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Vol. 1, No. 1: Feeling Triggered

Happy May Day and welcome to Soft Labor, the namesake publication of Soft Labor, a strategic consultancy for organizations, designers, and the culture industry led by Sarah Hromack-Chan. 

This is a publication about creative labor—what it is, what it looks like, and how it has and will continue to change. Soft Labor concerns itself with ideas, feelings, politics, and social and cultural propositions, but it focuses most closely on how to sharpen these aspects of being a person into functional strategies and tactics for deployment in the working world, where sometimes “being a person” seems like the hardest part of the job. 

Soft Labor isn’t your therapist or your life coach. Soft Labor isn’t your HR department; it isn’t your union representative and it isn’t a corporate management consultant. It may, however, become part of your personal playbook.

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Soft Labor will arrive in your inbox frequently enough to entertain you but not annoy you. 

Here’s what to expect: 

“Performance Improvement Plan” is a feature that seeks to solve problems by answering questions. Written in the first person, “PIP” represents the collective “we” through insights gleaned from countless encounters in and around the places where culture is produced. The voice of “PIP” is a united one: All sources are protected and anonymized; both questions and answers form an amalgamation of endless conversations between people. Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. 

“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests. “Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades. Finally, “Dress Code” is an ongoing visual essay on workplace looks of all forms and kinds. 

Deep thanks to those who have inspired and supported Soft Labor, in all of its forms, throughout the twenty-odd years of work that have informed our current practice and point of view. You know who you are. 

In solidarity,

Soft Labor
info@softlabor.biz

Performance Improvement Plan

Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.

Dear Soft Labor, 

I am a recent Ivy League graduate and work in a major museum in a major city as an assistant to a globally-regarded curator who is shockingly abusive toward the museum’s entire staff. Her child-like tantrums and always-demeaning tone are an open secret in the art world and yet, despite various delicate slaps on the wrist leveled by HR here and there, her behavior persists largely unchecked. I myself am privileged by all definitions of the term: I have the means, the familial connections, and the preternatural know-how to retain legal services, start a whisper campaign within the right networks, and severely hamper if not outright destroy her career. My problem isn’t figuring out how to manipulate or dominate a system. I’m not afraid of her. She knows this.

Rather, I’m wondering how to navigate the situation as a human being. Astonishingly enough, I do possess a degree of self awareness lifted straight from a Sally Rooney novel: I know how thin my skin actually is. I don’t need a job, but I want to retain the prestige associated with mine. How can I work with this person without unleashing the kind of rich-kid chaos my parents trained me to sow at the faintest feeling of personal discomfort? 

From the White Cube,
Feeling Triggered 

Dear Triggered,

Aren’t you lucky to have so many options? And straight out of the gates, no less! Triggered, we know you are afraid of her, OK? This is your first professional job. Precisely no one appreciates being made to feel degraded or humiliated.

Someone with your scope of resources, sheer hubris, and stunning sense of self-confidence has precisely one option here: Leverage your power.  

Effective immediately, you must use your seeming savviness with systems and how they operate to the advantage of others who simply do not possess the level of access and cocksured-ness you express in your letter (or are you as insecure as your boss?). Most folks don’t have the luxury of demonstrating their sense of outrage at will, as you were clearly socialized to do. Many simply cannot risk the consequences of acting out anywhere, let alone at work and in the face of a boss whose social capital might serve to advance a fledgling career by proxy alone. Jobs pay bills and art is ostensibly for everyone, which is some of why all kinds of people (artists chief amongst them) believe in its intrinsic value enough to tough it out in a brutal industry, even when it seems like the art world isn’t about art at all.

Yes, we are talking about alliance-building, a term whose social value has been diminished in recent years by rapidly shifting political agendas. In this case, we’re suggesting that every day, at any turn, you pause and consider how you can honestly work with others by effectively transferring your power, duty-free and low-key—this isn’t a benefit auction or performance art—while trusting that in doing so, you aren’t relinquishing your own reserves. You were born with this stuff, Triggered. Offer your seat, your voice, or your opportunity to someone else for once. The stakes are higher than ever. Divest from yourself. Do your job. 

Some say that strategy isn’t merely a form of planning. While that may be the case, one can begin to think about outcomes at the beginning of one’s career by keenly observing the working world and responding in kind by establishing a set of personal principles based on a framework of privately-held ethical beliefs. One thing we do surely know: It is possible for privilege, in all of its spectacular and terrifying forms, to coincide with conviction. And workaday action. You can remain critical of something while nevertheless being of that thing.

Retain a sense of awareness, Triggered, and behave accordingly. Move your king pawn out two spaces on the board; the rest will unfold from there. Stay tactical. Play close to the vest. Keep moving. Your skin—and your sense of humility—will thicken in due time. 

Your end game might end up being your own, after all.

Yours, 
Soft Labor

Search Results 

Progress Report

  • Soft Labor and fellow MICA alum Nolen Strals recently dropped AMoM—a t-shirt and send up of MoMA's iconic logo—on Metalabel, writer and Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler's new platform for releasing creative works. We donated our proceeds to Grief & Hope, a group united to support artists and art workers recovering from the recent fires in Los Angeles. We wrote about Metalabel and Strickler and his co-authors’ new book, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet for Hyperallergic a while back.
  • Longtime Soft Labor comrade and George Washington University professor Michelle Carlson (of the aforementioned Related Tactics) wrote an essay, “On Audience”, for Support Structures, a newsletter edited by architect and educator Andrea Dietz. It’s an essay about deep looking, working, and mourning—a balm for those going through it right now, in the field of academia and otherwise.
  • True thanks to collaborators Other Means for designing and developing Soft Labor. Congrats! to the studio for winning the Type Director's Club award for their recent rebranding of the Brooklyn Museum.
  • Deep thanks to writer, editor, and longtime comrade Eve Batey for being Soft Labor's strategic sparring partner. Follow her culture writing at Vanity Fair.
  • Thanks to Jarrett Fuller, whose interview with us in 2024 helped bring Soft Labor into focus as a consultancy.

Dress Code

Grace Jones, the prototypical Armani power dresser. 1981.

A Dress Code bonus: The most recent edition of Joanna Walsh's "Theory of Style" column for Spike, "Dressing for Dark Times" asks—and moreover, answers—a fundamentally political aesthetic question: "If no outfit is truly politically neutral, what does one wear for actual resistance?"