1. maggio/maig/mayo/may/mai 2004
Milano- Barcelona
Euro Mayday 004

Flexworkers of europe let's unite!
There's a World of Rights to Fight for:
Steady Income & Paid Vacation,
Access to Housing, Loving, Hacking

MAYDAY, MAYDAY!! Why precari@s, intermittents, cognitari/e are rebelling across EUROPA...

Remember MAYDAY, the global holiday of workers, dear to anarchists and socialists worldwide, born in America and mummified in Russia and China, fallen in neglect in Europe as neoliberalism mounted and many unions sold out? Well, in Milano since 2001 a network of Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish media hacktivists, rank-and-file unions, self-run and squatted youth centers, critical mass bikers, radical networks, student groups, syndicalist collectives, immigrants' associations, assorted commies, greens, anarcos, gays and feminists have given life to a MAYDAY PARADE taking place in the afternoon of May 1st, whose participation and meaning has grown tremendously from 5,000 to 50,000 people, thereby triggering many urban actions and social conflicts that are spreading among young temps, partimers, freelance and contract workers, researchers and teachers, service and culture workers in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere across Europe.

MAYDAY has been not only an event, but also a method, a project, and a process. A horizontal METHOD of crossnetworking the Genoa movement with the radical sections of unionism, based on subvertising, picketing, organizing and equal access to many identities and ways of action, thereby enabling the alliance between two generations of conflict. A PROCESS of radicalizing transeuropean service and knowledge workers to constitute an insurgent identity capable of contributing to a new european political and social SPACE in place of the one which recently foundered in Brussels.

PRECARIOUSNESS is what we live, FLEXICURITY is what we want. Across Euroland. And fast. We demand security and universality of income, social and vacation benefits, increased overtime and limitations on night and sunday work, subsidized education, housing, health, free access to media and knowledege, a eurowide minimum wage, right to union-organizing for temps and flextimers, an end of wage and union discrimination by employers between temp and non-temp labor, such as the fact that a partimer's hour is paid less than a fulltimer's, an end to xenophobic laws and mass deportations that are suppressing the free circulation of people of all hues, religions, and cultures across NEUROPA.

After Atocha, it's clear to everybody we are living in a WAR SOCIETY where all of us who live and love, think and struggle, get high or low, have become bomb-fodder for fundamentalist and neoliberal franchises alike. We live constantly under risk, under an imminent threat of destruction. It is not only basic social services, our incomes and jobs that are under fierce attack everywhere, but our very bodies could be annihilated in an instant at any instant, in a train, a building, a subway, a mall. Aznar's cynical attempt to manipulate the sorrow of Spaniards, Catalans, Basques and Europeans, has backfired and undermined one of the three neoliberal pillars on which euro bushism rests.

Now Blair and Berlusconi must absolutely follow the destiny of their military ally, this is what flex, temp and knowledge workers all over Europe demand, as March 20 unambiguously demonstrated in the giant street rallies that peacefully seized all euro metropolises, and especially Roma and Barcelona. March 20 can be the reversal of the apocalyptic trends unleashed all over the world by September 11 and the global war that has followed. March 20 shows that radical democracy can defeat neoliberalism and really make the world a safer place for all human beings.

We are also living in a WAR ECONOMY set in motion by an ongoing act of imperial aggression to establish the world hegemony of a neoliberal model that has proved incapable of either spreading wealth or preventing crisis. In the name of neoliberalism, the political élites of the West, reinforced by coercive social norms, such as drug prohibitionism or the return to family values, constant remote monitoring and close surveillance of unrest and disarray, have sold souls and assets to transnational financial markets and corporations, by privatizing utilities, housing, health, schooling, the ether, thus reinforcing the neoliberal bias in favor of stronger inequality.

Rumsfeld's flexible war had WAL-MART as logistics model, thanks to its information-rich labor-intensive efficient flow of goods and services. Wal-Mart is the biggest corporation and largest supermarket chain on earth. It's also a firm that pays on average SUBPOVERTY WAGES and imports huge quantities of textiles and other goods from Chinese non-union factories and weatshops. Global chainstore brands like Wal-Mart, Ikea, Carrefour, Adecco, Auchan/Alcampo, Manpower, Metro, Yum! Brands, Esselunga, Autogrill are the essence of how neoliberal corporations look at people: pliant, obedient, subservient, manipulable, available on call and on demand, exploitable at will, firable at whim.

We are convinced that at the core of the process of neoliberal accumulation lies flexible and contingent labor by the young, women, migrants and casualized employees, in crucial reproductive and distribution services, and in the knowledge, culture, and media industries that provide the raw material on which the system functions: information. We call ourselves PRECOG because we embody the PRECARIAT working in retail and services and the COGNITARIAT of media and education industries. We are the producers of neoliberal wealth, we are the creators of knowledge, style and culture enclosured and appropriated by monopoly power.

We believe the celebration of EURO MAYDAY on May 1 --in 2004 date of EU entry for ten states from Eastern, Central, Mediterranean Europe but not for their migrants, and since 1886 the world's festivity of defiant workers-- could COMMUNICATE, INTERWEAVE, HIGHLIGHT to the world the many RADICAL IDENTITIES of precarized, outsourced, offshored, downsized, downgraded, impoverished, humiliated and plain stressed-out temp/flex workers across 21st Century Europe, aka NEUROPA.

We have chosen the MAYDAY PARADE, to be propagated and subvertised via independent omnimedia (print, spray, radio, video, net, satellite etc), as a libertarian and multi-identity format featuring dozens of sound trucks, carnival and allegorical wagons, vans, carts, and bicycles with kids and grown-ups, jugglers of jobs and contorsionists of flexibility, all together expressing cheerful anger against the exclusion of a whole generation and soon the rest of society from social rights with guarantees of collective self-defense. These must have either a continental and federal eurowide coverage or they won't come into being. To put it simply, in the Euro MayDay Parades in MILANO, BARCELONA and elsewhere, we wanna rock the euro boat to get our rightful share of the booty...

EURO MAYDAY PARADE 004
eco/media activism joins metro/labor radicalism
for a bush-free europe

>from *Euro Mayday site*.

related context
> free culture manifesto. the mission of the free culture movement is to reclaim our culture from corporate control. our goal is to defend free and open cultural space and protect public intellectual capital from privatization and exploitation.
> verso un manifesto del lavoro cognitivo.

imago
> we: the flexworkers