Unequal hands: the promise and limits of craft as a future of work

Rediscovering craft during crises

It is spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic just hit Europe, and countries are going into lockdown. Stuck at home and tired of watching another series, we (re)discover craft as an alternative way of spending our time, and suddenly, we find ourselves baking banana bread, meticulously tending sourdough starters, or joining an online pottery course.

For those who turned to craft during the pandemic, it might be interesting to know that the experience is part of a broader historical pattern. Craft activities have been a source of comfort during crises time and time again. Interestingly, craft’s ‘soothing’ effect seems scalable to regional economies – granted a different meaning of the word ‘soothing’, of course. Studies show that craft businesses demonstrate surprising resilience during economic downturns, supporting recovery through their strong regional embeddedness and reliance on local supply chains (see e.g., Schroeder, 2022).

In a world facing multiple crises, craft’s potential to soothe on both micro and macro scales has garnered significant attention. At the micro level, craft making has been found to increase human well-being and support mental health. On a larger scale, professional craftwork could be part of the solution to the climate crisis as it allows us to re-imagine current ways of producing and consuming. Placing emphasis on sufficiency, craft aligns with ecological sustainability by focussing on (local) high-quality materials that are processed into fewer, more durable products. At the same time, its focus on human engagement offers an alternative future of work to scenarios of robotic automation and AI (as discussed in previous editions of the CROWC blog; "In the age of intelligent robots: a radical rethinking of human nature" and "The robots are coming... but what will they do when they get here?") – scenarios anticipated anxiously by many due to a fear of job losses.

The promise of craft as future of work

Professional craftwork has been heralded as a remedy to job loss and meaningless work by virtue of it prioritising human engagement over machine-centred forms of production. A specific sub-version of craftwork that has been drawing increasing interest is ‘neo-craft’, a term coined by Professor Chris Land from ARU. Neo-craft describes craftwork that combines traditional images of craft (skilled work and high-quality products) with novel, innovative approaches to making (e.g., unusual ingredients and new technologies to reduce water usage in craft beer brewing). Thereby, the stories of ‘neo-crafters’ often sound similar to the pandemic experience of people getting increasingly fed up with sitting in front of screens all day long. The difference is that neo-crafters experience this frustration in their work life and decide to swap office work and screens for manual activities, such as baking, barbering, or bartending in hip, urban cocktail bars, to name a few.

However, craft has also been discussed in broader terms, meaning that the overall economic system could be made more sustainable through a ‘craft-orientation’ following three principles: (1) the activity being guided by the desire to do the job well for its own sake; (2) the already mentioned prioritisation of humans over machines; and (3) a close relationship between maker and crafted object, marked by a heightened interest of the maker in the crafted product. That is, rather than seeing the crafted product as a means to an end (with the end often being profit), the maker engages with the product in an interested manner that seeks to expand their knowledge.

The limits: craft as a future of work for all?

Now, you might wonder how scale fits into this – surely not everyone can pursue a craft career if we want to keep up a societal division of labour that caters to our collective needs. This is an important point because who gets to do craftwork, or ‘craft-oriented’ work, is far from self-evident. For example, one of the potential pitfalls of craftwork is its classed character.

Returning to the example of neo-craft, an important question to ask is who gets to choose to pursue a neo-craft career. Often, it is members of the middle-class who voluntarily choose working-class jobs. Sociologist Richard Ocejo (2017) explains middle class kids wanting working-class jobs through the above-mentioned meaning craftwork can provide, which often comes from recognition by consumers and occupational communities. However, importantly, choosing a traditional working-class job is also a privileged freedom and dependent on neo-crafters ability to understand and use contemporary cultural streams to their advantage. That is, while neo-crafters might wear blue overalls for (parts of) their daily business, they can just as easily change back into the (symbolic) white-collar shirt to mingle with and sell their product to the more affluent middle class.

As such, neo-craft is not accessible to everyone. Ocejo gives the example of Mexican butchers who, while being the most practically skilled, cannot draw on the necessary cultural repertoire to communicate their skilled practice in a way that is understood by the white, middle-class customers who come to their shop in a hip area of New York City. That is, the Mexican butchers do not manage to effortlessly slip into the symbolic white-collar shirt when having to talk to their white-collar customer base – they do not ‘sound right’. This inhibits them from capitalising on their practical skill the way a neo-crafter who grew up in a middle-class milieu could. In addition to this, who is perceived as skilled by customers is often racialised and gendered, further putting Mexicans at disadvantage in this scenario.

A way forward

Let’s return to the opening paragraph of this blog post – did it perhaps not resonate with the experiences you made during Covid? Perhaps you did not find yourself elbow-deep in dough or pottery clay (and enjoying it!). While the list of possible reasons for this is long, it might be that you ended up with less rather than more time because you suddenly had to care for children next to working remotely. Maybe you did not have the financial means to pick up a new hobby or felt like you did not fit with the mental image of the ‘typical participant’ of an online crafts class, making you shy away from it.

While these examples refer to leisure activities, they are comparable to reasons why some people find it harder than others to opt for a craft career. This is because these are examples of structural barriers that are built into our society, i.e., factors that are not within the control of the individual to change. It is these structures of the wider economic system that need to undergo transformation. While an overall craft orientation might help in setting the guideposts of what to aim for, we need to actively counteract the trends that are already observable in neo-craft today, where it is mainly affluent (white, male) members of society that get to choose their career. Fair wages must be ensured (e.g., through a return to trade unions), training must become more easily accessible, and excluding cultural norms must be challenged.

Jana Stefan