|
|
|
ChainWorkers
= MEDIA+UNION ACTIVISM
Defending (young) workers of malls
and supermarkets from the retail chains that suck your lives dry
Some background
Founded in early 1999, www.chainworkers.org
is the Italian webzine on media and mall activism for awareness-building
and unionization of chainstore part-timers. Centred around people
from Bulk
and Loa, Milano's
squatted epicenters of political dissent and active hacking for the
oppositional youth, the site was launched on a 3-day event on media
subversion in early 2000, where we did a seminar on subvertising in
the world and Naomi Klein's book.
In late 2000 a ChainCreW started its activities on the urban and suburban
soil, by breaking into franchises, handing out flyers to workers and
staging flying-picketlines in front of fast food joints. This agitation
period culminated in the blockade of Milano's biggest mall (not without
getting beaten by security), which went on broadcasting TV and ensured
the launch of MayDay
Parade the following week. On MayDay 2001, five-thousand
people danced on and marched behind colorful soundblasting trucks
and radical unions reclaiming their abused rights as chainworkers,
tempworkers, brainwokers. The guys and girls from Paris who did the
long strikes at McDonald's and Pizza Hut in the winter of 2001 were
also there parading, cheering on and delivering speeches ending with
calls of "Tous ensemble contre la précarité!".
On December 7,
Milano's holiday and opening day for Xmas shopping, we tried a bustling
suburban strip mall: we did a no-entry picketline, with DJs and apertitifs,
helping out workers at METRO megastore against aggressive management
and scabs, and then crossing the street parading and marauding against
every single commercial chain in the giant plaza that hosts the highest
concentration of retail activity and flexible labor in Italy.
Tools for thought and action
Basically what we try to do, in our weekly meetings and CW mailing
list, is to merge two working generations and two strands of radicalism
presently at odds with each other in Europe and elsewhere. On the
one hand, we want to make the young, ununionized part-timers and temp
workers get in touch with the unionists and activists of the old working
class. On the other hand we want to make media activism, as symbolized
by Indymedia,
Adbusters, RTmark
etc, interact with labor struggles and union organizing.
Many in the ChainCreW have this strange profile of having a recent
union past and a present working in Milano's media industry. Living
in a country where commercial TV brought a dumb tycoon to power, we
well understand the persuasive power of pop culture and advertising
lexicon. Our intent is clearly to advertise a new brand of labor activism
and revolt, i.e. subvertise, by using language and graphix geared
to people who have no prior political experience other than the wear
and toil of their bodies and minds in the giant outlets. We try to
do so by constant reporting of labor conflicts and corporate misdeeds
in malls, franchises, and megastores around the world, but also commenting
on aspects of contemporary life, art, music related to commercial
spaces and chainworking in them.
Chain+Brain Workers Unite!!!
And remember: somewhere on the planet, a Wal*Mart waits to be unionized
write us: chainworkers@ecn.org
|
 |
 |