Free movement - Guaranteed income
Call for the Strasbourg anti- SIS international camp
10.Jul.02 - AC! (Agir ensemble contre le Chômage, Act together against unemployment) is a network of individuals, unemployed, trade-unionists etc. created in 1994, and organized in local groups (about 100 today), fighting against unemployment, social insecurity and exclusions.
Free movement
Slaves fleeing from plantations, migration: these are two tactics for the same strategy, using one's mobility to escape misery, exploitation and dependence. Fortress Europe which is under construction massively restricts the right to asylum, torments refugees and sans-papiers (undocumented migrants), criminalizes migrants and their children. By doing so, it opposes the arrogance of a privileged few mafia with the freedom of the oppressed, freedom they always have been using anywhere in the world to take their destiny in their hands. The SIS, whose head office is situated in Strasbourg, is at the heart of this migration repressive monitoring.
Freedom of settlement
Closing borders is a policy which just reinforces the increase of social control over the population of our own countries. The tremendous overexploitation of undocumented migrants, the deportations, discriminations, social relegation don't remain unanswered: the struggles for the regularization of undocumented migrants with 10 years stay permits, the struggles of the inhabitants of poor districts faced with the police repressive law-and-order offensives, the struggles for the right to housing, all struggles in which AC! network* and many other unemployed and insecure workers have taken part, constitute equivalent counter actions.
No to social control
In France, the Loi de Sécurité Quotidienne (LSQ, anti-terrorist bill), voted in November 2001 is an attack against the freedoms of movement and gathering: practicing free transport or gathering in city suburbs and in the halls of block of flats are now punishable by imprisonment. The Plan d'Aide au Retour à l'Emploi (PARE, the Convention which implements the new unemployment benefits system), adopted in July 2001 by the social partners (government, employers trade-union and some of the workers trade-unions), aims at forcing people into any kind of jobs. The new government has announced as well some measures to reinforce the power of employers and social institutions over people living on the already discriminatory and miserable Revenu Minimum d'Insertion (RMI, minimum income). France mirrors here the EU regressive reforms, which have been implemented in every one of its countries.
Guaranteed income
Intermittent and insecure employment, and discontinuous rights, subject us to imposed life paths. We will be present in Strasbourg as subjects deprived of the use of our mobility. In order to oppose the development of job and social insecurity, initiated more than 25 years ago, we will have to conquer some new social rights. The EU constitution's process has started, and the Strasbourg's initiative is an opportunity to meet and establish contacts in the perspective of the ESF in Florence next autumn, to initiate the mobilization for the right to a guaranteed income at the international level.
Paris, 5th July 2002.
AC! - Agir ensemble contre le Chômage!