?? Work Precariously, Live Precariously ?? !! No Borders, No Precarity !!
CALL FOR THE FIFTH MAYDAY-PARADE IN VIENNA, 1ST OF May 2011
Meeting point: 2 p.m., Wallensteinplatz, 1200 Vienna.
Do you have to work? Do you want to work? Are you getting paid for your work? Do you have permission to work? Or permission to live here? What are you living from? Do you have spare time? What do you do should you become sick? What are you going to do when you are aged? What do you wish for? How are you opposing your precarity? How are you organizing?
We’re not going to wait any longer for the empty promise of a wonderful life. We will challenge the ongoing precarisation of living and working conditions. Therefore, on the first of May we shout once again: MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Join the parade of the precarious! The MAYDAY!-Parade connects the isolated, strengthens the unsettled and creates a radius of action. Let’s resist!
It’s madness to wait any longer! Get out on the streets!
We empower ourselves to speak and to act. Organising is our trump card, diverse and offensive forms of action are our joker. We make the various aspects of the present precarity seen and heard in order to overcome the prevailing state of fragmentation and isolation and to provide a basis for collective political action. And we won’t wait any longer – for a gleam of hope, the revolution, the neo-liberal apocalypse or a social movement … Do it yourself: We are the movement!
Let’s organize!
We are versatile jugglers of jobs and contortionists of flexibility. Undocumented, illegalized, seasonal and fixed-term employees, the so-called „new self-employed“, low-wage workers, unemployed, freelance workers, project workers, (unpaid) reproduction workers, care workers, domestic workers, part-time or subcontract laborers: We all live and work in precarity.
Best practice
While employees in supermarkets work for lowest wages and students muddle themselves through mini-jobs and unpaid internships, workers in culture and art as well as cleaners have to work without social security. Because of the menace of disciplinary penalties, the freedom of action for persons living under the poverty level and the unemployed is very limited. The freelance knowledge workers are „freed“ from longterm perspectives, while disenfranchised sexworkers try to organize their lives.
I want my beautiful life
The process of precarity does not only include working conditions. MAYDAY! also adresses homeless persons that even have to pay for the homeless shelters; those who want to live in trailer parks, but are forced to settle down by city politics; those who (have to) squat houses and flats, while others live in palaces; those who are criminalized because of their leftist political activism; those who work, but don`t have enough to live from; and all those who cross constructed borders.
We want freedom of movement for everyone! We want to be mobile, without being forced into it – and to stay wherever and whenever we want to! We want free access to education and knowledge! We want to take our lives into our own hands, we want the same privileges for everyone – and we want a lot more!
For these and many other reasons we shout: MAYDAY! MAYDAY!
We have appropriated the alarm signal of ships in distress as a battle cry to underline the state of increasing precariousness of life and work and to intensify the networking of the precarious struggles.
!! Fight Precariously, Dance Precariously !!