New York State is set to implement the Fashion Workers Act, a piece of legislation championed by the Model Alliance, a group that aims to remake the modeling industry. The New York Times has the story:
[The Act] grants models basic workplace protections such as meal breaks, overtime pay and formal mechanisms to report harassment. It also includes protections against discrimination based on race, gender, age and sexual orientation, among other characteristics, and it has language about the ownership of digital replicas created by artificial intelligence.
“As a model, your job is to appear effortlessly glamorous — you’re supposed to appear not to be working at all,” Ms. Ziff said. “I know we’re not coal miners, but we’re workers, and we deserve to have basic rights and protections on the job.” (emphasis mine)
The legislation, and the quote, struck me, as I've lately been thinking a lot about providers of goods and services who are often not recognized as "working:" plasma donors, Phase I medical research subjects, and sex workers. As I say in Repugnant Work:
As previously noted, scholars, courts, and regulators have struggled to clearly define work, instead identifying a set of characteristics or contrasts (between work and, for example, leisure or idleness) that supposedly distinguish it from other activities. . . and tends to incorporate a set of characteristics, including that work involve effort, that the effort be deployed toward some goal other than enjoyment, and that it provides some sense of meaning and community. As discussed in Parts IV-V, this definition has been applied to the three RIGA addressed by this chapter to conclude that they are not work, and certainly not meaningful work, as those terms are understood in the literature.
Critics reject this traditional definition as a “folk conception” of labor. This folk conception, which embodies implicit assumptions about which activities are sufficiently difficult or socially valuable to be treated as work, is more than a mere classification. Instead, it is a normative judgement “about the role that the activity appropriately plays in our practical lives.” For this reason, claims that a new or socially marginal activity is work will be controversial, or even nonsensical, to some observers because it suggests that these activities possess the same level of social and individual importance as other activities that we accept as work.
Anyway, that's just a short bit-- read the whole thing here.
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