°When the ground shakes

September 27, 2009

From the UC Santa Cruz occupation. (A much better slogan than “We won’t pay for your crisis” methinks - and “No return to normal” is particularly good too.) Read the “Communiqué from an Absent Future”.


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°Contract’s end

June 27, 2009

In Wake in Fright, a man in very white suit tries to get out of town, end of contract time. Whiter than white, thinks he has shaken off that hint of indentured labour.


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°Without the crossing there is no border

June 18, 2009


Opening scenes from a film by Ursula Biemann, set in the Mexican-US (maquiladora) border town of Ciudad Juarez - on the feminisation of the border region through a reading of the gendered labor division, prostitution, the entertainment industry, and sexual violence.

See also, elsewhere: SOAS cleaners - deportations, occupations, some success | Calais NoBorder Camp | “Academics plan to boycott new [UK] student immigration rules” | “Australian bosses are racist when it’s time to hire” | Video of deportation from Madrid (awful)


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°Proud declarations of unanimity

June 6, 2009

at the Boys’ Institute for the Humanities. Unsurprisingly.


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°Perspective

June 1, 2009



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°I remember when the property cried …

May 15, 2009

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°Student+Migrant+Worker

May 4, 2008

The remarks below about the connections between student visas and work in Australia were written by Liz. I moved them from the comments under the post about the taxidrivers’ strike in Melbourne so as to prompt further discussion. - a.

So - if you look at Australia, obviously there has always been the use of low-wage migrant labour, and worse, slave labour for indig crew and Pacific Islanders.

However, I would suggest that the transformations in the Australian economy since trade liberalisation in the 1980s (1989 - Professor Ross Garnaut - Australia and the north east asian ascendancy - the policy document that Rudd’s new climate guru wrote convincing Hawke to move to tariff reductions - in textiles this actually predated tariff reductions in the rest of the West), as well as the nationalist counter-reaction from the trade and student unions, have created new and more direct manifestations of the attempt to drive the wage floor down by deliberately tweaking migration schemes towards the creation of low wage and precarious labour markets. As Ange has said many times, it is possible to trace the intersections between the internment camps and the labour market. I’m going to try to do this with a little bit on student visas too… actually, most of this is going to be about student visas, but with other stuff thrown in as poorly organised thoughts.


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