"Flexworkers of europe let's unite! There's a World of Rights to Fight for: Steady Income & Paid Vacation, Access to Housing, Loving, Hacking." Following these introductional phrases the Mayday-parade, which took place a first time in Milano in 2001, was extended 2004 on an european level. The excerpts below are from the call, which is published on http://www.euromayday.org/. Around 80.000 people participated in Milano, more than 10.000 in Barcelona. The Euro-Mayday was born.
MAYDAY, MAYDAY!! Why precari@s, intermittents, cognitari/e are rebelling across NEUROPA...
Remember MAYDAY, the global holiday of workers, dear to anarchists and socialists worldwide, born in America and mummified in Russia and China, fallen in neglect in Europe as neoliberalism mounted and many unions sold out? Well, in Milano since 2001 a network of Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish media hacktivists, rank-and-file unions, self-run and squatted youth centers, critical mass bikers, radical networks, student groups, syndicalist collectives, immigrants' associations, assorted commies, greens, anarcos, gays and feminists have given life to a MAYDAY PARADE taking place in the afternoon of May 1st, whose participation and meaning has grown tremendously from 5,000 to 50,000 people, thereby triggering many urban actions and social conflicts that are spreading among young temps, partimers, freelance and contract workers, researchers and teachers, service and culture workers in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere across Europe.
MAYDAY has been not only an event, but also a method, a project, and a process. A horizontal METHOD of crossnetworking the Genoa movement with the radical sections of unionism, based on subvertising, picketing, organizing and equal access to many identities and ways of action, thereby enabling the alliance between two generations of conflict. A PROCESS of radicalizing transeuropean service and knowledge workers to constitute an insurgent identity capable of contributing to a new european political and social SPACE in place of the one which recently foundered in Brussels.
PRECARIOUSNESS is what we live, FLEXICURITY is what we want. Across Euroland. And fast. We demand security and universality of income, social and vacation benefits, increased overtime and limitations on night and sunday work, subsidized education, housing, health, free access to media and knowledege, a eurowide minimum wage, right to union-organizing for temps and flextimers, an end of wage and union discrimination by employers between temp and non-temp labor, such as the fact that a partimer's hour is paid less than a fulltimer's, an end to xenophobic laws and mass deportations that are suppressing the free circulation of people of all hues, religions, and cultures across NEUROPA. (...)
We have chosen the MAYDAY PARADE, to be propagated and subvertised via independent omnimedia (print, spray, radio, video, net, satellite etc), as a libertarian and multi-identity format featuring dozens of sound trucks, carnival and allegorical wagons, vans, carts, and bicycles with kids and grown ups, jugglers of jobs and contorsionists of flexibility, all together expressing cheerful anger against the exclusion of a whole generation and soon the rest of society from social rights with guarantees of collective self defense. These must have either a continental and federal eurowide coverage or they won't come into being. To put it simply, in the Euro MayDay Parades in MILANO, BARCELONA and elsewhere, we wanna rock the euro boat to get our rightful share of the booty...
EURO MAYDAY PARADE 004
http://www.euromayday.org/
