Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Emerging out of the “anti-globalization” movement, EuroMayDay is a transnational protest event held since 2005 on May 1 in a dozen or more European cities, including Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, Helsinki, Seville-Malaga, Vienna, Naples, Maribor, Copenhagen, and Liège. It is also a cross-European network for social agitation and labor organizing among workers to fight for economic redistribution and free movement of people across borders. It was born with the Middlesex Declaration of October 2004, when labor and media collectives from several European countries gathered in London at Beyond ESF, an autonomous event coinciding with the European Social Forum (ESF). It sought to give rise to a unified May Day of precarious and migrant workers. Since 2005 the EuroMayDay network has held political assemblies in Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and Milan. The whole process originated in 2001 out of Milan, where the activists and “subvertisers” of Chain Workers, supported by Milanese and Roman squats ( centri sociali ), made an action pact with CUB (Confederazione Unitaria di Base, or the Unitary Rank-and-File Confederation), a militant union, to create a May Day parade that would give voice and visibility to temporary workers, part-timers, freelancers, and other service laborers belonging to the “precarious generation.” They meant to reclaim the international holiday of workers by bringing it back to ... log in or subscribe to read full text