, you may request removal by emailing us at workforfreerip@mailbox.org. Requests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
We collect the minimum data required to operate the platform. This includes your email address for login via magic link and the content of your submissions via the form. These are stored separately, and we cannot link your email to any submission. We do not collect usage analytics, device identifiers, or browsing activity.
As with most infrastructure providers, our hosting provider may automatically generate encrypted server logs containing limited technical data (such as IP addresses) for security, performance, and fraud prevention. This data is not accessed by us and retained only as required for system security. See our Privacy Policy for more details.
This Privacy Policy (“the Policy”) details how WORKFORFREE.RIP, a project legally represented by the association Jeunes Critiques d’Art (“we”, “our”, “us”), collects, uses and protects personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR — Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and, where applicable, the UK GDPR.
The Policy applies to all services accessible through the workforfree.rip website (“the Site”): the pay transparency index, the data submission form, and the digital residency space, including in their current beta version.
The Site relies on three third-party technical providers acting as processors within the meaning of Article 28 GDPR: Netlify (hosting and deployment), Clerk (authentication and account management) and Baserow (storage of the database of entries). Their respective roles, and the safeguards covering any data transfers, are set out in section 7 below.
We reserve the right to update this Policy. Any material change will be notified by email to the address registered in your account.This privacy policy was originally drafted in French. In the event of any discrepancy, the French version shall prevail.
1. Data Controller
Jeunes Critiques d’Art, 44, rue des Pyrénées 75020 Paris FRANCE
Contact for any data protection question: workforfreerip@mailbox.org
As data controller within the meaning of Article 4(7) GDPR, Jeunes Critiques d’Art determines the purposes and means of the processing of your personal data carried out through the Site.
2. Data collected
We only collect data strictly necessary to provide the services offered by the Site. Three categories of data are concerned.
2.1 Authentication data (collected via Clerk)
When you create an account, we collect your email address, which is transmitted to the Clerk authentication service in order to send a single-use sign-in link (“magic link”). No password is created or stored.
As authentication provider, Clerk may also automatically collect, in the course of providing its service, certain technical data such as IP address, browser and device metadata, and connection timestamps. This data is processed by Clerk under its own terms (see section 7).
2.2 Data voluntarily submitted by the user
When submitting an entry through the pay transparency form, you may provide the following information, which is stored in Baserow:
- Pay information (amount, frequency, currency)
- Employment status and type of contract
- Country of work
- City of work (optional)
- Year worked
- Type of employer
- Name of employer (optional)
- Worker category
- Job title or project type (optional)
- Duration of contract (optional)
- Number of hours worked per week (optional)
- Years of experience (optional)
- How the job was obtained (optional)
- Additional compensation (optional)
- Satisfaction indicators (optional)
- Free-form notes you choose to provide (optional)
2.3 Technical data collected by the host (Netlify)
Our host Netlify may automatically collect limited technical data in its server logs for security, performance and abuse-prevention purposes, in particular IP address, browser type and request timestamps. This data is processed by Netlify under its own terms (see section 7).
3. Purposes of processing and legal bases (Article 6 GDPR)
We process your personal data exclusively for the following purposes:
Purpose of processing: Legal basis (Art. 6 GDPR)
Publication of an aggregated and anonymised pay transparency index for the contemporary art sector: Explicit consent — Art. 6(1)(a)
Production of aggregated reports, publications or advocacy materials for art workers: Explicit consent — Art. 6(1)(a)
Improving understanding of pay disparities across countries and types of employment: Explicit consent — Art. 6(1)(a)
Authentication and management of your account (transmission of your email to Clerk, sending of the magic link, session maintenance): Performance of a contract — Art. 6(1)(b)
Manual moderation and validation of submitted entries (quality control, prevention of abusive submissions): Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f)
Site security and fraud prevention (technical logs from host and Clerk): Legitimate interests — Art. 6(1)(f)
Compliance with applicable legal obligations: Legal obligation — Art. 6(1)(c)
Withdrawal of consent: where processing is based on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before such withdrawal. To do so, delete your individual entries or your account from your dashboard.
Legitimate interests — balancing test (Art. 6(1)(f)): for processing based on our legitimate interests (moderation of submissions and Site security), we have carried out the balancing test required by Article 6(1)(f) GDPR. These activities are necessary to maintain data integrity and to protect contributors. They concern technical data or information voluntarily submitted by users, are limited to the strict minimum, and have no significant impact on the privacy of the persons concerned. They produce no legal effects with regard to those persons. As a result, our legitimate interests prevail over the rights and freedoms of data subjects in these specific contexts, without overriding them — the right to object remains exercisable (see section 10).
4. Anonymity and pseudonymisation
Entries are anonymous by default. We do not store any first name, last name or personal identifier beyond the email address used to log in.
Certain combinations of data entered in the index could, in theory, enable identification of a contributor in specific professional contexts (for example: a unique role within a small organisation, or a combination of city and contract type). To limit this risk:
- most fields are optional;
- mandatory fields offer broad categories rather than precise information;
- we reserve the right not to display certain combinations of data that would be too identifying.
Despite these precautions, absolute anonymity cannot be guaranteed in all cases. Only submit information you are comfortable sharing in this context of collective transparency.
5. Cookies and tracking technologies
5.1 The Site itself
The workforfree.rip Site does not place any first-party cookie on your device. User sessions are managed entirely server-side via Clerk. The Site stores no identifying information locally on your device.
5.2 Cookies set by third-party providers
The technical providers integrated into the Site may set cookies or use tracking technologies in connection with the delivery of their respective services:
- Clerk (authentication): may use session cookies necessary to maintain the authentication state. These cookies are functional and strictly necessary to log in. Clerk also uses analytics technologies (in particular PostHog) on its own interfaces.
- Netlify (hosting): may set technical cookies related to the performance and security of the hosting infrastructure.
We do not use advertising cookies, targeting cookies or third-party marketing trackers on our own initiative.
6. Sharing and disclosure of data
We do not sell, rent or otherwise transfer your personal data to third parties for commercial purposes.
We may publicly release the following:
- aggregated and anonymised statistics;
- aggregated research findings;
- summary reports that do not allow individual identification.
Individual responses are never disclosed. Your email address is never displayed or shared publicly.
6.1 Disclosure for legal reasons
We may disclose data if we believe in good faith that such disclosure is necessary to comply with a legal obligation or court order, to protect the rights or safety of the Site and its contributors, or to prevent established fraud or illegal activity. To the extent permitted by applicable law, we reserve the right to take measures to defend the anonymity of our contributors.
7. Recipients and international data transfers
In accordance with Article 28 GDPR, we rely on the following processors to deliver the Site.
Processor - Role and data processed - Location & GDPR safeguards
Netlify, Inc. - San Francisco, CA, USA - netlify.com
Hosting and deployment of the Site. Server logs (IP, technical metadata) for security and performance purposes.
Transfers to the United States are covered primarily by the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs — Decision 2021/914) and, as an additional safeguard, by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework (July 2023). DPA incorporated into Netlify’s terms and conditions.
Clerk, Inc. - San Francisco, CA, USA - clerk.com
Authentication and user account management. Processes the email address to send magic links, as well as technical session data (IP, browser, timestamps).
Transfers to the United States are covered primarily by the SCCs (Decision 2021/914) and, as an additional safeguard, by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. EU/UK representative: VeraSafe Ireland Ltd. DPA available at clerk.com/legal/dpa.
Baserow B.V. - Amsterdam, Netherlands - baserow.io
Storage of the database of pay transparency entries submitted by users.
Company established in the EU (Netherlands). Servers located in Germany (EU). No transfer outside the EEA. GDPR- and SOC 2-compliant. DPA available under Baserow’s terms.
Clerk and Netlify are US companies. If you reside in the EEA, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, your authentication and login data may be transferred to the United States. These transfers are covered primarily by the Standard Contractual Clauses adopted by the European Commission (Implementing Decision 2021/914), which remain applicable regardless of any future change in the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
8. Security measures
The technical and organisational security measures in place include:
- encryption of connections (HTTPS/TLS) for all communications between your browser and the Site, provided by Netlify;
- passwordless authentication via single-use magic links, managed by Clerk;
- temporary server-side sessions with no identifying information stored on the client;
- encryption at rest of data in the Baserow database, hosted in Germany;
- data access restricted to project team members;
- manual approval of every entry before publication in the index.
Although we implement reasonable protective measures, no system is infallible. We cannot offer any absolute guarantee as to the security of data transmitted over the internet.
9. Retention periods
Data category - Retention period
Email address (account, managed by Clerk): Until the user deletes the account. Clerk applies its own retention periods for technical session data.
Submitted entries (pay data, stored in Baserow): Until deletion by the user, or at most 10 years from submission, unless previously anonymised for collective research use.
Technical host logs (Netlify): Minimum duration required for security purposes, in line with Netlify’s policy and within applicable legal limits.
Anonymised or aggregated data: Indefinite retention for collective research purposes, as such data no longer allows individual identification.
On expiry of these periods, data is either permanently deleted or irreversibly anonymised.
10. Your rights under the GDPR
In accordance with Articles 15 to 22 GDPR, you have the following rights with respect to your personal data:
- Right of access (Art. 15): obtain confirmation that data concerning you is being processed and receive a copy of it;
- Right to rectification (Art. 16): have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected;
- Right to erasure (Art. 17): request the deletion of your data;
- Right to withdraw consent (Art. 7(3)): withdraw your consent at any time without retroactive effect;
- Right to restriction of processing (Art. 18): request the temporary suspension of the processing of your data;
- Right to data portability (Art. 20): receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format;
- Right to object (Art. 21): object to processing based on our legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your particular situation;
- No automated decision-making (Art. 22): we do not use profiling or algorithms to make decisions producing significant legal effects.
Exercising these rights: log in to your dashboard (to delete or modify your entries) or contact us at (email address). We aim to respond within one month (Art. 12(3) GDPR), extendable by a further two months for complex requests, in which case we will inform you accordingly.
Lodging a complaint with a supervisory authority: if you consider that the processing of your data infringes your rights, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the competent authority in your country of residence:
- France: Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) — www.cnil.fr
- United Kingdom: Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) — www.ico.org.uk
- Italy: Garante per la protezione dei dati personali — www.garanteprivacy.it
- Other EEA Member States: the national data protection authority competent for your place of residence
11. Protection of minors
The Site is intended for individuals aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from minors. If you become aware that a minor has submitted data without the consent of their legal representatives, please contact us at workforfreerip@mailbox.org so that we can delete this data as soon as possible.
12. Automated decision-making and profiling
We do not use profiling algorithms or automated decision-making systems producing legal effects or significantly affecting you. Any decision concerning the publication or removal of an entry is subject to human review.
13. Changes to this Policy
We reserve the right to amend this Policy at any time. In the event of a material change — in particular any change reducing your rights or expanding our processing rights — we will notify you by email at the address associated with your account, at least 30 days before the changes take effect. The revision date at the top of the document will be updated with each amendment. Continued use of the Site after a change comes into force constitutes acceptance of the amended Policy.
14. Contact us
For any question regarding this Policy or the processing of your personal data:
- By email (preferred): workforfreerip@mailbox.org
- By post: Jeunes Critiques d’Art, 44, rue des Pyrénées 75020 Paris FRANCE
For questions specifically related to the processing of your data by our third-party providers, you may also contact them directly: Clerk (privacy@clerk.dev), Netlify (privacy@netlify.com), Baserow (via baserow.io/contact).