More about precarity: Mayday Milan Call

May Day 2007 | Casualisation / Workplace

repost from email: 01.05.2007 - The indymedia.org.uk feature on Mayday speaks of "the precarious". In Milan, the Mayday activists have sent out a Mayday call that explains a bit more about the condition of precarity. Its about Italy, and each Mayday has its own story, but they are connected in many ways, too.

Rollcall Mayday 2007

To all the precarious workers, both natives and migrants, men and women. To the contortionists of flexibility and the acrobats of everyday life. To the temporary workers and contractors, the pseudo self-employed, the long-term precarious and those secure until-who-knows-when. To students and researchers, precarious workers in education and information. To all those still looking for income and wage, to all those demanding their rights.

Let's Mayday!

For the seventh time Precarious Milan is yelling Mayday!
The scream that seven years ago broke the embarrassed silence of media and institutions on the subject of precarity - be they of the right or the left - has today become a powerful presence, a fundamental point of reference, an unconcealable element on the national political stage.

As is known, each Mayday has its own story, but over time precarious workers have increasingly become the protagonists at the center of the stage, freed from the mediation of trade unions, parties and social centers. In a year that has demonstrated the unreliability of so called "radical" parties and the confusion of social movements, the precarious have found means and moments to organize themselves, both in the streets and in the ongoing process that links each Mayday to the next.

'''Mayday 007 speaks of conflict'''

We have long been convinced that precarity represents a crisis not only within society, but also in those social, political and trade-union movements that attempt to intercept, fashion and corral it. Mayday has been the proof of this. Those who wish to oppose precarity must reckon with the mechanisms that generate it. Precarization is a complex phenomenon; a fatal mix of atomization, blackmail, and consent.

The increasing protagonism of the precarious is the outcome of a process that began with new collective narratives, and has been able to create a virtuous cycle substituting the visible - but often transient - action that characterized many May 1st, with a continuing accumulation of determination, skills and passions. This has engendered increased participation. Two years ago we claimed that Mayday's radicality was born out of creating relationships. Today we reiterate that this radicality consists in its ability to translate the frustration, isolation and blackmail experienced daily by precarious workers into something else, whereby disappointment at the in/civility of business can be transformed into a complicity between the precarious, and where conflict can be renewed in order to face the disorientation in which precarity plunges us.

'''Mayday 007 speaks of demands'''

We believe that the protections of permanent employment for those in fixed positons still represents an important frame of reference for the demands of precarious workers. But we also think that the particular social structure characterized by this form of "security", cannot be reproduced today. Mayday demands universal rights and uninterrupted income, as essential elements in disarming the continuous blackmail to which we are subjected.

But some clarification is required: the centre-left government is weak and unable to grasp the implications of the wildfire spread of precarious conditions. Commissions on social shock-absorbers, pensions, and new rights, point towards a complex set of "solutions" that we find shocking.

Electing to manage precarity, rather than create a set of measures, rights and protections able to strengthen the condition of precarious, reveals their clear intention: to protect the means by which companies enrich themselves through precarization, at best softening their most drastic effects. They want to treat the symptom and not the disease, hoping the invalid just forgets about it. Continuity of income, demanded by the thousands of precarious who have taken part in Mayday in recent years, can be transformed into an opportunity, rather than being merely the newest type of chains - but only if it provides the precarious with a choice, to reject the worst jobs, and therefore, implicitly, to fight and improve their conditions. Any other solution changes the terms of precarity, but does nothing to diminish its intensity. It matters little if we are precarious due to blackmail in the labour market, or due to the coercion of the latter combined with a welfare system that forces us to work at any cost.

''' From conflict to income through the five axis of precarity '''

We know that precarity starts from employment to then permeate the social - that is the set of actions, relations and choices that anyone carries out daily whether out of need, desire, awareness or coercion. In this sense the five axis of precarity constitute the horizon to focus on. Housing, a right nowadays denied not only to the precarious; sociality; education and training; access to knowledge and to free sustainable transport, still represent fundamental fields of action and conflict, which have always encountered and encompassed Mayday in a variety of forms. Likewise anti-prohibitionism and self-determination, regarding which the government - subjected to a clerical offensive - lacked the backbone to keep its promises. Individual self-determination, the right to choose one's personal needs/desires, and the just demand to control one's own body, are issues that refuse inter/mediation, and must be demanded and won through the conspiring of individual subjects.

''' Mayday 007 speaks of rights, citizenship and new kinds of civilization '''

Witch-hunts in the name of 'security', together with refrains of 'order' and 'legality', the Bossi-Fini law on immigration and CPT (Temporary Accommodation Centers) represent a crucial tool for blackmailing an important part of the social fabric: migrants. The binding of citizenship rights to employment represents a a barbarism that humiliates and radicalizes difference, making much-vaunted 'integration' even more difficult. Migrants today epitomize the meaning of the precarity of life, and show how companies' hunger for profit and their need for labour is unlimited: migrants' rights to income, housing, health and education is, by law, under the control of business. And, following the same insistence on 'legality', they are prevented from freeing themselves from this yoke, as in the case of foreign phone-centre operators in Lombardia, who must suddenly lose their only source of income and go in search of new employment. Precarity doesn't find one homogenous expression, but is the intentional outcome of different strategies that affect many parts of the social body by dividing and segmenting them. Neoliberalism needs the clash of civilizations. But the only fight we are interested in is that between two opposing understandings as to how to build a different society: the path of rights that clashes with the refrain of 'legality'. Everyone must now choose unambiguously; which of the two paradigms will be the driving force behind which to mobilize one's commitment and define one's vision.

For us, it's clear that 'legality' is increasingly unjust, and civil rights are won through conflict. In Milan, where hardship, rage and exclusion increase day by day, becoming progressively more uncontrollable, the town council's only response is to demand that sidewalks of consumption and streets of fashion be unstained and untouched by this reality. We reject this shameless equivalence. It is imperative to reassert civil rights, abolish the CPTs, and repeal Bossi-Fini and all other discriminatory laws.

''' Mayday 007 speaks of Europe'''

This year once again Mayday will encompass many European cities, because Europe is the public space which must be made into a social and conflictual sphere where the conditions of precarity can be challenged and overcome. The Europe we imagine is different from that monetary Europe born of the hypocrisy of the new millennium. Within it, we want to propose a new politics of welfare, applying the same criteria to natives and migrants, to reduce the number of employment types, stipulate a minimum per-hour wage independent of the type of employment contract, and guarantee continuity of income for all.

EuroMayDay represents today one constitutive processes for the emerging idea of a new Europe - radical, free, social and sustainable.

'' Mayday Mayday ''' May 1°, '007 Milano, Porta Ticinese (Piazza XXIV Maggio) - 3pm

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