Organising in the time of COVID19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural  problems affecting 'non-white', racialized workers in the core and  periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political  economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, have been race neutral or  wilfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global  inequalities.

In this interview, David Austin, author of Dread Poetry and Freedom:  Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, Fear of a Black  Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, talks with Zophia  Edwards, Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at  Providence College, Rhode Island US and author of a brilliant analysis  of Racial Capitalism and COVID-19  (https://monthlyreview.org/2021/03/01/racial-capitalism-and-covid-19/)  about the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other non-white  racialized labor in the core and the periphery that has persisted  throughout the COVID-19 crisis, viewed from the lens of Black radical  scholarship on racism and capitalism.

I speak with Eurig Scandrett & Ros Walker, both active trade unionists in Scotland, UK.

Eurig talks about the pandemic reaching Britain whilst UCU was in a  national dispute over pay and equalities, in the context of neoliberal  commercialisation and new public management throughout higher education.  During the national dispute, the relationship between local branch  issues and national collective bargaining became a significant point of  contention (we don’t need to go into this in too much detail). At Queen  Margaret University, a well organised union branch, good inter-union  cooperation, and an enlightened approach by the Principal ensured that  UCU and other trade unions were brought into decision making very  quickly, unlike in many other universities (and at QMU only one year  ago). We, along with our sister unions, have been able to raise issues  of workload, impacts on contract researchers, health and safety,  implementation by middle managers, spreading strike pay deductions to  avoid hardship, and workers in outsourced companies. This has changed  the way in which the university has responded to the crisis, and what it  has demonstrated is, where the university is treated as a public  service, with unions as partners, representing staff, achievements can  be made. In most universities we have seen senior managers excluding  unions, putting the commercial business of the university before the  welfare of the staff and students, and pushing through cost-cutting,  unsafe and punitive actions against staff. This would be by way of an  introduction, handled by Eurig.

The relatively positive industrial relations at QMU, has also enabled  us to organise on behalf of the employees of outsourced companies, many  of whom are on low wages, insecure contracts and little leverage with  their employers, even though they provide essential services for the  university. We are in the process of escalating this campaign from the  local to the national level. This would be the significant portion of  the webinar, handled by Ross, hopefully with input from outsourced  worker.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be a major challenge to the future of the  university sector, as with all areas of economic life, and this will put  further pressures on industrial relations. There is a risk that  post-pandemic shutdown will lead to a renewed commitment to austerity,  and further cuts and commercialisation of higher education. But it  possibly also brings opportunities to ‘re-boot’ the economy in a  transformative way, to end the process of outsourcing and bring workers  in house, and to transform universities to a more collegiate,  cooperative form of governance with employees organised by trade unions,  in partnership with senior administrators committed to the public  service ethos, to the delivery of higher education as a public good.

I speak to Gacheke Gachihi from the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Gacheke spoke to us a couple of weeks ago, and we go back to catch up on news about the coercion and repression being used against people in the time of Covid-19

I speak to Joël E. Vorbe from Haiti. He is a member of the National Council for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled (CONARHAN), an entity which reflects on the problem of people living with disabilities in order to make proposals for public policies to improve their living conditions. This fan of Fidel Castro, of Nelson Mandela, is also a member of the board of the Fanmi Lavalas party of ex-president Jean Bertrand Aristide. In 1995, he said he had “eyes open on politics”. “If you want real change, you have to commit,” says Joel Vorbe, deploring the pressures on the family of those who engage in politics. On Jean Bertrand Aristide, the most popular politician of the last few years, adulated and hated, Joël Vorbe is sharp in his answer: “Aristide, the man who wants and fights for the change of his country has not changed . He has a role to play in changing Haiti. ” With another breath, he emphatically emphasizes “that a single man cannot change a country”. 

Nick Dearden talks about a debt jubilee. As director, Nick Dearden  manages the staff team and resources on behalf of Global Justice Now’s  members. He is also the public face of the organisation. Nick started  his career at War on Want where he became a senior campaigner. He went  on to be corporates campaign manager at Amnesty International UK. As  director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, he built strong relationships  with campaigners in the global south. He helped win a new law to stop  Vulture Funds from using UK courts to squeeze huge debt payments out of  poor countries. Nick joined Global Justice Now in September 2013.

I talk with Coumba Toure and Lamin Mohammed about Covid19 in Senegal and in Africa.

Coumba is, writer, story-teller, member of the African Feminist Forum  and the Per Ankh collective. She is a board member of TrustAfrica and  an Ambassador of Africans Rising for peace justice and dignity.  She has  serve on the board of urgent action fund for women Africa. She is as an  advisor to the Global Fund for Women and to International Development  Exchange. She is a mother, a sister, and a daughter to many.

Lamin is a Gambian Human Rights Activist and is the coordinator of  Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. He was instrumental in  organising widespread protests in 2017 leading to Gambian dictator Yahya  Jammeh’s downfall. He leads the emerging pan-African movement, Africans  Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. Muhammed Lamin has a track  record in youth capacity development. He is someone with Pan-African  vision, experience, and energy to steward a youth lead movement.  Saidykhan was involved in numerous campaigns and is no stranger to  mobilizing people in the streets and online especially during the  #GambiaHasDecided popular mobilization. He also served as Co-Chair of  ActionAid International’s Youth Working Group and as a lead Coordinator  of the youth-led Activista initiative.

I interview Cesare Ottolini, global Coordinator International  Alliance of Inhabitants, Italy, is a former squatter, engaged since 1977  in global / local struggles for the right to housing and the city, he  was also the secretary of a Trade Union of the building, former world  coordinator of Habitat International Coalition, also a member of  UN-HABITAT Advisory Group on Forced Evictions. He is a member of the  National Unione Inquilini Secretariat, the largest tenant organization  in Italy that organizes every year the Zero Evictions Days in dozens of  cities. He is a member of the International Council of the World Social  Forum, co-founder and global coordinator of the International Alliance  of Inhabitants. He is a co-founder and lives in a housing cooperative of  collective ownership, the Coralli Cooperative, with migrants and  Italians.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Researcher and Professor of Sociology at  Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de  Puebla. She has done research about indigenous movements in Latin  American and more recently about the feminist struggles. She has  participated deeply in those struggles she writes and thinks about.  Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia   was published by Duke University Press in 2014.

John Holloway is a lawyer, Marxist-oriented sociologist and  philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista  movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. He has published many books  including Change the World without Taking Power, Crack Capitalism, We  are the crisis of capital; In, Against and Beyond Capitalism

I talk to Silvia Ribero about the role that industrial food systems  give rise to viruses such as swine flu, Covid19 etc.  What are the  processes involved that lead to this happening? Who are the corporations  involved? How wide spread has this become? What is being done to  challenge these kind of food systems? Why is corporate media so silent  on this upstream problem? What is AMLO doing about it? What are the  constraints his government faces?

Silvia Ribeiro, born in Uruguay and resident in Mexico, is the Latin  American Director of ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and  Concentration). For more than two decades, she has studied the impact on  new technologies, specially on biodiversity, rural livelihoods and  indigenous peoples. She is a well-known lecturer, writer and educator.  She writes for the daily La Jornada in Mexico and other Latin American  papers and electronic magazines. The ETC Group works to protect cultural  and biological diversity and human rights through research and  dissemination of information, and it monitors the social and  environmental impacts caused by new technologies and the corporations  involved in their research, development and deployment. Sylvia has been  working on the industrial food systems more or less followed since the  swine flu started in Mexico.

I spoke with Boaventura Monjane on the situation in Mozambique. He  has a degree in journalism (Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo). His  journalistic – and analysis – work was published in Mozambique, South  Africa, Brazil, Spain, France and Portugal. He was the Portuguese editor  of Pambazuka News. He is now pursuing a PhD at the University of  Coimbra (Portugal). His research areas include land, the agrarian  questions and social movements.