A Callcenter In London - A Montage

Marion Hamm

"Precarisation" is what the mobilisations for EuroMayday¹ and many publications² about the issue of precarity come up with in their search for a missing link between very different life situations in neoliberalised Empire – and maybe even a basis for a shared, radical consciousness. The picture emerging from writings about cognitariat and migration, from the struggles of the US-based "Justice for Janitors" campaign and the intermittents in France, from the intoxicating demonstrations³ of the EuroMayday Parades and their connectedness with mobilisations for migrant rights, seems to lend justification to the more theoretical reflections.

Working Lives: Re-looking the Call Center Industry in Delhi

Iram Ghufran and Taha Mehmood

NOIDA, Sector 58[1]
15th September 2002
5:58:30 PM

It is late evening. The sun has not yet set but the halogen streetlights are on, casting a warm yellow glow on the street. He is standing amidst the steady stream of well-dressed individuals entering and leaving the office building. The street is bustling with activity as official cabs roll in every couple of minutes bringing the agents to work. Young men and women hang around snack carts to grab that last bite before the shift begins. Workers in about ten multistoried, international call centers in the area are getting ready to go "live".

The Age of Uncertainty

Oleg Kireev

The new year came to Russia along with the mass protests uncomparably stronger than anything we have seen since very 1993. An immediate reason was a Summer Duma decision about what had been called "monetarization of privileges" (or "benefits") - i.e. conversion of privileges concerning free medicine, transport etc. into money. According to the former Soviet order, many social groups did have certain kinds of privileges, but here they were mostly those of pensioners - i.e. of an extremely disregarded and disadapted group of a society. The trick about the privileges was that they got monetarized (a word everyone had learnt since these months), converted into money in such a way which was quite close to cancelling them; for an example, a free medicine was equalized to approximately 1.000 rubles (28 EUR) monthly. When the law was passing, there were already some protests, but not that much. While it was only a paper, people waited. But at January, 1 they started to demand payment from old people in the public transport, and the rage grew. Moreover: in a small unnoticeable line of the bill it was added that these are local authorities who are responsible for the payments, what meant full devastation: local authorities are ever off money, with quite few exceptions (like Moscow). In reality that all meant: first, cancelling of privileges for all country; second, saving some rest of privilieges for Moscow, the richest and the most explosive city, thus deepening the gap between capital and province. The humiliation was even harder because quite many of pensioners are World War II veterans who live last years of their life. But from the other side, these pensioners are more socially involved and engaged, because they keep a socially constructive spirit of socialism (whatever to think about it), and that was proven many times by their participation in the Red opposition.

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]

Precarious Residence. The Universal Embassy as a site of social production

Translated by Lisa Rosenblatt

Stefan Nowotny

Brussels, Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt: a long stretch on the periphery of the European capital, forming a section of the connection between one of the most stylish shopping districts in Brussels and the noble suburbs to the south of the city. Here, away from the city center, and also away from the European quarter and its immigrés de luxe, is a row of embassies and ambassadorial residencies, classical sites of international diplomacy and representation. One of these villas, lined up side by side, housed the Somali embassy until 1991. Today, due to Somalia’s civil war and the lack of an internationally recognized government, the embassy has lost its function. Whatever might be happening in "Somalia" and whatever the affairs of "Somalis" might be anywhere in the world, for the time being, this can no longer be represented within the framework of an international representational model based on the idea and practice of national delegates.  The fading photographs of Somali politicians hanging on the walls in the interior of the abandoned embassy, the maps, on which the lost integrity of a territory is recorded, are the mute witnesses to this impossibility. 

Fuzzy Production Logics. Experience and Reflection in the Laboratory of Insecurity

Translated by Aileen Derieg

Klaus Neundlinger

Since the 1970s a topos relating to the economic and political situation of Italy has enjoyed particular popularity: this has to do with a laboratory, a field of experimentation for the most different forces, interests and currents. The particular diversity of protest forms and differentiations of the non-parliamentary public sphere from the late 1960s to the turning point of 1977 seems to be especially susceptible to sparking romantic notions with respect to the strength of a "counter-power", a constitutive movement that does not allow itself to be coopted by representative structures.

Info-Labour and Precarisation

Franco Berardi Bifo

Translated by Erik Empson

"We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibility that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment."
(W. Gibson: Pattern recognition, tr. It. L’accademia dei sogni)

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.