Precair Forum: flexible labour/migration/the city
11/01/2005
Flexmens, Greenpepper Project and SearchWeb present:
Precair Forum: flexible labour/migration/the city
A one-day series of forums and workshops examining the precarisation of everyday life within and beyond the Netherlands? intersecting the changing nature of work (flex/temp/contingent) and production (knowledge-based and immaterial), migration and informal economies, and new strategies for metropolitan struggles.
Issues include: flexibilisation, social exclusion, migration and illegalisation, urban regeneration and gentrification, tactics for re-appropriating the city, organising toward EuroMayDay 2005 and demanding social rights to open citizenship, housing and income and more.
Featuring: (to be confirmed): local groups such as Vrije Ruimte, OKIA, SASH, NextGenderation and international speakers including Precarias a la Deriva (Madrid, Spain), Maurizio Lazzarato (France), London Particular (London, UK), and P2P Fightsharing (Rome, Italy) and more (tbc)
When: 12 February 2005, 14:00? 19:00
Where: Plantage Doklaan 12, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The Forum is free, but email contact@precairforum.nl to register.
For more information and updates, see http://www.precairforum.nl/ or go to our wiki page at www.greenpeppermagazine.org/process
Background:
Recent years have seen the rise of a knowledge-based economy based on immaterial production (of information and services etc) and flexible labour. This economy is one that requires us to permanently school ourselves, to adapt and move to its rhythms - animated as these are (it is said) by technology, innovation and other codewords for permanent improvement. Yet, as is clear to those put to work in it, it is an economy that operates by producing various kinds of?precarity? - or social and economic insecurity? as a structural feature of everyday life.
Precarity? which literally means to be continually uncertain of your own future - and the neoliberal organisation of work are tightly interconnected. Whether as legal or illegalised migrants, as unemployed workers without welfare-state guarantees or as freelancers, temps, part-timers, students or flexworkers,?flexibility? means the permanent fragility of one?s income, job or housing.
It is migrants, undocumented and illegalised workers that disproportionately bear the burden of precarisation. From factory work to agricultural production, domestic labour to sex work, irregular work through familial networks to various forms of self-employment, migrant workers are forced to endure a situation of perpetual social and job insecurity - that is neither temporary nor exceptional? under the continual threat of blackmail, detention or expulsion. Yet traditional unionization and appeals to citizenship rights are failing to resolve these problems, and there is a pressing need to forge new strategies.
And so we find ourselves in a precarious city - a metropolis shaped by processes of gentrification, social exclusion, speculation and mobility, while marked by the erosion of public space, privatization of social housing, by displacement and eviction. Yet, in the Netherlands, the term?precarity? is little known and rarely used by those most affected by the worst excesses of neoliberalism.
Across the rest of Europe, various groups have used the idea of precarity tomake connections between conflicts and to allow them to communicate and circulate. For example, in France it is?intermittents? (temp workers in the cultural industries),?sans-papiers? (undocumented workers) and?chomeurs? (unemployed) who recognise themselves in each others? struggles and situations. In Spain and Italy a number of groups are campaigning around the issue of precarity, such as the flexworkers? syndicate Chainworkers (Milan) and the research collective Precarias a la Deriva (Madrid). In 2004, the First of May was celebrated in Milan and Barcelona by 100.000 people protesting against their precarity and exploitation in the so-called "flexible, modern" neoliberal economy [http://www.euromayday.org].
