The Global Staffroom is a live podcast hosted by Manual Labours (Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope) involving conversations and interviews with people about what it feels like to care, be cared for, not be able to care at work. What does ‘staff room’ mean to you? We are hoping the Global Staff Room will, over time, be a space to connect people from different workforces and geographies and that members can air their experiences and concerns with each other. We want to explore issues such as the architecture of home-work, racialised experiences of lockdown, emotional labour of care and health workers, social reproduction and remote working.

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The Global Staffroom’s discussion on questions of social reproduction and care at work within this current moment of COVID 19 are questions intersected with structural injustice. Racism is a Public Health Crisis.

The pandemic only serves to further expose the already and ongoing inequality, exploitation and violence that upholds capitalism and the reproduction of hostile, oppressive workplaces and working conditions. Learning from our discussions with guests here, we hope to learn how we are implicated in re-enforcing these structures and importantly find ways to work against and collectively dismantle them.

In our last issue of Manual Labours we drew on the words of Audre Lorde: “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

The Global Staffroom builds on Manual Labours Manual Building as Body in which the social reproduction of the institution was the site of most concern and struggle in which care and maintenance of the worker and between workers was overlooked and unsupported. Conversations around social reproduction at work were expanded upon within a series of workshops with workers without a staffroom or workplace. Questions of our extended reproductive systems led us to think about how can we connect up with a Global Staffroom of workers upon which our work depends on.

The Global Staffroom launches on Monday 20 April, 12noon BST via Twitch.tv and will broadcast every Monday at 12 noon during the Summer term 2020.

Join us in the staffroom by clicking on the above link and listening in, commenting in the chatroom or emailing us on manual.labours@gmail.com