Transnational Social Strike (TSS) - Newsletter
Nr. 1 - Mid February 2017
The Transnational Social Strike (TSS) Platform has taken the decision to start publishing a regular newsletter for two reasons. First, to respond to two upcoming mobilisations for “A day without us” in UK on February 20 and for the Global Women Strike on March 8, and second, in order to continue the consolidation of the transnational structure of TSS. We also want to give anyone a chance to keep up with the new subsection on our website – named Conflict Corner – which has been being updated with weekly texts and articles since January. We intend to publish TSS newsletters roughly every 6 to 8 weeks.
Last weekend 160+ people from 9 countries and 40 organisations met in London for an assembly of the TSS platform called to support and influence the mobilisations for the February 20th “1 Day Without us” national protest, organised as a response to the increasing stigmatisation of migrants in the UK and more recently, in response to the Muslim ban ordered by President Trump. In the context of migrant strike experiences in US, France and Italy over the last few years an interesting exchange took place, that also touched upon the question of how to interconnect such symbolic events with daily local struggles.
Particular attention – with an extra workshop – was also given to the ongoing mobilization for the Global Women Strike. From Poland to Argentina, from Turkey to Italy, a global movement of women is rising. In more than 20 countries, on March 8th women will take to the street and strike, disrupting productive and reproductive activities for one day. The TSS released a call out for the strikes: “If our lives have no value, then we strike”.
The TSS platform has existed for two years now as a growing open process with more and more groups from various cities and countries. A first meeting took place in the frame of the mobilization of Blockupy in March 2015 followed by conferences in October 2015 in Poznan and again in October 2016 in Paris.
During these assemblies the TSS platform has mostly focussed on three main areas: logistics, care and social reproduction, and migration/migrant labour. The transnational dimension of these discussions isn’t something that only follows from local organising, it is imperative that it runs parallel, in finding through the diversity and complexity of the situations we face, new alliances and forms of organisation, new strategies and common goals that would break with the reactionary turn facing many regions of Europe. Fundamentally, our platform acts as a transnational political infrastructure, meaning with this at the same time a space of organization to exchange experiences and coordinate, and a site for strategic elaboration of a common political perspective and initiative on the European and transnational scale.
In this frame the idea of the Conflict Corner was developed, as a subsection of our TSS-website and with weekly contributions “dedicated to the communication and circulation of conflicts, practices of organization and strikes in various sectors and regions all over Europe and beyond. We intend to publish texts and reflections to share experiences and to show commonalities among various realities, even though apparently isolated or separated. Each struggle and strike attacking conditions of labor and life that are by now deeply transnational can become part of the strike movement and can contribute to create a common language able to bridge differences and to overcome borders between sectors and countries”.
The Conflict Corner started in January. Below you find attached the introduction texts and links of our first six published articles: about conflicts, strikes and self-organisational attempts in the education system in the Balkan, in the retail sector in Germany, in schools in Sweden, in the gig economy in UK, in the agricultural sector in Austria and from freelancers in Ireland.
The Conflict Corner will continue to present manifold collective experiences of struggles and structures, and all of you are invited to provide us with further texts, which might contribute to the intended transnational communication.
Write to: info.transnationalstrike@autistici.org
Join the process towards a transnational social strike!
(11.01.2017)
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We begin our new website section called «conflict corner» with two reports written by Për Universitetin Movement (Albania) and Student Plenum (Macedonia) about neoliberal education reforms in their countries and the struggles against them. While the education sector is one that has traditionally triggered national protests against national laws, the common trends of the neoliberal transformations of schools and universities force us to imagine a transnational student movement, able to strike back and disrupt the claim that students are just present or future labor force to be trained for exploitation. We start from two countries in the Balkans, as a confirmation of the centrality that our platform has ever since attributed to Eastern Europe as a laboratory of trends and reforms of neoliberal Europe. By this we also invite other student collectives and networks from all over Europe to send contributions and engage to form a common reservoir of analysis and practices to build a common power across internal and external educational borders.
(18.01.2017)
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We continue our new website section called “conflict corner” with an article from TIE (Transnationals Information Exchange), which is a global grassroots network of workers active in workplaces and communities. In the text the German section discusses successful experiences of self-organizing in the fashion company H&M, which is “a forerunner in precarious contracts in Germany”. Company strategies to prevent collective struggles are analyzed as well as the limits of the usual unions approach. With the concept of “mentors” it was possible to organize workers in about one third of the 400 H&M stores in Germany, to found works councils, to invent shop floor strategies to improve occupational health and safety, to push back precarious contracts and to become one of the most important unionists during strikes in the national collective bargaining. The works councils developed a transnational worker-to-worker network with garment unions which organize workers who produce for H&M and other retailers. They struggle together along the global value chain for better working and living conditions in the global garment industry.
(25.01.2017)
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by SARAH LIZ (Tidningen Brand – Sweden)
We continue the “conflict corner” this week with an analysis of some of the consequences and effects of the stricter immigration laws, passed by the Swedish parliament last year. Along with the increased economization of these legislative changes, in these last months the country has seen a large number of people have their hopes for the future shattered, especially because of the strict tie established between residence permit and employment. The counterforce to this development seems to be in the social sphere, especially in schools. The sense of identification, companionship, and community that this sphere offers at its best has allowed teachers and students to voice concerns more openly, and call for social justice. One of these conflicts is currently playing out at an upper secondary school in Stockholm, where the students are organizing a strike in solidarity with a fellow student facing the threat of being deported. The strike committee draws inspiration from earlier school strikes and blockades. These past experiences have convinced the students that this is the most effective and creative tool of protest to put pressure on things that – to a great extent – affect their daily lives.
(01.02.2017)
by JOHN MURRAY (Plan C, UK)
We publish a report of the current struggles carried on by Deliveroo, Uber and UberEats workers in the UK. Next appointment for discussion the workshop on logistical strike at the TSS London Assembly on Feb. 11th, with the participation of the curriers protagonists of these very struggles.
In 2016, workers in the «gig economy» in London began a series of spontaneous struggles against pay cuts and bad conditions. Deliveroo, Uber and UberEats all saw effective strikes and protests. These conflicts, emerging as they did in a period of low industrial conflict, prompted new analyses of the situation in the areas of the economy which had previously been considered «unorganisable». After this initial wave, there has been a period of consolidation and organization, which is now setting the groundwork for more, larger struggles in the future.
(08.02.2017)
Introduction of the brochure about the «Sezonieri» (seasonal workers) Campaign in Austria and beyond
This week we are (re)publishing an article in the conflict corner which focuses on another important sector of migrants’ exploitation, i.e. seasonal workers in agriculture. In 2013, Austrian union activists started a campaign in support of migrant workers struggles, many of them coming from Romania. The text is part of a brochure published after 3 years of campaigning. It describes the history, activities, goals, and obstacles of the «Sezonieri campaign» and also the first steps of its transnationalisation. In April 2017, the campaign will be restarted during asparagus harvest. Videoclips will be published (to inform both workers and the public), info-tours (in Austria and Romania) will be organised, and of course the organising/info work in the fields will be continued.
(15.02.2017)
by WORKER OF APPLE (CORK)
The text we publish this Wednesday offers a cross section of a specific kind of precarity, that of freelancing, in one of the biggest multinational companies of the world and it tells us the difficulties of organizing struggles and long-lasting strategies to obtain better working conditions, both on the legal and on the political level. The article is the story of workers employed by Globetech, a Vendor company, which employs workers for Apple. The workers were given bogus employment contracts, which means that they working as employees but paid by the day, without receiving any benefits. Recounting all the attempts to get organized against the abuses of the company – passing through Unions and State department – the worker describes the intertwining of different layers of precarization, exploitation and subordination – enforced also by harsh management control and bullying – stressing how the multinational company uses the Vendor company to establish its own rules by getting round national law, without any consequences. This storyalso shows the way in which big companies manage to outsource all its costs and due taxes to the workers, while practically depriving the law of any concrete meaning, something that recalls the case of the workers in the gig economy. This double level of control and abuse, strengthened by the threat and the actual use of unjustified dismissal, makes it very difficult for workers to run the risk of getting organized, because it convinces them they have no chance to win. The importance of this analysis lies therefore on two main axes: on the one hand workers’ struggle cannot count on the power of the law or the Union, on the other, consequently, the article shows the crucial need for new forms of organization capable of creating the conditions for the workers to fight. Since the workers’ fight against a transnational organization of production, their struggles must be organized on that level as well. A transnational connection among the workers could in fact give more power to the struggles also on the local level.
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