# 12: you can't eat solidarity
Things – imagine we’re gesturing at the world as a whole here – are tough at the moment, and our cooperative has not been spared from the global strife. As any freelancer undoubtedly knows, paid work is fast becoming an endangered species. As for regular, well-paid work on reasonable terms? Serious risk of extinction.
In many ways this is what we were born to confront. We didn’t start as a paid-up cooperative, but as a collective of translators providing professional-standard services to folks who couldn’t afford them, doing what we do outside of capitalist market logic without resorting to a simplistic, exploitative volunteer model. The point of our pro-bono Lovework is that we have control over it – one member has likened it to Julia Roberts’ “I say when, I say who” stance in Pretty Woman – and that we pay ourselves for it with money reserved from our professional agency work. It’s a way to enact transformative solidarity instead of charity, and to follow a model that others can follow.
Over the years, the vocational side of Guerrilla Media Collective has been misunderstood in some very creative ways: emails that praise our Lovework output, ask about our “services” and then go mute when sent a price quote; meetings and conversations about “exciting new ventures” that turn out to be thinly veiled vanity projects propped up by indefinitely deferred payment schemes; ambitious projects with “limited financial resources” that are only sheepishly revealed after a lengthy back and forth.
What this often amounts to is the leftist equivalent of being “paid in exposure”. Where a creative might be offered meagre (or nonexistent) payment that’s compensated by getting their name on a high-profile project, we’re often offered something similar; little to no money, balanced out by the warm, fuzzy promise of being on the side of the angels. What’s often on the table, whether explicitly or not, is being “paid in solidarity”.
But here’s the thing: you can’t eat solidarity.
So much of the translation industry, especially in progressive spaces, is already propped up by volunteers. And a lot of them do genuinely good work: Open Democracy and Progressive International both rely on volunteers for much-needed translations of their articles, and we don’t begrudge this. They don’t hide it, and there are clearly a lot of people willing to pitch in with no illusions as to what they’re getting into. These outlets also face serious financial constraints, as getting reliable funding for genuinely progressive media (“progressive” meaning it clears the low bar of actively opposing war and genocide) is all but impossible.
But if this becomes the dominant option, it sets a precedent for an industry built solely on good deeds instead of money. It depends entirely on people giving up their available time and skills, and it is fast becoming the norm.
More broadly, the prevalence of volunteerism in translation also puts further pressure on the sector by “deprofessionalising” large sections of it. Things have become bad enough with AI depreciating already stagnant rates, but the expectation of volunteer work or token rates devalues it even further. Good, carefully crafted translation has become – in the eyes of many people – a hobby, a favour, an add-on to a person’s paid work that they do to help out.
The future of translation can’t just be a choice between AI-powered post-editing exploitation and outsourcing to an army of unpaid volunteers. We know the problems with the former all too well, but to explain the latter we can turn to Mona Baker, who has written extensively on volunteer translation. She highlights how translation, “even when well intentioned, can be exploitative, manipulative, and can reinforce rather than challenge structures of power”. Translators sit at a cultural bottleneck – and if it’s only done by those with the time, energy or financial resources to do it for free or for symbolic payment, knowledge as a whole suffers.
We’ll end on a very important caveat: loads of the projects and people that contact us have genuinely fascinating, exciting goals, and are hamstrung by the demands of the capitalist system. There’s a whole world of people who want to do something meaningful, constructive, and enact real solidarity without getting into debt or bankrupting themselves, and they want to do it with likeminded folks. We’re very fortunate that many of our paying clients fit this description, and we’re immensely proud of the work we do with them, but we also actively, enthusiastically explore and build relationships that have no financial component whatsoever.
The point we’re making in this article is definitely not “leave us alone”, but rather a call for people to reflect on what they’re actually asking for when they reach out within the social and solidarity economy.
What we are today is first and foremost a business. One with a care-centred governance model, radically compensated pro-bono work and a very clearly defined set of principles, but a business nonetheless, with all the associated invoices, payslips and tax returns. When the glorious future of universal basic income finally arrives, we’ll switch to volunteer work. But until then we, like all other workers, need to survive.