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prol-position news #4 | 12/2005
The current riots in France are just another sign of the desperate situation capitalism’s current development has created for a large fraction of the working classes all over the world. While a section of the young migrant youth is being expelled, like in the banlieues in France, with no capital wanting to exploit it, other sections are being squeezed even harder in the factories, warehouses and offices. All of them have to deal with surviving, with making their voices heard, and fighting for their interests. Struggles are developing faster and become more radical in form, but so far there does not seem to be much to win. More...
Strike at Gate Gourmet in Düsseldorf/Germany
It’s been three weeks since this article was written but the strike of the Gate Gourmet catering workers in Düsseldorf is still going on (22nd of November). In August Gate Gourmet workers had been on strike against sackings at the airport in London-Heathrow. They were soon supported by British Airways groundworkers so the airport was broad to a standstill for almost two days. The management accepted to reinstate part of the sacked workers and pay higher compensations to others. Unfortunately, the workers in Düsseldorf do not have that kind of support, yet. More...
18th of November. The strike at Gate Gourmet against the deterioration of the working conditions and the lowering of the wages is on for 43 days now. The company uses scabs from other Gate Gourmet locations and temp agencies. When today around noon a Gate Gourmet truck with meals for an aeroplane tried to leave the company grounds it was blocked by about 70 strikers and some supporters. More...
Interview with Polish Tesco Worker in Ireland
For ten month I had worked for a company in Poznan/Poland as a sales-man. After they hadn’t renewed my work contract I decided to go abroad in order to earn some money. A friend had told me that wages in Ireland are not that bad and that there aren’t any bigger problems to find a job. I decided quite quickly. I arrived in Dublin with 100 Euros in my pockets. I was lucky to be able to sleep in friends” houses and not having had to pay for hotels. My expenditures I reduced to buying cheap food. More...
In the last months, T & G Union has evolved a campaign to unionise the workforce of a very aggressive convenience food company, Grampians Country Food Group. This group controls around 50 percent of the British Convenience food sector. It puts tough price pressure and logistic on suppliers and is itself submitted to significant pressure form the supermarket chains. It sticks to an aggressive anti-union policy. More...
Lodz/Poland: Household Appliance Industry
Masked men attack a manager from the Indesit kitchen stove factory and cut his face with a razor knife: This story from Lodz went through the Polish press in October. The attack came one day before the funeral of a young worker whose head had been crushed by a two-ton sheet metal press in the neighbouring refrigerator factory which also belongs to the Indesit corporation. The automatic stop mechanism had been removed from the machine in order to prevent the line from being stopped all the time. More...
Lodz with 700.000 inhabitants is becoming a center of the European household appliance-industry. Until 1989 the city was a center of the Polish textile industry which since then has been closed down. The city is poor, with high unemployment. Some household appliance-factories have settled down here, among them Bosch-Siemens (see article in this newsletter on Bosch-Siemens in Berlin). More...
Eastern European migration flows to France are recent and have been quite small in comparison with other migration flows : they only started around 2000, except for Polish workers (employed as seasonal workers) who already started coming in 1990 and Romanian workers (as asylum seekers) after 1994. More...
French Investments in Eastern Europe
In May-June 2005, during the electoral campaign about the European Constitutional treaty in France, there was a lot of discussions in French medias about the famous "Polish plumber", presented as a menace to French workers by the sovereignist Right and Far Right parties. Curiously, nobody tried to seriously inquire about what was, on the other side, the behaviour of French companies in Eastern and Central Europe. More...
Washing Machine Factory in Berlin/Germany
How quickly things change. It was only 40 years ago that major household appliances were mass-produced in Western Europe, but there are already few factories left and most have been shut down or relocated. It’s nothing new that almost entire branches go abroad. What is new is that no new branches arise which hire significant numbers of people. More...
Hewlett Packard has recently been in the public spotlight due to its management’s announcement to dismiss several thousands of workers in Europe and because of the resulting strike of HP employees in France. What follows is a report on the work situation in HPs central packaging plant for printer cartridges in Duisburg, which is run more or less entirely by subcontractors. More...
Mobilizations in the Greek Textile Industry
During the last decade, 44.000 jobs were lost in the greek textile industry. 28.700 workers have been sacked only in 2003 and 2004. Production in this specific industry is carried out through the use of obsolete machinery, piece work and a large workforce and thus it is based on “intensity of labour”. More...
Strike at Honda in Gurgaon/India
The month-long strike/lock-out at HMSI and the police attack on the workers caused a big stir in India. This is mainly due to the location of the strike: a modern factory of a multinational company in a developing region which up to that point was not seen as prone to industrial disputes. The conflict at Honda threatened to become a spark in a generally tense atmosphere within India’s modern international industry. Therefore the police brutality against the workers can’t be understood as a mere response to a single workers’ struggle. More...
Following a short update with news from the global car industry, serving as background information to the articles on the automobile sector in Iran and India in this newsletter. The car industry is still the most ‘globalised’ sector and therefore an indicator of the general condition of global capitalism. More...
The defeat of Rafsanjani and the election victory of Ahmadinejad might surprise outside observers, but only if they had ignored the growing economic and social misery in the country or had considered the development a result of the “politics of the mullahs” and their economic compartmentalization against the West. In Iran itself even conservative intellectuals assess the social situation as much more explosive. More...
Right after Katrina hit, it looked like issues of race, class, and poverty were again coming to the forefront in the United States. The images of “bloated bodies floating in muddy water washing over submerged pickups and campers, of corpses being eaten by rats as they decompose on the city streets, of people dying in wheelchairs outside the convention center as families poured water over their heads to keep them alive” transfixed the country. More...
Less Black People want to join the US-Army
As many wonder why Americans aren’t doing more to oppose a brutal, illegal, but highly profitable war (if you have stock in Halliburton that is) they should realize that a very quiet but effective protest is going on. It is a protest that affects military planning, the morale of the US Army, and may ultimately lead to the end of the war itself. There is a boycott going on and it is being lead by young, poor, black men. More...
Wildcat-Poster: Which way to the revolution?
Capitalism has been stagnating for thirty years. For the last twenty years, the social system and people’s working conditions have been under attack from above; and for almost ten years, there has been a worldwide movement denouncing the injustice of this system. Why do so many people still stay so quiet? Why doesn’t capitalism finally give up and die? More...
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