On 20 July 2003, Tony Benn was being driven to Dorset for a festival. In the car with him was Eva Dunn, a union organiser in the sex industry. Later that night, Benn wrote in his diary: ‘I have to brace myself for the idea that sex workers are organised.’ It was a strange comment, given Benn should have been no stranger to organised sex workers. Some twenty years earlier, Tony and Caroline Benn had visited London’s Church of the Holy Cross, at the time occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes, campaigning against dangerous conditions and punitive policing. Then again, perhaps Benn’s need to steel himself was not all that surprising. It could be said that many on the left have historically had to brace themselves, too, upon encountering this seemingly surprising truth: sex work is a labour like any other, and many of its labourers are organised.

Emphasising this fact is one of the achievements of ‘Hard Graft,’ showing at London’s Wellcome Collection until April 2025. The show, which explores a whole range of ‘hidden’ labours and their impacts on the body, makes forceful interventions on multiple fronts. Most obviously, it is a challenge to the Wellcome Collection’s own conservative history. In November 2022, the institution made headline news with the permanent closure of ‘Medicine Man,’ a permanent display which, the institution itself now suggested ‘still perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language.’ ‘Hard Graft’ has been seen by several reviewers as an explicit attempt to atone for those sins, a perhaps ironic formulation given the role that religion plays in the show.

But a less obvious — though just as vital — intervention regards discourse around work by the left itself, particularly in Britain. ‘Hard Graft’ aims to ‘explore experiences of physical work and its impacts on health and the body,’ but curator Cindy Sissokho has largely omitted subjects that might traditionally come to mind in such discussions (there is little mention of British industry, for one.) Organised around the spaces of the plantation, the street and the home, ‘Hard Graft’ focuses predominantly on slavery, sex work, and domestic labour.

The discomfort glimpsed in Benn’s diaries feels especially relevant given what feels like the centre point of the show: a new commission by Lindsey Mendick, the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement, and Rainbow Milk author and LRB contributor Mendez. ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’ takes the form of a church, an attempt to ‘reclaim the church as a sanctuary for the stories and the histories of sex workers.’ Harnessing the gauche aesthetics of Catholicism to great effect, stained-glass windows play on the centrality of maternity, and ‘WORKERS / WORKERS / WORKERS’ blasts in pink LED lettering. Kitsch money boxes occupy the pews, reflecting twin histories of oppression and resistance.

The occupation of the Church of the Holy Cross took place 42 years ago this month, but ‘Hard Graft’ is a reminder that these fights are far from consigned to history. Most recently the collective has focused on sex workers’ rights to work in groups, something long denied in the UK, despite broad recognition that this would allow for safer practices. ‘NOBODY FUCKS PROSTITUTES MORE THAN THE GOVERNMENT,’ reads an ECP poster on display. Sex work is yet to be fully decriminalised in Britain, and though collaboration between sex workers and trade unions is increasing, the question of decriminalisation remains a fierce dividing line for some.

All of this speaks to the broader issue asked by ‘Hard Graft’: which labours are deemed worthy of our attention? Not all labouring bodies are treated equally, even by those advocating for their rights. In her 1984 Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell wrote of those that have received the most attention: ‘The miner’s body is loved in the literature of men.’ It is possible she was thinking of George Orwell in particular (‘It’s only when you see miners down the mine and naked,’ mused the former Tribune literary editor in The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘that you realise what splendid men they are’) but the bias she identifies, inflected by gender and race, is visible throughout 20th-century left-wing culture. Where, in that canon, might we find lyrical descriptions of arthritis-ridden hands, such as those of the Black cleaners who fought for their rights, on strike from the Ibis Hotel Batignolles from 2019-2021? They are inserted by ‘Hard Graft,’ beautifully photographed by Louise Rocabert. Rocabert’s images celebrate the struggle without ignoring its often dull bodily toll. In one of the images, a worker named Mariam clenches her fists, her arms heroically outstretched towards the camera. It is an image of charismatic victory, but one that has come at a pragmatic cost. Another image, part of the same display, takes the subtitle ‘tendinitis’ — repetitive strain is awarded a monument in the gallery space. Romanticisation ought to be avoided, but there is a difference between it and the affordance of dignity and grace.

It is this affordance of dignity and grace that the work gathered together in ‘Hard Graft’ manages so well. Two further examples stand out: Shannon Alonzo’s ‘Washerwoman’ (2018) and Kelly O’Brien’s ‘No Rest for the Wicked’ (2022-ongoing). Both prioritise the strength of the bodies they depict, but not at the expense of exposing the toll taken on them. The resin that covers the body of ‘Washerwoman’ leaves a constantly visible slickness, highlighting gnarly, veined skin. This is partly a reminder of stains that cannot be removed, but it also renders the whole piece in a strangely glittering finish. Under the exhibition lights, the body of the Jamaican washerwoman almost glows: it is impossible to miss her.

Directly opposite, O’Brien’s work is a homage to her immediate family history. Some of her images confront the absurd invisibility of cleaning work: the pink mop becomes a head; work boots are literally weighed down with bricks. In others, though, it is a consciously soft power that comes to the fore: a lacy white bra-fastening, straining against imperfect skin, or a cigarette poised at the end of a fleshy arm. The latter is a quiet riposte to J. Howard Miller ‘s wartime ‘We Can Do It!’ poster and the manifold liberal feminisms that have followed since. These images have all too often been used to champion only particular kinds of permissibly feminised strength, promising that you too can ‘have it all.’ O’Brien’s photographs give the impression that these women certainly don’t, materially speaking, have it all, and have therefore been forced to forge their own iconography, their own ways of articulating beauty and strength.

‘Hard Graft’ forces casual visitors to, perhaps, like Benn, brace themselves but then get quickly up to speed. Afterwards, I walked home via King’s Cross, where ‘Thatcher’s Girls’ came to earn a living in the 1980s, and where the 1982 occupation took place. Gentrification might have brought an end to its reputation as a red-light district, but many still work away, earning a living there, struggling to make ends meet however they can in one of the most unequal cities in the world. That this exhibition might encourage its visitors to head down the Euston Road and see that the struggles depicted within the gallery walls are not curious histories, but the stories of living bodies making their own demands of solidarity, is the best compliment it might be given.