Precarious Design: Creative Workers’ Organizations and the Union Affiliation of the Associated Designers of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to literature on precarious employment and union organizing in the cultural sector through an analysis of the recent union affiliation of the Associated Designers of Canada (ADC) with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). We approach this topic comparatively by looking at the organizational models that theatre and live performance designers have used to collectively represent themselves in English Canada, Québec, and the United States. Drawing on 56 semi-structured interviews with working designers and designer organization staff in these three jurisdictions, we explore the challenges working designers face, the efficacy of their respective organizational models, and the motivations for unionization among designers in English Canada. ADC’s unionization and IATSE’s coalition work with other cultural sector workers, we argue, could offer broader lessons to others in the cultural sector seeking to organize to improve their wages and working conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".