On 14 January, at an assembly of their union SAT/SOC, the workers of Fresh Tom almost unanimously decided to declare an indefinite strike.
The company, whose activity is carried out in the plant in Pechina, Almeria, where the strike has been declared, also has facility centres in Ingenio, Canary Islands and in Surrey, UK. It produces and markets vegetables, especially tomatoes, which it distributes internationally.
Difficulties lie ahead, which they will overcome thanks to the bonds of solidarity that they will build locally and internationally. The struggle will be approached using all possible means: by legal means, by calling the labour inspectorate, by raising their voices internationally and by direct action.
The strike begins
The first day of strike action is declared on Tuesday, 19 January, with a majority turnout. The main demands are limited to demanding compliance with labour laws and the collective agreement:
– Increase in wages to the current Minimum Interprofessional Wage (1180€).
– Conversion of temporary contracts into permanent or permanent-discontinuous contracts, recognised in the previous collective agreement for the sector.
– Transport and seniority bonuses.
The sector agreement, which dates back to 2015, has not been updated, which shows the extent to which the employers value maintaining labour relations that respect the rights that, at least by law, are recognised for workers.
This and other companies in the same sector, where workers also have to fight for compliance with the law in terms of their labour rights, are certified by the employers’ organisation Coexphal and by Global Gap. It is clear that the guarantees that these organisations offer to consumers are far removed from assessing the conditions of the workers. It is up to the workers themselves to organise and fight against these miserable conditions.
You will be able to accompany the workers in their struggle as they have set up an information picket at the gates of the company and are present every day at the work centre: Cortijo del cura 1, 04250 Pechina.
The strike continues. Sixth day of strike
The mainstream press, as is the case with almost any workers’ struggle, has virtually no coverage of this feat that the Fresh Tom workers are carrying out. That is why we continue to insist on the need for an independent press that gives a voice to the working class, that tells the story of the strikers and that shows that, despite the attacks by the bosses, taking advantage of the situation that the crisis has opened up, the workers will not back down in their demands.
During this first week of strike, the company has sent the Guardia Civil to identify the picket line. As was the case during the strike at the provincial level in the handling and field last December, the companies are once again trying by all the means at their disposal to make it difficult for the workers to exercise their fundamental right to strike.
Confident, the picket line has continued to be proud and to support each other in overcoming the difficulties. However, they need the solidarity of the rest of the workers of the companies in the sector. The struggle did not end in December. Most of the companies are still not complying with the minimum wage, not paying the full working hours, not treating the workers with respect and not reconciling their working hours with their family needs in these difficult times.
The repression of the strikers was already felt in December. Not only the violence against the pickets, both the scabs and the employers and managers. But especially the violence that has been exercised since then. By not hiring temporary workers. Therefore, it is essential that the majority of the workers go on strike.
It is not only necessary that the rest of the trade union organisations join in, but also that the social organisations take into account the most forgotten sector of the whole production, without whose work we would not be able to pick from the shelves in the supermarkets any groceries.
We need solidarity
The Fresh Tom workers, like the rest of the workers in the countryside of Almeria, are not alone. A large number of comrades internationally support them, because the struggle is the same. From that conviction we ask you to continue fighting and to share with us your experience and the lessons learned.
We call on you to send messages of solidarity for the workers to the following email address: fieldworkerssolidarity@protonmail.com
Any help, any ideas are welcome, and if you are also on strike, tell us all about it, we want to support you!!!
Their companies, Cortes LTD and Beehive, distribute the products on the Irish and English markets, but also on the local market. The production plants are not only limited to Almeria, but also produce in the Canary Islands.
You can send your concerns to the employers’ organisation so that they can work with rights in the company Fresh Tom at the following addresses:
Production centre in Pechina (Almeria) -> info@freshtomexport.com; administración@freshtomexport.com; logistics@freshtomexport.com
Production centre in Ingenio (Gran Canaria) -> Ilopezfalcon@gmail.com
“PECHINA 14/1/2021 – After weeks of searching for solutions through dialogue and weighing up the serious breaches of labour law committed by the company, the workers of Fresh Tom Export in Almería (Spain), a vegetable grower and trading company specialising in tomato crops, , have decided to go on INDEFINITE STRIKE.
From this moment on, we are fighting on all fronts: the mobilisation front, the labour inspection front, the judicial front and that of our allies in Europe. Against the employers who exploit and repress. Workers struggle!
Strike begins
Today, Tuesday 19th January, the workers of Fresh Tom have started the strike. The workers will remain on strike until their wages are increased and updated to the current Minimum Interprofessional Wage (1180€). In addition to demanding the rights recognised by the previous Collective Agreement in the field: seniority bonuses, transport bonuses, as well as the conversion of temporary contracts into fixed or fixed-discontinuous contracts. It should be remembered that this agreement, which dates back to 2015, has been out of date for two years, and a new one is being negotiated.
The workers have stated that they will remain concentrated at the entrance to the company for the duration of the strike, respecting anti-Covid-19 security measures. The measure has been requested and approved by the government sub-delegation.
International solidarity
We need international support as this struggle is the same struggle that workers all over the world are fighting. From this understanding we ask you to keep fighting back and let us know about your struggle and the lessons learned.
In addition, any other support will be welcome, from videos or pictures sending your symbolic support to looking for those companies that are distributing Fresh Tom’s groceries in Europe. This company operates in Irish and English market as a distribution company called Cortes LTD, among others. Help us find where else and let them know workers solidarity does not understand national borders.
To contact us please send us an email to fieldworkerssolidarity@protonmail.com
Also check the companies contacts to make them know workers in Almeria are not alone, that we are workers united!
Workers with the Unite union at British Airways Cargo have just completed nine days of strike action. Beginning on Christmas Day and ending on 2nd January, workers were striking in an attempt to protect their pay and conditions. Unfortunately, due to COVID, the union decided not to maintain any picket lines. British Airways are cutting staff’s pay (25% for some staff), downgrading other terms and conditions (holiday, sick etc) and breaking up their bargaining unit (making them negotiate for pay separate to the rest of BA staff). BA are also threatening to outsource their cargo operation all together.
All this is very similar to what Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) have been doing with their staff. BA spokespeople, like HAL’s, have been telling the media that large numbers of staff on newer contracts are actually getting a pay rise out of the proposals. [1] Given the 98% return for strike action it looks as though most staff have hopefully seen through these divide and rule tactics. Like a great many workplaces at Heathrow, the divide between staff on old and new contracts is a tricky one to navigate. A cargo worker told us that although most of the newer staff walked out, there is still a feeling that they are under-represented and that the strike was mainly about protecting the old contracts. Although the old guard on the night shift stand to lose £11,000 and 20 year bods stand to lose £8,000, these are still amounts that newer starters never had in the first place. As is the case elsewhere at Heathrow, workers that have been there a long time also often occupy the easier jobs and the better shift patterns. Resentment can easily grow and just as easily derail industrial action if left unchecked. In this particular instance, it’s believed the timing of the strike at Christmas and the £70 a day strike fund, may have been enough to get newer starters on board with the strike. But any strategy that is going to last is going to need to address the inferior conditions of newer starters. Workers on these contracts need a forum where they can make their own demands. Are they going to be willing to continue a hard strike without one?
BA’s onslaught is made all the more outrageous by the fact that these workers have shipped 12,000 tonnes of PPE into the country to help deal with the pandemic. The government has awarded BA and Virgin Atlantic £150m worth of contracts between them for the PPE shipments (BA probably making up the lions share) and awarded a further £2.7m so far to BA for flying testing kits back from China. [2] The government is dishing out huge sums of money to BA, without competition, while they slash their workers pay and destroy their bargaining rights. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, but it should focus our anger to fight as hard as we can against these disgusting attacks.
Once again, Heathrow workers have shown they’re not willing to just take these attacks lying down. Compared to much of the workforce across the nation, nine continuous strike days, over the Christmas period is a bold move. It’s unclear at the moment exactly how much impact the strike has had. The management don’t appear to have reacted, and there hasn’t been any reports of severe air cargo delays or disruption. Even before the strike, delays were being reported at ports. A number of issues have been causing logjams, including a rise in imports following the end of the first coronavirus lockdown, Brexit-related stockpiling and containers filled with personal protective equipment not being collected from ports. Mountains of uncollected containers are having to be stored at huge cost and many companies have been worrying about having enough supply to meet demand over Christmas. [3] In an attempt to alleviate delays, BA were asking their customers to “unitise” their freight rather than sending it “loose.” [4] With the queues of lorries in Kent in the run up to Christmas, it was likely even more companies would be looking to move their goods by air. Cargo is the only department in the company that has managed to turn a profit since the start of the pandemic. The timing seems reasonably well-suited for the cargo workers to take strike action. We’ve heard that, although there has been some scabs crossing the imaginary picket line, only a handful of staff have been in work. Maybe 20 out of around 600. By this measure it’s been a pretty successful strike. If this strike hasn’t caused the disruption required to change the companies mind, we need to ask why.
Some of the work is probably being mopped up by companies like Dnata and Menzies. Does the union have a strategy to tackle this issue? How have BA weathered the storm? Why have we not seen reports of freight pile-ups and empty shelves? British Airways has likely enlisted the help of scab labour from somewhere and temporarily outsourced some of the work to another company. If companies can do this, what can we do to counteract it? The workers that are doing the work might not even know they are scabbing. We need to get to them and let them know. If there were areas in Heathrow that were still moving goods that would have usually passed through IAG Cargo, it could have been targeted for some kind of socially-distanced action. COVID-19 is making all these things more difficult, but we can’t just wait, in the hope it goes away. It is a tough call, but we are going to have to think of solutions.
It also raises the question of what could have been done sooner. At the start of this crisis, BA were threatening to make 13,000 staff redundant and “fire and rehire” everyone else on zero-hours contracts and people were saying nothing can be done. “No ones flying.” “BA don’t care if we strike.” This was never entirely true of the cargo division. Although passenger flights had plummeted, there was still obviously a need for goods to be flown in. The fact that IAG didn’t have dedicated cargo planes and nearly all its freight arrives in the belly of passenger planes, also presented a problem for the company. Workers we are in contact with watched BA staff hollow out Boeing 777’s, to turn them into makeshift cargo planes. Work that was needed, to keep the company running, was happening and should of been stopped until the company removed its threats. A high level of organisation is required to make this a reality, but it’s where we need to be at if we’re going to stand a chance in situations like this. The lack of a unified response and the strategy of departmental deals that was pursued by the union, has now left the comparatively powerful cargo division isolated. A combined fight back at the start, with cargo playing the pivotal role, may have been beneficial for everyone. This is all good in hindsight, but was predicted by workers we know at the time. [5]
Looking to the future, with the introduction of customs declarations on goods coming to and from Europe and extra checks on food and livestock, cargo workers everywhere may have a window in which their bargaining position is higher. Even so, it’s fairly clear that unless workers start combining their efforts across unions, companies, industries and eventually borders, we’re not going to be able to resist the bosses blitz on our conditions. Workers on the HAL picket lines in December were keen to combine their efforts with the cargo workers and even the striking Rolls Royce workers at Barnoldswick. [6] Workers can see the logic and there is a definite appetite for it. Loads of workers at Heathrow and in aviation everywhere are in the same boat. Even before the crisis, while companies have been making massive profits, most of us have been seeing our living standards squeezed. The pandemic is just accelerating the downward trend. The boards, shareholders and the management lackeys at these companies are going to be ok. Why should our fellow workers struggle to make ends meet? We don’t have to accept it. Together we can apply the pressure needed to make sure we aren’t the ones that pay for the bosses crisis. If you want to get involved with our efforts to bring this about, get in touch! Email:-heathrowworkers@protonmail.com
We worked in a fruit farm in Kent picking strawberries. It was about 80 acres. The family who ran the business had several other farms. On our farm the strawberries were grown outside in poly-tunnels, suspended at chest height. The work we did was de-leafing (so maintaining the plants), and some picking work. We arrived in June and worked until September.
We lived in on a 1 or 2 acre caravan site next to a small industrial estate. Around us were fields with the polytunnels. The rent cost about £69 quid per week. So about a day’s pay. This included a bed in the caravan for up to 6 people, and it covered electricity, water, communal showers/toilets and cooking facilities. The pay was directly taken from our pay cheques.
The caravans were very basic. We saw pictures of other farms and they can be a lot nicer. The cooking facilities were also very functional. The toilets were always blocked. We arrived as a couple so were able to share the main bedroom. It had a mattress and a wardrobe. We got lucky, because this was better than other rooms. You could be in a very small room together with another stranger, sleeping a few inches away from their face. And one plug socket per room.
Between workers coming and going, there was no cleaning of the caravans. This was left up to the workers. Because it was the lockdown period, people left often as work reopened, e.g. the local McDonalds. When a new person came, the site manager would knock on your door and then it was up to you to introduce them to the caravan site and show them around. The new worker’s bed could still have the old worker’s stuff on it. So no, not much cleaning.
Up until mid summer we got up around 4.15/4,30am. Though it could be as early as 3.30am. We’d start work 45 mins later. We’d quickly eat something, get dressed and take our phones so that we could listen to music etc while working. You’d take a packed lunch with you.
We’d meet our team supervisor in the yard and then walk to the field we were working in and be given our task for the day. We had two 15 min breaks for the day. One around 9.30am and then one around 13.30. We’d finish around 2.30-3pm, though this could go later in August depending on the latest Supermarket orders.. So it could be a 10-12 hour day. Because it was summer, you had to also make sure you kept drinking water. You were told to bring your own from the caravan as water wasn’t supplied. If you needed the toilet out in the field there were some porta-loos, which were in an unspeakable state. Shit across the walls etc. Not great during a pandemic. There was no sanitiser. Sometimes there was no soap by the water pump outside, or no water pump at all.
When we were de-leafing we had to work our way down the 20-30m poly tunnel, one row after another, pruning the plants of their leaves. Up and down all day. There was always a target, which was far too high to achieve. We learned quickly that the way they tell you to do the de-leafing isn’t actually how people do it. You had to find ways to cut corners and to make it look like you’ve done it how they want it, but actually do it differently. More experienced workers would give tips on how to do this. e.g. spreading leaves on the floor in a way that made it looks like you had pruned more than you really had.
We only did de-leafing and picking, then others on our sites would place the fruit in trays that were then driven to the packhouse on the other side of the village at a different site.
The work was hard on the body – on your hands and legs, and dehydration was a real issue during the summer. It was hot under the poly tunnels and you had to bring all the water with you for the day from the campsite. You’d need at least 2L a day. But there weren’t any serious injuries while we were there. Once a week the farm organised a minivan to go to the local supermarkets so people could stock up on food and drink.
August was the busiest. There were around 200 at our caravan site, but they were also bringing people from another site, so there could be maybe 400 working on the site at that time. The main waves of arrival were late May/early June. Picking was at its peak in August, and after that people started going back to their countries, there was less work, and it changed to things like ripping up the plants.
There was one English guy we worked with who could speak Italian, and so he was able to communicate with a Romanian who spoke Italian, having worked in Italy for years. This Romanian showed the English guy how to pick the strawberries really fast using a technique with your hands. The managers don’t teach you this, or anything, so you have to learn from others. The work was measured in rows of plants, and we’d be given different quotas to do.
The supervisors were mainly Romanian and Bulgarian, but we had an English supervisor. He’d never done fruit picking before but he’d been a manager in a shop so they made him a supervisor. He’d work out the quotas (around 20kg of fruit per hour). The base pay was minimum wage, but if you went past a certain amount you’d be in ‘bonus territory.’ But you had to go really damn quick to even reach minimum wage territory. If you didn’t go fast enough too often, you’d get sent home to your caravan for the day. You’d get paid for your shift but then you wouldn’t get asked to work again. You’d just continue being on site with no work. You didn’t find out until the night before if you were rota’d to work the next day. This was put up on the kitchen notice board. The farm operated 7 days a week and you had to check the rota each night. So if you wanted time off you’d have to tell them you were having a day off or just not go to work and deal with it. Normally they were okay if you told them in advance.
There were mainly workers from Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine, with some Polish, Slovakian and Czech. There may also have been some Roma workers on the farm. The Ukrainian workers lived on a separate caravan site and were shipped in to bulk up numbers when demand was high. The camp site we were in was mainly Romanian, and there was a second one that was mainly Bulgarian. People mainly stuck to their language group. The workers were mainly male, many in their mid-20s, but there were still plenty in their 30s, 40s, 50s. Some of the migrant workers seemed quite experienced, and many of the new ones had come with experienced ones who showed them the ropes.
Our work team was mainly English. At the start of June there were 35 of us, but it went down to around 16 who stuck it out a while and when we left at the end of September there were 4. The English workers didn’t last long. Many people were from hippyish backgrounds – normally working at festivals. Some had just been made redundant, and others had been travelling around the world when the pandemic hit. There were also a couple of dodgy people who seemed to just be there for cheap accommodation and to steal. Stressful when they’re living in your caravan. They didn’t stay long and moved on.
The English levels of the workers varied a lot. There wasn’t a whole lot of interaction between us and the migrant workers. We were the weird newcomers. The job was never normally done by English workers. We were only there because of the pandemic. It’s just not a job that’s normally advertised or accessible to English people. The culture is Eastern European and it’s its own world. Entering the farm is like going to another country. Romanian lads showing off their tinted cars, Eastern European BBQs and drinking. The social occasions were quite nice, but there was a lot of macho posturing as well – particularly from the Romanians, which was perhaps a response to the fact that all the nationalities seemed to look down upon them as the lowest.
Sometimes I overheard arguments or conversations about arguments, and often I couldn’t understand what was being said as it was all in Romanian, Bulgarian or Slovakian. But what I gathered from asking people what was being said, or from watching/context, was that people resented the target system and the speed they were obliged to work at. I regret how little of the domestic dramas which unfolded in the kitchen, ladies toilets, washing-machine room and at the picnic benches in between the static caravans I actually understood.
Why did we get a job working in a field? Working outside is always a bonus and we needed a place where we could live and work at the same time. We also had a slightly naive idea of what agricultural work would be like. Growing things seemed like a nice idea, but it quickly became clear that the reality of mass scale agriculture is very different. It’s just a factory in a field. This was pretty much the same realisation everyone went through there. Most people hadn’t experienced agricultural work and were pretty disappointed by the working and living conditions. You realise that the reality of work for low skilled migrants is extremely different to your average work environment in England. The norms, care, effort, health and safety you might expect in normal work environments doesn’t exist in poor migrant working situations here. Modern day slavery comes to mind – the farm we were on got done for slavery a few years ago due to not paying people who weren’t hitting targets and for people living and working in unsanitary conditions.
When we as the English workers arrived, the farm had to up their standards a bit because they knew we were used to other conditions and knew more about the law and what’s right and wrong. If you’re Ukrainian or Romanian you won’t know what the rules are here as much. Plus you’re here to work so you’re kind of stuck.
Despite our working from June to September 2020, no-one on our farm became ill with Covid. I did hear of other farms in other parts of the UK where one person became ill with Covid, shortly followed by everyone else on the farm and then the farm had to close. The living and cooking/washing facilities at the farm where I worked and at farms like it generally were such that if one person got Covid, everyone else would have, for sure. In the fields (90 acres) it was possible to work in a really safe socially distant way, but this didn’t really matter if we were then fifteen people in the kitchen at the same time and five to a static caravan. My theory as to why no one on our farm got sick with Covid is that in the summer infection rates were lower anyway, plus vitamin D is meant to be really effective at reducing risk of getting the virus and we were outside working from before midsummer sunrise until 2/3pm six days in seven. Luck also.
To begin with, pretences were made at keeping us in ‘bubbles’ and staying two metres apart, but this quickly dropped and everyone (our farm- roughly 100/150 people) more or less interacted as normal, before the pandemic. Our temperatures were taken once a week to check for fever but really that was all.
Also, I remember working in the field once with a Ukrainian team, and someone had got something stuck in their throat- a small hair from the strawberry plants perhaps, this happened quite often. This person was coughing and coughing trying to clear their throat and someone else in the next strawberry row said ‘Aha, coronavirus!’ and everyone in the surrounding rows laughed. That summarises how people seemed to relate to the virus, I think, in the context of their working lives. It was so serious it was hard to take it seriously any more, if that makes sense.
I don’t remember the UK folks who I mainly worked with and hung around with speaking about Covid that much. I think for many of us it was a real freeing joy to be working all together after the first lockdown in the late spring and early summer of 2020, and we talked about our lives, where we lived/were from and how Covid had disrupted our life-plans, but not really Covid itself. It was fun to just pick in the field all day together and then hang out in each others’ static caravans and get fucked up around a fire in the forest below the farm after dark. It was a good escape not to talk about the virus and I think we subconsciously avoided it as a topic.
As fruit pickers/agricultural labourers we were definitely key workers, but in working on the farm I came to be aware of a kind of stratification of key workers in public conception, with doctors/nurses at the top and people doing our work much lower down. I guess doctors and nurses are clearly linked to fighting the virus in peoples’ minds, but folks sweating away in an anonymous field deep in Kent less so. If anyone found a shop in Canterbury (the nearest large town) which offered discount for key workers we’d all tell each other to be sure to take the most advantage of it as a kind of practical solidarity thing.
I think workers at my workplace came out of this period stronger, as individuals and as a group. We learnt how hard we are able to work, which is not to glorify hard work for its own sake, but instead to celebrate our adaptability and ability to meet the challenge of survival in such a physically tough workplace. We grew together as a community of disparate people thrown together by a combination of economic circumstance and the environment created by the pandemic. Many times I realised that the main reason I was able to keep at the long, hot, itchy, dry, early, dirty shifts was the other people I worked with, and knowing that that ‘family’ would be there with me.
I am 18 years old and I work at a McDonald’s franchise. I started in summer 2019. Our store is relatively small. During a single shift there will be around ten people; overall there might be around 90 people, which means that many of them are part-time.
When the first lockdown started, people were no longer allowed to sit inside to eat in. The area where the store is located became a high risk area. They then offered only delivery and takeaway orders. Some new rules were introduced, like wiping counters more regularly, wearing masks in-store and glass shields between different parts of the kitchen. But the managers themselves were running back-and-forth between different sections and there was a shortage of masks at first. Even now, managers do not really care about safety. A manager told me that if I am too worried I should stay home. There was no real collective resistance about all this. The financial situation of my family is pretty bad, so I couldn’t afford to stay home. At the same time I didn’t want to go to work, as my parents are vulnerable. So I initially took holiday days because we didn’t have much information about whether we would get paid at all after McDonald’s closed. So now I don’t have any holidays left.
Then they said that the company is making losses by staying open, so they put us on furlough till the end of June 2020. A lot of workers, some of them are university students, didn’t come back after the end of the first lockdown. At the same time, you saw people who were full-time construction workers and part-time McDonald’s workers taking on full-time roles here because their sites had been closed. In general there was no shortage of labour at all, even if a few people were off sick.
People discussed that the government is crap when it came to the pandemic, but none of the discussions were serious enough about it. People think that nothing can be done, so they don’t even want to talk about it. This is a big issue that plagues us, without any valid representation or organisation, the average worker is bound to feel powerless and insignificant.
When it comes to unionising, I am a part of the McStrike campaign, but not an official union member yet. I heard about the campaign when they had a short strike in six stores and they made it into the media. I also took part in the BAME group of the campaign. There are around 40 workers who somehow organise within the McStrike campaign in London, who are on group chats. There are more pub workers than fast food workers who are taking part, especially in south London. They are working in a dozen pubs or so. None of my co-workers in my own store is a union member or in contact with the McStrike campaign though. Some only work for a day a week, others have to pay back student loans and don’t want to spend money on dues, others are scared. My franchise used to have members from the McStrike campaign, but due to the high turnover, many of them left again. This is the main issue with the fast food industry, no one wants to stay.
Wages are bad, I have been there for more than a year on £6.25 an hour. Now I get paid £7.25 now that I am 18. It is possible to get small raises if you get a shift manager position or something, but the stress and responsibility that come with are absolutely not worth it. You cannot bargain individually either, we need a collective force if we want actual effects. The hours are unpredictable, too. There is an option to get a fixed hours contract, but most people are on zero confirmed hours.
During lockdown, our campaign was impacted severely. We only had Zoom meetings. We couldn’t visit other McDonald’s stores. Although the union campaign has existed for a few years now, it still relies on paid union organisers. It would be better to have teams of workers who visit other workers in their area. Workers organise the Zoom meetings, but not the real life campaign yet. Organisers organised a protest once in front of my store, but that was six months before I started working there. People who were organising in the store at the time are now gone. That’s the painful part. You would also have to reach out to grocery store workers, because if fast food goes on strike, people will just go to the next convenience store. But the unions don’t cooperate either.These are some the problems we will face when we are trying to use trade unions alone as organs of class struggle. You spend your whole life fighting for economic causes alone while being restricted to a single industry. You need something that organises workers overall. This is a massive problem as well, in Britain, I have heard many unions have gone class collaborationist and trade union memberships have gone steadily down.
At the moment, fighting to improve the positions of trade unions does still seem like the most effective way to organise workers, despite the difficulties. The great thing about the McStrike campaign is that it is not merely an economic struggle either. Our core demands are improving the minimum wage to £15/hr across the industry, union recognition and an end to zero-hour contracts. Now this might not seem like a lot, and might sound like pure social democratic concessions, but there is more to it. With union recognition, even if still bound by capital, collective bargaining for working conditions will help workers leave the shell of thought that we are insignificant and weak. It is a very important step to build workers’ power.
We also have good relationships with the delivery riders. We know a lot of them by name. What is amusing and kind of sad is that none of them mentioned the Deliveroo strikes a single time. McDonald’s uses UberEats and JustEat for its customer food deliveries but we see the delivery drivers using multiple devices and other platforms such as Deliveroo and Foodpanda too. Another interesting thing I have observed is that the majority of the delivery drivers are Brazilian and not just in my store but a few other places as well and usually their level of proficiency in English is not that great, leading to language barriers.
Demographics in the fast food sector in London is definitely a huge issue. Fast food workers have been considered key workers and the majority of key workers in London are BAME. You can often see that entire stores are filled with one of these ethnicities and the reason behind it is that BAME workers like me are more likely to be willing to work at a lower wage as well.
On race based conflicts and social upheavals that happened this year, I discussed the BLM protests only with two co-workers and attended a demonstration with one of them. There were meetings within the McStrike campaign about it, Zoom calls with guys in the US. Despite all of us being in the same hole together, there is still a great level of mistrust between these communities. There are black people being racist to asians, there are asians being racist to asians etc.
There is racism at the workplace, and a lot of nepotism. Branches are filled with single nationalities. This happens when managers hire primarily people from their own background. This in itself is not racist, I guess. In my store there are primarily Italians. They are pretty social, they go to each other’s houses and stuff. But they remain a clique. Self-segregation is a big problem. This is one of the biggest aims and achievements of the McStrike campaign. We are trying to organise workers of so many different backgrounds all in the same struggle and together trying to fight reactionary ideals that divide us. Perhaps we have not had a similar display of internationalism in London in a while. It is in the McStrike campaign where it seems entirely realistic and common for a Jamaican to organise with an Anglo and a Pakistani.
When it comes to the situation at my school, people in my class all just started sixth form. There are only very few other students in my class who work part-time, so you can’t talk about the situation at work that much. I haven’t heard anything from the student union yet. The debate club is currently closed due to lockdown. So there has not been much room for discussing the current affairs and raising consciousness either at school.
The time you spend in class has been reduced, students come in at different times.
But before the lockdown there were the climate strikes and many young people participated in the BLM protests. I would say 95% of the people were under 25. With the BLM stuff there was a lot of identity politics, a lot of people just wanted to virtue signal. However it did display revolutionary potential. For the climate strikes, it would be incorrect to say it was overall just middle class kids but it was people of all sorts and, most importantly, a lot of working class people realising their own self interests were at odds with the industrialists and cronies, the ruling class. The phrase “EAT THE RICH” getting popular amongst kids of my generation does indeed indicate polarisation even if there’s not much substance to it.
Teens now view communism as way more favourable than teens 20 years ago did in the UK. However by the time I joined sixth form, the protests had died down. I didn’t see anything happening at school. When the climate strikes were happening, I was at a different school, in East London. No one really joined the strikes from mine. I think that was mainly schools in richer areas, mainly white kids. Perhaps there was also less backlash against them. People in poorer areas didn’t go. They perhaps did not see the prospect of joining a more indirect struggle.
At a stage where the proletariat is dormant and unorganised, it is important for us to go on despite all the difficulties. If the McStrike campaign can get a foothold, maybe perhaps a push for strengthening cross industry labour organisation could be a thing.
I’m a university lecturer at a former polytechnic. My work is made up of three parts: teaching (designing courses, materials, conducting seminars and one to one tutorials, marking); research (collaborating, publishing and presenting); and admin (pastoral care, as well as monitoring student attendance). So I’m either teaching in seminar rooms with up to 30 students, or in a lecture hall with 200 students, or in an office I share with 2 other lecturers. Before corona, I was spending 3 days on campus and 2 days working from home.
When all the corona stuff started happening, we were actually on a national strike about pay and casualisation. There are a few hundred members of the union at our university, and the strike seemed pretty solid in our branch. At that point, most of us were focused on the strike itself, so corona didn’t feature too much in our discussions at first. On the picket, I did raise the issue, asking colleagues if they thought universities would continue teaching if corona got worse, but I felt it wasn’t much of a live issue at that point – that was in mid-March. However, things changed quite rapidly. There was about a week in-between the strike finishing and the lockdown starting and in that week, a union demo was pulled for safety concerns. The union started calling for a shutdown, rather than remote learning, although this was pretty late in the day.
But even then, the management kept saying we should continue teaching face to face. They waited right up until the national lockdown before face to face teaching was stopped, maybe also because they were scared of being sued by the students. Their expectation was that we would immediately just start remote teaching, even though we hadn’t had any extra time to plan how this would actually work in practice. The union was telling teaching staff that we shouldn’t just start online teaching, that we shouldn’t put lectures online, that we should wait. But with management pressuring people to continue online, it was pretty chaotic and we were being tugged in two directions at the same time. Informal chats about how to organise our work were happening mostly within departments by email. The union were also sending out advice in relation to negotiations they were having with management about the move to remote working. Most of us did end up taking our teaching online, also maybe because we didn’t want the students to suffer more than they already had, what with teaching being suspended for the previous recent strike.
Initially there weren’t any resources to do this. IT workers were working flat out to try and aid us, which is also why the union was asking management for more time to get ourselves sorted. Things varied between teams and departments. Some departments went straight to live teaching, some just put presentation slides up for the students. Within our department, we decided to give ourselves some extra time to arrange how we were going to coordinate things, but there wasn’t too much of a delay. We used to have an email list that staff could use to communicate across the university, but that got closed down a few years ago which makes it harder to have informal discussions across departments remotely. In general, universities are pretty top-down in terms of decision-making. But departments do have their own cultures of working and things can vary depending on how many outspoken people ether are in that team, and also what the head of department is like. We have a department email list that is used a lot, especially to air grievances and discuss the situation amongst ourselves. The emails go to everyone, including the departmental management, which means that people who are on more insecure contracts are less likely to raise issues that way. It’s not the same as talking face to face though – especially as management are listening in!
There are lots of staff at the university who can’t work from home, including cleaners, catering and security staff. When the first lockdown happened, the university effectively shut down (including things like catering), and staff who could work at home were told to keep working, and staff who could not work from home, were told that they would be asked to work when needed. There was some flexibility in relation to people having to care for others or being vulnerable to corona.
The workload has gone up for sure. We had to reconfigure all our lessons to be taught online. All students had a blanket ‘mitigating circumstances’ which meant that they could all resubmit work if they wanted, which meant extra marking for us. This went right on into the summer, meaning we had less time to prepare for the next academic year. Now the new term has started, I’m working around 10 extra hours a week than my usual 37.5 hours. The union did manage to negotiate some extra hours for teaching in our ‘Workload Model’, which assigns a time to each task – but it still doesn’t really reflect how long it takes, which means we end up working more hours than we are paid for.
During the summer, management promised students that some face to face teaching would resume in the new term – which was a decision made purely by them, no doubt because they rely heavily on students turning up, paying their fees and renting university accommodation. We disagreed with this though. Another top-down decision was which modules would be taught, when and how long for. While the union agreed that it was still too dangerous to simply resume face to face teaching, management didn’t seem to be budging. In our department though, we decided to take our own course of action: staff teaching on face to face modules wrote a joint letter setting out the reasons why we didn’t think it was a good idea – the usual stuff like H&S and risk assessments, but also pedagogical reasons. Management ended up agreeing to our demand that all teaching in our department continues online, which was great! Why did they agree? I think because all the teaching staff had stuck together, and they knew our team would push back. I’m not sure if the union knows we managed to do this though, at least, they haven’t contacted us about it…
The university has suffered a lot in terms of student numbers – my university relied a lot on clearing to get students, but with the A level fiasco, that was more difficult. Still, we got an extra days holiday (even though this was in the middle of the marking season!). At the start of the academic year, we usually got a small pay increase, which didn’t happen this year.
The relationship with students has changed. You feel more like a ‘service provider’. Moving to the online world means you feel more like you’re just ‘providing content’ to students rather than actually teaching them. Saying that though, there has been a lot of common ground between students and teachers during corona, what with the added stress and pressures we’re under. Students have largely been supportive of us, as they were during the previous strike.
Not being in the same physical space as my co-workers changes things.There’s obviously less general collegial interactions. But on the flip-side, there have been more opportunities for people to participate because all our discussions now happen online. Attendance of the union branch meetings has increased. And we’ve been discussing how to support each other – with the extra work and our mental health, which has been really good. We managed to set up staff wellbeing meetings. The management haven’t provided any support in this regard, aside from signposting you to something on the website. In fact, the relationship with management has become even more distrustful after the strike and with their stance in relation to corona. They refused to renew loads of fractional/hourly paid contracts because of the university’s more precarious financial situation. This happened quite close to the start of teaching – staff on short term and zero-hour contracts are especially vulnerable when the university wants to save money as they just refuse to renew them, but can avoid looking like they’re ‘sacking’ people or reducing the number of staff. This has increased the workload even further onto the permanent staff. It also took them ages to acknowledge the fact that we have to teach from home at the same time as juggling childcare because all the nurseries had shut. There was some possibility to take a special kind of leave if you couldn’t manage, and in our teams we talked to each other about distributing work differently. It was a big problem for me because I also relied on grandparents for childcare which hasn’t been possible for ages now.
The union has been pretty good in terms of pushing health and safety and workload issues. The management are currently trying to restructure the IT department – despite the fact that they’ve been invaluable during corona and having to teach online. We have been on strike over it, and it seems like the students agree with the strike action as it’s so obviously a bad idea to sack IT staff when most of the teaching is online. The union is pretty active, and has been organising virtual picket lines, teachouts and meetings, some of which have had a couple of hundred people attending. The branch seems quite democratic locally – it’s quite easy to get involved and the leadership takes on board the views of the branch – a lot of things are decided in branch meetings, which as I said have been pretty well attended online.
What’s been better and worse during corona? I’ve spent more time with my child, and less time commuting. But the increased stress and uncertainty during this time has definitely affected my mental health. My kid is only in nursery part-time because it’s too expensive for full-time care. Me and my partner, who is also working from home have had to devise a schedule where we take it in turns. Before we did that, it was chaotic and unworkable.
Corona has been an opportunity for the university management to pursue a more blended learning model, which they’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I don’t think they’d want a fully online learning model, because a major draw of the university is its location. At the moment, I think they’ll carry on trying to push for more lectures being posted online, which is problematic because it makes them less reliant on staff, but will probably become harder and harder to resist. I think the online meetings will continue, and that virtual one to one tutorials with students will become more normalised practice.
There have been a lot of ongoing conversations about the handling of the pandemic and a lot of people I’ve spoken to at work are very angry. Management promising students stuff because they need to attract them in the marketed system is at odds with their needs as students and our needs as lecturers. The government insisting that universities opened created a dangerous situation for all those students moving to new places, and for the communities the universities are in. Making universities compete in a market means that it’s much harder for them to survive a situation like this. Some people are really worried about their future. At the same time, there have also been more conversations about having to enforce things ourselves because it’s obvious that management are trapped in their market mentality and the union have limited powers. Yes, they say we should use employment law (e.g. section 44), but this is made for individual use, rather than a collective one. I think we’ve come out stronger as a department because we had that victory about keeping modules online. We’re a bit more confident. Individually though, people are struggling. The current strike feels strong, but I think management are digging their heels in as they want sack people to save money.
In terms of wider stuff, I’ve been involved in my local mutual aid group, both receiving help, as well as trying to coordinate help for others. We’ve also set up a fund to help people financially, with shopping bills and stuff. I heard about a local cleaners strike at Lewisham hospital about lack of PPE. Black Lives Matter has also been a big thing in our university. Management have doing the usual PR stuff, but there’s been lots of solidarity actions and events to discuss racism within the university being organised by staff and students themselves. Many issues have been raised, stuff from racism within the management structures, the curriculum, staffing, the kinds of contracts we’re on, how certain staff are treated, the experiences of black students. There have also been a lot of academic discussions about the issues, about the relationships between race and gender and class. The union branch also held a memorial meeting for essential workers who had died of corona and we had a good discussion about H&S at work. That’s all been really good.
What else would I like to say? Well, I think the government wants universities like mine to close. They’re using corona as a way to close us down, without having to be blamed. It can simply be blamed on the pandemic and the market. You can say that this was always the logic behind marketing higher education. And secondly, I think corona was a missed opportunity to re-think how the university could be used. All these people found themselves unemployed or with more time on their hands – we could have opened up the university to give free courses for the general public, opening up education to more people. In a market system, this becomes impossible.
A short interview with a comrade who works nightshift in a supermarket. We will publish parts of these interviews in a pamphlet on ‘struggling under lockdown’ next year.
I work as a nightshift customer assistant at Morrisons, stacking shelves and moving goods from the warehouse. They only guarantee you a minimum of 16 hours a week. It’s a bigger supermarket, with 200 to 300 people working there. I only ever see 30 to 40 at any one time though. I started the job during the pandemic, it took them around one and a half month to do the paperwork before I was able to start.
Since the pandemic started they open the store earlier, on some days for vulnerable customers to come in, on some days just to extend opening times. That means you have an hour less to do the actual job before customers are on the floor. Especially when a delivery comes in late it becomes a bit of a nightmare. Having to wear a mask all the time when you are lifting 25kg boxes is also tough. A lot of people have dropped out and left the job. Management doesn’t really want to talk to you, they hardly ever come out on the shop-floor. There is no guidance, you learn by doing things wrong and then someone correcting you.
The main grievances are around sick pay or rather the lack of sick pay. People tell you not to lift things in a certain way, because if you hurt your back the company won’t pay you. People also complain about the unsafe environment, like, there are too many people in the break room at the same time. They also give you your shift rota too late, like a day before, which is hard if you work night-shift. One co-worker suggested to write a collective letter, but that never happened. People are angry, but also knackered, they don’t want an extra argument. The union is not present on the shop-floor.
During the pandemic more people try to get jobs like these. There are actors working with us. Some of the students who work here are also pretty disillusioned with university. They consider dropping out, as they don’t like the online lectures.
In the first part of this review we look at the concepts of ‘workers inquiry’ and ‘class composition’ and how they are used in the book, primarily in the editorial. In the second part we exemplify some of our criticisms by going through each chapter of the book.
In recent years, ’workers’ inquiry’ and the concept of ‘class composition’ have become the toast of the academic town. Rescued from the annals of obscure workerist history, books like this one are reviving the concepts, and trying to apply them to the modern day contexts of labour organising in strategic industries. While we welcome this publication and encourage people to read the book, we think that there are two related, but not identical problems with the way that Ovetz and the nine authors approach these concepts.
Firstly, their largely academic approach means that we don’t really get to read ‘workers’ inquiries’, but academic texts based on fairly conventional methods of research. They get around this by using linguistic acrobatics (‘workers inquiries from above’ etc). Whilst there is a lot of useful information in the book, by shrouding the perspective in a bit of a fraud, it is far less useful than it could be. The writers’ external position means that they depend primarily on trade union organisations and officials as representatives of ‘the workers’. This, in turn, results in a partial view (the focus of most texts is the question of unionisation), and also a skewed perspective, as certain events are either misunderstood or misrepresented.
The academic mode of production also means that we are presented with rather random individual work, despite more ambitious claims:
“As a step towards carrying out a global workers’ inquiry this book offers inquiries from nine countries, representing in total about 70 percent of the global population on four continents. (…) This book is an attempt to identify newly emerging strategies used by workers and the lessons that can be learned from them and circulated globally.” (p.21)
The introduction claims that the book forms part of an ‘inquiry into the global class composition’, but it doesn’t appear as though the articles were chosen as a strategic way of demonstrating this. The only attempt to relate the various articles to each other is by a pretty random and unhelpful categorisation into three bigger themes, such as “Transport and Logistics”, “Manufacturing and Mining” and “Education, Cleaners and Gamers”. The article on union organising campaigns at DHL and UPS in Turkey has little in common with the depiction of a mainstream truck drivers’ union in Argentina. At the same time, the union campaign in Turkey is definitely not an example of the ‘most advanced’ workers’ struggles in recent times. Here it would have made more sense to compare, for example, the series of wildcat strikes in the car industry at Renault and the supplier factories in 2015, with the wildcat strikes in the automobile sector in India in 2010. We would have liked to see this book make more of a collective effort to put each contribution into a regional and global context, and to draw political conclusions from them. An effort to portray the differences in development between the global regions and the impact this has on struggles, would have also been useful. In the end, most of the articles written by ‘co-researchers’ don’t describe how the research work actually benefited the workers’ struggles they write about – although all articles emphasise this as the main feature of a ‘workers inquiry’.
Secondly, we can see that there is a certain ‘depoliticisation’ of the practice of workers’ inquiry and of the concept of class composition. This is only partly related to the fact that the research is done as part of academic work, as we find a similar tendency amongst trade union organisers. In most of the book’s articles, ‘workers’ inquiry’ is reduced to a more or less technical method to find ‘choke-points’ or to analyse the vulnerability of supply-chains and the production process. Class composition, in turn, is reduced to a sociological category, which can be applied at any limited level of capitalist organisation, for example, the ‘class composition’ in a particular company or sector.
When applied to a wider social level, class composition is presented as a kind of eternal ping-pong game between two subjects – the working class on one side and capital on the other. Here we have to maintain that, historically speaking, workers’ inquiry was, first of all, an effort to understand the opposite: how capital is not an external force that has the power to re- or decompose ourselves, but the product of our very own cooperation. This then raises the question of the specific capitalist nature of this cooperation, which brings us together and disappropriates us at the same time. In the way the editor and authors present the concept of class composition, there is no contradiction within the capitalist mode of production, just an antagonism. There is only a back-and-forth, but no tendency, for example, the tendency of concentration of capital or towards crisis, beyond being an immediate result of workers’ struggle.
“As capital plays its hand, workers regroup, alter their strategy, play their own hand, and take a win. In response, capital withdraws, regroups, alters its strategy, and then plays a new hand, putting workers on the defensive and perhaps even defeating them.” (…) “We call this understanding of the dialectical push and pull of class struggle the theory of class composition. To push the ebb and flow of that struggle back in favor of workers it is critical that we carry out a global workers’ inquiry to understand the strategies, tactics, organization, and objectives of capital and how workers are adapting their own strategies, tactics, and organization to achieve their objectives of responding to, defeating, and transcending capitalism.” (p.22)
The ping-pong game cannot explain why capital cannot just ‘decompose’ workers completely, while capital is forced to produce workers’ concentrations on one side and under-development on the other. To reduce everything to a relation of struggle cannot explain why capital is in crisis, even though workers’ struggles have also been at a low point. In this sense, Ovetz represents the ‘autonomist’, ‘American’ adaptation of the concept of class composition (we would include Midnight Notes here). Capital not only exploits us, but is also the way we materially reproduce ourselves. The ‘autonomist’ interpretation of workers’ inquiry dissolves this contradiction by introducing a clear cut division between workers and capital:
“Because we still live under what Cleaver (2017) calls the “dialectic of capital,” that strategy must be rooted in the refusal of work in the spheres of production and reproduction where capital is organized.” (p.24)
By refusing to look at the contradictory nature of production beyond being a sphere of struggle, the articles don’t mention the link between struggle and social alternative at all, or if they do,only in the vaguest terms in the introduction:
“It cannot be emphasized enough that the study of class composition is the study of the power of the self-organized working class to attack, disrupt, and transcend the bounds of capital by constructing multiple others ways of organizing life.” (p.29)
From how the editorial depicts the relation between workers and capital, it appears as if capital and the working class are on opposite sides of a social seesaw, on a balance of power, either one side or the other having the upper hand. If workers are weak, capital must be strong. We think that this picture is not adequate and that it ultimately leads into political dead-ends by cutting working class politics off from the productive and creative element of workers as collective producers inside the capital relation. Comrades have written about this problem before. [1]
By reducing the term ‘class composition’ to a research tool that is applicable to each and every limited dispute, the term becomes blunt. We think it is worth reconsidering the term as an effort to understand the unifying and revolutionary tendencies in a much wider class movement. Why were the skilled workers as an industrial minority able to recompose the class in the early 20th century around the councils, which were as much a weapon and organisational form of struggle, as an embryonic form of social alternative? How did this minority of workers relate to the wider class, which was characterised by artisanal and peasant work? How did the different political forms taken by workers autonomy during the peak revolutionary moment, namely anarcho-/industrial syndicalism, revolutionary councilism and the communist party form, express different regional stages in the relation between industrial core and hinterland? [2]
Here we see that the reduction of the concept of class composition to a question of ‘balance of power’ between workers and capital, disregarding the question of political autonomy and vision of the working class, leaves the door open to integrate the concept into all kinds of ‘external’ political projects. Through this reduction, ‘class composition’ can then be used as a ‘tool’ to analyse, for example, how workers’ struggles can gather enough economic clout to put pressure on or support a socialist (Corbyn, Sander) government, or to enforce ‘democratic changes’, such as trade union rights in China.
While there is no monopoly or clear definition of ‘workers’ inquiry’ and ‘class composition’, it seems to us that two crucial aspects are missing here: the collective dimension from and for workers, and the political dimension beyond ‘organising’. [3] The articles’ descriptions, always from above and from afar, are useful, but would have been more so if the changes in working class activity detailed in the book had been explained, simply and straightforwardly, by any of the participants. Then you would not only have descriptions of the changes in the outward forms of working class organisation, but you might also have got some insights into the changes in thinking that lay behind the events. Without these, simply describing the forms of organisational change are of limited use.
For example, the article on South Africa details workers leaving the corrupted official trade unions and self-organising in a non-bureaucratic way. But look at the Russian miners in the collapsing days of the USSR. Vast strikes took place across the coal fields, hundreds of thousands of miners staged sit-down strikes and turned their backs on the ‘unions’, demanding that the state negotiate with their vast mass meetings, without any representatives. Very good, they helped put an end to the regime. But within months, a new bureaucracy, as much in league with the authorities as the old unions, emerged out of these mass meetings. And in fact, this soon became so corrupt that miners returned to their old unions. So by itself, the emergence of new forms can mean anything – they are not intrinsically ‘progressive’ in the longer-term. Without an insight into the thinking of the masses and in particular those workers who are playing a leading role at any one time, it’s difficult to make any real assessment of events.
Overall we can also see that the ‘external’ view of academics vis-a-vis workers’ struggle leads to a certain inversion between struggle and consciousness. It seems some of the authors think that ‘collective planning’ and ‘overcoming of divisions’ is primarily a precondition for struggle, not something that can only be tackled once workers are in actual and contradictory movement.
“For Emery, as for the Italian, French, and American autonomist Marxists who rediscovered and reinvigorated Marx’s project from the 1950s to the 1970s, there should be no struggle before we know who we are, the conditions under which we work, how capital is organized, its weaknesses and choke points, as well as our sources of strength, power, and leverage.” (p.16-17)
However, the problem that we face is not a technical one. The main problem for workers is not to find ‘choke-points’ per se. The main problem is to find the confidence to lead and analyse our own struggles – but this happens primarily when workers are already in a collective struggle and confronted with material constraints that compel them to reconsider and analyse.
Conclusions
We don’t want to call the individual abilities and motivations of the comrades who edited and wrote this book into question. The problem is more general. The problem is the detachment of revolutionary (or at least combative) theory from everyday working class struggles, which academia reproduces.
We also don’t want to imply we have all the answers. We and our international political contacts haven’t managed to take on as big a task as research into the ‘global working class’, based both on collective debate and local insights. Our own debate is stuck. [4]
Similarly, although we managed to organise smaller actions in factories and warehouses in west London and formed deeper roots in the local working class, we didn’t establish bigger collectives of workers who would actually engage in a workers’ inquiry. [5]
This is not a technical problem of workers’ not seeing the benefit of analysing their workplace. It is a problem of reconstituting both a combative self-confidence and a political independence of the class.
——————
In order to make our criticism more concrete we go through each chapter of the book.
*** Transport workers in Argentina
The historical part that dominates this article might be interesting, but is not really relevant for the question of the ‘workers inquiry’ into the transport sector. The description is almost exclusively a description of the truckers’ union, the various fusions and collective contracts it was involved with. There is no real analysis of the working class reality or of actual struggles. How did the truckers organise during the 2001 struggle when unemployed organisations blockaded major highways? How did they relate to this, also bearing in mind that the leadership of the union was close to the Kirchner government? How did the transport workers union relate to the fact that during 2001, the export and therefore transport of meat was booming, while domestic cases of child starvation skyrocketed? We also don’t learn much about whether this union is different from truckers’ unions in Chile or India, which includes small enterprises and which therefore, like in the case of Chile 1973, can also be mobilised by bourgeois forces. Instead we learn:
“During the cycle of “defeat,” the Camioneros managed to sign only 11 CBAs. [Collective Bargaining Agreements]” (…) “Between 2003 to 2011, the Camioneros signed 145 agreements which together make up the CBAs (Pontoni 2013: 144).” (p.73)
Consequently, while seeing legal documents such as collective bargaining agreements as a strength of the working class, the author presents ‘the law’ as the major weapon of state and the bosses:
“And now they are coming at it again, using the National Congress to eliminate the benefits obtained during more than 130 years of struggle, and in this way weaken the unions and decompose the working class’s power.” (p.72)
At this point, a real workers’ inquiry would be necessary in order to understand if and why a decree issued by a small circle of politicians is supposed to be able to ‘decompose working class’ power’ and its obtained benefits. The author writes that ‘having a strong leader’ was one ingredient of the trade union’s success story:
“Linking the whole trade union organization with the leader, Hugo Moyano. Earlier we highlighted the role of the charismatic caudillo in Argentine politics. Moyano is no exception and Peronism reinforces the point. The masses act and struggle but they search for a charismatic leader. The caudillo is central to Argentine culture whether in relation to politics, the unions, or soccer.” (p.75)
The text doesn’t mention that Moyano is very close to the political class, in particular to Duhalde and Kirchner and that he was charged with laundering over 100 million USD using the trade union’s account and assets.
*** Transport workers in Turkey
The author starts with pretty bombastic claims:
“This chapter concerns a case of class composition led by a Turkish trade union representing road transport workers called Tüm Taşıma İşçileri Sendikasi (TÜMTİS).” (p.78)
“To scrutinize this case of class composition, I use the power resources approach in a critical way.” (p.79)
We’ve already questioned the method of applying the concept of ‘class composition’ when dealing with a singular struggle. The problem with this article is that the union in question did not even organise any strikes, beyond symbolic pickets outside of company headquarters. We hear a lot about the organisational strategies of the trade union organisation, primarily about the decision to cooperate and accept the funding of the International Transport Workers’Federation (ITF). We hear about the union’s left-leaning leadership. There is no analysis of the actual workplaces and very limited information about actual struggles – perhaps because the struggles themselves were limited.
“During and since its organizing campaigns in large companies such as UPS, DHL, and Aras, TÜMTİS has never gone on strike in these firms either formally or informally. This is not only because a strike requires much larger funds.” (p.95)
But it seems the union is not only worried about their own funds, but also about the funds of the employer:
“In case of a strike no company which has a contract with UPS for delivery would say let’s wait for the strike to be resolved,” as one union leader put it. This would be devastating for the struck firm, leading to serious downsizing or even bankruptcy. Therefore, in its revitalization process since the end of the 2000s, TÜMTİS has exploited this power resource in a quite limited way, probably only as a threat.” (p.95)
At DHL Express, sacked workers picketed the headquarters for 20 months. This is what the author then calls ‘associational power’. It is quite clear that he doesn’t mean that workers form wider associations, but that, for example, the Turkish union links up with international federations. At Aras Delivery it took four years of legal battle to get recognised.
Otherwise we hear nothing from workers themselves, but a lot about the right kind of leaders:
“In neither an industry nor a workplace are workers’ interests naturally commonly expressed. A group of leaders is needed to create and maintain the perception that there are common interests (Hodson 2001: 204–9; Kelly 2002: 30–6). Intermediation comes into play at this point. A relatively high level of interaction between leadership and lay members functions as a form of intermediation that builds collective interests and identities.” (p.97)
The article does not try to situate the ‘struggles’ in logistics either in the context of overall struggles in Turkey – and there have been a few actual (wildcat) strikes! [6] – nor in comparison with struggles in logistics in other countries (e.g. at GLS in Italy).
“In this chapter, I have examined an extraordinary case of class recomposition led by a Turkish union, TÜMTİS.” (p.99)
To claim that these organisational tactics are a ‘class recomposition’ deflates the concept of any content.
*** Female logistics workers in Italy
The article on the women warehouse workers in Italy is better, as it describes actual struggles, but it is pretty much a recycled article describing a dispute in 2014. While there is a bit more flesh to it, it also operates with a lot of questionable concepts and phrases, which sound very sophisticated, but remain unclear and somewhat tautological.
“In the Mr. Jobs warehouses, work is organized by juxtaposing race and gender in order to subordinate and exploit the gendered and racialized workforce.” (p.108)
“Capital has historically turned race and gender into an extraordinary realm of accumulation, where racism and sexism have become indispensable dispositifs of capitalist development.” (p.109)
Rather than assuming that ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are some kind of ready-made tools and strategies that can just be used by the bosses, we would like to hear more about the process by which this actually happens. The author mentions a few concrete examples, such as the Bossi-Fini migration law or the sexual harassment from managers who can use the dependency of the migrant women workers in their favour. Does that justify inventing or reproducing a category as loaded as ‘race’? In what way is ‘gender’ a realm of accumulation?
When we met some of these same strikers together with male SI Cobas militants in Italy a few years ago, we had the impression that the male union militants made the decisions concerning the dispute. However, the text doesn’t explain how and to what extent the women workers organised the strike themselves. As far as we understand, the contact with SI Cobas was established before the strike started, not afterwards, like written in the text. We heard that workers were not able to overcome their minority position inside the warehouse and that, in the end, the strike was not very effective. This in itself doesn’t make the struggle less heroic or the experience less valuable. It just seems that there is a big gulf between the author’s praise for the initial round of struggles, primarily led by SI Cobas, and the rather veiled criticism of SI Cobas at the end of the article. We know that the political collective closest to the author retreated from engaging in the logistics workers struggle, but the process of ‘degeneration’ of the logistics workers’ struggle that led to that decision is not really discussed.
Unlike most of the other articles in the book, we think that in this case, the ‘engagement in the struggle’ came first and the ‘writing about it’ came later. It would therefore be even more important to understand what the author thinks the ‘co-researchers’ have contributed to the struggle, beyond their contacts to the political scene who could mobilise supporters or the media. What did the process of ‘workers’ inquiry’ actually look like in a situation where most of the warehouse struggles depended heavily on external blockades – rather than on actions within the work process?
*** Higher education in California
This article, which was funded by the College of Social Science, deals with the question of ‘strike threats’ and whether they are part of the process of ‘working class recomposition’. The idea that a credible strike threat can obtain material concessions is not wrong. And in some situations it might actually be an expression of workers’ collective steps. Still, most of these threats are rather an expression of trade union tactics than workers’ self-activity. In a way, the article portrays the same slightly skewed academic view that workers’ struggle is like a poker game between workers and bosses. Are workers clever enough to create a ‘credible strike threat’ that would allow them to wrestle concessions from their opponents without actually having to risk walking out? It’s easy to forget that in many situations, workers’ struggles are not an expression of some calculating ‘homo economicus’. More often than not, the urge to ‘go on strike’ itself is as much a part of the goal and motivation for workers as the raised demands.
The author himself presents good arguments why ‘strike threats’ are rather an aspect of ‘union vs. employer’ negotiation tactics than of class struggle:
“A 1985 ruling by the Supreme Court of California found that a credible strike threat can alter the balance of power preventing an illegal public sector strike from taking place. “Without the right to strike, or at least a credible strike threat, public employees have little negotiating strength. This, in turn, produces frustrations which exacerbate labor- management conflicts and often provoke ‘illegal’ strikes” (County Sanitation Dist. No. 2 v. Los Angeles County Employees’ Assn.). The court concluded that a credible strike threat can “equalize” power between workers and employers, raising the costs to employers of not settling, and reducing the incidences of strikes.” (p.125)
In the end then, it is often a question of ‘management’: how can you mobilise workers and cool them off, in order for the union not having to risk financial costs or legal repression?
The author then analyses the strike threat on 23 campuses of the California State University in 2016, a campaign in which he took part. The whole campaign seemed pretty top-down, with students being paid by the union to do door-knocking and other ‘campaign-style’ elements.
“The CFA announced on February 17 that “Strike Schools” were being held on the campuses to inform the membership of the strike plans. Online strike pledge forms for each campus were announced on February 24 and a single form for the entire system made available on March 2. (…) a hardship fund for members was created in March 2016, and members were asked to wear their red strike-threat T-shirts during the first week of spring 2016 classes. The strike was endorsed by the California Democratic Party.” (p.146)
Both strike threats remained threats.
In the end the author wants to use a Panzieri quote to bolster his thesis that ‘strike threats’ can be a sign of working class recomposition and autonomy, but to us, the quote reads like a criticism of the idea that workers can regain independence and power through ‘clever bargaining tactics’:
“As Panzieri observed, the class struggle “expresses itself not as progress, but as rupture; not as ‘revelation’ of the occult rationality inherent in the modern productive process, but as the construction of a radically new rationality counterposed to the rationality practiced by capitalism” (1980: 54).” (p.160)
*** Teachers in Mexico
Again the text starts with a pretty hefty claim:
“This chapter will analyze the class recomposition of the Mexican multitude.” (p.165)
Half of the chapter is a description of various incidents of state violence, which are all subsumed as part of the ‘neoliberal social war against the self-organised multitude’. It seems it has been written under the influence of Negri’s old kool-aid, mixed with some 1994 Zapatista tequila.
“This social war can be seen as part of capital’s “global civil war” to fragment humanity and consume nature which has intensified since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US (Berardi 2016).” (p.166)
This is a pretty questionable analysis of the mass killings in the drug wars in Mexico. Is it all just a plot of the neoliberal Empire? What about the fact that the violence and instability actually damages the ‘investment climate’ in Mexico? What about the fact that narco-traffic is part of a pretty profitable business cycle? What about the relation between large-scale under-employment both in Mexico and the US and the increased influence of mafia-type structures? Instead of analysing the contradictory nature of capital, we are presented with a rather condensed ‘autonomist’ view that the violence is a calculated act in a social war.
“…the multitude [is placed] as a networked body politic of antagonist subjectivity that embraces all the previous antagonist class formations.” (p.168)
“One of the main characteristics of the multitude, at least the multitude in movement, is its capacity for self-organization; that is, its capacity to organize autonomously at a distance from political parties, trade unions, non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, civic associations, and pressure groups that have become absorbed into, are functional to or dependent upon state power.” (p.169)
Again, this all reads fine, but what about the increasing influence of organisations, which seem crucial for the material (and ideological) survival of impoverished masses in Latin America, namely the mafia, the church and political rank-and-file structures of government parties, such as Peronism or the various welfare structures of 21st century socialism? Once we collapse the working class with its various productive, unproductive, developed and undeveloped sectors into a ‘multitude’, we actually give up on an analysis of ‘class composition’.
“One of the most important movements resisting neoliberalism, dispossession, and state terrorism is the cognitariat multitude of the CNTE dissident teachers’ movement.” (p.175)
The article continues describing some of the struggles of the teachers’ union movement, bits of it are concrete and interesting, although none of it seems to have originated from direct contacts with workers. While the author first claims that everything is ‘self-organised’ nowadays, he then has problems to explain why the ‘leadership’ of the CNTE was able to ‘betray’ the rank-and-file.
“This heightened the conflict with the Peña government, leading to the Nochixtlan massacre in June 2016, and the effective shelving of the reform thereafter. However, despite being an evident political attack on workers’ rights and control over the workplace, the reform also contained a plethora of neoliberal-type educational and technical changes, many of which have been incorporated into the new educational reform of September 2019 passed by AMLO, which returns to the previous state-union pact of yore and was supported by most of the Morena deputies close to the CNTE.” (p.180)
“In September 2016, following the Nochixtlan massacre, some state leaders of the CNTE made opaque deals with local state governments, after returning to work without having gained concessions from the government. These under-the-table deals were made over the heads of the CNTE members and without respecting the assembly and direct participation methods of decision making.” (p.186)
We also don’t hear about how the teachers’ mobilisations fit into the picture of explosive struggles, for example, of workers in the Maquiladoras in the US border regions, or the women workers’ movement against (gendered/sexual) violence. [7]
*** Platform workers etc. in the UK
This article reflects more of a collective effort and actual experiences, even if these experiences are limited to very specific sectors, close to the more academic milieu of the authors. We mainly read about higher education and student-y jobs. The attempt to draw a picture of the wider ‘class composition’ remains superficial, which means that we don’t get to understand whether the authors think that the struggles in the portrayed sectors have an impact on the wider situation of the class and what this impact could look like:
“Before getting into these different inquiries, it is first worth sketching out the overall contours of class composition in the UK. The UK labor market is marked, broadly speaking, by low official unemployment, low wages, and low productivity. This has even been remarked on with the emergence of a productivity paradox following the 2008 financial crisis. Despite the introduction of new technologies and more workers into employment, productivity remains low. Despite this, there remain large areas of absolute surplus value extraction— alongside the continuing dominance of global finance in London.” (p.193)
We also don’t really get a critical assessment of the strikes of delivery couriers or hospitality workers; the article largely operates on the level of description – and the descriptions are very much oriented towards the formal organisations involved:
“Across these different workplaces there were a range of unions involved, “from huge Labour Party and TUC [Trade Union Congress] affiliates Unite, to small Labour Party and TUC affiliates the Bakers Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU), to the syndicalist IWW and grassroots IWGB” (Cant 2018b). Each of these represents a different political composition, both in organizing practices and perspectives.” (p.202)
This makes sense given the shared, though perhaps not consensual outlook amongst the authors that for an actual political recomposition, ‘workers’ struggles’ need some form of political mediation or transmission via a parliamentary organisation, such as Labour under Corbyn.
Despite the authors’ participation in the UCU struggle, they chose not to report and reflect on the whole cycle of struggle in 2018-20. Yes, a new ‘activist’ slate was elected to the top of the union after the 2018 pension strike. But the 8-day strike in 2019 and the 14-day strike in the early 2020 showed that UCU, after years of peaceful coexistence with the bosses, was unable to rebuild itself from service-/campaigning type of a union into an organizing union with base structures across campuses. The cycle of strikes ended in defeat (inability to impose the demands of the ‘Four Fights’ strikes) as well as moral and financial exhaustion of the membership, especially those in insecure positions. This facilitated a frontal attack of many universities in 2020 on its most precarious staff, leading to the losses of thousands of jobs under the pretext of forecasted income losses due to the pandemic. Reflecting on this trend of academic proletarianization would lead to the uncomfortable realization that the UCU (let’s forget for now that the union is also internally skewed towards the conservative interests of the permanent professors) has been left out of touch with the fast restructuring of the higher education industry and the emergence of a new landscape of class forces. Everyday labour by zero-hours academics, researchers on short fixed contracts or contracted support staff and specialists from the private sector, is no longer marginal, and these workers have often got different interests and needs to the more secure workers who are the core of the union.
Still, together with the article from Italy, we can see that a closer relationship between ‘researchers’ and ‘workers’ also creates more insightful texts.
*** Workers in China
There is not too much to say about this article; it doesn’t portray any particular struggle or group of workers. It is largely a historical account of the changes between the state and workers’ struggles from a perspective that sees trade union ‘freedom’ comparable to the west as a prerequisite for a generalisation of struggles. The text is pretty contradictory, stating first that:
“Despite some modest labor gains in wages and social insurance benefits, workers’ ability to organize remains severely restricted by employers and by the government.” (p.213)
Only to mention the large amounts of individual workers’ strikes and protests:
“Following a brief decline, since 2011 the number of labor dispute cases has shot up annually, reaching an unprecedented 828,410 cases in 2016.” (p.219)
A crucial question for us is whether trade unions of the legal type are the best way to address the main shortcoming of most struggles, namely their limitation to a single company or region. This question becomes more pertinent when we see that the state itself wants to use ‘legal association’ as a form to contain struggles once they develop a certain dynamic:
“Officials seek to divert open protests and massive strikes into the judicial system by streamlining the legal procedures. The first national labor law was promulgated in 1994 and came into force on January 1, 1995.” (p.219)
We have seen many times that trade unions become the first vehicles of ‘democratisation’ (Solidarnosc, CC.OO etc.), by mobilising workers power into a new and ultimately more stable state form.
The article mentions a couple of alternative examples of ‘workers’ networks’, but it seems like an outsider view:
“In 2016, for example, two former Walmart employees took the lead to mobilize against the corporate implementation of a flexible hour system and a significant wage cut through online strategizing. They moderated an internet-based forum under the banner of the Walmart Chinese Workers’ Association, breathing new life into a self-organized network linking Walmart workers across multiple cities in China. While the momentum of the movement died down following a split over worker strategies, coupled with management attacks and government intimidation, the experience was not entirely negative. Walmart workers enthusiastically debated the timing and effectiveness of strikes, among other key questions over fundraising and coordination, demonstrating their active participation, reflexivity, and capacity to devise their own tactics, strategies, and organizations.” (p.228)
The other example in the book, about the Jasic struggle, is also depicted falsely, either because of the author’s distance or complicit position. This struggle was primarily a Maoist theatre act that instrumentalised workers and raised the demand for a free trade union as a political line of the intellectual leaders and not as a genuine demand of the actual workers. [8]
*** Mining workers in South Africa
In many ways this is the most informative article, given that the 2012 Lonmin mining workers strike is presented in a detailed fashion, although this has been done before. [9] It might have been more fruitful if the author had focused more on the actual practice of the Casual Workers’ Advice Office (CWAO) and Simunye Workers Forum (SWF) – the other main subject of the article.
“Hundreds of workplaces on Johannesburg’s East Rand now participate in SWF by sending delegates to its mass meetings held at CWAO’s office.” (p.250)
The picture of what the CWAO actually does remains slightly blurry. We hear about strike funds for casual workers and more or less traditional ‘campaigning’:
“In the last few years the SWF has been engaged in a number of new battles. A prime example has been the CWAO/SWF “Big New Rights Campaign,” which was instituted after the Constitutional Court ruled in July 2018 that labor broker workers should become the workers of only the client company after three months and must be treated “not less favourably” than the client’s other permanent workers. When worker groups engaged in coordinated pamphleteering in Johannesburg’s industrial areas, it “led to 117 new workplaces approaching the CWAO and SWF between August 2018 and February 2019” (Schroeder 2019: 1).” (p.250)
The impression we get is that the information is from a secondary source. The question therefore remains whether this text can be seen as a workers’ inquiry.
*** Car workers in India
We are able to see some of the limitations of academic research more clearly in this case study, given that some of us have spent some time in the industrial outskirts of Delhi, collaborating with local comrades around Kamunist Kranti/Faridabad Majdoor Samachar. [10] We have written about the disputes mentioned in this text extensively, namely the wildcat actions at Maruti Suzuki 2011 and 2012. [11]
The author is at least aware of the structural limitation of academic research that, “makes the relationship between research, working-class struggle, and organizing harder to build, and requires strong individual resistance to the marketization of knowledge production and research.” (p.261)
However, the methods of obtaining research information (using workers’ surveys to map working and living conditions) along with the content of the article (assessing levels of unionisation, describing the working conditions and peoples’ backgrounds and positions), begs the question: how would or could this ‘inquiry’ benefit the workers involved? They certainly know their own background and the reality in their factories so on these fronts, it wouldn’t be too illuminating. It would be different if the author would be part of a car workers’ collective from Europe that could actually share workplace and struggle experiences. Here we would have to go much deeper into the actual fabric of production and compare, for example, automation levels in body shops or line-speeds. The same problem arises when we look at how a report about a very significant struggle in India can be useful for workers in the global north. One problem is that the struggle happened already some while back; another problem is to figure out how an academic article would be circulated amongst car workers.
Another major issue is whether the academic mode of production itself enforces a rather partial view on the event itself:
“The access to more autonomous workers was possible only through independent labor activists.” (p.266)
“Firstly, the inquiry had a possible bias towards permanent workers, who were accessible through unions and risked less when filling the questionnaire.” (p.270)
Permanent workers’ perspectives were actually a minority of the workforce, and therefore an analysis from this position skews the perspective and misses vital concerns. The fact that the author used the trade unions to make contact with workers, who themselves only represented permanent workers, narrows the view further. Being dependent on information and views of trade union representatives and the Maoist leftist usual suspects, the foreign academic goes beyond portraying a skewed perspective on struggle, but actually writes factually wrong stuff about the course of events:
“The strike also inaugurated a period of fierce repression starting with a supposed accident on July 18, 2012, followed by a fire in the Manesar plant in which a human resources manager died.” (p.271)
In parroting the line of the permanent workers’ legal representatives on this issue, the author fails to mention that we aren’t dealing with ‘an accident’ here, but a mass riot of hundreds of workers who burnt down parts of the factory and beat up dozens of managers. It is clear that union representatives want to portray workers as victims, not as agents. But this comes at a cost of neither seeing or portraying a qualitative shift in workers struggles. When workers all over India saw workers in Maruti uniforms attacking their own factory, they knew something else was happening. These were seen as some of the best paid workers in the country. Millions of young workers in the hinterland want to become a Maruti worker. We can see that the system and its drive to casualisation is not just a ‘race to the bottom’, but it creates its own grave-diggers – yet again. The system is fragile.
Most of the recent struggles, from the Hero Honda occupation in 2006 and the wildcat actions at the car parts manufacturer Delphi in 2007, were actually driven by casual workers. In this regard the authors’ assertion that, “the large participation of contract/casual workers, struggling with the permanent workers, in an unprecedented display of solidarity” in the Maruti struggle is not so accurate. [12] In the case of the Maruti factory occupation, it was only under the (physical) pressure of hundreds of casuals that permanent workers actually rejoined the occupation. This was another important omission from the article.
Both the left – who are mainly composed of students and middle-class activists – and the academic comrades focused on the official demand of the struggle, the demand for an independent union. They failed to see, or chose to ignore, the deeper underlying reasons for the strike and its primary dynamic. There are therefore various problems with this focus.
Firstly, many of the Maruti Suzuki workers would not have been able to become part of the union, given their temporary status. In several disputes, management was able to use the fact that only a minority is part of a union in order to undermine struggles of temporary workers. For example at the Honda plant in Manesar, the management and union agreed to productivity bonuses based on an increased production output that could only be achieved by working the casuals harder. The actual line workers are predominantly casuals and therefore non-union members, while maintenance staff, supervisors and other workers who are not directly impacted on by the line-speed tend to be permanents. [13] What also didn’t come out in the article was the fact that this demand led to a struggle over the leadership of the new union, which divided the permanent workers depending on their region of origin.
Secondly, the demand for a company union undermined the potential to generalise the strike. The main issue that connects the Maruti Workers with tens of thousand of other manufacturing workers in the IMT Manesar industrial area are work-speed, low wages and shitty living conditions in the surrounding industrial villages. By focusing on a company-specific demand (a company union), the smaller core of permanent workers and their leftist supporters undermined the possible area-wide generalisation of the strike. This is not hypothetical, as we saw solidarity actions by Maruti workers for other workers during the strike days, e.g. when a group of 200 Maruti workers ‘visited’ management of a parts manufacturer to demand compensation for an injured worker.
So we can say that due to the academic mode of production, this article not only comes a bit late in the day, it is also contributing to a mystification – when workers’ inquiry’s prime goal was and still is the destruction of myths.
Instead of laying out a strict definition of workers inquiry, we want to look briefly at one of the historical origins of ‘workers’ inquiry’. The introduction and some of the articles mention the efforts of comrades in Italy in the 1960s, but don’t really go into detail. We want to stress that the workers’ inquiry at the time was conducted in a particular political tension. The old working class communist party (PCI) was integrating itself into the state in the post-war period, at the same time that capital was also undermining the traditional base of the communist movement, primarily its skilled workers. The PCI disarmed their most militant rank-and-file members – literally by taking the arms they still held after the Resistance; politically and spiritually, by endorsing tanks against workers in Hungary in 1956; and theoretically by using the official (Soviet Union style) Marxism, which advocated the ‘progressive nature of industrial development’ as a necessary step towards socialism.
At the same time, capitalist restructuring, primarily in the form of assembly line production, was undermining the traditional skilled workforce and threatening to replace them with a small number of ‘technicians’ and a large number of ‘uneducated’ migrant workers from the agrarian south. The comrades from the operaist tradition who conducted workers inquiries wanted to understand how the ‘traditional communism’ and power-base of the skilled workers would fuse (or not) with the more spontaneous anger of unskilled ‘mass workers’ who experienced work not as a something to be proud of, but something to despise. In order to understand the new factory reality, these comrades went ‘back to Marx’ – to resurrect and recapture his critical view on the production process, machinery etc. from the official Marxism and its praising of ‘technological progress’; – and ‘back to the workers’, initially addressing groups of already politicised workers. For an overview we suggest reading this article: https://libcom.org/library/renascence-operaismo-wildcat
Workers’ inquiry here became part of a political project to undermine the left’s belief in the ‘planning state’ being a necessary step towards socialism. They did this by focusing on the permanent chaos on the company level, which the top-level planning states and their bureaucracy could never solve in their top-down ways. Workers’ inquiries bring out the fact that it is the workers themselves that are constantly having to compensate and improvise to guarantee a smooth production process. The inquiry was partly about ‘finding the choke-points’ of production, but as much about demystifying the contradictory nature of capitalist production: the fact that it is a production process of use values, and a valorisation process to create profits at the same time. These two contradictory aspects create thousands of micro-conflicts which, seen from an individual perspective, appear as random or arbitrary. On the most immediate level, the contradiction expresses itself as a permanent conflict between producing ‘quality’ and being forced to churn out as many products as cheaply as possible. The proclaimed aim of producing ‘quality’ is used against workers to increase control over them, which in turn is mainly geared towards squeezing the most ‘quantity’ out of them. Management uses ‘quality aspects’, such as a monopoly over crucial information or the task to coordinate aspects of production, in order to justify their power to make people work harder. Machines themselves embody this contradiction. A machine is neither just a ‘rational apparatus’ geared towards effective production, nor a mere tool to control and subjugate workers. Capital applies machines when they promise profits, not when they can effectively reduce labour. Workers have to constantly compensate for the hiccups of machines that, due to their double-character of being both productive and control apparatus, might not work well.
To put it another way, ‘inquiry’ is a collective process of discovery of how capital depends on the knowledge, improvisation and cooperation of workers, but makes it appear as if these living relations were its own features. This is the contradictory core of capital’s command: in order to increase productivity a smooth cooperation between workers is necessary, but a cooperation that becomes ‘too close’ becomes a political liability. Workers who cooperate too closely and directly feel their power inevitably start to question the need to have bosses in the first place. Capital therefore has to hide workers’ cooperation from them, and present itself as a necessary precondition for production. Inquiry is a political process of critiquing the irrationality of the production process as much as it is a quest for collective power. This is what the comrades in Italy in the 1960s meant when they talked about the fact that they take the standpoint of the ‘collective worker’. They meant that the micro-conflicts and chaos within the production process can only be seen as part of a wider systemic contradiction from a perspective that goes beyond the individual worker. They meant that therefore our organisational steps cannot stop at the company door, but have to discover and involve all workers necessary to put the production process in motion. In Ovetz’s book, the concept of the ‘collective worker’ is reduced to the figure of an outspoken worker:
“In a sense, the South Africa workers’ inquiry closely resembled the early workerist practice of identifying a collective worker: a single, vocal, politicized individual, with deep knowledge of the struggle, who could embody and represent the experience of a mass of workers engaged in the struggle.” (p.259)
The political process of inquiry goes beyond sociology, it is not just based on Marx’s questionnaire, but on his general critique of political economy. In the ‘autonomist’ adaptation of ‘class composition theory’, such as Ovetz proposes, these contradictions between atomisation on one hand, and the necessary socialisation of labour on the other, are pretty much wiped out:
“On the shopfloor, in a particular firm, or in the national polity, capital’s strategy of decomposing workers into atomized individuals commonly includes the tactics of making concessions, cooptation, institutionalization, and repression.” (p.44)
The organisational question is oddly missing from the book. For the editor, ‘class composition theory’ by itself seems to answer the ‘organisational question. The idea is that if we just did workers’ inquiries everywhere, that that is enough to change the world. But this seems odd if we see how much strife there was around the question of political organisation between different factions who all claimed to speak in the name of ‘class composition’ in the 60s. For some it meant that only the traditional workers’ parties, primarily the PCI, could be the vehicle for a further socialisation of ‘workers’ control’; other comrades believed that in order to break out of the struggle’s confinement on the company level, a direct attack on the state led by a vanguardist Leninist party, such as Potere Operaio, was necessary. Another minority believed that the formation of a centralised network of political committees within the advanced industries was the main next task. These were important questions that went beyond ‘analysing the immediate production process’ in order to facilitate workers’ organising. It included questions of how to react to an increase of state repression, how to relate to the new ‘social movements’, how to tackle the question of global uneven development.
Latest wave of wildcat strikes with a very systematic depiction of the process behind the demand for ‘union recognition’ in struggles shared by both casual and permanent workers:
On July 3rd, Tower Hamlets broke a COVID pandemic ceasefire with its workers by firing most of them – around 4,000 people – and rehiring on worse contracts. The attack, branded ‘Tower Rewards’ by the council and ‘Tower Robbery’ by everyone else, affected workers in administration, schools, housing, social care, drug and alcohol services, youth services, street cleaning and libraries (or ‘Ideas Stores’ as Tower Hamlets calls them).
Effects of the new contracts included cutting travel and other work allowances, rejigging pay grades, streamlining disciplinary procedures, cutting flexible working, and drastically reducing redundancy terms. The council argued Tower Rewards was a ‘workforce investment’ exercise, making much of enhanced holidays, special leave provisions and the fact that certain categories, like newly-trained social workers, would get higher starting wages.
Workers in UNISON, one of the four main council unions, voted for unlimited strike action in February. Strikes planned for April were called off because of the pandemic. Then, instead of the all-out strike members voted for, UNISON’s regional officers watered the action down to three limited strikes of three days each – two for July and one for August. The strike call applied to around 1,500 workers across council departments like social care, schools and housing support. Workers represented by the other main council unions – Unite, GMB and NEU – didn’t strike, although on some days refuse workers and school bus drivers respected picket lines by refusing to drive out of their vehicle depot. This was, in fact, the only true picket of the strike. The others were more like small street demonstrations outside buildings that were closed or largely empty, due to pandemic working arrangements and restrictions.
We thought the dispute was important beyond its local significance – maybe a kind of ‘litmus test’ for how things might develop more widely. Tower Rewards is the kind of strategy bosses are scaling up to cut labour costs, restructure work processes and reinforce worker discipline, all over the UK and beyond – more and more using the brutal ‘fire and rehire’ tactic. It was the first example of large scale, organised pushback by council workers in England. It was also kicking off in the heat of the pandemic, when private and public sector workers were stretched to keep services and supplies going. There seemed to be rising awareness of who actually are essential workers, and what is essential work. So there was a potential for this fight to spill out of the usual limits.
AW comrades connected with strikers by getting involved at picket lines, talking to strikers and local working class people. We wanted to know the real motivations of the dispute below the headlines, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the fight, and see what solidarity action could look like. One of us was also a militant striker, which meant we could get a closer take on what was happening among one fairly well organised group – social workers – and how they were interacting with the union and management apparatus. We produced a leaflet to hand out on the street to start political conversations and test our ideas. We made some worker interviews, and wrote about the strikes on our website.
Here are some of the things we found:
• The things that strikers disliked most about the new contracts was the reduction of flexible working arrangements and the big cut in redundancy terms. Flexible working is mainly something used by white collar workers. Losing it would make it hard for some of them to balance work and normal life, especially those with families. People thought the cut in redundancy pay terms meant once the new contracts are safely in place, the council will be looking to fire existing staff wholesale and restructure the workforce. • Beyond Tower Rewards, there are plenty of other big and small grievances which could energise the fight, from hot desking arrangements and getting reimbursement for work expenses, to management bullying, intensifying workload and increasing red tape. In fact, with hindsight, our contact in the social worker group thought he and his colleagues might have been even more motivated by these long-stranding work grievances and diffuse anger against management, than they were by the complicated technical insult of Tower Rewards. • There was no hostility to the pickets from local working class residents, and plenty of moral support – yet very little general awareness of what the strikes were about, or even that they were happening. The council declared itself to be ‘well prepared’. We can take that as meaning they were holding their breath and hoping for the best, but in the end there was little obvious disruption to services – at least not the kind that would put the screws on. • It was hard to assess the internal strength of the strike, because many workers were working from home anyway. Some were making up for strike days by working harder just before and after, some offices were closed anyway due to COVID. Some managers were sympathetic, or striking themselves. Some workers carried on doing the things they considered ‘essential’ – like staying in touch with some clients – but not doing other things, like paperwork. Sometimes, because of the chaos, it wasn’t even clear workers would lose pay by being on strike. • The pickets we talked to were upbeat about being on strike, but had few suggestions about what winning might look like, or even how the dispute could be won, beyond ‘putting pressure’ on the council. This meant letter writing and lobbying local and national Labour politicians. People were encouraged to think like this by UNISON and its leftist cheerleaders, whose entire strategy seemed to be to whip up a mood of popular moral outrage and somehow embarrass the council into submission. • UNISON is an entirely average union, in being shockingly ill equipped to cope with any kind of collective disruption except by making it as tokenistic and ineffective as possible. The union sets out its stall to provide services to individual members, and to represent. The higher you go up the hierarchy – from local shop stewards to the branch secretariat to the regional office to the top dogs – the more its officers are scared shitless by the law and worried about losing money. This motivates them to limit strike days, organise protest rather than strike enforcement, create delay, drag their heels and generally suck away everyone’s time and energy. [1] • UNISON doesn’t have its own member mailing list, let alone any infrastructure for proper worker discussion, except for mass Zoom meetings where the same bigwigs made the same empty speeches. In the heat of a strike, workers were therefore forced to use the employer’s own email system, or easily-infiltrated channels like WhatsApp. • On the flip side of the same coin, the union monopolises and de-oxygenates the organising space, so it’s difficult for militant workers to even approach colleagues without having some kind of union authority. Basically, you have to be a shop steward to avoid being singled out. Then, finding other militant workers to co-operate with turns into an effort to persuade them to be shop stewards themselves. However, if militant workers take up these positions, they may quickly find themselves in conflict with the branch or regional hierarchy. UNISON has form when it comes to cracking down on bolshy reps. Becoming a shop steward might seem the best or only option to talk to more people, you might find yourself up against more than just the bosses. [2] • When rank and file workers seem passive or apathetic, that is made to look like a deficiency in their attitude, or a sad lack of class consciousness – rather than something the union-management regime cultivates day in day out. If a strike is thinly supported or weakly enforced, it then looks like the workers are letting the union and themselves down rather than a structural, predictable outcome. • There are bright sparks in the gloom. One section of social workers organised a series of independent forums to discuss collective grievances. They successfully put forward demands for more pay, backdated in line with the contracts being offered to new workers. They did it collectively and directly, without going through the UNISON machine. It might seem ironic that the best organised group of workers in the strike is one the council were hoping to be able to buy off. Now this skirmish has been won, if they communicate about their success and how they did it to less ‘privileged’ groups such as school kitchen workers, it may encourage them to rethink the fight and create a material basis for solidarity. Nothing succeeds like success.
Since the summer strikes in Tower Hamlets, the crisis in local councils has deepened and spread. Tower Hamlets itself implemented a recruitment freeze, and is now mandating cuts of around 50% in the provision of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) teaching, an essential service if ever there was one. SEND teachers struck in December, and are threatening to do so again in January. Croydon Council announced consultations on firing 15% of the workforce, then declared it was effectively bankrupt. Refuse lorry drivers in Thurrock are threatening to strike if the council goes ahead with cuts to the bins service. And this is just in the local authority sector. Beyond this, attacks on workers are intensifying all the time, using the COVID crisis as leverage and cover.
Looking back and forwards: AW comrades formed a small local group around the strike. We got together a bit late in the day to form a really effective crew, meaning we fell short on some basic safety protocols at the vehicle depot picket – one of us got isolated and arrested. It was perhaps naïve to intervene without more planning in a hot situation carved up by an SWP union branch secretary, an angry depot manager and the police.
We had useful conversations with strikers elsewhere, but it was difficult to make contact with some non ‘white collar’ striker groups, because they weren’t as visible on the pickets and demonstrations. We don’t know exactly why this is and if there had been more of us we could have found out. We thought possible reasons might be discomfort, unfamiliarity or even disapproval around the whole street picket ‘thing’; people treating the strike days as a chance to just take a load off and stay home; and perhaps nobody really asking them to get involved.
We produced a decent leaflet, also a fly poster designed to raise local working class awareness of the strikes and link the strikers’ issues to wider working class frustrations. In the end our effort was simply too small to distribute widely enough. Rebuilding East London Wildcat as a local AW collective in Tower Hamlets is part of the plan – so get in touch if you’re in the area and want to get involved.
This interview has first been published in German on our comrades’ blog. We would add that there were significant strikes of teachers and dock workers in Croatia during 2019 and successful strikes of construction workers from India in Serbia during the time of the protests. The interview mentions the significance of Chinese investments and development credits for the Serbian economy. The Chinese state has cut these foreign development credits severely, from 75 billion USD in 2016 to 4 billion USD in 2019. This will be another blow for the region…
In early July, short but quite vehement protests flared up in Serbia against the national-conservative government under the autocrat Aleksandar Vučić. Since these were largely received in the German-language media as mere anti-lockdown protests, if they received any attention at all, we decided to conduct this interview with a comrade from Belgrade to get a more nuanced perspective on the events on the ground.
What emerged was a picture of a diffuse movement that brought all opponents of the government to the streets, from organized fascists to liberals and radical left. The interview was conducted under the direct impression of the wave of protest, which has since waned. This cannot be said about corona infections in Serbia. Nevertheless, we think that the assessments from Belgrade are also of interest to the local social-revolutionary left: One reason is that political developments in the Balkans, apart from liberal civil rights discourses, often receive little attention. A little more exchange about the dynamics of social eruptions under right-wing hegemony and the possibilities of a (radical left-wing) practical critique would be highly desirable.
Last but not least, the question of how to update the communist project in “post-socialist transformation countries” should be seriously debated. This should apply not only to the territory of the former Yugoslavia, but also explicitly to the GDR.
Anyone interested in a more detailed account of the events can do well here:
For (anarchist) perspectives from Serbia on history and current events we recommend the journal project Antipolitika: https://antipolitika.noblogs.org/
Q: Could you give a short summary of the events that led to the recent protests?
A: To put it briefly, the protests began as a reaction to the government’s decision to institute another lockdown on July 7, starting with a total curfew on the following weekend. However, the primary motivations were far from a typical anti-lockdown protest, like the one that is going on in Germany. Although the motivations of the roughly 12,000 people that showed up in front of the National Assembly on the same day when the lockdown was declared were certainly heterogeneous and there was a right-wing, conspiracist component present, the protest was in essence a spontaneous eruption of popular anger mostly directed at the flippant and irresponsible way that the SNS1 government has been treating the pandemic during the last several months, as well as the general political and economic state of Serbian society. Probably the most crucial event was the report by BIRN, an investigative reporting network, on the true scale of the pandemic in the month prior to the 21 June general elections: supposedly, the SNS government was cutting down the number of infected and declared a premature end of lockdown measures in order to use their “victory” over the virus as an electoral prop. And indeed, almost immediately after the SNS won by a landslide, taking over 2/3 of seats in the Assembly, the situation was once again declared “extremely critical” and a return of draconian lockdown policies was announced.
Q: How did the government react to the pandemic? What’s the state of the Serbian health care system?
A: Overall, the government’s response was far from consistent or responsible. Reportedly — and eventually confirmed by members of the Crisis HQ themselves — the first cases of COVID-19 were present in Serbia as far as December-January, but the first official case of the virus was as late as March 6. Initially, the government tried to play off the pandemic as a joke in order to leave the circuits of capital uninterrupted — the most prominent member of the Crisis HQ was Branimir Nestorović, a controversial celebrity doctor who made a series of statements such as that the virus is as deadly as a regular flu, there is nothing to be scared of because Italians are just weak and genetically inferior compared to Serbs, and women should use the opportunity to travel to Milan and buy designer clothing on sale. However, after a week the situation became obviously too dire, Nestorović was pushed out of public view, an official state of emergency was declared and Draconian lockdown measures, aided by a considerable amount of police repression, were introduced for the next two months – only to be ended a month before the elections along with a premature announcement about the virus being effectively “defeated”.
The healthcare system has consistently been overloaded and unable to effectively handle the number of infected people, and there are shortages of respirators and PCR tests. I’m certain that this wasn’t inevitable though — the healthcare sector is severely underfunded, and a lot of this could have been avoided had the government consistently pursued a more responsible pandemic policy.
Q: The protests lasted for several days. Can you portray the course of events?
A: On the very first day, a far-right fascist group led by Srđan Nogo, “dostojni srbije” (ДОСТОЈНИ СРБИЈЕ – Worthy of Serbia), threw molotovs at the National Assembly and blew the front door open using firearms, in a supposed attempt to storm it and take it over — however, basically nothing happened when they came inside, and there are good reasons to believe that the entire action was a police false flag to justify what would happen next. The response was extraordinarily violent — with kilometer-wide clouds of tear gas spread all over the city center, riot cavalry, baton-armed policemen beating up anyone present anywhere close to the Assembly and wanton arrests. It caused an instant outrage all over the country, with solidarity protests springing up in cities and towns outside of Belgrade literally overnight.
The second day was marked by a violent mass response to the brutality, with street riots and anti-police violence happening all over downtown Belgrade. The police response was potentially even more brutal than yesterday. While some violent anti-police incidents were likely staged by the far-right, the reaction of the liberals at the protests was to mark any and all instances of rioting as a police provocation meant to justify the brutality, and efforts were made to turn the protest into a Gandhian, non-violent sit-in on the third day. The incredibly lukewarm atmosphere on the third day’s protest only helped the far-right impose itself as the dominant force at the protest on the following days, due to being able to present themselves as having a superficial aura of militancy that a lot of protestors were desiring of. Still, the numbers quickly waned due to a combination of the frustration at the protests’ increasing toothless performativity, the presence of far-right extremists and fear of police reprisals. Already by the end of the week, the protests were barely able to rally more than a thousand people.
However, while the main protest wave died off there was a continuation of sorts in the form of protests of solidarity with the arrested demonstrators, led by the left wing — but that also lasted for only about a week.
Q: Which were the most influential groups in the streets?
A: During the first couple of days, the demonstrators were violently driving out anyone they could identify with opposition political parties, due to the prevailing militantly anti-political sentiment. Still, it allowed Nogo’s “Worthy of Serbia” and the affiliated anti-migrant vigilante “People’s Patrols” to pass through the cracks, due to their lack of visible parliamentary ambitions combined with a diffusive approach. Despite possessing strong protest infrastructure, they didn’t try to present themselves as a unified bloc or an intervening political organization — they were spread out all over the crowd, with no clear political markers, pretending to merely be a spontaneous collection of “concerned citizens”. I don’t think that their positions were representative of anything more than a clear minority of the protestors, though, as shown by the dramatic decrease in numbers by the point where they clearly “took over” the protest. At that point, the initial militant opposition towards opposition politicians was also gone, allowing right-wing parties like “Dveri” or “Enough is Enough” to join the protest too – luckily, they didn’t have much left to capitalize on.
Q: Can you describe the role of nationalists or fascists in the protests and their relationship to police and state?
A: There are photos and reports of incidents like Srđan Nogo directing the police cordon on whom to attack and whom not to, or people with police walkie-talkies among the rioters. It’s not entirely clear why they would cooperate in this particular instance, but there is a well-recorded history of cooperation between the police and far-right in Serbia. Most notably, during the past thirty years far-right football ultras groups (also present at these protests, though — at least in appearance – in the ranks of the demonstrators) have been used to violently crush protests so the cops wouldn’t have to get their own hands dirty.
Q: During the protests, which groups of the political left were relevant? Were they able to give a good spin to the events?
A: Marks21, a Trotskyist group, attempted to organize a closely knit “left bloc” with visible left-wing placards and symbols, but the heavy-handed approach got them driven out due to the protestors’ anti-political sentiment that I mentioned. I wouldn’t say that there was anything close to a significant spontaneous anti-socialist or anti-communist sentiment at the protests, though — I personally got involved with a loose group of activists who were trying to promote a set of four clear social demands as the protest’s “official” set of demands, mostly related to the COVID-19 crisis (diverting police funding into healthcare, transparency of information of public importance, further legal limitations on the police use of force and increased social aid plus measures against layoffs), to a very positive response.
Also, the protests in Novi Sad were led by local left-wing activists, who attempted to sabotage the infrastructure chains by blocking the highway. The later solidarity protests with the imprisoned protestors were also organized by the Belgrade left: the nascent broad “Party of the Radical Left”, the aforementioned Marks21 and several grassroots groups.
Q: These were not the first protests against the Vucic government. Was there a significant difference this time compared to the protests since 2018 before the pandemic?
A: The first big anti-Vučić protest was in 2017, but I think that what separates this year’s protest from the ones in 2017 or 2018-19 was a much more pronounced social component, shown by the willingness to riot, as well as a considerable disinterest in the usual lukewarm political demands of the prior liberal protest movements, like fair media representation for opposition politicians, repeated elections, resignations of individual political figures etc. It absolutely crossed the boundaries of liberal protest civility in form as well as in content. In spirit, I think that it was closer to the often-overlooked protest over increased gas prices in the summer of 2018 (extremely similar to the Yellow Vests protests, but predating them by a couple of months), when thousands of car owners were blocking key traffic nodes in the country and working on forming a broader working-class based protest front against the poor economic situation.
Q: As Serbia is located at the center of the Balkans with direct borders to the European Union it plays an important role for geo-political strategies of several world-powers. Can you explain which nation states are involved and what interests they pursue?
A: To world-powers, Serbia is important for two main reasons — as a source of cheap skilled labor and as a transit node of strategic importance. While the former isn’t a major point of conflict and there are capital investors from all over the world, the latter has always been a point of contention, the most obvious recent case being Russia’s South Stream gas pipeline project. However, since the cancellation of the initial South Stream project Russia appears to have been steadily reducing its diplomatic presence. The European Union, despite putting its expansion plans on pause, still has a consistent presence in Serbia, with Pan-European corridors being a priority. A new major contender is China, with Serbia joining the Belt and Road Initiative2 in 2019 and several important partnerships being made, both with the Chinese government and with companies like Huawei.
Q: Did you recognize reactions of these powers to the pandemic (with respect to the situation in Serbia) and to the recent protests?
A: Serbia received considerable amounts of medical and monetary aid from all over the world, but for reasons that aren’t entirely clear a disproportional spectacle was made out of the Chinese aid package, going as far as to placing Xi Jinping billboards all over Belgrade, even though it was smaller than the EU aid package. Although EU officials were aggravated over this, it didn’t change their generally favorable stance towards President Vučić and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party. The protests didn’t change that, either — the EU didn’t go beyond a few vague and incredibly lukewarm declarations of “concern” about the police brutality, similar to the USA’s reaction. The other world-powers mostly kept quiet. There were several theories about the protests being, in some part, a geopolitical playground between the great powers related to the ongoing negotiations over the status of Kosovo, but looking back I don’t think it holds up.
Q: You had a very strict lockdown of public life, probably followed by massively increasing unemployment while the health care system is in a bad shape. Have there been any attempts of self-organization in response to the crisis?
A: Notably, “Zakrov nad glavom”3 (Joint Action Roof Over Your Head), a left-wing tenant solidarity network with branches in several cities, has been doing a COVID-19 relief campaign: finding shelter for the homeless and supplying food to the particularly vulnerable. There have also been completely grassroots local aid programs coordinated over the internet, which is quite uplifting.
It’s also probably important to mention major student protests that happened about a week before the main protest wave, over the decision to urgently evacuate student dorms in Belgrade after they turned out to have been compromised by the virus and send everyone home — for the second time this year. Of course, the students were mainly worried that it would mean jeopardizing their family members back home — the protests were a success and they were allowed to stay in the dorms.
Q: In 2017, Serbia was shaken by a wave of strikes and labor struggles (for instance at FIAT). Have there been any labor struggles during the pandemic?
A: Yes, most notably the workers of the South Korean Yura electronics factory4 in Leskovac, notorious for its terrible working conditions, have launched a wildcat strike in April, demanding to be relieved from work after the factory was reported as one of the prime COVID-19 hotspots. Unfortunately, the strike was quickly crushed. At least 15,000 of workers all over Serbia were laid off over the spring and summer, many of them by large foreign companies like Benneton or Hutchinson seeking to cut down on their costs — such large workplaces faced protests by laid off workers, but without much success.
Q: How did the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis change the role of trade unions in these conflicts?
A: I wouldn’t say that there has been a qualitative change — trade unions being an institutionalized mediator between the state and the working class in general that has been used to constrain class revolt as much as push some of the class’ limited interests. But during this crisis the unions have pretty much completely capitulated to the state, any instances of revolt have been independent of them.
Q: Was there a reaction of the government to ongoing labor struggles? Were concessions made, or was the reaction of repressive nature?
A: Well apart from a 100-euro stimulus package for every adult citizen, which was a measure meant to keep the economy afloat independent of any labor struggles, there haven’t been any real concessions. The employers were allowed to keep it up with the lay-offs, though given a stimulus package to discourage them. Some of the most vocal striking workers, like in Yura, have been targeted for “disinformation” and other offenses, by the partnership of their respective companies and the government. Overall, while the state didn’t directly intervene much, the capitalists were given completely free rein in suppressing the labor struggles.
Q: Since the shutdown of Hungarian border crossings, many refugees are stranded in Serbia. Can you illustrate their situation and how the pandemic effected it?
A: The refugees have been crammed up in overloaded reception centers, with poor access to healthcare, and basically forced to stay there like in prisons. Due to the panic over refugees spreading the virus. The police and military were organizing search patrols for refugees, arresting them and indiscriminately chucking them into camps. The situation is especially bad in the north of the country, close to the Hungarian border. Supposedly, Serbia is aiming to build a fence on the Macedonian border in order to stop the refugees from coming via that route.
Q: Do you think that (the area of former) “Yugoslavia” is still a useful frame of reference for the left in the Balkans? Or are the succeeding nation states insurmountably divided by nationalism and separated by their membership in different alliances (EU, NATO) that it’s merely nostalgia by now.
A: Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a lot of space for most things that are more significant than purely symbolic shared declarations or regional academic/NGO conferences. Most of the former Yugoslavia shares a common Serbo-Croatian language, which makes communication easier and allows for regional agitprop platforms without resorting to English, but in practice at this point it makes about as much as much sense to use it as a common political frame of reference as it would to lump Germany, Austria and Switzerland into a single frame of reference too. Each ex-Yugoslav country is by now a nation-state on its own accord, and most actual instances of politics spilling over the borders are based purely on ethnicity. Regional international solidarity will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, but I think that we absolutely have to avoid calls for a “New Yugoslavia” – let us not forget that Yugoslavia was still a (pan-)nationalist project, and that its pan-Slavic nature gave ideological credence to the systematic discrimination of Albanians and other non-Slavs on its territory.
Q: Currently, we experience a major worldwide economic crisis due to the pandemic. The total extent this crisis will have is not clear yet. What are your expectations for, say the next one or two years?
A: I’m no economist and can’t say that I’m informed enough to make a prognosis on the extent of the crisis or all of its concrete effects, but what appears pretty certain is that the geopolitical and economic position of China, apparently being the least harmed by the crisis, will grow even further in significance, and that is bound to impact the Balkans too. Vučić is likely fully aware of that, given the sudden extreme attempts of cozying up to China. I can easily see a scenario where Serbia could turn into China’s economic and diplomatic outpost in Europe.
Q: How could we in Germany support the ongoing struggles of comrades in Belgrade or Serbia in general?
A: I don’t know about Germany, but what I’ve noticed is that a significant part of the international left — mostly it’s Stalinist-aligned component — is spreading this idea of Vučić effectively and responsibly handling the COVID-19 pandemic. I think it is important to break that myth — the bourgeoisie and politicians aren’t our allies, no matter what part of the world we are talking about. Otherwise, it’s probably warranted to give another shout-out to “Joint Action Roof Over Your Head” and “Solidarna Kuhinja”5 (Solidary Kitchen) for the great work that they’ve been doing with self-organizing during the crisis. Though I’m personally not a member, I can’t see how facilitating connections with networks or organizations working on similar projects can be of any harm.
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