Euromayday Bremen: What a start! (English)

The day had started early for half a dozen superhero-costume wearing Euromayday-activists who had joined the official trade-union demonstration in the morning in order to promote the first Euromayday-Pparade in Bremen after the union march and to perform a short militant research on precarious working conditions among factory staff unionists using a clipboard questionnaire.

The day before, the German newspaper TAZ had featured long interviews with the local trade-union boss Helga Ziegert and Euromayday-activist Lea with a strong em-phasis on the differences between what they regard to be “old school” trade-unionism and “new-school” Euromayday-activism. So for a little change on May 1st, armed with a clipboard full of questions, the activists set out to find common grounds.

When the unionists heard that the Euromayday-Parade was all about precarious la-bour, superficial prejudices were quickly dispelled. Almost every colleague had a re-port of precarious working conditions in her shop on her lips. But the activists them-selves were also rather flabbergasted, when the majority of the unionists responded to the questionnaire-question “Can you picture a world without capitalism?” either with response “b) Would be worth a try, wouldn’t it?” or with “a) I dream about this every day”. No wonder, some of the colleagues joined the parade later, so that one could even spot a small couple of Arcelor-steelworkers wearing red IG Metall jackets among the participants.

After a short but suspenseful waiting time between the two marches, only a stone’s throw away from the trade unionists’ final rally point, a good 500 euromayday-protesters appeared rather suddenly around the sole parade-truck. The activists had not expected more than 250 protesters to attain the parade. But shortly after starting off, the parade even grew to 800 people.

It was the first Euromayday-Parade in Bremen, but there wasn’t left much to explain to the protesters. They did not only bring good vibes right from the start, they also brought lots and lots of realized ideas to play an active part in the parade: Blank car-toon-bubble-signs distributed by some activists were quickly filled with personalised protest slogans. A rolling bed drove trough the parade to scandalize working condi-tions in the nursing&care-industry. A self-proclaimed cleaning brigade even moped the café guests’ latte-macchiato-glasses shiny. A small delegation of the local “mil-lionaires club” tried desperately to brush up the image of “their” bank, but using way to much dishwashing agent on its windows didn’t make it any better. Other protesters promoted the climate-action-day on may 16th, were people are asked to ride public transports without paying in order to claim eco-friendly free public transport ( http://klimaplenum-bremen.blogspot.com/).

The organisators had also prepared a lot of features. Numerous short speeches from the driving truck scandalized many public grievances in Bremen, for example the huge number of detained fare dodgers who simply hadn’t possessed the means to pay neither fare nor fine next to the city court. In front of a supermarket the speakers criticised working conditions in this industry and applauded the retail workers strug-gles and strikes. The same applause went to the 2002 cleaning workers’ strike in Paris when the parade passed a hotel belonging to the hotel-group Accor. Another speech raised awareness for the exploitation of nurses and care-workers and pro-moted the upcoming “Shit-Strike” in this branch ( http://www.jenseits-des-helfersyndroms.de/). But the parade’s two highlights certainly were the speeches of two well-known refugee-activists from Bremen who were talking about their precari-ous and racist working conditions in a sausage factory and a temp agency.

The organizers had made bold plans for the parade. Its route turned out too long when half the participants disappeared in the afternoon’s summer heat after the last stopover in front of the main station. But even the remaining protesters made a lot of noise when they reached their final destination at the traditional leftwing street festival at Buchtstraße.

What a start for the Euromayday-Parade in Bremen! But there’s more in the works: “We’re not a mere parade-organizing club. We’re an open political association. We’ll keep on tying our network tighter throughout the whole year in order to connect the different social struggles in Bremen, in order to give the many different faces of pre-carity a common expression. Stay tuned!”