To my research community,
While I’ve been working on my thesis on labor organizing at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), some faculty here have been organizing. This week’s newsletter highlights my project “Collective Cards” — a customizable pack of cards for use by organizers — which was born through inspiration close to home at SVA.
COLLECTIVE CARDS: For Your Coworkers
Collective Cards are covert yet friendly print materials, designed in the spirit of collectible trading cards, that organizers can use as aids and leave-behinds during conversations with coworkers. Tear open a pack and find approachable information on workers’ rights, common grievances, and the value of acting together. Organizers can customize decks to fit their workplace and choose to DIY print or order them for distribution.
“The hardest part of organizing is the first point of contact. It’s not easy to do with someone you’ve only interacted with professionally, and, now, you’re having a conversation about something that implicates their finances and politics too. Anything you can do to mediate that moment is helpful, especially something physical like this.”
– Excerpt from user interview with a labor organizer in architecture industry
Additional organizers say the cards can:
Serve as “a prop that people can lean on” if they’re nervous
Help an organizer “hit on a lot of important points that may not be easy to remember” – particularly the immediate and digestible information on union history in America.
Allow for flexibility when initial conversations are kept short. For instance the cards would be something you’d give a coworker and say: “Oh, okay you only have 2 minutes? Well here, check out these cards.” An organizer can then follow-up with: “Hey, did you get a chance to look at the cards? Were there any that made you think?”
I also interviewed potential ‘receivers’ of the cards: uninvolved coworkers at workplaces with union drives under way. One person recounted how they’d previously been approached about unionizing, saying the email they’d received was “cryptic” and the ensuing phone call was “pressurized” in a way that prompted “instant pushback.” They said they’d sign a card but instead quickly deprioritized it. They liked the Collective Cards approach, in contrast, for being tangible, warm, and instantly theirs, inviting in ownership for them to be a part of it.
Another potential ‘receiver’ I interviewed in higher education said:
I think the pack would work really well as something to receive from a coworker. It’s low pressure but intriguing — like if somebody gave it to me at an event I’d prefer that to getting trapped in a long conversation about the issue. But I would definitely open the pack later because it’s really kind of curious and inviting — like ‘Well let’s see!’
How’d I Get There?
As I mentioned at the top of this newsletter, Collective Cards were born from my experience at SVA.
The MFA Products of Design program requires that I include physical product design in my suite of interventions for my thesis. Admittedly, I was nervous to create a physical tool for the formation of labor unions: a process that relies on a degree of covertness, of invisibility. I very much entered without a clue as to the end result and gave myself to the design process instead.
The following is a rambly retelling of the rabbit hole I jumped in.
Last year, I took a course on Utopia with HK Dunston, whom I’m lucky to call a mentor. We read manifestos like Vandana Shiva’s Soil not Oil, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, and revisited my favorite text Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. We designed our own utopias set in Chelsea. Though I disliked sci-fi throughout childhood, the works of Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin are now beloved to me. I’ve become all in on the importance of utopian writing.
Fast forward a year and, when faced with the option to write a speculative dystopian or utopian newspaper during Sinclair Smith’s Futuring & 3-Dimensional Product Design course… I chose the dystopia. I chickened out. I chose the easy but abysmal route.
Writing the newspaper was an ideation warm-up. Under Sinclair’s guidance, we were to illustrate a world 80 years from now. This would help us, as designers, identify what tools we need to make it reality. Or, in the case of dystopia, what tools we need to actively intervene.
I titled my dystopian paper The CEO’s Almanac. You can picture it. Every day looking at the news in 2025 is not far off. Writing a dystopia takes little imagination. Writing for utopia is much harder, meaningful work. The same work of labor organizing. But, I was tired.
Until, I took a work break and decided to go put up some posters in my graduate school’s elevators.
Just the day before, SVA’s president David Rhodes sent out an email to all staff essentially denouncing the prospect of a union. The administration may as well have googled “union-busting templates” and copy/pasted it in.
So, to show some support in contrast – I taped up some simple signs in support of faculty.
Within 2 hours, these signs (amidst a myriad posters that you’d expect on a college campus) had been ripped down.
This properly fired me up. I scrapped my dystopia, took the subway home, and started writing my utopian newspaper.
Inspired by Amazon workers’ use of the Streisand effect in their organizing, where they’ve filmed and released videos of union-busting captive audience meetings, I took this moment to turn the camera back on SVA. I decided to make my newspaper specific to the school and to dream bigger about what support for a faculty union can look like: to visualize it as a reality.
Writing the newspaper pushed me into the playfulness of manifesting. It pushed me to get specific. Shifting from a static, taped-up poster to a transmittable stack of newspapers pushed me get creative about covertness.
This experience perfectly primed me to productively design these Collective Cards and not get caught in the doldrums of dystopia.
The cards are “good vibes” as a staff organizer at Labor Notes recently told me, which “is needed in organizing world.” The feedback mirrors what another organizer enjoyed about organizing gym: “this way is more fun, it’s less stressful.”
My thesis keeps showing me how fun, joy, and connection are nourishment in the hard work of organizing.
What’s Next
Know of an organizing effort that would like to try these out? Let me know!
Bonus Track
A card left unturned, for me, is a gamified version of this deck. Cella Sum, Ph.D. student with the Tech Solidarity Lab, recently shared with me a labor organizing card game that she designed in school with some peers a few years ago. It’s both persuasive and practical. I’m also reminded of the origin story to Monopoly. Did you know it was originally called The Landlord’s Game? Elizabeth Magie developed it in 1903 to illustrate the negative consequences to wealth hoarding. There’s other similar games to explore at Interference Archive. Check them out if you’re ever in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY!
I'll close each newsletter with a recommendation per category:
A book: speaking of graphic design + labor organizing… Our Members Be Unlimited by Sam Wallman
A documentary: Ruthless: Monopoly's Secret History by Stephen Ives
An article: The Case for a Faculty Union at the School of Visual Arts by Anthony Hawley
A social media account: @nice4workers
A podcast: Don’t Let Trump’s Cuts Destroy the Government That Works For You by Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
A training/offering: Secrets of a Successful Organizer by Labor Notes
An org: coworker.org
Current organizing to support as a consumer (student!): SVA Faculty United
If you'd like to chat, share, or give feedback – reply and I’d love to hear from you!
With gratitude,
Erica Fink