This past weekend I dropped in on some talks at the Leftist Book Fair in Berlin (Linke Buchtage Berlin). It was multi-day event where many of the progressive and left-leaning publishers and authors in Germany came to share their new publications at Mehringhof in Kreuzberg.
There were a whole bunch of events I was interested in, but I ended up only making it to two of them:
CrimethInc.: "Work – capitalism . economics . resistance”
I hadn’t heard of the "CrimethInc ex-workers collective" before, but I am curious about works in translation, and in particular how a “translation collective” worked on taking this collection of essays on work and capitalism and translated it into German. The readings that the member of the translation collective read piqued my curiosity, and I’m hoping I’ll find time to read the whole book (in English) in the near future.Between Migration and Work. Worker Centers and the organizing of precariously and informally employed in the USA
(My loose translation of the German title).
The other talk I made it was for this book by Martina Benz, who researched worker centers in LA and New York. I had not heard before about worker centers before I went to the talk, having not even read the Wikipedia article — but they seem to help address the needs of workers who aren’t or can’t be organized into traditional labor unions, and create room for them to organize and advocate for themselves. In general, a really fascinating topic, and one I hadn’t known much about. It was also particularly neat to hear about US labor organizing from a German researcher, whose perspective and grounding in a German/European labor movement naturally highlights different issues and struggles than say, a US researcher would have.