EuroMayDay

The EuroMayDay Parades

The movement is most visible in the annual EuroMayDay parades of “the precarious.” These processions are timed to coincide with the International Day of Workers Struggles, May 1. At the same time, they sharply differ from traditional trade union marches, not only in their demands but also in their extensive use of radical media. In their endeavor to produce “new political subjectivities,” EuroMayDay activists draw on popular culture to create imageries of precarity. For instance, they “subvertize” mass-cultural formats like comics, psycho-tests and games, or détourn (hijack) rituals taken from the popular traditions.

The first MayDay parade was organized in 2001 in Milan by activists and subvertizers from the group ChainWorkers, together with the militant trade union CUB (Confederazione Unitaria di Base), and supported by Milanese and Roman centri sociali (squatted culture centers) in order to give visibility to temporary workers, parttimers, freelancers, and other service laborers. In 2004, the MayDay parade was held simultaneously in Milan and Barcelona—and in cyberspace, where 17,000 carefully designed avatars marched in a net-parade through a digital urban landscape. Media and other activist collectives embedded in their respective local political scenes succeeded in devising a transnationally resonant event.

In October the same year at Beyond ESF, an autonomous event coinciding with the European Social Forum in London, activist groups concerned with labor, migration, and urban issues formed, in conjunction with several media collectives, the transnational EuroMayDay Network. In the so-called Middlesex Declaration (2004), they declared their intention to launch a “structured network of labor radicalism and media activism” and

By 2009, EuroMayDay parades had taken place in 15 countries and 41 European cities, including Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Helsinki, Liège, Maribor, Naples, Paris, Seville-Málaga, and Vienna. The protest format of MayDay parades was also adopted by precarious workers in Japan. The number of participants ranged from less than 100 (Hanau, Germany, 2008) to more than 100,000 (Milan, Italy, 2005). The shared web-portal http://Euromayday.org provided links to dedicated local EuroMayDay websites. In 2008, a web-feed was established to include multilingual content from these local websites.

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