Meet 12noon Clerkenwell Green to join the Autonomous Bloc on the TUC march!
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mayday stickers
Meet 12pm Clerkenwell Green to join the Autonomous Bloc
This Mayday we invite all self-organised workers, migrant workers, non-unionised workers, agency workers, cash in hand workers, dole claimants, free-lancers, work rejecters and all of those who fall outside of traditional union organisation to join our autonomous bloc on the TUC march. To make Mayday a day where the invisible claim a common voice.
MAYDAY is International workers day, born out of the struggle for an 8 hour day in 1886. Over 100 years later our lives are still taken up by the world of work. Even more so now, as the work imposed by Capitalism has become more casualised (temporary contracts, flex time, part time, no time!) forcing us to adapt to the point where it's hard to tell when, where or even if we are working. This leaves us in a situation where our lives are always on hold, on call and at the mercy of the market. May 1st this year falls on a bank holiday, yet for many it will be just another day at work. Our leisure time too is filled with anxieties. The anxiety of not being able to have enough money to pay the rent, go to the cinema, a nice restaurant, shop for food, clothes, anything! In reality our work never finishes and when we're not at work we still end up making some other person even richer. Even looking forward to a nice retirement is set to become a thing of the past, with us soon to be working ‘til we drop and a pensions’ crisis leaving many of us in fear of an old age of poverty.
Around Europe people call this new working and living condition "precarity" and over the past few years the “EuroMayday” parades of casualised workers, temps, part-timers, immigrants and unemployed have marched through Europe's capitals to demand new social rights. The riots of marginalised suburban youth, and the rebellion against new contracts of insecurity for young workers in France; the massive strike over pensions by public sector workers, and the mobilisation of agency employed cleaners to fight for a living wage in the UK are all struggles against a life of insecurity.
This Mayday we call for freedom of movement across borders for everyone and the right to stay and work in the country of their choosing, with access to all the benefits and freedoms available to that population. We reject an immigration system which allows the movement of goods but not people, of the rich but not the poor; which forces migrants, refugees and asylum seekers into a choice between destitution and illegal, often dangerous work.
On May 1st we act in solidarity with the many Mayday actions against precarity and insecurity which are taking place around the world; and with the French workers refusal of a future where the only certainty is insecurity. We take action on May 1st because May Day is a celebration of the struggles won by workers for a better world. One less day of working and one day more for us.
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hmmmmm
05.04.2006 15:22
***
EXCELLENT EXCELLENT EXCELLENT
05.04.2006 16:24
See you on May 1st.
Start the sundances now. Let's have a festival!
Matthew Cuffe
e-mail:
matthewcuffe@gmail.com
Homepage:
http://www.myspace.com/matthewcuffe
It happening?!?! I am amazed!
10.04.2006 16:38
Shock!
MAYDAY 2006 (London) HIT THE STREETS
13.04.2006 13:00
Regards to all the Mayday crew years past, this one is from me to you.
I simply love police cars---Especially when there wrapped round lamposts....
The Notorious Heckler
Good one
20.04.2006 11:15
Sonia
e-mail:
soniacub@yahoo.com
Homepage:
http://shorno.net
where to get stickers...
23.04.2006 21:53
one
Mayday: London No Borders Statement
24.04.2006 16:36
EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL – MIGRANTS, REFUGEES, LEGAL OR 'ILLEGAL'
TEAR DOWN THE BORDERS THAT DIVIDE US
MONDAY 1ST MAY – MAYDAY PARADE
Meet 12pm Clerkenwell Green &
join the Autonomous Bloc on the TUC march
May Day is International Workers Day, a day that should recognize that the working class is an international class; that the oppressed and exploited throughout the world have everything in common with each other and nothing in common with 'their' nation, 'their' government and 'their' bosses. So migrants, refugees, those deemed 'illegal immigrants' by the State, those facing deportation, people in detention, should be at the center of what May Day is all about.
The Trade Union movement has had a sorry history in relation to immigration controls. At the beginning of the 20th century the TUC agitated for the first immigration controls against Jews, which helped bring about the introduction of the 1905 Aliens Act. At various times throughout that century trades unions have organised against migrant workers and for greater controls.
So not only have migrants confronted with the physical and legal borders, they have to contest the borders that exist within the workers movement itself. On May Day we must challenge that and call for a world without borders.
There has always been a voice within the trade union movement in support of migrant rights and against controls starting with the 'Voice from the Aliens' over a hundred years ago. More recently trades unions have opposed new legislation strengthening immigration controls. Today some unions such as Natfhe and NUJ have come out against immigration controls.
Immigration controls are in your work place and the union ought to be fighting them. People in the caring professions are supposed to act as immigration officers; reporting migrants to the Home Office, denying people services because of their immigration status, evicting them and taking their children away. We say DEFIANCE NOT COMPLIANCE!
People in your union are rounded up, detained and deported. We say NO DEPORTATION! NO DETENTIONS! Set up or support a campaign against their deportation. Take industrial action to oppose their deportation.
'Illegal' or precarious immigration status makes many workers vulnerable to super-exploitation paid well below the minimum wage with no health and safety conditions. The tragic consequences of this have been seen on the sands of Morecambe Bay. It is a duty of the trades union movement to organise, support and defend all workers regardless of their immigration status and say loud and clear IMMIGRATION CONTROLS KILL! NO ONE IS ILLEGAL!
WHO ARE LONDON NO BORDERS? London No Borders are a group of people who are opposed to immigration controls. As well as putting forward the arguments against immigration controls, we are involved, often with alliance with others, with practical activities against the various aspects of controls.
We are working to support people detained in centers around London – Harmondsworth and Colnbrook, Yarlswood – organising visits, campaigning for their release and against their deportations. We have organised demonstrations at Harmondsworth and Colnbrook.
We are currently supporting the self-organised struggles against detention centres by people detained inside Colnbrook, Haslar and Harmondsworth detention centres, who have formed a new movement called ‘Cry Freedom’ to demand their release. Their dissent has taken the form of hunger strikes, mass food refusals, and sit-down protests, and many of them have faced severe repression from guards as a result of this.
We leaflet at centers where asylum seekers have to sign-on and could be detained and taken away, with information about their rights.
We support and encourage people in the caring professions to refuse to carry out immigration control duties.
We disseminate information about campaigns around the country and around the world and will work in concert to make international days of action.
We meet every two weeks on Thursdays. Our next meeting is on Thursday 4th May, 7pm @ The Square Social Centre, 21 Russell Square, London WC1.
If you want to get involved you can contact us at
NO ONE IS ILLEGAL! NO BORDERS!
London No Borders
e-mail:
noborderslondon@riseup.net
Homepage:
http://www.noborders.org.uk
Cannabis Parade?
26.04.2006 13:26
nicola harris
e-mail:
nlharris87@hotmail.co.uk
No way
26.04.2006 18:41
Jo
Oh humbug
27.04.2006 16:56
James
Mayday
28.04.2006 00:48
Originally it was in 1 May 1886 and it was a mass protest / strike of workers in America, Chicago or New York i forget which, they protested on working conditions and for an 8 hours working day (as opposed to up to 16), the benefits of that you probably enjoy now,
Since then it became an annual event of socialists and anarchists communists and other "radicals" which oppose our enslavements to our "masters", be they our bosses, our governments, their wars, corporations and other institutes which hold us back, or repress us.
Feel free to add or correct me on that though
Osama Bin Cohen
e-mail:
OsamaBinCohen@Gmail.com
FUCK EUROMAYDAY
30.04.2006 12:05
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE
DESTROY EUROPEAN SUPREMACISM
As the European Union grows in power, Pan-European internationalism will create more problems than it solves. Whereas some may see “European-wide” links as being a healthy way of breaking out of the limits of the nation, for us the real key to internationalism lies in its universalism. We suggest that the abandonment of “Europe-wide” organising is necessary to allow a more egalitarian way of organising which does not privilege the “European”, whether understood in terms of culture, race or region.
It is precisely this three-fold ambiguity in the sense of the word “European” that gives it such a volatile ideological value. It can be understood by different people in different ways. Those that understand it terms of region, perforce must adopt the sort of territorialism which is characteristic of the state, in this case the emerging European Union. Another conception is racial, which originated in the consolidation of a White social elite in European colonies outside Europe. The third associates the highest level of human achievement with the history of Europe from the days of ancient Greece to today.
Europe-wide organising has a reactionary effect by:
• Encouraging a European identity as something separate from humanity in general by privileging European connectedness.
• Discouraging the participation of people from non-European diasporas living in Europe by discriminating against their social, cultural and political connections with places outside Europe
• Obstructing a critical appraisal of Eurocentrism, institutional racism and White Supremacy by adopting a structure which facilitates all three.
"Globalisation" has highlighted our increasing need to develop counter-strategies at a global level. For this to succeed we need to ensure that an organisational practice that embraces the whole of humanity, rather than allowing a method of organisation which asserts the autonomy of one of the richest parts of the world which has a track record of spreading destruction, exploitation and brutality across the world since the inception of capitalism in the sixteenth century C.E.
17th May 2005 West Essex Zapatista
NEUROMAYDAY
Why is this not hidden
05.05.2006 21:14
This Euromayday is racist. It discriminates between European people who take the stereets for Mayday and non-European people. Why does Indymedia UK sanction this racism?
fabian
e-mail:
fabian@dalitstan.org