Work

Worker Co-operatives and Democracy
Bernard Marszalek

Members of worker co-operatives necessarily live schizophrenic lives. On one hand, we must function as owners of small businesses and contend with all the insidious forces of capitalism – the anti-ethic of profits before people. At the same time we are members of an egalitarian corporate entity that most people can’t imagine existing, much less thriving. Here we are, a diverse group – some friends, some OK folks and some who we don’t socialize with after hours – working together day-in-and-day-out dealing with all the tensions arising from individual personality quirks, the aforementioned forces of the marketplace, unexpected emergencies, and, when everything else is under control, the boredom of daily tedium.

A collective life like this for those who have drunk the Kool-Aid of individualism – also called the Great Ape theory of human nature – think that it must be hell. Of course, when we face “challenges” in our co-operatives, especially during contentious meetings, the thought crosses our minds that, in fact, hell is other people. We all have doubts and wonder, at times, if we have taken the wrong fork on the path of life and have foolishly placed ourselves on a trajectory heading towards a nervous breakdown. Luckily for most of us, this fear passes and we realize that we wouldn’t want to trade our bizarre lives for confinement in a cubicle of some “friendly fascist” enterprise – even if it paid more.

All Eyes on Longview:
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
Insurgent Notes

Dear friend(s) and comrade(s):

We are writing to inform you about a very serious class confrontation developing on the northwest coast of the U.S., in Longview (Washington state).

In that small city, an international grain company, EGT, owned jointly by three firms (U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Itochu and Korea-based STX Pan Ocean), spent $200 million constructing a new state- of- the-art grain terminal.

While the construction was underway, EGT indicated that it would continue to employ the 225 members of ILWU Local 21 in Longview, in keeping with the solid unionization of west coast American ports since the 1930’s by the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union).

Instead, when the construction was completed, EGT turned to a “rogue” union, General Construction and Operating Engineers Local 701, with the intention of displacing the ILWU with a “sweetheart” contract saving the company (according to its estimates) $1 million a year in labor costs.

CFP For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity
Interface

Once, the labour movement was seen as the international social movement for the left (and it was the spectre haunting capitalism). Over the last century, however, labour movements have been transformed. In most of the world membership rates have dwindled, and many act in defence of, or simply provide services to, their members in the spirit of interest or lobbying groups. Labour was once a broad social movement including cooperatives, socialist parties, women’s and youth wings, press and publications, cultural production and sporting clubs. Often it was at the core of movements for democracy or national independence, even of social revolution. Despite the rhetoric of ‘socialism’, ‘class and mass trade unionism’ or, alternatively, technocratic ‘organising strategies’, most union movements internationally operate strictly within the parameters of capitalism and the ideology of ‘social partnership’ (i.e. with and under capital and state).

New Guragon Workers Newsletter
GurgaonWorkersNews

Gurgaon in the industrial belt of Delhi is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young proletarianised middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers up-rooted by the rural crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh, China or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, new industrial zones turn soil into over-capacities.

We Are Not Contingent: An Academic Manifesto

We are the non-tenure track faculty who now constitute two-thirds of the instructional workforce at universities and colleges across the nation. We are frequently invisible to administrators, yet we are the first professors and instructors that undergraduate students meet on their journey to becoming engaged learners. We are the majority. We have been silent too long, and it is time for us to reclaim our voices and outline our demands.

WE ARE ESSENTIAL. Words carry within them powerful connotations. Contingency implies that we, as non-tenure track faculty, are incidental or even accidental to the educational mission of the colleges and universities where we work. No employees, regardless of their field, would willingly apply this stigma to themselves. To continue calling ourselves “contingent labor” is to accept the fate that has been chosen for us by administrators who view us as easily disposable freelancers or potential tenure track faculty in a period of transition.

Preliminary Balance Sheet of the 13-Days Sit-Down Strike at Maruti Suzuki Factory in Manesar/Gurgaon, India
Guragon Workers News

From 4th to 17th of June around 2,000 young workers engaged in a wildcat sit-down strike at Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar [1]. With the following text we hope to contribute to the necessary debate about this important strike and invite friends and comrades, particularly in Delhi area, to share their experiences and views. Before we go into chronological details of the strike we try to provide a rough political summary.

It was an important strike in local terms. The two Maruti assembly plants coordinate hundreds of local supplying factories [2], the Manesar plant dominates a new industrial area of major importance. There has been silence at Maruti Suzuki for more than a decade: the workers in Gurgaon plant have been silenced by the lock-out in 2000/01 [3], and they did not join the strike in June. The Manesar plant was opened in 2006/07, but the young and casualised work-force had not found their voice as yet.

The Workers Economy Third International Meeting Mexico June 9-11
Analyzing and Debating a New Economy from the Perspective of Workers and Self-Management
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City

We invite workers, activists, and researchers from around the world to the Third International Meeting of the Workers’ Economy, taking place on June 9, 10 and 11, 2011 in Mexico City at the Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco (UAM-Xochimilco). With a focus on “Analyzing and Debating a New Economy from the Perspective of Workers and Self-Management,” this Third International Meeting aims to continue the discussions and debates concerning workers’ alternatives to global capital that began in Buenos Aires at the First and Second International Meetings of the Workers’ Economy in 2007 and 2009.

For the Third International Meeting, we propose bridging academic and intellectual contributions with the practices and ideas of workers, bringing together researchers, theorists, and political activists with workers from around the world. This Third International Meeting will continue the spirit of the past two International Meetings by systematizing workers’ experiences of exploitation, projects of alternative work organizations and institutions, and workers’ roles as leaders of their own economic destinies, while also aiming to collaboratively study resistances to capitalists’ management of the economy.

This time, the International Meeting will be held in Mexico. For the organizers, this means consolidating the space of debate that the past two encuentros have generated and accentuating its international character. Mexico is a country where neoliberalism has rampaged against the people and provoked many workers’ struggles and myriad social movements of protest. They need support. The Third International Meeting in Mexico will, in particular, be drawing attention to these struggles and reinforcing them.

Human Capital or Toxic Asset: After the Wage Marina Vishmid Reartikulacija This is a sequence of reflections on affirmation and negation, on identification and severance: determinate negation as strategic affirmation, the identification of concrete universals and severance from a defunct relation. These lines will be explored with reference to the current situation of the waged and unwaged working class, most proximately in Britain, as “debt” becomes the ideological white noise and the practical horizon of all social and political imagination. Household indebtedness is confused with the state deficit in the spontaneous ideology of the Conservative austerity agenda, as what remains of the crisis-riddled economy is sacrificed to the “debt” – as poor people to loan sharks, so Britain to the bond investors. The nationalist narrative of “we’re all in this together” eliminates any space for discussion as to who might bear greater responsibility for the crisis, and who should be paying for it. The announced cuts make it all too clear – it’s the bloated public sector and welfare payments which are responsible, and those that have the least shall have even that taken away, as the Biblical parable goes. Yet a fatalistic consensus prevails for now, transfixed by a menace beyond dispute: the “debt.” Debt has taken on an unprecedented social centrality, almost eclipsing the labour theory of value as both the principle of capital accumulation and the principle behind the structural role of labour in social relations organized through the value-form. The social logic of speculation is also at work [sic] in the premise of human and social capital which, as Jason Read argues, has reformulated every human activity as an investment in a future of potential access to greater social wealth. The notion of “human capital” also serves to eradicate any antagonism between those who own the means of production and those who only have their labour to sell, since both are understood to be investors seeking to maximize a return, which is only natural.1
Marx and Makhno Meet McDonald's Loren Goldner Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them. While some of these methods benefit from aspects of French labour law that are more favourable to strikers than one finds in the backward U.S. of A, the overall strategy can certainly find its uses in other countries.
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