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hydrarchist writes...here are some documents related to the series of wildcat strikes which broke out in the transpoirt sector in Italy in december. The strikes shut down Milan, Brescia and numerous other cities in what is a struggle not only over pay but also working conditions. The main trade unions have been run out of the tramworkers (autoferrotranvieri) depots to be replaced largely by grassroots trade unions such as the CUB, COBAS and SULT.

Efforts to build support for them have also involved a reflection on how 'precari' can make conflicts in the transport sector their own but makeing demands for free transpoirtation and 'social tariffs' rather than abstract 'solidarity'. Here are some libertarian tracts produced on these questions.


[January 12, 2004]


Let’s Block Everything…


…All of it

The transit workers in struggle in all the cities of Italy are not alone. From Paris to Bucharest, from Los Angeles to Rome wildcat strikes, city blockades and riots are spreading over the entire planet, a sign of a widespread impatience with the living conditions imposed on all the exploited. When the masters have less and less to concede, pressed in a crisis that is not a crisis but the normal functioning of the economy, when insecurity and fear become the social norm, there is no longer any distinction of category that holds. When there is nothing to mediate, all that remains to the unions – long since pledged to guarantee the resignation of the workers to business and government – is to put on the uniform of the police, as they did in Milan two years ago when they handed the names of the participants in the blockade of the station during the strike of railroad cleaners over to the forces of order.

"The Undesireables"

Pont St. Martin Parigi

There are ever increasing numbers of undesirables in
the world. There are too many men and women for whom
this society has not provided any role except that of
croaking in order to make everyone else function. Dead
to the world or to themselves: this is the only way
society wants them.

"A Rift in Empire?

The Multitudes in the Face of War"

Brian Holmes

The February 15 [2003] antiwar demonstrations proved it: the self-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetary scale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In a manifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used the language of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create a rift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the great transnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financial disasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command of the earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted to encourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of the American, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment that had multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing the traditional mechanisms of representation.

Anonymous Fls
writes here is a long article in three parts, the first below, the Part II and Part III. All footnotes are at the end of the final segment.

"Precarias: First Stutterings of Precarias a la Deriva"


Precarias a la Deriva


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’[1] 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?”

Comrade Fls writes

Michael Hardt: Affective Labor

Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value. Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women's work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.

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renegado writes

Ewa in Basra, 18.12.2003

Oil workers in Iraq's biggest and most profitable company the Southern Oil Company have refused American Occupation Administration slave-wages and created their own wage scale instead to be accepted on pain of mass energy sector strike. CPA forced to retreat and start paying workers more. Iraqi worker representatives from the country's energy sector met last week to discuss the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority)imposition of low wages upon public sector workers in the country.

hydrarchist writes:

This is the third part of the essay. All footnotes are collected at the bottom of this segment.

Part I.

Part II.

THE COMPANY’S LOGIC

Let’s just say that we have fallen into the same productivity that capital expects from a worker, that it expected from a factory worker, except that now the factory is life and we almost never do anything that does not have a clear purpose, whose end has not already been determined. (Drift with language workers).

hydrarchist writes ... continued from Part I


MOBILITY

Mobility is the quality which best describes the present malleability of the work force around the three axes: time, space and task. Mobility in the disposition of rhythms and schedules, mobility between jobs and, beyond that, in geography, in vital decisions, in lifestyle, and mobility in ‘unit acts’ and in the ways of developing them, always subject to mutations, to processes of evaluation and adjustment, a constant auditing. Mobility opposed to the old staticness, to bureaucratization and routine and, without a doubt, to the organizational capacity of persons who in any moment may find their functions modified and recombined, persons who don’t know the limits of what they have to do, and in general, of what they themselves are.

"Manifesto Against Labour"

Gruppe Krisis

1. The rule of dead labour

A corpse rules society -- the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. They don't know but one slogan: jobs, jobs, jobs!

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renegado submits:

"Iraqi Oil Workers Throw Out KBR, Reconstruct Their Own Workplaces Autonomously"
Ewa Jasiewicz, Occupation Watch
Occupied Basra, 12/12/03


Southern Oil Company Trade Unionists have declared their workplaces a no-go zone for Halliburton, formerly headed by US Vice President Dick Cheny's, subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. KBR was give a no-bid contract by USAID to reconstruct bomb-shattered oil refineries and installations in Iraq. Included in the contracts was authorisation to export and market Iraqi Oil. The SOC Union however, representing over 10,000 workers has banned all KBR representatives and foreign workers from entering their sites. SOC Union Head Hassan Jum'a says, ''Till this moment we haven't needed any foreigners to come in. We can do everything ourselves'.

Worker unrest erupted in Bergeseeya oil refinery and control section in October following the employment of Indian and Pakistani labourers by Kuwaiti subcontractors Al Khorrafi Company. Workers staged a wildcat two-day strike, physically threw out the foreign workers and demanded a portion of the 70% unemployed population of Iraq be employed instead. The employment of foreign labourers was halted immediately.

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