February 10, 2004 - 11:07am -- hydrarchist
hydrarchist writes...here are some documents related to the series of wildcat strikes which broke out in the transpoirt sector in Italy in december. The strikes shut down Milan, Brescia and numerous other cities in what is a struggle not only over pay but also working conditions. The main trade unions have been run out of the tramworkers (autoferrotranvieri) depots to be replaced largely by grassroots trade unions such as the CUB, COBAS and SULT.
Efforts to build support for them have also involved a reflection on how 'precari' can make conflicts in the transport sector their own but makeing demands for free transpoirtation and 'social tariffs' rather than abstract 'solidarity'. Here are some libertarian tracts produced on these questions.
[January 12, 2004]
Let’s Block Everything…
…All of it
The transit workers in struggle in all the cities of Italy are not alone. From Paris to Bucharest, from Los Angeles to Rome wildcat strikes, city blockades and riots are spreading over the entire planet, a sign of a widespread impatience with the living conditions imposed on all the exploited. When the masters have less and less to concede, pressed in a crisis that is not a crisis but the normal functioning of the economy, when insecurity and fear become the social norm, there is no longer any distinction of category that holds. When there is nothing to mediate, all that remains to the unions – long since pledged to guarantee the resignation of the workers to business and government – is to put on the uniform of the police, as they did in Milan two years ago when they handed the names of the participants in the blockade of the station during the strike of railroad cleaners over to the forces of order.
