This tuesday is a collaborative effort of dozens of groups collaborating on a transnational platform around the struggles of migrant and contingent workers from different parts of the world. Before starting this website all participating groups were asked to present their goals, backgrounds, and activities. These articles have been collected in a book that is permanently updated and under construction.
AMRC is an independent NGO, which focuses on Asian and Pacific labour concerns. The Centre provides information, research, publishing, training, labour networking and related services to trade unions, pro-labour groups, and other development NGOs in the region. AMRC’s main goal is to support democratic and independent labour movements in Asia and the Pacific. In order to achieve this goal, AMRC upholds the principles of workers’ empowerment and gender consciousness, and follows a participatory framework.
We believe that the following conditions will help workers to become truly empowered:
Workers must have access to information, tools, and skills, as well as opportunities for the exchange of experiences and ideas.
Men and women must work together as equal partners.
The international solidarity of workers must be strengthened.
Workers’ perspectives and alternatives must be articulated and translated into action; including education and training programmes, campaigns, and other organising strategies.
Core labour standards must be a priority: freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining; the elimination of forced labour; abolition of child labour; and abolition of discrimination at work. Labour - particularly women, temporary, migrant, home-workers and casual workers - must not suffer any form of discrimination.
AMRC’s Position and Identity
AMRC is a regional organisation serving Asian labour by providing support, networking and intermediary functions to reinforce and facilitate workers’ effectiveness in labour advocacy. Being an intermediate body and not a mass-based nor a frontline organisation, AMRC has been able to provide services to the following:
Grassroots NGOs concerned with women workers, labour issues, and development activists within the labour movement;
Labour organisations specialising in areas such as education and training, health and safety, and labour rights;
NGOs in developed countries and international organisations concerned with labour rights and labour standards in Asia;
Organisations requesting information on specific countries or industries for the purpose of raising public awareness of labour issues in Asia; and
NGOs seeking North-South or South-South collaboration in research projects, monitoring, information exchange, and the analysis and sharing of experiences on organising.
AMRC is involved in the following areas:
AMRC focuses on the following 5 themes both thematic and geographical. They are as follows:
Asian Trans-National Corporations Project
Although consumer-based campaigns brought some positive contributions to the improvement of working conditions in sweatshops in Asia, we believe that the empowerment of workers eventually guarantees sustainability in improving workers’ living conditions. Focus on Asian Transnational Corporations is important because it is in the ATNCs where workers are employed and attempt to organise themselves. AMRC’s ATNC monitoring is designed to compensate workers’ self-organisation by working with workers through our interactive research, education and training, publication and actions. To do so, AMRC is working together with 9 labour organisations in 8 different countries in Asia while our 5 sub-regional researchers in East, South, South East, China and Central America are collecting wide range of information about the activity of ATNCs. http://daga.dhs.org/atnc/blog/index.htm
Labour Law
This project focuses on the emerging labour trends in the Asia Pacific region in the wake of new neo liberal policies adapted by almost all Asian countries. AMRC brings out a regular publication on the Labour Laws in the Asia Pacific Region and its effect on the working class in the region. AMRC organizes various workshops on labour laws and its implementation for the betterment of the workers.
Occupational Health and Safety
This programme is aimed to address the serious occupational health and safety concerns in the Asia Pacific region. The programme has a two fold approach; at one level we focus on elimination or reduction of the hazard at the workplace and on the other hand we focus on the problems that occupational accident and disease victims face and the means to address those problems. Our activities include research, training, campaigns and publications and our target group includes trade unions, labour NGOs and other workers or victims’ groups. We believe that effective participation of workers at all levels in any OHS programme is the key to its success.
China
This is a geographic project and focuses on various important labour issues inside China. This project consists of all other themes viz ATNC, OHS and labour law. Besides these themes China project also focuses on migrant workers, laid off workers and sex workers. The working strategy includes research, training, networking, campaign and publications.
Asian Labour Update
ALU is a quarterly newsletter which examines labour issues and current events in the Asia-Pacific region from workers' perspectives. It provides information and analysis of issues and stories that are not covered thoroughly by the mainstream media. Sources for articles are workers' organisations: national, regional, and international labour groups and trade unions; academics; and development organisations.
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Background Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA) in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles was founded in March of 1992. In the beginning, KIWA focused on Korean immigrant workers. However, with the increase of the Latino population within Koreatown and the increase of Latino immigrants working for Korean businesses, such as in the Korean restaurant and supermarket industries, KIWA has changed to organize both Latino workers and Korean workers.
Through its work, KIWA has recognized the importance of immigrant workers struggling together in solidarity in order to overcome their present day situation, regardless of race and country of origin. Based on past experience while working in Los Angeles, KIWA has addressed the need to help link the lives and experiences of Asian workers and Latin American workers.
In past years, various labor organizations and workers from Latin America and Korea have contacted the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA) requesting participation in international solidarity work. They hoped KIWA could play the role of a bridge between Latin American workers and the workers in transnational corporations in Korea. Because KIWA is based in the US, working with Latino workers and Korean workers and linking with Korean NGOs. KIWA has helped for campaigning Kukdong, ChoShin and Poongkuk which are owned by Koreans and produced for the US market in Latin America.
Therefore KIWA has formed a new committee named Asia - Latin America Workers Solidarity Committee . With the Asian Latin America Workers Solidarity Committee (ALAWS), KIWA aims to proactively work toward much needed international solidarity between workers of Latin America, the US, and Asia, especially South Korea. The ALAWS aims to build a bridge between the struggles of workers in the US, Asian and Latin America and to mitigate the negative consequences of globalization on workers.
Urgent need to develop Asia-Latin America Workers Solidarity Project
Various plans and programs of Free Trade Agreement (FTA) such as North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and US- Chile Free Trade Agreement, have affected lives of workers as well as many others in the US and Latin America. Besides the FTAs relating to Latin America, other FTAs such as Central America Free Trade Agreement(CAFTA), Free Trade Agreement in America(FTAA) and Puebla Panama Plan have been the topic of ongoing discussions. Because of these agreements, not only the US capital but also Asian capital will shift more in Latin America, and as a result, global division of labor and production will be more intensified for the US market and US brands.
As the global chain intensifies, it is necessary to develop new strategies for workers rights, and global workers solidarity . Cases involving Kukdong and Choshin were idea examples global solidarity, targeting retail companies, manufacturers, sub-contractors, and local authorities simultaneously to achieve recognition for trade unions and collective bargaining.
Through globalization, global production chain(value chain) has become a common trend especially within the manufacturing sector. Consequently, various free trade agreements have strengthen global division of labor. Due to the geographical location to the US, Mexico and Central America, many factories, known as "maquiladoras" have been operating for the markets in US and other regions worldwide.
Main reason for Asian capital participation is a result of low capital and labor intensive industry such as garment and textile in Mexico and Central America. East Asian capital (particularly from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong) has played a leading role in operating maquiladoras. For example, Taiwanese capital makes up a major part of Nicaraguan industrial parks and Korean capital makes up huge portions in Guatemalan and Honduran industrial parks. As for Guatemala, all the maquiladoras are in textile and apparel industry. Among total maquiladoras, over 50% are owned by Koreans.
Asian-owned Transnational Corporations(TNCs) make up a significant amount of the capital invested in Latin America, with hundreds of Asian TNCs employing thousands of workers.As companies and corporations become increasingly transnational in scope, it is imperative that workers' movements expand organizing efforts to cross borders and continents.
Consequently, it is urgent to conduct solidarity activity between the workers of capital sending and receiving countries with a pro-workers' perspective. Although a few NGOs in Japan and Korea are actively involved in monitoring and surveying their own TNCs in other countries, these programs are very limited. Therefore, as in the case of Korea, most monitoring and surveys take place only when labor disputes occur, and even then most surveys concentrate only on the small TNCs where the worst working conditions exist.
The ALAWS Programs
Currently, Asian workers have nearly no interest in workers out side of Asia although such anti-neo liberalization requires the solidarity of workers beyond the region or continent. Therefore, Asia- Latin America Workers Solidarity Committee will serve to help Asian Workers including Korean workers understand the situation of Latin America and workers in this region.
And ALAWS will serve the labor movement in Asia and the labor movement of Latin America by building a relationship between Latin American workers and Asian workers. Uniting workers movements in Asian and Latin America will empower workers to challenge the corporations that exploit them.
ALAWS will contribute to worker awareness and organizing efforts by:
Organizing
Initial Coalition Building : collaborate our efforts with local organizations in the US, Asia and Latin America who have traditionally been actively working on globalization issue or workers' rights issue.
Internet-bulletin board : participation and communication tool for members of ALAWS members worldwide.
Building relationships between workers in Latin America and Asia.
Reporting and Publication
Publication of quarterly booklets to deliver general information or any recent developments in Latin America to Asian labor groups.
Monthly E-newsletter to inform activities of ALAWS to individuals and organizations that are interested in ALAWS.
Document the stories and experiences of workers in Korean -owned maquiladoras.
Reporting and publicizing Research findings to workers in Asia
Research
Researching and monitoring the global development of Korean TNCs in Latin America.
Researching current labor practices of Korean or Asian TNCs in Latin America and the struggles of Latin American workers against these corporations.
Campaign
Organizing campaign for currently demanded solidarity.
Asia-Latin America Workers Solidarity 3465 W. 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90005 Tel. 1-213-738-9050 / Fax. 1-213-738-9919 / alaws@kiwa.org
Co/scienze Politiche Migrants’ Group was born in September 2001 as an attempt to bring inside Bologna University migrants’ fight against what still was the Bossi Fini immigration law project.
Our work started as a collective analysis of that law project, to involve in its comprehension that new generation walking in the streets of Genoa during the days against G8, on July 2001. Trough that work, we came to consider the Bossi Fini law as a political attempt to manage immigrant labour force in Italy, and we try to show its strict connection with the “white book†on labour market promote in that period by Italian minister of welfare. Considering migrations not only as a “necessity†determined by poverty, hunger or war, but as an autonomous social movement, an thus considering migrants not as a sick subject needful of assistance, but as a potential strong political subject under the light of their centrality in the process of fragmentation and “precarization†of labour in Italy as in all Europe, we started to think about a political practice coherently with that political position.
On the field of practical intervention and political organization, the problem was consequently how to give to migrants voice the possibility of take political word in a public space where “their†instance were at the same time the common field of fight for every worker is now involved in that process of precarization in which the Bossi Fini law have had, and still have, a central role.
That’s why the Group chose the practice of a militant inquiry (conricerca) with migrant workers in the province of Bologna: it has been a way for understanding the plurality of subjective experiences and conditions and to give start to a political subjectivation process inside an interactive relation between the two subjects involved in the inquiry. Then, it gave us the possibility of build up a communication network between the subjects inquired, starting from the common instances emerged from individual interviews. The second step, now operative, is to make active a political communication between migrants and italian workers, in the perspective of a common fight against the exploitation to which both them are forced. As an important result of this activity, on 2003 October 24, during the general strike organized by the unions, a group of migrants and Italian workers we putted into communication subscribed a document in which they denounced how the attack to pension system under which Italian workers now find themselves started two years ago with the Bossi Fini immigration law.
A political project that is today trying to show the big contradictions inside the so called “cooperative production systemâ€, whose social attempt is in facts the mask under which in the last twenty years the worst experimentation of that process of flexibilization and precarization of labour took place, and inside which migrant labour force is today involved for most, in Bologna province.
During these years, we always have tried to give our contribution to the political initiative of the whole social forum movement in Bologna, and of the Tavolo Migranti of Italian Social Forum. On the field of militant inquiry, the no-border camp organized in Italy during last summer has been an important moment to start a debate about the possibility of using that political practice to build up a transnational political network in which even seasonal migrant workers can be involved.
We think it should be one way to show how the political centrality of migrant work has today a real European and global scale, and to put into communication migrants all over the production frontiers.
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1986 to advance the human and civil rights of immigrants and refugees in Los Angeles. As a multiethnic coalition of community organizations and individuals, CHIRLA aims to foster greater understanding of the issues that affect immigrant communities, provide a neutral forum for discussion, and unite immigrant groups to more effectively advocate for positive change.To further increase these goals, CHIRLA:
- Educates community members about issues that affect immigrants and refugees.
- Organizes immigrants around important social issues.
- Provides legal representation and support network for immigrants and refugees.
- Participates in national, state, and local advocacy to inform public policy on topics that impact immigrant welfare.
- Implements an extensive referral system.
- Works to improve race and ethnic human relations in Los Angeles and other areas throughout Southern California.
- Provides extensive referral services via it's bilingual hotline to the immigrant community, service providers and community leaders.
CHIRLA’s History:
CHIRLA was formed in 1986 in response to the Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). It was an effort to (1) get as many people as possible through the amnesty program established by IRCA and (2) monitor and document post-IRCA discrimination. It was originally housed in the United Way building at 621 South Virgil Avenue and was staffed solely by volunteers. United Way donated the resources CHIRLA needed to operate. Among the founding organizations were APALC, MALDEF, Dolores Mission, the L.A. Center of Law and Justice, and various legal services organizations.
The newly formed organization consisted of a steering committee and a number of other committees, the chairs of which were members. Monthly general meetings were held to debate issues, take positions, and strategize. Soon enough the steering committee received some funding and hired some staff to work on communications, monitoring the implementation of employer sanctions, and do administrative work. At this point CHIRLA was still running by a steering committee and had no executive director.
Within a few years, however, it became clear that CHIRLA was growing and would need to become independent from United Way. Frank Acosta was hired as the first executive director as the need for more serious fundraising became apparent. Eventually CHIRLA left United Way and received its 501(c)(3) (i.e. non profit) status. This meant that CHIRLA had to form a board of directors, which also meant grappling with the possible shift in power from the member-based steering committee to the legally mandated board. The key was to have a board without losing the coalition dynamic which had guided CHIRLA’s work up to this point.
Meanwhile, committees came and went with the ebb and flow of issues, participation, and other factors. For instance what was once the “Legalization Committee†(and dealt directly with the legalization program under IRCA) became the “Legal Services Committee†and broadened its scope. The Committee on the Undocumented was also created. It was in this committee that CHIRLA was asked on various occasions to help address the problems of the day laborer corners. After attempting and failing to find members or other community based organizations which could take this work on, CHIRLA began what would eventually become the Day Laborer Project. The origins of the Domestic Workers Association and the Sidewalk Vending Coalition were similar. While the Domestic Workers and Day Laborer Project are still housed at CHIRLA, the Sidewalk Vending Coalition is housed in CARECEN, a member organization.
CHIRLA
2533 W. Third St., Ste. 101
Los Angeles, CA 90057
(213) 353-1333
Fax (213) 353-1344
info@chirla.org
Hotline 1-888-624-4752
CHIRLA's hotline provides a bi-lingual Spanish/English information and referral service. The hotline provides information on access to services, immigration, workers rights, and all other types of information pertaining to the immigrant community.
The European Civic Forum (ECF) was established in December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The initiative was taken by members of the European Cooperative Longo Mai
[1] together with a circle of friends in different countries. The main aims were to develop links of friendship and cooperation between people in eastern and western Europe, seek together new forms of social and political action as well as alternative ways of life, in opposition to the all too predictable triumph of neo-liberal free-market capitalism.
The ECF also aimed to pursue the activities of the European Committee for the Defence of Refugees and Immigrants (CEDRI) which had been created in 1982, also at the initiative of Longo Mai. This meant that the ECF also included a strong North-South element, in particular with regard to all matters concerning immigration and asylum.
The ECF is a completely voluntary organisation with no paid staff. It relies solely on the involvement of members of Longo mai and friends concerned by particular fields of activity. It publishes a monthly review, “Archipelâ€, in French and German and also contributes to radio programmes broadcast in French by Radio Zinzine (Forcalquier, south-east France) and in German within the framework of the programme “Europa von unten†broadcast by many German-language radios.
It has concentrated on certain questions, including:
[1]Longo Mai is a movement of agricultural and small-scale industrial cooperatives in Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland and Ukraine.
The temporary association Everyone is an Expert was created in response to the shift in the official immigration-policy in Germany (expressed in March of 2000 by the government's slogan: "we need experts") and recognising an increasing importance of the migrant labour forces for the economic development all over europe, our association started in 2001 as "everyone is an expert" with the focus to redefine and to reclaim the social dimensions of migration.
Coming from different cities and involved in various campaigns from "no one is illegal" and "No Border Camps" during the last years, we are convinced, that a contemporary resistance has to be organised as transnational as possible. We think, that the fights for freedom of movement and the potential of the autonomy of migration on one hand and the struggles for informational self-determination and universal access on the other hand should be seen as driving forces in the process of shaping an emancipative multitude. As freedom of movement and residence attack the differentials and the global hierarchies of the labour market, it undermines the system of borders, which are all borders of exploitation. the circulation of experiences and social struggles in the migrant networks can act as a catalyst for a globalisation from below. As freedom of information and communication attacks intellectual property, licenses and patents, it undermines the global hierarchies of knowledge and puts into question the whole logic of valuation and payment of work. The free associations of net-activism have the potential to break up constructed borders and identities and to cause a transnationalisation of struggles on a daily level. following these positions "borders, migration, work and new medias" have been the main cross-over-topics in our activities and projects during last years:
Some of us participate in the organisation of a conference about precaroiusness in june 2004 in Dortmund, together with labournet/germany. it aims to lead together left wing unionists, antiracist activists and selforganised migrants. and our main project for 2004: we plan an eight-weeks noborder tour along the new eastern outerborders of so called enlarged europe. researching temporary as well as permanent working migration will be a central topic. http://www.expertbase.net/everyoneisanexpert/
This coalition emerged out of the famous "Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride" in 2003, which united nearly one thousand immigrant workers and their allies traveling on buses from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Houston, Miami and Boston and cross the United States over 12 days. The new Freedom Riders traveled some 20,000 miles of U.S. highways and stop at more than 100 cities, towns and workplaces. Met members of Congress in Washington, D.C. traveled to Liberty State Park, overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and finally gathered at Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York for a rally that drew tens of thousands of people.
Just as the Freedom Rides of the early 1960’s exposed the brutality of legal segregation in the South, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride exposed the injustice of current policies toward immigrants. workers work hard, pay taxes, and sacrifice for their families. They work as construction workers, doctors, nurses, janitors, meat packers, chefs, busboys, engineers, farm workers, and soldiers. They care for our children, tend to our elderly, pick and serve our food, build and clean our houses, and want what we all want: a fair shot at a dignified life.
But our broken immigration system keeps millions of hardworking immigrants from becoming full members and enjoying equal rights in this nation of immigrants. As a result, many are subjected to exploitation, separated from loved ones, and unprotected by our laws. The road to citizenship needs a new map. The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride intended to help draw that map.
The destination? Policies that work for immigrants and for all Americans. Policies consistent with our most noble principles and sacred values. Policies that: 1) Reward work by granting legal status to hardworking, taxpaying, law-abiding immigrant workers already established in the United States; 2) Renew our democracy by clearing the path to citizenship and full political participation for our newest Americans; 3) Restore labor protections so that all workers, including immigrant workers, have the right to fair treatment on the job 4) Reunite families in a timely fashion by streamlining our outdated immigration policies; and 5) Respect the civil rights and civil liberties of all so that immigrants are treated equally under the law, the federal government remains subject to checks and balances, and civil rights laws are meaningfully enforced.
We drew our inspiration from the Freedom Riders of the early 1960’s. The original Freedom Riders are American heroes who demonstrated that when ordinary people show extraordinary courage, a movement for sweeping social change can be sparked. We hope to make our contribution by widening and extending the road they traveled so that it includes immigrant workers and their families in the ongoing struggle against exploitation and exclusion, and in support of liberty and justice for all.
Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United), is Oregon’s union of farmworkers, nursery, and reforestation workers, and Oregon’s largest Latino organization. PCUN’s fundamental goal is to empower farmworkers to understand and take action against systematic exploitation and all of its effects. To achieve this end, PCUN is involved in community and workplace organizing on many different levels. Founded in 1985 by 80 farmworkers, PCUN has since grown to include more than 5,000 registered members, 98% of which are Mexican and Central American immigrants, and to encompass a wide variety of organizing projects.
Background information:
PCUN’s office is located in Woodburn, a town of just over 20,000 located in the mid-Willamette Valley, the center of Oregon’s agricultural industry. Woodburn, which evolved during the 1960’s into a service and cultural center for the Valley’s Mexican community, currently has a majority Latino population of just over 50%.
Oregon’s farmworkers:
The fruit and vegetable growers of the Willamette Valley have depended heavily on Mexican labor since the 1940’s. Reforestation and plant nurseries emerged in the 1970’s as major winter occupations, enabling thousands of area farmworkers to remain in Oregon year-round.
Employees in these areas generally work long hours for low wages, with no overtime pay, paid breaks, seniority, job security, or other benefits. Seasonal workers are often housed in squalid labor camps owned and operated by growers or labor contractors. They are exposed to a myriad of chemicals and pesticides sprayed on crops and often lack the proper protective gear and training to apply pesticides. They also lack the right to collective bargaining, which is guaranteed to all other industries under the National Labor Relations Act.
Organizing efforts:
PCUN’s organizing and outreach efforts include workers from the various areas of agriculture, including year-round employees, irrigators, seasonal workers, nursery and reforestation workers, and cannery workers. PCUN’s Collective Bargaining Committee uses various direct organizing tactics, such as visiting fields, distributing leaflets, and holding house meetings and marches, yet PCUN also organizes through its Service Center for Farmworkers, which provides registered members with support services such as translations, recommendations to lawyers for work-related incidents, and immigration services, as well as a death benefit.
Collective bargaining:
Collective bargaining is, in our view, the most effective and lasting way to improve farmworker conditions because it redresses the power imbalance between growers and workers, and establishes respect, fairness and dignity as the bases for the employment relationship. Collective bargaining agreements are negotiated by a committee of workers elected by their peers at the farm, assisted by PCUN staff, and ratified by a vote of the workers.
Key components of these agreements include:
1. a simple and expeditious procedure to submit and resolve grievances;
2. seniority rights in lay-off, recall and promotion;
3. prohibition against retaliation and discipline or discharge without just cause;
4. guaranteed paid breaks and overtime pay;
5. workers’ right to refuse to work in conditions they regard as unsafe or hazardous;
6. paid and unpaid holidays and leaves of absence, including bereavement;
7. workers’ right to information about chemical used in the workplace, and
8. union recognition.
None of these protections or procedures is presently provided by law.
Collaborative efforts:
PCUN also works closely with a wide variety of other local organizations, including the Farmworker Housing Development Corporation, which runs the farmworker housing units in Woodburn, Voz Hispana, which organizes Latino voters and educates community members of the legacy of Cesar Chavez, CAUSA, which advocates for immigrant rights, and Mujeres Luchadoras Progresistas, which promotes economic and leadership development for farmworker women.
On a national level, PCUN collaborates with other organizations to promote legalization for undocumented workers and to ensure immigrants’ rights, and also advocates with the Oregon Legislature to protect farmworkers’ rights through legal means as well. PCUN’s Pesticide project has also involved national and statewide collaboration around issues such as controlling pesticide use and protecting the health of workers.
PCUN has led or been involved in numerous organizing efforts and campaigns since its founding.
Trabajo flexible ¿Es que somos invisibles? Trabajo inmaterial ¡Ay que estrés mental! Trabajo de jornalera ¡Eso es la repera! (Little song by Precarias a la Deriva in the General Strike of 20 June 2002)
THE PICKET-SURVEY
Precarias a la deriva (Precarious women workers adrift) is a collective project of investigation and action. The concerns of the participants in this open project converged the 20th of June 2002, the day of the general strike called by the major unions in Spain. Some of us had already initiated a trajectory of reflection and intervention in questions of the transformations of labor (in groups such as ‘ZeroWork’ and Sex, Lies and Precariousness, or individually), others wished to begin to think through these themes. In the days before the strike we came together to brainstorm an intervention which would reflect our times, aware that the labor strike, as the culminating expression of a process of struggle, was unsatisfactory for us for three reasons:
(1) for not taking up –and this is no novelty- the experience and the unjust division of domestic work and care, almost entirely done by women in the ‘non-productive’ sphere,
(2) for the marginalization to which both the forms of action and the proposals of the strike condemn those in types of work –ever more common- which are generally lumped together as ‘precarious’ and
(3) for not taking into consideration precarious, flexible, invisible or undervalued work, specifically that of women and/or migrants (sexual, domestic, assistance, etc.).
As a friend recently pointed out in the context of the more recent ‘political’ strike against the war (April 10, 2003), “How do we invent new forms of striking when production fragments and dislocates itself, when it is organized in such a way that to stop working for a few hours (or even 24) does not necessarily effect the production process, and when our contract situation is so fragile that striking today means risking the possibility of working tomorrow?â€
We saw that many of these jobs in the margins: the invisible, unregulated, unmoored jobs were in no way interrupted or altered by a strike of this type, and that the precarization of the labor market had extended to such an extent that the majority of working people were not even effected by the new reforms against which the strike was directed. Therefore we tried to think of new forms of living this day of struggle by approaching and confronting these new realities. We decided to transform the classic shut-down picket into a survey-picket. Frankly, we didn’t feel up to upbraiding a precarious worker contracted by the hour in a supermarket or to closing down the little convenience store run by an immigrant because, in the end, despite the many reasons to shut down and protest, who had called this strike? Who were they thinking of? Was there even a minimal interest on the part of the unions for the situation of precarious workers, immigrants, housewives? Did the shut-down stop the productive process of domestic workers, translators, designers, programmers, all those autonomous workers for whom stopping this day would do nothing but duplicate their work the next day?
It seemed more interesting to us, considering the gap between the experience of work and the practice of struggle, to open a space of exchange between some of the women who were working or consuming during that day and with those who were moving in the streets. This small, discreet sketch of an investigation was the starting point for what became the project of the ‘drifts’.
The exchange of that June 20th was fruitful. Not so much for what people told us here and there, or for what we made visible for ourselves and for others, as for the opening we glimpsed, the possibilities for unpredetermined encounters, the pleasure of an unclassifiable dialog, mediated by no apparatus besides the tape-recorder, camera and notepad.
IN THE MARGINS
These and other questions arose, as we have said, from reflections which in one way or another had long been circulating among us. In the first place, we too situate ourselves in the midst of change and continuity in productive processes, we too, in various ways, are faced with a new work context strongly marked by neoliberalism.
A dominant tendency in much neo-Marxist thought points to the emergence of so-called immaterial work (work which is affective, communicative, creative, linguistic, etc…). This work, which has to do with cognitive processes, production of knowledge, languages and links is not, despite what many analyses might suggest, homogenous. It is heavily marked by the social value assigned to the different kinds of work within this category, which is what establishes a difference between giving a hand-job to a client and designing a web-page.
This is important for the debate, especially since all those questions which concern ‘reproduction’ -both in the strict sense, that is, domestic work and care (whether paid or not) and in a broad sense, such as communication, management, socialization, production of well-being, lifestyles, etc. (a formulation which goes beyond the ‘production and reproduction of immediate life’ of Engels)- generally remain in the shadows. In the case of reproductive work in the strict sense, this is often explained away because these jobs are not part of the so-called “hegemonic tendencyâ€, but rather part of what is simply interpreted as the legacy of an historical disequilibrium which establishes a continuity and interrelation between paid and unpaid work, in one’s own house or the house of others, which women do and which, by extension, determine their position in the labor market (or is it the other way around?), as much in terms of the kind of jobs they do (office work, client assistance, nursing and care, etc.) as in terms of the differences in work and salary in general. The emergence of the Third Sector, with the precarized transfer of some women’s reproductive activities to other women, locally but also on a global scale, introduces a new element which we should keep in mind. In the broadest sense -if we accept this distinction between broad and strict senses at all- the reproduction of immediate life as an affective link turns out to be an extremely diffuse field which rapidly gets mixed up with life (“life put to workâ€, “the reappropriation of living timeâ€â€¦) visibilizing the aspects of domination which make life, cooperation, affective relationships, tastes, knowledge and sexuality very slippery terrains whose ‘naturalness’ remain unquestioned.
We see that some of those that participate in the debate on immaterial work are deaf to the question of reproduction and its relationship to patriarchal and racial domination. Facing this reality, we recuperate part of a long tradition of debate within feminism which precisely does elaborate a Marxist idea of reproduction in the broad sense, crossed through by multiple power relations. This orientation coincides with the ideas of Foucault about power and the processes of subjectification, that is to say, about modern forms of domination which to a great extent are not based upon the direct exercise of violence but rather in the active production of submission, an idea which has been amply developed, with different emphases, by thinkers like Butler or Pateman. It coincides also with many of the radical, materialist and psychoanalytic tendencies within feminism, those that give important weight to questions such as the sexual division of work, the control of sexuality, normative heterosexuality or socialization within the family.
The debates on reproduction smattered through the whole decade of the 1970s now have new things to offer which should be brought to light. From them we rescue an analysis of reproduction, of the articulation of capitalism, patriarchy, racial domination, and now more than ever, the history of colonialism, the geographical asymmetries which have produced the inequalities motivating the displacements of populations in the last decades. We also rescue the political thought and practice which thematize the body as a place of expression of domination and exploitation, and we think of the “productive body†or the “production of the (sexed) body†as a continuous process of incarnation of subjectivities which are simultaneously bound and struggling to determine the conditions of their development. We also rescue the feminist theorizing on the public and the private as a form of approaching the continuities and discontinuities between what happens in the realm of relations and homes and what happens in the more socially valued realm of employment, politics and the State. The growing integration of these realms, of employment and personal life, of education and employment, etc., as a historical process which produces differentiations and as a political criticism of the segmentations of modernity seems to us an essential path for investigation.
Second, the studies done on immaterial work, whose homogenization we resist, look at other modes of organizing work which feed upon the very characteristics of the activities which they lump together in the category of the ‘immaterial’; specifically the strategies of neoliberal restructuring, which consist basically in cutting costs in rights and salaries and increasing the strength of command over an ever more fragmented and mobile labor force which presently works under conditions all too well known to women: by commission, with flexible and unpredictable hours, with long days then periods of inactivity without income, by hour, without contract, without rights, freelance, at home, etc. Thus the development of this category has to do with key questions to which we will return later, such as the reordering of time, space, contracts, income and conditions. The consequences of these modalities are known to all (women): isolation and incapacity to organize life “as it should beâ€, stress, exhaustion, social control, impossibility of developing a self-determined social life, of protesting, of “coming out†and of expressing oneself freely in all sorts of questions.
Third, all of this must be linked to other aspects of social life which permit that certain subjects occupy certain positions of disadvantage due to their limited mobility. This is what occurs when one does not have residency papers, or decides to get pregnant, or is a mother or just a woman, or has an “inappropriate/ble†presence, being, for example, transsexual, or non-white, or visibly queer, or physically different, etc… The articulation of all these elements is a constant source of differentiation and hierarchization which causes certain groups to be systematically poorer or to have lesser access to opportunity and choice. The so-called feminization of work thus consists in a ever more wide-spread servility or a generalization of precariousness, produced upon a tremendously irregular topography, reinforcing, reproducing and modifying the social hierarchies already existent within the patriarchy and the racial order inherited from colonialism. It is upon just this background that the changes in family and home structures, the global restructuring of cities and the performances and rhetorics of gender are imprinted.
FROM THE LABORATORIO DE TRABAJADORAS TO THE ‘DRIFTS’
That first picket-survey of June 20th, which was limited though very inspiring, gave way to a new project of interpellation based on displacement, that is to say, the possibility of preparing and carrying out a series of itineraries which would cross through the diverse metropolitan circuits of female precariousness. Thus, against the habitual division of life and work, a division long questioned by feminism, we opted for a research practice that would attend to the spatial/temporal continuum of existence and the experience of the double (or better, multiple) presence as a subjective transposition or, as the Situationists would say, as a technique of uninterrupted passage through diverse physical and psychic environments.
We might have spent more time, seated, situating the theoretical bases of our research, the hypotheses we were dealing out or the feminist perspective from which we departed. But what pushed us on was, above all, the desire to experience the path, to communicate with each other on the road, to meet those new (and not so new) situations and realities of the precarized labor market and of life put to work.
We decided, moreover, that this drifting should be done in the first person, that is, with each one telling the others about herself, and walking together towards a prudent but sustained approximation of the differences between us. We talk, therefore, of seeking common places and, simultaneously, of singularities to strengthen. This approximation has grown through the subsequent debates which have made us modify the initial utterance “we are precarious workers†for others less prone to affirming identity as an original element and more attentive to the processes of (de)identification.
Our situations are so diverse, so partial, that it is very difficult to find common denominators from which to elaborate alliances and irreducible differences with which to mutually enrich ourselves. It is complicated for us to express ourselves, to define ourselves from the common place of precariousness; a precariousness capable of bypassing a clear collective identity through which to simplify and defend itself, but one which demands discussion. We need to communicate the lacks and the excesses of our working and living situations in order to escape from the neoliberal fragmentation which separates and debilitates us, turning us into victims of fear, of exploitation or of the individualism of ‘each one for herself.’ But, above all, we want to make possible the collective construction of other lives through a shared creative struggle. Our insistence upon singularity we owe to our desire to not produce, once again, false homogeneities, without permitting that this insistence prevents us from saying anything at all. We thought, in relation to this, of the specific situation of some companions who are migrants working in domestic service and in the consequences of a link which demands other forms of commitment than those to which some of us are accustomed.
Basically it was a question of producing a cartography of the precarized work of women based on the exchange of experiences, shared reflections and the recording of all that was seen and told in an effort to materialize to the greatest extent possible –through photographs, slides, video, audio recordings and written stories- these encounters in order to communicate the results and the hypothesis which might be derived from them; a question of taking communication seriously not only as a tool for diffusion but also as a new place, a new competence and primary material for the political. Our point of departure: the occupied women’s house La Eskalera Karakola, point of arrival: unknown. It is the transit that interests us now.
THE DRIFTS
The ‘drift’ or derive, is a tactic which some of us had already experienced in other research contexts whose basic source is the Situationists, and which has not always been easy to explain. Nevertheless, the course of events has clarified, bit by bit, the logic of substituting static interviews for journeys through the city. When proposing the ‘drifts’ we particularly emphasized not only passing through the past and present workplaces of our guides but also the possibility of linking the spaces and, once on the road, to see what would come up. Thus we ended up including in our routes streets, houses, businesses, public transportation, supermarkets, bars, shops, union offices, health centers, etc. We opted for the method of the drift as a form of articulating this diffuse network of situations and experiences, producing a subjective cartography of the metropolis through our daily routes.
In the Situationist version of the drift, the investigators wander without any particular destination through the city, permitting that conversations, interactions and urban micro-events guide them. This permits them to establish a psycho-cartography based on the coincidences and correspondences of physical and subjective flows: exposing themselves to the gravitation and repulsion of certain spaces, to the conversations that come up along the way, and, in general, to the way in which the urban and social environments influence exchanges and attitudes. This means wandering attentive to the billboard that assaults you, the bench which attracts, the building which suffocates, the people who come and go. In our particular version, we opt to exchange the arbitrary wandering of the flaneur, so particular to the bourgeois male subject with nothing pressing to do, for a situated drift which would move through the daily spaces of each one of us, while maintaining the tactic’s multisensorial and open character. Thus the drift is converted into a moving interview, crossed through by the collective perception of the environment.
So how do we do a drift? We depart from a few paradigmatic feminized sectors of precarious work. To begin, we chose five:
1) domestic
2) telemarketing
3) manipulators of codes (translators, language teachers)
4) food service (bar, restaurant)
5) health care
and identified other equally important ones for a future phase of the project: prostitution, scholarships/research, advertising, communications, social work and education. The women working in these sectors whom we asked to guide us chose a series of relevant places: their houses, workplaces, supermarkets, the park, the cyber café, the yoga class… and we threaded these spaces together as points on an itinerary loaded with significance, the networks of chance and simultaneity which compose our daily lives. Thus, following an English teacher we were able to connect -through the fortuitous tour one of her students gave us in NCR (a multinational which installs and maintains automatic bank tellers) where she teaches- the reality of the flexible work of our companion within the new factory structure, recomposed according to the demands of the global market.
The drift permits us to take the quotidian as a dimension of the political and as a source of resistances, privileging experience as an epistemological category. Experience, in this sense, is not a preanalytic category but a central notion in understanding the warp of daily events, and, what is more, the ways in which we give meaning to our localized and incarnated quotidian. It is not exactly an observation technique; it does not aspire to ‘reproduce’ or approach daily experience as it habitually occurs (an ideal of classical anthropology which has proved difficult to realize) but rather to produce simultaneous movements of approaching and distancing, visualizing and defamiliarizing, transit and narration. We are interested in the point of view of those that guide us –how they define and experience precariousness, how they organize themselves on a daily basis and what are their vital strategies in the short and the long term, what they hope for- without dismissing, in this process, the dialog and complicity which is produced in our encounter. There is no going back; once you get home from a drift your head keeps buzzing until the next one.
There is uproar among the precarious workers in Turkey. Precarious workers are now practicing some spontaneous actions of struggle, partly isolated from each other. Activists who try to contribute to these struggles and who have some contacts are in search of ways of combining these experiments actions into a united and common melting pot. There is a favorable base in Turkey for uniting the precarious workers who struggle or want to struggle for their basic needs; for achieving common goals; for defining the problem of precarity as a general problem of the society; and for complementing these efforts with the struggle for basic rights and freedoms at regional and national scales.
Turkish Working Class and Precarity
Precarious work has become the main characteristic of employement for a great majority of the Turkish working class. There are 16 million wage earners in Turkey of which 14 million are workers in general; and a 1.5 million of which are public employees. There are only 4.8 million workers who have social security, who are employed in public and private sector; and only 700.000 of them are members of trade unions and have collective agreements. 700.000 public employees are members of newly founded trade unions; but they do not have the right to strike and to have collective bargaining. State is actively involved in shaping various modes of precarious work as a part of the privatization policy. At the moment, there are 50.000 workers who are employed in such types of work but the number is growing fast.
In sum, 65% of the wage earning population of Turkey consist of precarious workers; the majority of the work in industrial production and service sector is done by precarious workers.
90% of the textile industry jobs, which is the main export sector of the Turkish economy, are sweatshop jobs. 80% of the workers employed in these sweatshop companies are unregistered-informal workers.
In the large metal and oil-chemical factories, production processes are sub-divided and each of these sub-divisions are transferred to subcontractor companies. In these sectors there is a massive subordinate industry formed by small and medium business. These small and medium scale firms are generally informal.
Major works of municipal services are too done by subcontractor firms. The workers of these firms are mainly unregistered.
The same situation is relevant in sectors such as scavenging, security and marketing...
Precarity and Trade Union Struggle
From the 1980 coup till today, all attempts of precarious workers for organizing in trade unions were confronted with massive firings. State, LaborAct and the Trade Unions support this policy of the bosses. This has been the main reason of defeats of the precarious workers' struggles who are employed by subcontractor companies. Indeed, the large industrial and service companies and the State prefer to work with subcontractor companies especially for sustaining unorganized working conditions.
The number of unionized workers is decreasing consistently because of the divisions in the production process among the big industrial and service corporations and their transfer to subcontractor companies. There were 2.5 million unionized workers 20 years ago; this number decreased to 1.5 million 5 years ago; and now it is only 700.000.
Big companies forced trade unions to adapt this process with various methods and they were successful.
The first method of this policy is to increase the wage level of unionized workers in the factory while the scale of irregular work increases. In this way, trade unions are protecting their total income; but naturally the number of unionized workers is reduced.
The second method is to buy off the trade union bureaucrats with bribery.
Third method is to use the threat of transfer of production facilities to Eastern Europe, North African and Asian countries if opposition grows against precarisation.
Traditional centre of the trade unions movement did not spend any effort for constructing a counter strategy of struggle and organization against precarity, except DISK (progressive trade union confederation of Turkey,"The Confederation of Revolutionary Workers Trade Unions"). DISK has prepared some programs about precarity but could not implement them because the most effective affiliates of the confederation did not join the implementation.
The Roots of the Precarious Workers' Struggle
Efforts to organize precarious workers developed from several channels.
First of these efforts were the attempt of the socialist activists of the trade unions. These attempts are performed especially in textile, metal, petrochemistry, printing, transportation, dock, and health sectors. But only a few of them were partly successful. But, a special action network emerged between the activists who tried to unionize precarious workers.
The second channel was formed by the initiatives deriving from the public employee's movement that emerged in the 1990's. These initiatives are still developing mainly in distribution of energy, health and education sector.
a- Firstly, distribution of energy services of the state was transformed to companies and was divided to sub-works and led to subcontractors. Some leading figures of the public employees unions in this sector (Energy, Road and Construction Union- Enerji Yapi Yol Sen) intervened in this process. They began to organize the workers of subcontractor firms in their own unions; they forced the authorities of distribution of energy to add some clauses (that included the basic rights of workers) to their contracts with subcontractors; they threatened subcontractors with using their positional authority against them.
Finally, some workers of subcontractor firms were unionized and attained some de facto collective bargaining rights. Now, nearly 1000 workers of subcontractor firms in the sector are unionized and 75% of them have collective agreements.
b- Governments have been implementing the deregulation policy in the health sector for years. Main tool of deregulation is to employ health personnel with various types of individual contracts. State divides the public health institutions into two parts in terms of internal division of work: direct health services and general services. For general services, like cleaning, cooking, etc. the members of the governing bodies of the public hospitals are establishing "foundations and associations" in order "to support hospital's services". These foundations are employing workers with precarious conditions and working as subcontractors of the hospitals. Sometimes, they are employing skilled health workers as "reserve" personnel.
In direct health services which require skilled personnel, state is developing a policy of some kind of individual contracts. Skilled personnel like doctors, nurses, radiologists and biologists are forced to work in worse conditions than the general level of public employees.
Some activists of The Trade Union of Public Employees in Health and Social Services (SES) organized some resistance against these types of employment. These efforts were not regular or consistent and continuous in the beginning. There were some initiatives for unionization of health foundation's and association's workers. Some individual contracts were cancelled by Courts of law and some skilled personnel regained their statutes as public employees. Two years ago, some activists of SES and some other militant workers from former struggles revitalized an old trade union, Dev Sagl?k Is (Revolutionary Trade Union of Health Workers) and began to plan a new organizational strategy. They began to organize skilled personnel of the hospitals of the SSK (Institution of Social Security for Workers) who are employed with individual contracts. There were 4250 workers in this status in 8 big hospitals. Finally, 1 year later,the State cancelled their individual contracts and accepted them as public employees. After this struggle, Dev Saglik Is became an effective centre for precarious health workers. Now the union has a network in public and private sector's subcontracting health companies.
c- In the last years, especially in the secondary schools, public authorities started to employ teachers with individual contracts or as part-time workers. This is part of a general deregulation project for education. But the movement of the public employees is mainly based on teachers; so, among precarious workers in education sector, there is a strong tendency for struggling against their working conditions and for unionization.
The third source of struggle is the neighborhood organizations that are developing in slums. Along with the actions against poverty, the militants of the People's Houses (Halkevleri - the main organization of the urban poor) often face the irregular work phenomenon. Many of the home-working women, workers in workshops, workers in subcontractor and clothing companies want to struggle against precarity and to join seminars about their basic rights and to express their demands as a social movement.
Worker's Commissions of People's Houses, that are founded on this dynamism as theis base, are making agitation and propaganda to the mass of precarious workers who live in the slums and work in the workplaces around these settlements. They are organizing some protest actions against companies that force precarious working conditions to the workers.
Precarious Workers and The United Struggle
In the last year, union activists who are working with the precarious workers started to feel that there is an upward trend in the struggle.
Firstly, 4250 workers who are employed by the SSK with individual labor contracts, got organized in a movement, against their working conditions in Dev Saglik Is. Workers changed their status and became public employees and Dev Saglik Is attained a better workplace relation in 5 hospitals of the SSK.
After a short time, 200 workers who were employed by a pseudo subcontractor company in the quality-control and storing section of the Pirelli tire factory in Izmit/Kosekoy, were organized by the neighborhood organization of People's Houses, under Transportation Workers Union (Nakliyat Is). But All the workers were fired due to this organization. Fired workers started a resistance actions in front of the factory by pitching up their tents. Resistance still continues today. Through their struggle the Workers gained large compensations from the company in the Court Of Law.
Meanwhile the Enerji Yapi Yol Sen increased the number of its collective agreements up to 4 in energy distribution sector and established some ties with other workers from various sectors' subcontractors.
In the region of Terazidere/Istanbul, where the hosiery factories are found, a protest began. For 15 days, workers from 3 big hosiery factories started strikes, meetings and demonstrations on the streets. They founded a regional Assembly of Hosiery Workers. But after several months, this Assembly was put to sleep by the leaders of the movement.
In a postal centre of Istanbul, Post Office of Bahcelievler, workers of the subcontractor company that is responsible of mail distribution are organized in a newly founded innovative trade union, Independent Trade Union of Worker's (BIS); and began a strike in order to make a special collective bargaining with the subcontractor company. They were alone when they began to strike; but in a short time, the regional branch of the People's Houses got in touch with them; and established a strong solidarity network with the postal workers. Postal workers and the People's Houses are now preparing to transform the strike into a starting point for a general propaganda campaign for the precarious workers of the whole region. Meanwhile B?S has been closed down by a court decision claiming that its founders cannot legally prove that they really work in some workplaces.
The activists of all these struggles are now composing a broad network for solidarity in this process. And, the pioneers of these struggles came to realize that it was necessary to construct a social movement around the problems of the precarious workers.
Towards A Social Movement of Precarious Workers
The first spark emerged in the "City Festival for Solidarity and Commonality: The Poor are Meeting, The Women are Talking 19-24 August - Izmit". The last day of the festival began with a solidarity demonstration in front of Pirelli factory. There were 2.500 poor people in the demonstration. They were mainly precarious workers and most of them were organized in the People's Houses.
The activists of the People's Houses decided that if the militant network of Worker's Commissions of the People's Houses would work to form a broad based precarious workers movement, it could happen! "To begin a movement on the streets of 5-6 cities with 500-600 people in each region" is sufficient in creating a common conciousness around any problem. If precarious workers who are in struggle now would meet in forums about the problems and solutions about precarity, they could find the original language and rhetoric of their movement.
First attempt was developed in Izmit, the city of the resistance of Pirelli/Ekolas and the People's Houses, where they have a high flexibility in action. The activists of People's Houses, a group of Ekolas Workers, a group of trade union activists from various unions and a group of women from the Cooperative of Women Solidarity came together and started a propaganda campaign on the problem of precarity. They published two pamphlets about precarity. 50.000 pamphlets were distributed in front of workplaces, bus stops and in all public places with daily demonstrations in two months. They pasted 5.000 posters on the walls of the city. They organized some seminars among the poor people. These activities produced a broad network of relationship among the mass of precarious workers and also outside of the region.
This success of the campaign encouraged an appeal for a regional forum of precarious workers. Organizer of the forum was the People's Houses. This would be a first-step meeting for broadening precarious worker's initiatives in the biggest industrial region of Turkey, Istanbul-?zmit.
The forum is organized on December 8th 2003-Sunday, in Gebze, a big industrial town between Istanbul and Izmit. It was given the name of "Problems and Solutions of Workers of Subcontractor Companies". Organizers of the forum were a group of teachers who had individual contracts and the Gebze branch of People's Houses. The forum was supported by regional bodies of some progressive trade unions. Teachers from Gebze and Izmit, health workers from Istanbul, postal workers from Bahcelievler, Ekolas workers from Izmit, textile workers from Gebze, Dilovas?, Kartal, Pendik and Izmit joined to the forum. Regional bodies of progressive trade unions sent some representatives to the forum; they were from Dock Worker's, Transportation Worker's, Health Worker's, Printing Industry Worker's, Mining Worker's, Metal Worker's, General Services Worker's and the Banking Workers Unions of DISK; Municipality Worker's Union from Turk-Is and the General Services Worker's Union from Hak-Is. There were 300 workers in the hall.
The workers who spoke in the forum, listed their problems in 8 main subjects: working times, wages, social security, job security, workplace security, national and sexual discrimination, suppressions on the right to establish unions, suppressions on the right to struggle.
At the end of the forum; precarious workers decided
a- To organize broad activities to create consciousness about these problems among the mass of precarious workers.
b- To organize regional forums of precarious workers.
c- To organize a national forum after long and broad based regional campaigns that will include forums, panels, demonstrations, pamphlets and posters.
d- To produce from this forum a general framework that will provide a continuos struggle platform against precarity.
According with these decisions, in December, our steps are these:
1- On December 18th a Solidarity Fest for strikers of Pirelli and Postal Workers, in Izmit. We expect around 2500 precarious workers to join to the fest.
2- An educational and planning meeting with 150 union activists from 15 cities and various sectors on December 20-21.
3- An effective support with massive marches from poor settlements to main hospitals in the general strike of doctors against privatization of health system on December 24th.
4- During the month, together with groups of 3-5 activists, graffiti and poster campaigns around the precarious workers settlements and workplaces.
5- During and after this month, to increase the efforts of distribution of pamphlets in front of factories and workplaces. 2 flubat 2004, Pazartesi
We are the Refugee Initiative of Brandenburg (FIB) and Elexir-A, an antiracist group working in Berlin and the federal land of Brandenburg in Germany. Both groups from our respective perspective are working towards self-organization of refugees.
Two and a half years ago we organized an event in Berlin with guests from the United States, the topic was labor struggles of immigrants, with and without documents. Many refugees had come to listen but the topic was clearly not up their alley: "Hey, we have different problems here in Germany, we do need jobs!!!!". What does it mean, looking from this economic perspective, to be a refugee in Germany??? Refugees are obliged by law to stay in communal refugee shelters, each person receives Euro 40,- monthly social support and a chipcard and/or vouchers to shop for food in a local supermarket. Refugees by law are not allowed to work, except after a special application procedure where in Berlin/Brandenburg practically no work permit is ever given. With the low rate of asylum recognition and the increasing attempts to deport people people also fluidly move from the state of being an asylum seeker to the state of being illegal. No matter in which state- people can’t survive in the conditions that the state foresees for them and need support, both financial and structural. So of course refugees do work, but under precarious conditions. Our idea was to adapt the discussion event and to give the refugee community some information on how to avoid betrayal on the (illegal) job! We researched both legal as well as political information and started to put it out in discussion events in refugee shelters around Berlin and also e.g. at NoBorder camps. In December 2002 we were approached by a group of refugees who had worked on a big inner city construction site in Berlin, officially run by a city owned housing company (WBM), and who had never received their proper money!!!!!! Imagine that scenario: it quickly became clear that over a period of 6 months in the year 2002 at least 5 different sub-subcontractors had systematically exploited at least 50 workers by hiring them for dirty deconstruction and never paying them! The workers had not been standing around like sheep, they had already waged many different confrontations, some of them of physical nature, none had been sucessful and they were frustrated. Despite their question "Well, is there anything you can do for us???" they were full of mistrust. We started to think about a campaign, our means of organization will be described later. For 6 months we slowly built trust with the workers and did groundwork, then in June 2003 we went public with a demonstration and good press work to target the WBM. Surprisingly enough the WBM immediately invited us in for negotiations and we managed to claim Euro 13.500,- for the first 19 workers!!! YEAH! The momentum continued, 23 workers picked it up and continued to negotiate and struggle, resulting in another big payment for 15 more workers in October 2003. The remaining 8 workers who are claiming another Euro18.000,- have not given up, they might change strategy and go to court soon. But the struggle is and has been going on!
What do "precarity" and "migration" have to do with that? Of course it is a two-fold-situation: one precarious aspect is the refugee-situation where work is not legal which makes the workers highly vulnerable. The other precarious aspect is the construction sector itself. When budgets for construction projects are done, there is usually high competition for the jobs. This ferquently results in offers and calculations already based on "black labour" and exploitation. This phenomena is as well known as ignored in Germany, one of "our white elephants".
How did you get organized in your struggle? The workers were predominantely interested in receiving their money, our organizations FIB and Elexir-A had a broader outlook and and interest in organizing the people. Still in terms of the different action levels the workers had already raised hell on the construction site, then we came in with legal research and friendly yet threatening letters to their former employers and finally in the action phase we acted together. Yet during every step we paid much attention to common decisionmaking processes and transparency. Talking about steps, what did we actually do??? As our "we" consists of the workers, the FIB and Elexir-A, we did a broad range of things! The first group of workers after two months work and no salary had occupied the construction site and seized all machines. They were ready to move the mobile tools away from the site, when the subcontractors gave in and paid them cash. Other workers had physically threatened the bosses of the sub-sub-contracting firms, had visited their personal homes, had confronted them in many phonecalls. A small number of workers had even gone the legal way, claiming their wages in small claims court (German: Mahnverfahren), one of them had even gotten paid! Now Elexir-A and the FIB had written many letters in the name of the Antiracist Initiative and through a lawyer, had done research to come up with the strategy to "attack on the top level" (WBM), had done publicity with god timing, be the demonstration, be feeding information to the press using the slogan "Betrayal on city-owned construction site". There was a high public interest in the topic "black work", resulting in the WBM being quite afraid of image damage. All of us joined in the negotiations. The WBM as top level called their subcontractors to the table who had to take responsibility for illegaly bringing in sub-sub-contractors, even though none of them was willing to fully take responsibility. As already mentionned, some people are even now thinking to go to court. Self-Organization is in our eyes the central piece of the struggle. The ability of people to empower themselves and others to stand up for their rights, be the right to stay here, be the right to work, to be treated with dignity, to receive good medical treatment – you name it! Illegality does not begin at the point where you loose the last stamp in your papers and "legalisation" needs to be addressed as a much broader concept.
The German RESPECT-network was founded in Berlin at a meeting of migrants' organisations and counselling services in February 2000. The network consists of projects and organisations that are concerned with the working conditions of migrants in private households and in the cleaning industry, irrespective of their residence status.
2000: the founding of the RESPECT-network
Status Quo in Germany many women without a residence permit work in private households the restrictive immigration regulation pushes the migrants into these areas of work in contrast to other countries, there is no possibility to enter Germany legally as a domestic worker and obtain residence and work permit (the only exception is a special regulation for the nursing staff from Eastern Europe) the state does not want to introduce arrangements to to grant permanent legal status to all undocumented migrants of undocumented persons like they exist in other European countries the attitude of the public, the media and the trade unions towards the issue of migrants' working conditions is for the most part negative and focused on the "illegality"
2002: protest agaist the new immigration law
At the second nationwide RESPECT meeting in Berlin 2002 a joint protest declaration agaist the planned immigration law in Germany was passed.
Political demands domestic work should be recognised as socially important work and be made visible the sexist and racist attributions in the labout market should be done away with, and a political debate on the social division of domestic and caring work should be started working and human rights should be guaranteed to everybody and it should be possible to assert these rights, irrespective of the residence status access to health care, education, kindergartens and schools for everybody documents, open borders and respect for everybody
The signatories of the RESPECT-network Germany: agisra e.V. (working group against international sexist and racist exploitation) / Köln; FiM e.V. (women's rights are human rights) / Frankfurt am Main; IMRADIVA (initiative of brasilian women against discrimination), KOFIZA (contact and information centre for women of Africa, Asia and Latin America) / Nürnberg; Papiere für alle – FrauenLesbenbündnis gegen Rassismus und Illegalisierung (Documents for everybody – association of women/lesbians against racism and illegalisation) / Berlin; RESPECT-Initiative / Berlin; SoLatina / Berlin; S.U.S.I. – Interkulturelles Frauenzentrum (intercultural women's centre) / Berlin; ZAPO (centre for commuting migrants from Eastern Europe) / Berlin; and others
RESPECT in Berlin
"We, the undocumented, are living de facto without any legal protection and if the authorities get us, it is most probable that we get deported into absolute misery! For the right to legalisation!" (Mujeres sin rostro / Women without faces)
RESPECT-Initiative Berlin: Muchachas no more!
The RESPECT-Initiative Berlin is a free association of women, founded in 1999. The goal is on the one hand practical cooperation with migrants' groups, on the other hand political work regarding working conditions in private households and feminist perspectives on reproductive work and globalisation.
Activities from 2000 to 2003
coordination of the nationwide meetings of the RESPECT-network in 2000 and 2002 participation in the organisation of campaigns and public actions, e.g. the Offensive for a Right on Legalisation 2003 translation and publishing of adviser brochures in Germany lectures and discussion rounds in Germany and abroad participation and contributions to the European coordination meetings articles in daily and weekly newspapers as well as in political and academic publications expositions of the group Mujeres sin rostro / Women without faces since 2002 film, video and audio productions, theatre workshop
Networking
The RESPECT-Initiative Berlin is linked up with other projects in Berlin, such as Papiere für alle – FrauenLesbenbündnis gegen Rassismus und Illegalisierung (Documents for everybody – association of women/lesbians against racism and illegalisation), ZAPO, SoLatina, Gesellschaft für Legalisierung (Society for legalisation).
Mujeres sin rostro / Women without faces
Since 2002 the RESPEct-Initiative Berlin cooperates closely with the group Mujeres sin rostro / Women without faces, a self-organised network of undocumented women in Berlin.
Campaigns and demands
The UN Convention on the protection of migrant workers One foundation of our demands and campaigns is the international convention on the protection of the rights of migrant workers and their families which was ratified in 2003 as a result of the pressure from the International Trade Union Movement in the UNO. The convention obliges the states to ensure to all migrants within their territory – regardless of their resident status - the same rights as citizens have with regard to public services in education and health care. Working rights are given a clear priority over the nation state residence permits. However, until now the agreement has been signed only by the countries of emigration but not by countries of immigration such as USA and EU.
Organisation in trade unions
Since 2002 the RESPECT-Initiative Berlin and Mujeres sin rostro / Women without faces are intensively making contact with the trade unions in order to achieve the representation of undocumented people in the labour organisations. For this purpose talks, discussion rounds and actions have been carried out.
Demands on ver.di (services trade union)
On the occasion of the first nationwide congress of the services trade union ver.di in October 2003 the following catalogue of demands was drawn up:
ver.di should actively address workers in irregular employment relations; in order to respond to their special living conditions, ressources should be made available, such as service centres for counseling and legal protection as well as staff for organising workers independently from the workplace. admission formalities and fees must be changed and adapted in order to ensure – multilingual - access for people without residence documents or without a bank account and with an irregular income that hardly secures livelihood. active representation of working rights and social minimum standards for undocumented people in the politics and the society as well as in the trade union's own education work; pressuring the government to ratify the UN convention. especially for the areas of domestic and care work as well as sex work: development of new forms of interest enforcement in the workers' struggles against wages that are below the standard rates, against non-payment or withholding of wages and against working conditions that are detrimental to their health.
"We are performing indispensable work here, we clean and look after children so that the German women can fulfil themselves. We are also colleagues." (Mujeres sin rostro / Women without faces)
RESPECT in Europe
RESPECT stands for Rights, Equality, Solidarity, Power, Europe Corporation Today. It is a European network of migrant domestic workers' organisations, individuals, and supporters, that campaigns for the rights of women and men working in private households in EU countries. RESPECT supports its members’ campaigns and facilitates the sharing of experience and expertise in campaigning, organising and lobbying.
EU coordination:
Solidar / Brussels www.solidar.org
in Germany:
RESPECT-initiative Berlin www.respect-netz.de email: kontakt@respect-netz.de
GWC is a non-profit membership-based organization of garment workers. Our mission is to help garment workers to organize to end sweatshops created by the $30-billion California retail industry’s subcontracting system.
GWC is led by a 9-member worker Board of Directors. We have helped over a hundred workers win over $1.4 million in owed wages, penalties, and damages. Members of GWC are also leading a boycott campaign against Los Angeles-based retailer Forever 21for using sweatshops in L.A. to make their clothes. GWC sponsors workshops and intake clinics where workers can come and speak to staff or worker peer counselors.
After being open for only one year, GWC was named one of the Most Influential 2002 by the California Apparel News.
Los Angeles, the Sweatshop Capitol of the U.S. According to the 2000 census, the 100,000-plus garment workers in Los Angeles’s 5,000 shops earn on average only $14,000 per year, well below the poverty-level income for a family.
The U.S. Department of Labor conducted a study of garment factories in Los Angeles in 2000 and found:
DOL found in 1998 that Southern California employers owed as much as $80 million in unpaid wages to garment workers.
Here is much more information:
1. BACKGROUND
In the fall of 1999, Sweatshop Watch convened a series of meetings with garment workers, including Thai and Latino workers who had been imprisoned in a slave shop in El Monte, to discuss the creation of an organization dedicated to the struggle to end sweatshop abuses in Los Angeles. As a result the Garment Worker Center opened its doors in January 2001.
Overall, the Garment Worker Center has accomplished much in its three years of existence. The Garment Worker Center is one of the only multi-ethnic and multi-lingual worker organizations in the country. We are proud to be an organization led by Latina and Asian garment workers. With our worker leaders, we have developed a multi-pronged approach to address sweatshops and worker exploitation. We have concentrated on worker organizing and empowerment, policy advocacy and coalition building while our partner organizations have led a legal strategy. Here are some highlights of 2002-2003:
CASE MANAGEMENT
WORKER MEMBERSHIP
CAMPAIGN WORK
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
2. CONSTITUENCY, ORGANIZATION AND STRUCTURE
The Garment Worker Center primarily serves garment workers in Los Angeles: 100,000 workers employed in more than 5,000 sewing shops. These workers are newcomers from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, China, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere. 85% of garment workers in Los Angeles are women. 75% are Latina/o, and 15% are Asian. Generally between 30 - 50 years old, some are in their 20’s or teens. Most are monolingual in their native languages. They are contingent workers, paid by the piece and often employed seasonally. According to the 2000 Census, the average annual income for a Los Angeles garment worker is $14,000, well below the poverty level for a family.
The membership of the GWC has grown to over 250 garment workers, and more than 125 are active in the Center, coming to actions or meetings to discuss cases and campaigns. The Center only has a membership program for individuals. Over 700 workers have come to the Center for workshops or activities and we encourage older members to recruit new people to the Center. Workers decided on a membership fee of $20 every 6 months. Board members call other members to tell them about events and to remind them to pay dues.
Leadership development is one of our main priorities. Every meeting or presentation, we identify workers to facilitate or help present materials. As we develop our membership base, we are working with the Board in developing their organizing and leadership skills but also identifying workers to also develop. We have also just started a strategic planning process with the Board. The strategic planning process includes political and organizing training for Board and staff. It has been a great opportunity for Board and staff to evaluate the structure and development of the Center. Cameron Levin has been hired to facilitate the process, with funding from the LA Women’s Foundation. We estimate that it will take us a little more than a year to finish. Of course, implementation of the plan will be incorporated into our daily work on an ongoing basis. We currently discuss strategic planning at each Board meeting and every other weekly staff meeting. Topics for the process include: power analysis, membership program, decision-making procedures, recruitment and retention of new members, campaign strategy and evaluation. We are developing a process to create a long term strategy for the Center. We are evaluating our current worker programs and creating a two year organizational development plan. This comprehensive plan will be used to create weekly and monthly workplans for the staff and Board. To prepare the Board for these comprehensive discussions, we have an extensive training incorporated into the process. The general trainings will accompany the personal Board development plans.
3. PROBLEM
The garment industry is one of California’s most important manufacturing industries, raking in $30 billion each year. Los Angeles is the nation's largest garment center, with 5,000 garment factories employing 100,000 women, men and children. An estimated 4,500 of these factories are classified as sweatshops -characterized by sub-minimum wages and working conditions hazardous to workers' health and safety. In fact, a recent Department of Labor survey of Los Angeles garment factories reveals that 67% violate minimum wage and overtime laws, and 75% violate health and safety laws. Because the large majority of garment workers do not speak English and fall well below the poverty line, they are often ill-informed about labor laws and extremely hesitant to inquire after their rights. Less than 1% of garment workers belong to a union.
Garment workers and their advocates must contend with the reality before us: 100,000 garment workers are living in a city where labor laws afford them little or no protection, workers rights attorneys are few and far between, and organizing efforts are extremely difficult. Although many garment sewing jobs may leave the country in the coming years, we believe that garment workers will remain, as will a certain portion of garment production. In order to build on the current interest among garment workers to address imminent changes in the industry -resources and a central resource space are needed.
2. OBJECTIVES
We are working toward a future where all workers labor decent hours and earn a living wage; where their working and living conditions are safe and healthy; and where corporations who exploit people are held accountable. To achieve this, we are organizing with garment workers in our communities to lead the struggle for justice. We are able to learn from our members which strategies are most effective in protecting workers’ rights; what gaps in resources need to be filled; what workers themselves need on a day-to-day basis; and what types of solutions will bring about systemic and long-term change. By learning from our members through organizing and advocacy, and filling in the gaps, we strengthen the organizing efforts of our members and work for industry-wide change. We are researching upcoming changes in the industry, and we plan to form international partnerships in order to continue this work on a global scale.
4. STRATEGIES
Outreach and education.
Outreach among Latino workers in the L.A. area has been relatively easy because those workers are concentrated downtown near our office and because the Spanish-language media has been extremely helpful in promoting the GWC. To reach Asian garment workers, we hold office hours in El Monte and Monterey Park once a week. We hired a part time Chinese Worker Organizer, who is a garment worker, to focus on Chinese garment workers. We hold workshops every month to attract new members to the Center. Workshop topics include wage and hour laws, health and safety, globalization, and immigration laws. We have a Women’s group that meets monthly and also provide a space for worker exchanges with other workers from around the world. We have also provided trainings for speaking to the media, what to do in an INS raid, how to facilitate a meeting, and filing taxes.
Multi-ethnic, multi-lingual monthly meetings.
Garment workers realize the importance of building alliances across race and gender to create a strong movement for worker’s rights and economic justice. Each month, we offer a variety of workshops to help educate workers on larger issues. Workshop topics include globalization, effects of the war, reproductive health, childcare, speaking to the media and filing taxes. Our approach to educating workers is more holistic. We understand the importance of addressing issues outside of the workplace such as health, women’s support, financial independence and social support.
Direct Action & Campaigns.
Garment workers have a clear understanding of the structure of the garment industry. They know they are not paid minimum wage and overtime because the retailers and manufacturers are setting the contract prices too low and reap enormous profit from their labor. They want to stand up for their rights and hold these companies accountable. Garment workers have spoken out at numerous press conferences to demand justice, and they have participated in several protests and educational forums.
Leadership Development.
Using a participatory model of training, members of the center engage in leadership development. At every worker meeting, we include a discussion on a political issue or a training on organizing skills. Our curriculum builds workers' knowledge of and experience with political movements, workplace rights issues and organizing. At our worker-facilitated quarterly membership meetings, members update each other on their campaigns, learn about new issues and get to know each other better. At all meetings, workers facilitate, make presentations and make decisions for the Center. Workers have become spokespersons for the Center in the media and coalition meetings. Workers are now serving as peer counselors to expand our capacity to help workers. We have also started a monthly women’s group which has allowed our female members a safe place to talk about domestic violence, self esteem and personal independence.
Case Management Program.
We help workers directly settle disputes with employers. We do not emphasize service as a means to change the industry but we use it as a tool to outreach to workers. We hold weekly drop in clinics in downtown Los Angeles and El Monte. We have trained workers to be peer counselors to help with wage clinics and health educations. Since most garment workers are mistrustful of organizations, our case management system helps to build trust between the workers and us. We distribute a Know Your Workplace Rights booklet and comic book (in Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese & English) which contains information on workers' rights to minimum wage and overtime, a description of how to collect wages by filing a claim with the Labor Commissioner, and a workbook for recording hours, wages, labels, etc. Workers have sought our assistance with unpaid wages, wrongful termination, harassment, unsafe working conditions and racial discrimination. Our main objective is to take direct action first, before going through the legal system.
Policy/Advocacy.
Through its policy and advocacy work, the Center provides its members an opportunity to engage in political education and participate in workshops to develop advocacy skills. Workers testify at government hearings, media events and public presentations. We also have played a strong role in getting worker’s health and safety issues addressed. The garment industry will not change by itself. Consumers must put pressure on the retailers to stop the use of sweatshops.
5. How Your Program Will Meet JFJ's Guidelines
Sweatshop workers tend to be the most vulnerable members of our society—immigrants and women with limited English language skills, supporting families on poverty wages. The Garment Worker Center will help fill a void for Los Angeles' large garment workforce by providing workers with information about their rights, skills for advocating on their own behalf, and a space to organize. The Center will also help develop an organized base of workers to demand accountability from the garment industry and provide workers with skills that they can use throughout their lives regardless of where they may work in the future. The Garment Worker Center has received political support from the Los Angeles Jewish community, which has been a valuable ally since many garment manufacturers are members of the same community. Continued support from the Jewish Fund for Justice, would not only give us financial support, but also important political support.
6. Program Management
In February 2002, the GWC held its first worker retreat with about 30 workers in attendance, with 18 Latinos and 11 Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin speaking) workers. This was an opportunity for the Center's members to give extensive feedback on our past work and discuss the programs they would like the Center to take on this year. The members also began discussing formal membership criteria and development of a governing board. In the Spring of 2002, active workers adopted a membership criteria and elected a governing board of Latino and Asian garment workers in September 2002. The Board has taken a leadership role in the Center and our membership has grown to over 250 members. In September 2003, we elected our second Worker Board, with 5 out of 11 returning from the year before.
Policy decisions are made by the Worker Board. Right now, the Board is developing their own by-laws and personnel policies to prepare for the Center to become independent. Since Sweatshop Watch is our fiscal agent, our budget is reviewed by Sweatshop Watch but is now approved by the Worker Board. For political issues, we present the information to the workers and they vote on whether the Center should endorse or participate. Daily management of the office is coordinated by Kimi Lee, Director of the GWC. Joann Lo is the Lead Organizer and she oversees campaign work and membership development. Alejandra Domenzain is our Case Manager and Health Educator. She handles our worker cases and is developing our health program.
Day laborers are workers of all races who wait on street corners or in other public locations every day, looking for work in every major city in this country. They are predominantly poor, Latin American, immigrant men in search of work to support themselves and their families. They form a valuable and productive workforce, but suffer from severe exploitation and discrimination. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), founded in 2000, is a collaborative between eighteen community-based organizations that organize day laborers in different parts of the country. The mission of the NDLON is to strengthen and expand the work of local day laborer organizing groups, in order to become more effective and strategic in building leadership, advancing low-wage worker and immigrant rights, and develop successful models for organizing immigrant contingent/temporary workers.
NDLON fosters healthy, safer and more humane environments for day laborers to obtain employment and raise their families. In this sense, NDLON advances the human, labor, and civil rights of day workers throughout the United States
tie is an international grassroots network of workers and union activists. Rooted both in the global North and South, tie aims to encourage, organize, and facilitate international consciousness and cooperation among workers and their organizations in various parts of the world.
tie supports an international exchange of information and experiences among labour activists, women’s and human rights groups. tie’s activities are geared to enable workers to engage in a process of self-organisation, to develop their own strategies for better working and living conditions, and to facilitate international solidarity.
In Germany, the tie network is represented by “tie – Internationales Bildungswerk e.V.†which is a politically independent non-profit organization. In keeping with the overall objectives of tie, tie Germany has the following work priorities and projects:
Since 1993, tie Germany has been organizing the international tie conferences taking place every two or three years. These conferences are being attended by representatives of all tie offices and their most important project partners to discuss current and future work and strategies. The last conference has taken place from November 27th to 30th, 2003 in Oberwesel, Germany.