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We Are Not Contingent: An Academic Manifesto

We are the non-tenure track faculty who now constitute two-thirds of the instructional workforce at universities and colleges across the nation. We are frequently invisible to administrators, yet we are the first professors and instructors that undergraduate students meet on their journey to becoming engaged learners. We are the majority. We have been silent too long, and it is time for us to reclaim our voices and outline our demands.

WE ARE ESSENTIAL. Words carry within them powerful connotations. Contingency implies that we, as non-tenure track faculty, are incidental or even accidental to the educational mission of the colleges and universities where we work. No employees, regardless of their field, would willingly apply this stigma to themselves. To continue calling ourselves “contingent labor” is to accept the fate that has been chosen for us by administrators who view us as easily disposable freelancers or potential tenure track faculty in a period of transition.

Preliminary Balance Sheet of the 13-Days Sit-Down Strike at Maruti Suzuki Factory in Manesar/Gurgaon, India
Guragon Workers News

From 4th to 17th of June around 2,000 young workers engaged in a wildcat sit-down strike at Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar [1]. With the following text we hope to contribute to the necessary debate about this important strike and invite friends and comrades, particularly in Delhi area, to share their experiences and views. Before we go into chronological details of the strike we try to provide a rough political summary.

It was an important strike in local terms. The two Maruti assembly plants coordinate hundreds of local supplying factories [2], the Manesar plant dominates a new industrial area of major importance. There has been silence at Maruti Suzuki for more than a decade: the workers in Gurgaon plant have been silenced by the lock-out in 2000/01 [3], and they did not join the strike in June. The Manesar plant was opened in 2006/07, but the young and casualised work-force had not found their voice as yet.

The Workers Economy Third International Meeting Mexico June 9-11
Analyzing and Debating a New Economy from the Perspective of Workers and Self-Management
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City

We invite workers, activists, and researchers from around the world to the Third International Meeting of the Workers’ Economy, taking place on June 9, 10 and 11, 2011 in Mexico City at the Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco (UAM-Xochimilco). With a focus on “Analyzing and Debating a New Economy from the Perspective of Workers and Self-Management,” this Third International Meeting aims to continue the discussions and debates concerning workers’ alternatives to global capital that began in Buenos Aires at the First and Second International Meetings of the Workers’ Economy in 2007 and 2009.

For the Third International Meeting, we propose bridging academic and intellectual contributions with the practices and ideas of workers, bringing together researchers, theorists, and political activists with workers from around the world. This Third International Meeting will continue the spirit of the past two International Meetings by systematizing workers’ experiences of exploitation, projects of alternative work organizations and institutions, and workers’ roles as leaders of their own economic destinies, while also aiming to collaboratively study resistances to capitalists’ management of the economy.

This time, the International Meeting will be held in Mexico. For the organizers, this means consolidating the space of debate that the past two encuentros have generated and accentuating its international character. Mexico is a country where neoliberalism has rampaged against the people and provoked many workers’ struggles and myriad social movements of protest. They need support. The Third International Meeting in Mexico will, in particular, be drawing attention to these struggles and reinforcing them.

Marx and Makhno Meet McDonald's Loren Goldner

Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them.

"Serving our Life Sentence in the Shacks" Abahlali baseMjondolo

People all over South Africa have been asking the leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo as to why the government continues to ignore the demands of the shack dwellers. They have been asking why after all the marches, statements, reports and meetings the Kennedy Road settlement continues to get burnt down through the endless shack fires. They have been referring in particular to the recent Kennedy Road shack fire on Sunday, 4 July 2010 that took four lives, leaving more than three thousand people displaced and homeless.

Can the New Global Labour Studies Stimulate a New Global Labour Movement? Two Drafts for Discussion Peter Waterman

Global Labor Charter Project p.waterman@inter.nl.net http://blog.choike.org/eng/tag/peter-waterman

Film: Visteon Workers Fight for a Better Deal

The UK education charity and its alternative news channel WORLDbytes has released a filmed report covering the Visteon protests in Enfield. The report draws out the situation workers faced upon being made redundant and what prompted them to take matters into their own hands and occupy the car part factory.

Interviews conducted directly after the workers left the occupation capture the mood at the time: a great uncertainty about what the future holds yet hope and defiance that ultimately led Visteon bosses to meet their demands.

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