Art for Mobilization

The Collage Workshop

In the early 1980s, before we began using computers, Gary and I experimented with a cut-and-paste method of creating cartoons. The German Dada artist John Heartfield, who was famous for creating photomontage (or photo collage), influenced us. Some of our earliest efforts at cartooning classes were for the Local Union Press Association (LUPA) of the United Automobile Workers (UAW). At the UAW education center in Black Lake, Michigan, we had the opportunity to work with talented UAW members who loved to draw. But not all classes were successful. For those who could not draw, enthusiasm soon evaporated. Given our faith in worker creativity, we needed to develop another format to include all workers. Later that same year, we were invited to lead a workshop at the Great Labor Arts Exchange at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland. Not wishing to repeat an unsuccessful Black Lake experience, we experimented with the collage method. Signing up for the class were twelve participants, mostly labor organizers from around the country. We started by showing examples of our work incorporating the collage method and showed examples of collages used in commercial magazines as advertisements and illustrations for articles. We grouped three or four union members at a table and supplied each table with a number of commercial magazines (e.g., Time, Newsweek, food, fashion, etc.), poster paper, scissors, glue sticks, and markers. In our introduction we wanted to eliminate the belief that only artists can create art, so we reminded participants that they were all artists when they were children. Freed from the psychological pressure of not being able to draw, the participants felt encouraged to free their imaginations. Our job as facilitators was simply to show folks how to cut-and-paste using the materials at hand. We instructed the participants to cut-and-paste pictures and letters to present their message—like creating an illustrated ransom note. Within two to three hours, each participant created one to four posters. The group setting helped facilitate creativity because folks at each table influenced each other’s ideas. Participants were also free to roam the room and see what others were doing. It was a form of improvised art making, a kind of collage jazz session that was fun and imaginative.

Individually and together we have repeated the workshop with groups in and out of the labor movement, including sixty high school students studying nuclear proliferation; participants of a working women’s conference in Birmingham, Alabama; a Latina youth group; Hurricane Katrina survivors living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and a group of international artists in Cairo, Egypt, less than a month after the Egyptian revolution. The workshop has never failed to produce inspiring and powerful work. Over time the classes have grown in both popularity and attendance, from a dozen in the beginning to nearly six hundred workers at a Health and Safety Conference of the Civil Service Employees Association (AFSCME 1000) of New York State. The conference setting also enables participants to display their art in a common area and share it with other conference attendees.

The Labor Cartooning Class

The labor cartooning class required a more structured setting. One example is the four-day class we taught at the UAW Local Union Press Association (LUPA) conference. Another is the fourteen-week online class offered by the National Labor College (spring 2011). We introduced students to the basics of cartooning such as brainstorming ideas, simple pencil sketching, composition, and preparing the cartoon for publication using pen and ink. Students practiced the basics of pencil, drawing heads, bodies, facial expressions and simple props like furniture, buildings, cars, and so forth. Using tracing paper, students learned to compose their drawings. Once students finished the pencil sketch, they learned to transfer their cartoon to illustration board (card stock art paper) and apply ink for final reproduction. While some level of talent and skill are helpful—and it is easier for those who did not lose their artistic skills when they became adults—the basics of the form can be learned. As self-taught cartoonists, Gary and I are living testimony.

The Corporate Campaign

For more than fifteen years the Teamsters Corporate Campaign Department has utilized parody of corporate identity as a tool against employers. At the request of former staffer Ron Carver and present corporate campaign director Andy Banks, I produced a number of parody cartoons without any legal challenge. In July 2011, the Teamsters launched a campaign against BMW for threatening to lay off sixty-eight union employees of its Ontario, California, parts distribution center. The Teamsters commissioned me to lampoon the BMW slogan “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” calling it “The Ultimate Misery.” The parody was the focus of a multiple action campaign. The Teamsters produced banners that workers displayed at BMW dealerships. Workers then distributed leaflets to customers. The union also created a website to explain the campaign to the public. According to the website’s Internet data (analytics), thousands of hits were recorded from Germany, California (site of the dispute) and New Jersey—BMWs U.S. headquarters. As a result, BMW postponed the layoffs and ultimately reached a settlement with the union. According to Teamsters Corporate Campaign staff member Elissa Laitin, “Without the strategic campaign, which included the parodied logo, these jobs would no longer exist.”

Parodies are not limited to flyers and banners. Billboards are also utilized. In 1994, Miller Beer distributors in St. Louis, Missouri and Hartford, Connecticut sought to bust Teamster delivery truck drivers. The union rented billboards to inform consumers of distributors’ unfair practices. The target, Miller Brewing, pressured the distributors, who then agreed to settle the dispute. In 1996, a Budweiser distributor in Providence, Rhode Island threatened to eliminate seniority and cut full-time jobs. The Teamsters went on strike and organized the bars and restaurants served by the distributor to refuse deliveries from scab drivers. Teamsters also commissioned a cartoon parody of the old Budweiser frog advertisement to display on a billboard, but corporate billboard companies can be vulnerable to employer pressure—and the billboard company refused to sell the space. To show how important worker creativity is to corporate campaigns, the workers brainstormed an ingenious solution. The billboard was attached to a tractor-trailer and used as a rolling billboard. The strike was settled, and the fifty-one drivers and warehouse workers won increases in pay and pension contributions.

At the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC) conference in May 1996, attorney Michael Anderson of Davis, Cowell & Bowe of San Francisco presented the legal foundation for unions to use parody; his conference paper thesis was Congress’ multiple statuary exemptions for “fair use.” Noncommercial use of corporate images and advertising is not copyright infringement. “The legislative history of the Lanham Act (copyright act) shows that Congress did not intend to regulate noncommercial uses ‘which raise free speech concerns.’” In many rulings, the Supreme Court reinforced these statutes and declared parody to be protected speech. Anderson concluded, “As the potential defendant, the union has the option to avoid any exposure under trademark and copyright just by backing down and complying with the employer’s demands. This gives the employer more power than it deserves. Union publicity is more effective when it displays the ‘authorized’ employer trademarks . . . for the same reason that the employer’s advertising is more effective because of these elements. Images are more powerful than words.”

Art for Mobilization

The Art for Mobilization module incorporates fair use theory and introduces workshop participants to the tactical use of ridicule and parody to confront an employer during a contract dispute or strike. We explore corporate identity, copyright, and the First Amendment, followed with a slideshow that briefly describes parody, satire, libel, slander, and copyright. Students describe employer logos, and then brainstorm to generate parody ideas. I render rough sketches of their ideas (on a blackboard or easel) and, after additional brainstorming, prepare a finished drawing. Brainstorming—the opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other—will generally create better ideas.

Our experiences as teachers and workshop facilitators, using labor cartooning and labor art, have confirmed what the IWW organizers believed long ago: that “social/economic revolutionary perspectives were broadened and deepened by a no less revolutionary cultural dimension.” Today’s union leaders and labor educators must seek ways to include this cultural dimension in all their education programs. As the striking textile mill girls of Lawrence, Massachusetts insisted, “We want bread but we want roses, too.”