May Day's origins as a worker's holiday date back to a time when working conditions looked a lot different than they do now. With deindustrialization and the breakdown of the factory as the primary site of empoyment, the nature of work in the world's richest countries has also changed: an increasing emphasis has been placed on low paying service and retail jobs (the latter often in chain stores), on "knowledge work" like that in call centers, as well as in the increasingly less utopian IT sector, but above all on the "flexibility" of labor, where a series of meaningless jobs replaces the career, where temp labor replaces the job, where "independent contractors" replace the employee.


And as work has become more flexible, more *precarious*, the social saftey net has been gutted. If the neoliberal rulers of the worldhave their way, all labor would be as precarious as the illegal immigrant: forced to work to survive, but unable to call upon any civic institutions to fight for better working conditions.

Activists in Europe and elsewhere have tried to name this condition with the word "precarity", trying to forge an alliance based on the precarious aspects of life shared by the sans-papiers and the university student, the call center employee and the artist. Some might claim that such an alliance is impossible or poorly conceived. Nevertheless, this May Day, the "Euromayday" protests in major cities across Europe will be trying to bring precarity into the street.


To do our part to celebrate May Day, Red Emma's invites you to our Precarity Potluck, where we'll try, together, to see what we can make of this word "precarity". Bring your horror stories of temping, your experiences fighting for the rights of the supposedly unorganizable, your thoughts on the theory of precarity, and maybe even some food to share. To get us started, we'll be screening parts of "P2P Fightsharing III: Precarity", a collection of short films documenting precarious labor and resistance worldwide, as well as some documetary films about precarious labor struggles right here in Baltimore.

May 1st
7:00 PM
Red Emma's Bookstore Coffehouse
800 St Paul St.
(410) 230-0450
info-AT-redemmas.org
redemmas.org