Precarity and The Global Justice Movement
Around year 2000, the word started being used in its English usage by some global justice movement (sometimes identified with antiglobalization) activists (Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions - European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion), and also in EU official reports on social welfare. But it was in the strikes of young part-timers at McDonald's and Pizza Hut in the winter of 2000, that the first political union network emerged in Europe explicitly devoted to fighting precarity: Stop Précarité, with links to AC!, CGT, SUD, CNT, Trotskyites and other elements of the French radical left.
In 2001 the Italian collectives and networks identifying with the global justice movement, as they were preparing for the Genoa counter-summit just months away, inaugurated in Milan a new kind of first of May, MAYDAY, spelling it like the international call for rescue, and explicitly centering it on the street representation of the so-called "precarious generation." It employed carnival-like techniques of agitation (allegorical wagons, media subvertising, colorful actions etc.) in imitation of gay prides and love parades of the 1990s. Italian activists meant it as a revival of the wobbly traditions of May Day, and consequently as a break with traditional union representation and social-democratic compromise that had allowed precarity and social insecurity to spread unchecked to reach critical levels in all of Europe, thus repeating the experience of UK and US economies with a few years' lag.
By 2003, the event had grown exponentially in size, and Catalan global justice activists participated as non-neutral observers. In 2004, activists in Barcelona joined the Mayday efforts, as delegations of French "Intermittents" participated as guests of honor in both Mayday parades. The same year saw the launch of the icon of San Precario, patron saint of the struggle against precarity. The religious imagery proved very popular in Italy and elsewhere, and would colonize the mainstream mediascape in the following years. By virtue of all these developments, Mayday 2004 drew 80,000 young protesters from all over Italy. This attracted attention from other parts of Europe.
Read more about this topic: Precarity (Social Christianity), Precarity in Europe
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