News from our comrades in India

I just received this in my e-male. It is interesting but I'm not entirely sure of its politics. It is from a newsletter from a part of India. I am posting it because it is interesting and I try to get information from a lot of different sources. So if anyone has any opinions of this group, be sure to express them in the comment section.

-សតិវ​អតុ

From GurgaonWorkersNews no.64 - November 2015 - Material for the debate on 'global working class' and organisation:

www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

*** Editorial

This newsletter is dedicated to our comrade Chintamani, a gentle man, who died in July 2015. He was, amongst many other things, a metal worker and active participant in Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (FMS). We will miss him. 

We haven't published GurgaonWorkersNews for over a year and we won't publish another newsletter for a while. While FMS continues the monthly publication and distribution of their Hindi newspaper, we won't have as much time for translations and additional research in the near future. This is mainly due to new political priorities: we started publishing a workers' newspaper in the west of London, amongst mainly food processing and warehouse workers. It was possible to publish GurgaonWorkersNews while at the same time working low paid working class jobs, but to do so and publish and circulate a regular workers' paper is not. Comrades who have more time and want to become involved in GurgaonWorkersNews, feel free to contact us. Otherwise check out our London-based paper. Reflections and comments are welcome.

www.workerswildwest.wordpress.com

Giving GurgaonWorkersNews a break does not mean that our political activities in Delhi and London will become detached. This is mainly due to the fact that workers' conditions become increasingly similar: being new in town, not finding permanent jobs, living on the minimum wage, sharing rooms to be able to pay the rent, working 12-hour shifts, finding no solution in the traditional trade unions, searching for ways to organise under the conditions of enforced and voluntary mobility. As you can read in this newsletter, Amazon workers' conditions in India are not that different from the conditions of their class-mates in, e.g. Poland. Other connections are even more direct: as you can read in the article below, working in fashion warehouses in London or Hamburg puts you in the same value chain as garment workers in Delhi, Gurgaon or Faridabad. Or to be more concrete: we were smiling when, while we were working as agency workers at Jack Wills in London, our shop-floor manager started crying about having to send back a shipment of clothes from Modelama because of too many 'quality flaws' , because we knew that the Modelama comrades in Gurgaon are in constant struggle with management.