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redlightpolitics: RIP Jayaben Desai, feminist role model and union leader via The Hindu, Jayaben Desai, architect of Asian women workers’ movement, dead Jayaben Desai, a pioneer of Asian women workers’ movement in Britain, died after a brief illness. She was 77. She is survived by her husband and two sons. The diminutive India-born Ms. Desai, who moved to Britain from Tanzania in 1969, came to be known as a “lioness” for her role in leading the two-year long strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, north London, in the 1970s to demand union recognition for its largely Asian and female workforce. She famously told a manager : “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.’’ Recalling her memorable taunt, Labour MP and Jack Dromey, a former trade union leader who worked with her during the Grunwick dispute said: “She was 4ft 11 tall, but an absolute lioness.” The Grunwick strike (1976-78), regarded as a seminal moment in British trade union movement, was sparked by the dismissal of Devshi Bhudia, a male worker, for working “too slowly’’. Ms Desai who walked out in support along with other workers, including her son, was dismissed . Most of the workers at the factory were women, mostly Indian, and as they took to the streets led by Ms Desai with her trademark handbag they were fondly dubbed the “strikers in saris’’. Although workers failed to achieve their demand, the strike helped highlight the oppression of migrant women workers. In what The Guardian said was her last known public statement, Ms Desai told the newspaper: “I am proud of what I did. They wanted to break us down, but we did not break.” Tagged “awesome” because she was awesome.

redlightpolitics:

RIP Jayaben Desai, feminist role model and union leader

via The Hindu, Jayaben Desai, architect of Asian women workers’ movement, dead

Jayaben Desai, a pioneer of Asian women workers’ movement in Britain, died after a brief illness. She was 77. She is survived by her husband and two sons.

The diminutive India-born Ms. Desai, who moved to Britain from Tanzania in 1969, came to be known as a “lioness” for her role in leading the two-year long strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, north London, in the 1970s to demand union recognition for its largely Asian and female workforce.

She famously told a manager : “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.’’

Recalling her memorable taunt, Labour MP and Jack Dromey, a former trade union leader who worked with her during the Grunwick dispute said: “She was 4ft 11 tall, but an absolute lioness.”

The Grunwick strike (1976-78), regarded as a seminal moment in British trade union movement, was sparked by the dismissal of Devshi Bhudia, a male worker, for working “too slowly’’. Ms Desai who walked out in support along with other workers, including her son, was dismissed . Most of the workers at the factory were women, mostly Indian, and as they took to the streets led by Ms Desai with her trademark handbag they were fondly dubbed the “strikers in saris’’. Although workers failed to achieve their demand, the strike helped highlight the oppression of migrant women workers.

In what The Guardian said was her last known public statement, Ms Desai told the newspaper: “I am proud of what I did. They wanted to break us down, but we did not break.”

Tagged “awesome” because she was awesome.

(via rtothemj)

readnfight:

firesandwords:

here is a video of an action unidad latina en accion/new haven workers association, groups i organize with, put on. it was picked up by the associated press, wtnh, new haven register and the struggle- a local cable news show. it’s since made it to the la times and other national news outlets.

My crew! I was out of town! This is a fancy restaurant here that owes several workers tens of thousands of dollars in back pay. The last time there was a picket a couple weeks ago, the owner had the cops there within minutes; the police department sent 4 cop cars and a van, and once the picket was over the cops went inside the restaurant to have lunch because apparently the owner is connected to the police department.

(via woc-resist)

{ LINK: The Battle Against Benefit Cuts }

dappercat:

A Laurie Petty piece including some interesting words from a frustrated frontline staffer working for DWP - which pretty much mirror what I’ve heard from other people who used to work on their phones too. Excerpt below, with my bolding.:

“The system is driven towards saving money at the expense of vulnerable people. We want to help people but they’re not letting us,” says William Davies, a 22-year old worker in a call centre that deals with Incapacity Benefit claims. “You get old people phoning up in floods of tears when their relatives have died.”

“I hate them calls. We’re so limited in what we can say because all our calls are recorded and they watch us all the time. You’re chained to your desk. It’s hell working here,” he says.

“We have people off sick with stress all the time - I’ve had to take medication for anxiety, and I normally consider myself quite a strong, down-to earth person,” Davies adds. “People come to work in floods of tears, but they’re terrified of saying they can’t cope, because they know just what happens if they have to go on the sick.

“Nobody wants to have to deal with our system from the other end.”

Good piece, although I’m uncomfortable with her calling people with disabilities “the weak” (sorta like the guy in the quote above who implies that people who take medication for anxiety are “weak”) and calling the abled “ordinary people”.

(via torayot)

{ LINK: The abusive practices of 1-800-Flowers }

dr-grumbles:

damekatharsis:

Valentine’s Day, which accounts for 40% of fresh flower sales annually, is fast approaching. If you’re planning to order a bouquet from 1-800-Flowers — the world’s largest florist — you should know where most of those flowers really come from. At flower farms in Ecuador and Colombia — the countries that export the most to the U.S. — two-thirds of the workers are women. These women are routinely subjected to harassment and even rape from their male supervisors. They suffer eye infections and miscarriages from consistent contact with dangerous pesticides. In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, they’re routinely forced to work 80-hour weeks with no overtime pay. Attempts to form a union are met with opposition by police and armed forces.

Many retailers — such as Whole Foods and Stop & Shop — have taken the important first step of offering Fair Trade flowers to consumers who want no part of these abuses. Fair Trade certified farms must adhere to strict standards for workers’ rights, which prevents the abuses described above.

Click on the link to sign the petition.

 Another option is to just opt out of cut flowers and give a different gift. Since so many flowers aren’t fair trade (and fair trade is more expensive) why not take the money that would have been spent on flowers and either go out to a meal, donate it to charity in the name of your partner, buy a dvd and watch it together, or maybe even buy some seeds and plant them. Flowers are a temporary gift, where as other more lasting things (even seeds to grow a live flower) can create great memories together on valentines day.

(via tranzient-deactivated20110219-d)

{ LINK: The abusive practices of 1-800-Flowers }

NOTE: even if you’ve already signed, take a look at fiercelynative’s second link (scroll to bottom)

fiercelynative:

dr-grumbles:

damekatharsis:

Valentine’s Day, which accounts for 40% of fresh flower sales annually, is fast approaching. If you’re planning to order a bouquet from 1-800-Flowers — the world’s largest florist — you should know where most of those flowers really come from. At flower farms in Ecuador and Colombia — the countries that export the most to the U.S. — two-thirds of the workers are women. These women are routinely subjected to harassment and even rape from their male supervisors. They suffer eye infections and miscarriages from consistent contact with dangerous pesticides. In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, they’re routinely forced to work 80-hour weeks with no overtime pay. Attempts to form a union are met with opposition by police and armed forces.

Many retailers — such as Whole Foods and Stop & Shop — have taken the important first step of offering Fair Trade flowers to consumers who want no part of these abuses. Fair Trade certified farms must adhere to strict standards for workers’ rights, which prevents the abuses described above.

Click on the link to sign the petition.

 Another option is to just opt out of cut flowers and give a different gift. Since so many flowers aren’t fair trade (and fair trade is more expensive) why not take the money that would have been spent on flowers and either go out to a meal, donate it to charity in the name of your partner, buy a dvd and watch it together, or maybe even buy some seeds and plant them. Flowers are a temporary gift, where as other more lasting things (even seeds to grow a live flower) can create great memories together on valentines day.

Sign the petition. Seriously. And I totally second to vote to donate in your person’s name instead of buying flowers (even fair trade ones). To start, there’s a list of trans-friendly shelters and crisis centers available here at Questioning Transphobia.

(via lakalenyu-deactivated20111225)

{ LINK: tangerine trees and marmalade skies: I cannot even REMOTELY speak to the experience of working in a call center for U.S. customers while Indian. }

thecurvature:

[Trigger Warning]

But I can say that I read this:

Workers must be able to “pass” as American or British and maintain their composure in the face of sometimes racist abuse by irate customers; it is simply part of the job.

And thought: “Um. Yeah. Obviously.”

But it’s probably not obvious to…

(via so-treu)

{ I cannot even REMOTELY speak to the experience of working in a call center for U.S. customers while Indian. }

jaded16india:

thecurvature:

[Trigger Warning]

But I can say that I read this:

Workers must be able to “pass” as American or British and maintain their composure in the face of sometimes racist abuse by irate customers; it is simply part of the job.

And thought: “Um. Yeah. Obviously.”

But it’s probably not obvious to a lot of people? I mean, it’s probably obvious that people who work at call centers get a lot of shit from people who are angry. Are yelled at a lot. But I don’t think they realize the real extent that the abuse gets to. And that you can’t do anything about it.

When there’s some guy screaming at you that you’re a stupid cunt, fucking bitch, need to suck his dick, etc. because the rule is that you’re not allowed to reverse his overdraft fee. You can’t hang up on him. When someone is shouting racial slurs at you — and the call center I worked in was in a very white town, so the staff was overwhelmingly white, but the few POCs who I talked to about working there did seem to usually get it significantly worse — it’s too bad so sad. Deal with it.

Once I had some guy call and pretend to be interested in a new account, and made me rattle off information about every single option under the sun, while he masturbated and muttered “suck it bitch” under his breath. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Through this assault and humiliation, I did nothing.

Once I had a guy yell at me so long and so angrily and so threateningly that when he finally got to the climax of his temper tantrum and repeatedly screamed for me to “DROP DEAD,” I actually ended up breaking down into tears. (And I still hate myself, every time I think of it, for losing it.) I transferred him to a manager.

If I’d done any differently in either of those circumstances, if I’d done what I should have been allowed to do, which is HANG UP. If I did that, and it happened to be one of those times when a manager was listening on the line, I would have been called into their office. And instead of a chat about “That was really rough, I’m sorry someone did that to you, are you okay?” I would have been fired.

I can’t even BEGIN to imagine the abuse and terror that someone with an Indian accent goes through. It must be an absolute fucking nightmare, the kind that working the job used to give me, only even worse, and real.

Wow that must have been hard Cara.  Hugs and support coming your way if you want them. I don’t have the spoons or the time to get into this entirely, but a few brief points before I dive in my books again. And all of this is judging from how call centers work here. 

1. The ‘indian’ accent is not only a marker for race, but also class. Most call centers give “accent training” but that only goes as far if your English was good or above average to begin with. And the general demographic of people that work at call centers don’t come from privileged backgrounds.

2. What I find fascinating — where fascinating is the new gross — that call centers have become new sites of colonising ‘native’ identities in an invisible space, considering the interaction is only through phones. So ‘bodies’ get ‘lost’ or are ‘invisible’ so to speak. But the way most Indians are treated, while they may be located in India, while they may have consensually taken up the job, there is a clear master-slave dichotomy, even with the ‘absent body’.

3. The reason the accent is so focused is another form of neo-colonising-imperial focus on speech, that ‘different’ is synonymous to ‘bad’ and that a ‘globalised’ accent is the one that reigns. To resist such erasure and violence (and assault as Cara points out) would but an Indian in a relatively more dangerous space as this “difference” in speech ‘hampers’ doing the work as we ought, as well as we’re told that ‘to progress, one must think, talk, be like them’. 

4. Gendered violence again intersects with race as this Indian Woman With A Smooth And Sultry Voice (And Imagined-Absent Body) becomes an Earth Goddess, an Eternal She so that she* can be placed on one position under this First World Caller, made infinitely open to possession and punishment, without causing much guilt. 

(via oncejadedtwicesnarked-deactivat)

{ I cannot even REMOTELY speak to the experience of working in a call center for U.S. customers while Indian. }

grrspit:

kiriamaya:

jaded16india:

thecurvature:

[Trigger Warning]

But I can say that I read this:

Workers must be able to “pass” as American or British and maintain their composure in the face of sometimes racist abuse by irate customers; it is simply part of the job.

And thought: “Um. Yeah. Obviously.”

But it’s probably not obvious to a lot of people? I mean, it’s probably obvious that people who work at call centers get a lot of shit from people who are angry. Are yelled at a lot. But I don’t think they realize the real extent that the abuse gets to. And that you can’t do anything about it.

When there’s some guy screaming at you that you’re a stupid cunt, fucking bitch, need to suck his dick, etc. because the rule is that you’re not allowed to reverse his overdraft fee. You can’t hang up on him. When someone is shouting racial slurs at you — and the call center I worked in was in a very white town, so the staff was overwhelmingly white, but the few POCs who I talked to about working there did seem to usually get it significantly worse — it’s too bad so sad. Deal with it.

Once I had some guy call and pretend to be interested in a new account, and made me rattle off information about every single option under the sun, while he masturbated and muttered “suck it bitch” under his breath. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Through this assault and humiliation, I did nothing.

Once I had a guy yell at me so long and so angrily and so threateningly that when he finally got to the climax of his temper tantrum and repeatedly screamed for me to “DROP DEAD,” I actually ended up breaking down into tears. (And I still hate myself, every time I think of it, for losing it.) I transferred him to a manager.

If I’d done any differently in either of those circumstances, if I’d done what I should have been allowed to do, which is HANG UP. If I did that, and it happened to be one of those times when a manager was listening on the line, I would have been called into their office. And instead of a chat about “That was really rough, I’m sorry someone did that to you, are you okay?” I would have been fired.

I can’t even BEGIN to imagine the abuse and terror that someone with an Indian accent goes through. It must be an absolute fucking nightmare, the kind that working the job used to give me, only even worse, and real.

Wow that must have been hard Cara.  Hugs and support coming your way if you want them. I don’t have the spoons or the time to get into this entirely, but a few brief points before I dive in my books again. And all of this is judging from how call centers work here. 

1. The ‘indian’ accent is not only a marker for race, but also class. Most call centers give “accent training” but that only goes as far if your English was good or above average to begin with. And the general demographic of people that work at call centers don’t come from privileged backgrounds.

2. What I find fascinating — where fascinating is the new gross — that call centers have become new sites of colonising ‘native’ identities in an invisible space, considering the interaction is only through phones. So ‘bodies’ get ‘lost’ or are ‘invisible’ so to speak. But the way most Indians are treated, while they may be located in India, while they may have consensually taken up the job, there is a clear master-slave dichotomy, even with the ‘absent body’.

3. The reason the accent is so focused is another form of neo-colonising-imperial focus on speech, that ‘different’ is synonymous to ‘bad’ and that a ‘globalised’ accent is the one that reigns. To resist such erasure and violence (and assault as Cara points out) would but an Indian in a relatively more dangerous space as this “difference” in speech ‘hampers’ doing the work as we ought, as well as we’re told that ‘to progress, one must think, talk, be like them’. 

4. Gendered violence again intersects with race as this Indian Woman With A Smooth And Sultry Voice (And Imagined-Absent Body) becomes an Earth Goddess, an Eternal She so that she* can be placed on one position under this First World Caller, made infinitely open to possession and punishment, without causing much guilt. 

—-

*She because queer, trans* identities again get ‘lost’ with this ‘absent body’.

<3

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  I can’t begin to describe how hard it is to work at a call center, (and I’ve worked at several) and how much harder it is when you’re a marginalized person of any sort.  I stereotypically “sound white” over the phone, so I got to hear all sorts of racial bullshit about others on top of the usual abuse heaped on call center workers.

Honestly, I’d rather do almost anything else than work at one again.

{ LINK: Egypt's New Military Rulers To Ban Unions, Strikes }

redguard:

Egypt’s new military rulers will issue a warning on Monday against anyone who creates “chaos and disorder”, an army source said.

Egyptian protesters stage a sit-in in Tahrir Square, rejecting army’s appeal to leave. (John Moore/Getty Images)

 The Higher Military Council will also ban meetings by labor unions or professional syndicates, effectively forbidding strikes, and tell all Egyptians to get back to work after the unrest that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

The army will also say it acknowledges and protects the right of people to protest, the source said.

Protesters argued heatedly in Tahrir Square over whether to stay or comply with army orders to leave. “The people want the square cleared,” one group chanted. “We will not leave, we will not leave,” replied another.

Police officers, emboldened by Mubarak’s downfall, gathered outside the Interior Ministry to demand higher pay. Warning shots were fired in the air. No one was hurt.

Workers from the health and culture ministries staged demonstrations as Egyptians began venting pent-up frustrations.

Thousands of workers have staged strikes, sit-ins and protests over pay and conditions at firms and government agencies in fields such as steel, textiles, telecoms, railways, post offices, banks and oil and pharmaceutical companies.

Egypt declared Monday a bank holiday after workers disrupted operations at the country’s main state banks.

Protest organizers were forming a Council of Trustees to defend the revolution and urge swift reform from a military intent on restoring law and order during the transition.

Mahmoud Nassar, a youth movement leader, said: “The army has moved far along to meet the people’s demands and we urge it to release all political prisoners who were taken before and after January 25 revolution. Only then will we call off the protests.”

(via rivetsorabsinthe-deactivated201)

{ LINK: Picketing over underpaid Chinese workers//ABC }

ardhra:

ourcatastrophe:

A powerful construction union claims Chinese workers on 457 visas are being exploited on a Perth building site.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union says 50 Chinese workers, who are helping to build apartments on Barrack Street in the centre of the city, are being underpaid.

The CFMEU’s state secretary Kevin Reynolds says they are picketing the site.

“We’ve got a problem with the Chinese workers, particularly the female Chinese workers being paid $12 an hour, $100 a day, and some of them complained today they weren’t paid at all last week,” he said.

“This is totally illegal what’s going on and shouldn’t happen in Perth or in Australia.”

Mr Reynolds says they are entitled to $28 an hour plus other benefits.

minimum wage for an adult in australia is $15 an hour before tax.  this is pretty interesting!  not just the protest/situation itself but that the CFMEU are picketing around the exploitation of  migrant workers with temporary visas (which is rife).  australia, being an island, has quite different border politics to the US or Europe.  we have comparatively few totally undocumented residents, but a lot of underdocumented residents — people working more hours than they’re legally allowed to, on expired visas, etc.  you can obviously be deported for violating the work conditions of your visa, but it can be pretty hard to survive without doing so, and employers take advantage of that.  anyway, the CFMEU is really fucking huge and strong and very very white.  it has a history of being pretty dismissive about migrant workers’ rights, restricting its analysis more or less to “they’re undercutting local workers, they shouldn’t come”.  so this could be a sign of positive new trend in Australian unionism.  or not.  time will tell. 

I doubt it. The CFMEU remains pretty racist and anti-immigrant. Until recently the CFMEU was actually reporting irregular migrant workers at construction sites to the Department of Immigration. They’ve also supported the racist cap & slash bill, and actively campaigned to change migration laws that would result in fewer international students having their qualifications recognised. They’ve also campaigned against 457 visa holders having job security.

Also, in terms of terminology, “undocumented” isn’t really a useful descriptive term, nor do I think is “underdocumented”. The (neoliberal) global standard is “irregular”, but that tends to normalise whatever a government arbitrarily decides is normal. I don’t think that’s as useful as distinguishing between visa overstayers vs. irregular border crossers, since those are the dominant types of irregular migration in the world, across the 20th & 21st centuries.