One of the comrades from Precarias a la Deriva has a project about precarity in the US. Along the way she plans to visit with people from a number of organizations - bitter ultraleftist that I am I find myself wanting to dis some of them, which isn’t particularly productive. She links to an interesting interview of the Precarias with someone in the US, and another exchange with the same person about conditions here in the US.

Perhaps it’s worth considering formulating a call to circulate, for a network of US folk to exchange thoughts and plans on precarity here, and to formulate some goals. Among those goals I’d like to see the formulation of several provisional maps: Euro-precarity/precaritization for the US observer, Euro-precariat movement(s)/organizations/struggles for the US observer, US-precarity/precaritization for the US observer, and US-precariat movement(s)/organizations/struggles for the US observer. I’d be interested in seeing how similar calls were formulated (in Europe on precarity, and anywhere, including here in the US, on other issues such as noborders) and how the networks were formed.

In any case, I suspect she’d like it if folk would go say hello.

Spectacle Inside the State and Out. Social Rights and the Appropriation of Public Spaces: The Battles of the French Intermittents

Translated by Aileen Derieg based on the German translation by Michael Sander

GlobalProject / Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Ile de France

The strength of a political movement is found not only in its ability to reach a concrete objective. These kinds of successes depend mostly on the economy of power relations. The strength of a movement reveals itself more in its potential for raising new questions and providing new answers. And this much is certain: the battles of the precariously employed French cultural workers have raised new questions demanding new answers.[1]

La inseguridad vencerá. Anti-Precariousness Activism and Mayday Parades 

Gerald Raunig

"We are the precarious, the flexible, the temporary, the mobile. We’re the people that live on a tightrope, in a precarious balance, we’re the restructured and outsourced, those who lack a stable job, and those who are overexploited; those who pay a mortgage or a rent that strangles us. We’re forced to buy and sell our ability to love and care. We’re just like you: contortionists of flexibility."
("Mayday, Mayday! Les precàries i precaris es rebel.len",
Manifiesto convocatoria Barcelona EuroMayDay 004)[1]

Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work

by Precarias a la Deriva

Synopsis: we are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social exposure). But our situations are so diverse, so singular, that it is difficult for us to find common denominators from which to depart or clear differences with which to mutually enrich ourselves. It is complicated for us to express ourselves, to define ourselves from the common ground of precariousness: a precariousness which can do without a clear collective identity in which to simplify and defend itself, but in which some kind of coming together is urgent. We need to communicate the lack and the excess of our work and life situations in order to escape the neoliberal fragmentation that separates, debilitates and turns us into victims of fear, exploitation, or the egotism of ‘each one for herself.’ Above all, we want to enable the collective construction of other life possibilities through the construction of a shared and creative struggle.
-From the invitation to participate in the first derive, October 2002.

MAYDAY MAYDAY! euro flex workers, time to get a move on!

Alex Foti

__Synopsis of previous conflict episodes__

Since 2001, a network of Italian, French and Catalan media hacktivists, rank-and-file unions, self-run and squatted youth centers, critical mass bikers, radical networks, student groups, labor collectives, immigrants’ associations, assorted communists, greens, anarchists, gays and feminists have given life to the MayDay Parade taking place in the afternoon of 1 May in the center of Milan, Italy. Milan MayDay has steadily grown in participation and meaning from 5,000 people in 2001 to 50,000 people in 2003. MayDay 2004 mobilizations of precari@s in Milano and Barcelona saw 100,000 demonstrators parading for organizing and social rights as a way out of generalized precarity. MayDay has proved to be a horizontal method of cross-networking the Genoa movement with the radical sections of unionism - thereby enabling an alliance between two generations of conflict based on subvertising, picketing, organizing and the proliferation of multiple methods of action. MayDay has also triggered multifarious urban actions and labor conflicts in the Milano metropolitan area and, soon after, across the rest of Italy - mobilizing young temps, partimers, freelance and contract workers, researchers and teachers, service and knowledge workers.

I like some of this and disagree with some of it strongly. I’ll be commenting on it soon-ish, I need time for non-blogdimensional pursuits as well as some research for my respone. 

An antibushist future for Europe: DEMORADICAL VS DEMOLIBERAL REGULATION
By Alex Foti

The answer to the party form conundrum seemed, for a while, to lie in the network. Now it looks like the network is being shoe-horned back into the party form. Here Alex Foti, former organiser of the ChainWorkers, advocates a pink, green and wobbly extension of the mayday network into a card-carrying transeuropean syndicate whose methods are majoritarian and vote-based and whose target is the production of a radical constitution for the EU formulated from below. Seems like the idea of a socialist supra-national state has never been so popular.
(more…)

The following text from Fassanito Network about "Movements and Struggles of Migration in and around Europe" was written for and distributed at the 4th European Social Forum (ESF), which took place between 4th and 7th of Mai in Athens/Greece and when migration became the first time an own thematic axis inside the ESF. (more…)

Even Without a Union, Florida Wal-Mart Workers Use Collective Action to Enforce Rights

by Nick Robinson

January 2006

Workers at Wal-Mart  and other big-box retail chains—like workers in any mostly nonunion industry with low pay and tense, dreary working conditions—are generally a disgruntled lot. In central Florida, Wal-Mart workers are fighting and sometimes winning campaigns using collective action to solve both shop floor and larger industry-wide problems. 

The Starbucks organizing drive is something to continue to pay attention to. Starbucks workers fit under the term ‘precarity’ as it’s used in some locations, and an interview with someone from the Starbucks campaign featured in the Greenpepper issue on Precarity. Web resources for the campaign include:

The Starbucks Union website. 

IWW web site’s news about the campaign. 

I also want to start collecting media about this campaign.  

11 Precarious Ideas for a Biopolitical Sindicalism

00. Introduction

To speak of precarious labor is to speak, to begin with, of half the workers in Argentina: those who work in the black economy. To continue, it is to speak of the multitudes of un- and undermployed who, despite working outside the wage relation, also produce a type of wealth which, in many cases, is directly linked to the survival of hundreds of thousands of people. To those must be added those who work under the so-called "garbage contract". Contracts for services, temporary, without recognition of minimum labor rights. Neither holidays nor vacations nor sick days. To those must be added, in addition, a multiple variety of grantees, volunteers, etc.

This is the precariat. The workers not recognized as such by outmoded conceptions that assign the condition of worker based on a type of contractual relation that is increasingly exceptional. Workers invisible to the State which does not recognize their rights and also to the majority of the unions, which do not permit them to affiliate or participate for themselves. This is the precariat today: the vast majority of the class that lives from its labor.

The precarization of labor, the permanent instability of the conditions of life profoundly alters the very notion of project of life in young workers. Our parents had project of life with contents distinct from those of our grand parents. The conditions of life for the one and for the other were distinct, but in both cases these conditions were relatively stable. For our generation it is not a matter of elaborating distinct contents but rather of reinventing the very notion of project of life. How to project when instability becomes a starting point? In what way can singular and collective trajectories be constructed that avoid remaining subject to dispersion and the aleatority of market flows? To reinvent the notion of project is a task that connects immediately with the task of reinventing the spaces of collective organization that allow us to materialize said projects.

What is sindicalism or what could sindicalism be after precarity? What type of transformations in its organization, in its dynamic and its modes of action would produce a union that wanted to stop neglecting the most significant portion of the present workforce? *1

This writing attempts to propose some precarious ideas, tools, and hypotheses that contribute to the labor of reinvention and relaunching that the worker organizations most committed to social change are attempting to carry forward. It is a matter above all else of a set of sketchs, fragments, or clues that will have value in as much as they are able to stimulate the collective process of debate and thought.
(more…)