WORLD WORLDWIDE AUSTRIA WIEN News Journal Update - (en) wien syndikat: The Tüwi is finally paying! (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 After more than a year of industrial action, Tüwi has finally decided to pay an

out-of-court settlement to a wrongfully dismissed worker. But that is only the
beginning. ---- For more than a year, a group of Tüwi employees has been
protesting against the unbearable conditions in which the club, the Tüwi kitchen
and the Beisl are. The main demands were for wages to be raised to the legal
minimum and for workers to be able to keep tips (until September 2022 workers at
Tüwi only earned 8 euros an hour and to this day they cannot keep tips).
In addition, workers have called for more accountability and transparency from
the leadership of the association. Indeed, the current CEO and other coordinators
have excluded members of the association from auditing the finances, while
systematically silencing and marginalizing dissenting opinions. Although Tüwi is
said to have a charter, collective decision-making has been repeatedly overridden
by a small group of people in positions of power.

In September 2022, one of the people most involved in the internal conflict was
unilaterally dismissed by the Tüwi managing director. As a reason, he expressly
stated that the person was "causing too much trouble" and that he did not want
"the Tüwi to become a second Gagarin".

Although the Tüwi and the Gagarin have very different structures, they are both
commercial places based on an ideal of collective values and solidarity. They
"sell" a space where people are happy to spend their money because they believe
it's not going to a big capitalist corporation and where they can hang out
without financial pressure because the prices for food and drink are cheap.

The problem is that both places are unable to live up to their standards or even
to be self-critical. Shady power structures are part of the problem that needs to
be resolved internally. The other part is, and there's no getting around it,
people need to be paid fairly for their work!
The standards set by the legislature are the bare minimum for survival. We as
anti-capitalists should strive for much more and that should also be clear within
the left scene.

Since the Tüwi managing director finally decided to comply with the minimum legal
standards, the WAS did not start a campaign like in the Gagarin case. In fact, it
is not the aim of WAS to smash left spaces in Vienna that we value and in which
we see value (see e.g. WAS' support of Tüwi in 2018).

The aim of the WAS is to support workers in their material conditions and to
expose the economic exploitation that keeps marginalized people in their
marginalized positions.
We are an anarcho-syndicalist union: we get no money and/or credit by fighting
industrial disputes, we all put our free time and energy into our mutual aid
network and the only reason the WHAT is involved in these disputes is because the
affected workers organized in WAS have taken their situation into their own hands
to change it.
It is up to the "Vienna Left Scene" to demand responsibility from these spaces,
and it is up to the spaces themselves to change their structures and end the
exploitation of the workers.

Flyer about labor rights in the Tüwi from November 11, 2022

Finally, the Tüwi managing director agreed to pay out of court 3,000 euros, which
are unpaid wages (e.g. due to non-compliance with the minimum wage, unpaid
vacation, unpaid 13th and 14th wages), plus 5 months' termination compensation
for the without notice dismissed worker, acts.

But the struggle of the Tüwi employees is not over yet. More and more Tüwis are
starting actions against the management because the internal structures, which
are becoming more and more authoritarian, do not allow for democratic
decision-making and expression of opinion.
The WAS will continue to remain in class solidarity with the struggling workers
in the Tüwi and will support their actions.

There is no "integration" through economic exploitation!

You can contact the struggling workers at tuewi-workers-united@riseup.net.

Flyer about labor rights in the Tüwi from November 11, 2022 (as PDF)

Published on WAS-Blog on 03/18/2023. Copying possible with reference to the source.

https://wiensyndikat.wordpress.com/2023/03/18/das-tuwi-zahlt-endlich/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca