Not An Alternative is participating in a panel on "precarious power" this Saturday, July 16, investigating the intersections of labor organizing, art, and direct action. The panel is part of an upcoming exhibition "The Making of the Chinese New Working Class", curated by the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers in Beijing and hosted by Ludlow 38 in NY. Associated programming is organized by artist Marty Kirchner and The Public School in various NYC venues.
Symposium: Precarious Power: Syndicalism, Solidarity, and the New Organizational Paradigm
Saturday, July 16, 2011, 4-6pm, free
@ Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies
25 West 43rd Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, 19th Floor
The reorganization of production along global supply chains, often through a complicated pattern of subcontracting, has provided significant challenges for the labor movement. Temporary and contingent employment has undermined labor rights protections worldwide. However, in both China and the West, the last few years have seen a proliferation of dissident worker movements, new kinds of workers organizations and workers’ rights campaigns. Some of the most dynamic and innovative have combined elements of community and labor organizing, cultural production, and direct action.
Immanuel Ness, professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York will facilitate the discussion. His writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy and migrant worker resistance to oppression.
Invited guests include the following participants:
Jeff Becker, International Labor Rights Forum
Daniel Gross, IWW/Brandworkers International
Carrie Gleason, Retail Action Project
Not An Alternative
“The Making of the Chinese New Working Class”
Exhibition by the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers (CAMMW)
@ MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38
July 14 – September 4, 2011
38 Ludlow Street
btw Grand and Hester
New York, NY
www.ludlow38.org
Gallery hours: Thursday – Sunday 1-6pm
Initiated in 2008 by a former migrant worker and musician, Sun Heng, the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers is located in Picun, a village outside Beijing that is home to some 10,000 migrant workers. CAMMW is a project of Migrant Workers Home, an NGO founded in 2002, dedicated to supporting the rights of migrant workers, providing education for their children, and serving as a community center. The purpose of the museum is to record the histories of migrant workers and to advocate for the value of their labor. “The Making of the Chinese New Working Class” is an installation consisting of eight thematic topics that depict migrant workers conditions, a re-creation of a migrant worker’s living space, and materials donated by migrant workers from across China. It is an installation that was originally part of the exhibition The Potosí Principle that traveled from the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid, to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the IG Metall (metal workers union) in Berlin, to the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz.
To coincide with the exhibition, Ludlow 38 is launching a series of side-events conceived in collaboration with New York based artist Marty Kirchner and The Public School New York.
Exhibition opening and conversation
Thursday, July 14, 6pm, free
@ MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38
The exhibition opens with a conversation between Zhibin Lin, research co-coordinator of the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers, and Ellen David Friedman, a union organizer and labor educator in both the U.S. and China. The conversation will include a discussion about the work Lin and Friedman do in China, as well as a recent history of Chinese migrant labor, including internal migration to urban economic zones, and a new wave of proletarianization.
Performance
Friday, July 15, 6:30-8:00pm, free
@ Unique Hairstylist, 47 Essex St.
The Hanns EislerWorkers Chorus (H.E.N.S./N.W.C.) will join Maria and Nancy at Unique Hairstylist to present a new cabaret performance: Nail Salon /Nail (re) Zoning, Manicured, a music soiree to describe and denounce the forces of dislocation and dispossession at work in our communities.
Symposium: Precarious Power: Syndicalism, Solidarity, and the New Organizational Paradigm
July 16, 2011, 4-6pm, free
@ Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies
25 West 43rd Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, 19th Floor
The reorganization of production along global supply chains, often through a complicated pattern of subcontracting, has provided significant challenges for the labor movement. Temporary and contingent employment has undermined labor rights protections worldwide. However, in both China and the West, the last few years have seen a proliferation of dissident worker movements, new kinds of workers organizations and workers’ rights campaigns. Some of the most dynamic and innovative have combined elements of community and labor organizing, cultural production, and direct action.
Immanuel Ness, professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York will facilitate the discussion. His writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy and migrant worker resistance to oppression.
Invited guests include the following participants:
Jeff Becker, International Labor Rights Forum
Daniel Gross, IWW/Brandworkers International
Carrie Gleason, Retail Action Project
Not An Alternative
About the speakers/organizers:
Zhibin Lin
Dr. Zhibin Lin is the research coordinator of Migrant Workers Home, an NGO in Beijing, part of which is The Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers. Zhibin Lin has taught Development Sociology, and Gender and Rural Development at China Agricultural University from 1990 to 2001. Since 2003 she has been an NGO staff member working in migrant communities while conducting research in different parts of China. Her research reports include: “Migrant Workers Residential Rights and Future Development” (2009), “Action Research on Migrant Children’s Education and Development Projects” (Issue I in 2009, Issue II in 2010), “Where to Go? – Migrant Workers in between the City and the Countryside”(2011).
Ellen David Friedman
Ellen David Friedman has been a union organizer in Vermont for thirty years, twenty of which she served as the Vermont affiliate of the National Education Association. She was a founder and long-time leader of the Vermont Workers Center and the Vermont Progressive Party, and is a member of the Labor Notes Policy Committee. Since 2006 she has taught labor studies one term per year at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and has worked at different levels of the labor movement, including grass-roots labor NGOs, the All China Federation of Trade Unions and with labor scholars.
H.E.N.S./N.W.C.
Manicurists, stylists, community organizers and artists are a potent alliance of life worlds, and their differences only invite the building of solidarity. Their desires are constrained by similar forces; beholden to capricious markets, their production rationalized as "luxury" by the forces of capital. The H.E.N.S./N.W.C. mission is to interrupt the politics of beauty, dislocate the politics of the gallery, and begin to imagine new relations that transform our ways of being in the neighborhood and being in the world; to manicure the ready-to-hand. Our namesake, exile composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), was twice robbed of his community; fleeing the rise of fascism in Germany, he found a home in the United States only to find himself on the Hollywood Blacklist, called before HUAC and deported. Like the current denizens of the Lower East Side, power came to deny him community by a vicious process of reorganization, redefinition and rezoning. His music, banned by Fascism, disavowed by US xenophobia and forgotten by the world of fine art, questions the false distinction between “development as progress,” “managed change” and "community preservation," and instead imagines new artistic-political-community relations. Eisler wrote some of the most potent hymns to workers rights. We strive to invest his political and artistic project with a lived experience of difference worthy of the contemporary beauty industry; to give an old Marxist a new manicure.
Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College
Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is currently writing a book on contemporary worker militancy. His work focuses on workers and capitalist political economy, migration and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker activism. Most recently he is author of Ours to Manage and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). He is General Editor of theEncyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, four volumes). He has written numerous essays and books on labor migration, including Immigrants, Unions, and the U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press, 2005). He is editor of the quarterly, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society. (University of Illinois Press, 2011).Guest Workers, and the Resistance to Corporate Despotism
Jeffrey Becker, International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF)
ILRF is an advocacy organization dedicated to achieving just and humane treatment for workers worldwide. ILRF’s work supports international labor rights as defined by the International Labor Organization, including the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, the prohibition of discrimination against women, and the elimination of forced labor and child labor. ILRF promotes decent work around the world. Jeffrey Becker joined ILRF in the summer of 2010, and serves as the program officer for the organization’s work in China. Mr. Becker holds a Ph.D. in political science from the George Washington University, and his research examines the rise in labor protests among migrant workers in China. As part of his dissertation research, Jeffrey spent thirteen months in China, interviewing migrant workers about their experiences in the workplace in Beijing, Guangdong, and Jiangsu provinces.
Daniel Gross, IWW / Brandworkers International
Daniel Gross is the founding director of Brandworkers International, a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees. By empowering low-wage employees with legal, advocacy, and organizing tools, Brandworkers promotes fairness on the job and challenges corporate misconduct in the community. Brandworkers is helping lead the widely-acclaimed Focus on the Food Chain campaign, an organizing effort of immigrant workers overcoming sweatshop conditions in the food processing and distribution warehouses that supply New York's grocery stores and restaurants. With the Industrial Workers of the World, Mr. Gross co-founded the first labor union in the United States at the Starbucks Coffee Co. A graduate of the Fordham University School of Law where he was a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics, Mr. Gross is a workers' rights attorney and serves on the steering committee of the National Lawyers Guild Labor & Employment Committee.
Carrie Gleason, Retail Action Project
Carrie Gleason is the director of the Retail Action Project (RAP), a growing network of New York City retail and fashion workers. RAP is dedicated to winning economic justice for retail workers through strategic organizing, policy and research, creative communications, and services. RAP has integrated art into organizing by using video, design and performance to spotlight retail workers’ experiences and hold retailers accountable for workplace injustices.
Not An Alternative
Not An Alternative is a hybrid non-profit organization and arts collective with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, and history. We curate and produce work that questions and leverages the tools of advertising, architecture, exhibit design, branding, and public relations. Programs are hosted at a variety of venues, including our Brooklyn-based gallery No-Space (formerly known as The Change You Want to See Gallery). Not An Alternative has exhibited work in New York, Baltimore, Toronto, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Sao Paolo.
Marty Kirchner
Marty Kirchner is an artist and labor organizer based in New York City. He completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2010, after graduating from HfBK Städelschule Frankfurt/M in 2009, and the University of California Los Angeles in 2004. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, he is currently an organizer with Focus on the Food Chain, a campaign to improve conditions of immigrants workers in New York’s food processing and distribution warehouses.
The Public School New York
The Public School is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.
“The Making of the Chinese New Working Class” of the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers has been supported by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 is supported by MINI and Friends of Goethe