Workers' Liberty

The occupation of the Directorate’s offices at SOAS was the first such occupation in the UK and Ireland against an immigration raid on a workplace - and long overdue. The rate of paper checks and raids has been accelerated dramatically over the last year by New Labour with thousands of workers already raided and deported and hundreds of thousands living vulnerable to such violent assault.

The fact that the occupation had a majority of activists from outside SOAS demonstrates the range of networks and groups now fighting against the attacks on workers being orchestrated by their bosses and the UK Border Agency. The big rallies of solidarity and so many students deciding to occupy their Principal’s office is a product of the determined and successful campaign for the SOAS Living Wage fought by cleaners and other workers in UNISON and their comrades in the UCU and students’ unions. Activist groups at the university, notably the SWP and the SOAS detainee support group have developed much of the culture of resistance and action on that campus. Indeed, we believe from experience that gang-masters like ISS collaborate with the UK Border Agency in targeting precisely those workplaces where workers have dared to organise and dared to win.

Visitors to the occupation included the secretary of the RMT union’s cleaners’ grade and also the London regional organiser following the RMT’s major strike last week. Victimised Columbian cleaner-activist, Einstein Alberto Durango, promised important solidarity from the radical Latin American workers’ organisations. Messages of support for the occupation were received from labour and student movement activists and leaders from across the country, and all around the world. Students and lecturers involved from the living wage campaigns on the Bloomsbury campuses rallied round tremendously even outside of term-time. Importantly, other outsourced and super-exploited workers on the campus took heart and demonstrated what support they were in a position to. Left-wing MPs and MEPs expressed their defence of the protests.

Several of us occupying were from an affinity group of London activists that have worked together around the Tube cleaners’ dispute and other migrant workers’ struggles, during the Gaza mobilisations, and in feminist and anti-capitalist actions and campaigns. Some of us had met over the weekend and planned to occupy on Monday morning. That there were many other students and activists prepared to take such action and work together was inspiring.

We worked and pressed throughout the occupation for more to be achieved than we ultimately did and feel that our failure to acknowledge and use our collective strength to the full was a considerable missed opportunity to secure what the detained cleaners wanted, particularly a guarantee that any future raids would be met with non-compliance from SOAS management. They have not even received an apology! Most of our demands were not met and we left simply on receiving a statement signed by the Principal and the president of the students’ union that was ok in sentiment but guaranteed nothing other than a letter to the Home Secretary from SOAS and future discussion on the other issues; objectives that could have been gained through much less concerted action.

The occupation ended without ever negotiating directly with the SOAS management, who refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the occupation, as is their policy. To an extent, the SOAS Students’ Union figures, including those from the SWP, negotiated narrowly on their own behalf as SOAS students, with a time-serving campaign in mind rather than action appropriate to the urgency of the situation or proportionate to the scale of the outrage. They cajoled other occupiers, volubly and disruptively demonstrating their desire to end the occupation, talking up the risk of violent eviction and victimisations, and of being kicked out with none of our demands met. Even before any statement was agreed, preparations for a final rally were being made and a drive to pack away and be out by midday, whatever, before any such decision had been made by the occupation as a whole.

There was either little experience of or respect for participatory and democratic processes of decision making on the part of those who foisted themselves forward as the mouthpieces of the whole occupation, thus creating the need to negotiate with them in similar unequal and disrespectful terms as the occupation had to contend with management. Occupations should draw their strength and legitimacy from the issues they are fighting, but also crucially in demonstrating what direct and consistent democracy looks like, a living example of the values we are fighting for, a counter example to the power-play of the privileged. In this regard, it is aggravating that some students chose to make much of the elite status, limiting this struggle within the bounds of the established hierarchy of the campus. There was much talk of the SOAS community, cleaners needing to be respected as part of this community. This is a joke. There can be no harmony and community between the principal who earns more in a month than the cleaner in a year, with students who act out their fear of losing their degree privileges at every juncture.

Clearly, what happens now as we move forward is the most important thing, and we must all continue to work together. That should include an assessment of this occupation, its many strengths and its weaknesses, and how we can build on the overall experience to secure the majority of demands that have not been met and generalise the campaign against all immigration controls and papers for all.

The whipping up of anti-migrant sentiment and racism in general over the last years has brought two BNP fascists to the European parliament to join the growing block on the continent; the UK Independence party standing on an anti-immigration platform, knocked the (pro-capitalist and racist) Labour Party to third place. The Green party was the only progressive political group to see some increase in their vote, but there was nowhere a strong force representing and accountable to the working-class. The election results were yet another reality check that pointed to the need for rapid working-class self-organisation in politics as well as workplaces and communities, and left unity in action. Such solidarity campaigns are living examples of the kind of left unity we need to develop.

At the same time as the occupation, 100 Romanians were driven from their homes in Belfast by racist persecution, and detainees in Yarls Wood began a hunger strike against the countless injustices of their detention inside the barbed wire camps. There have been anti-Muslim rampages in Luton and attacks on anti-fascist activists in Liverpool. Massive unemployment, about 20% of youth, is being widely being blamed on immigration rather than the crisis of the capitalist system, with sections of workers taking action under the BNP slogan, legitimised by Gordon Brown, of British Jobs for British workers. A similar wave of racism and nationalism as a response to the recession is being experienced across Europe. A worrying campaign is underway for an ‘Amnesty’ for undocumented workers, which risks dividing the resistance of migrant workers and which would impose such stringent and untenable conditions designed to be amenable to an incoming Tory government. We must not accept the blackmail policy of an Amnesty which grants one section of undocumented workers rights at the expense of the rest and has the effect of strengthening the border regime.

The SOAS cleaners who were detained have been clear that the offensive did not begin last Friday with the terrifying and dehumanising raid. They are part of legion of workers who have been forced from their homes by economic and political reality shaped by capitalism and imperialism: with the SOAS cleaners from Latin American countries; those one the London Underground largely from the Niger Delta, where there have been hundreds of killings in recent weeks caused by the actions of the oil multi-nationals. In another workplace last week, maybe 12 workers from around the formerly colonised world were detained and deported, cleaners at Kings X mainland station.

Immigration controls enable bosses and capitalist states to exert terrible power over workers, through the control of their movement and through denying workers basic human rights. The Campaign against Immigration Controls in London has been fighting in solidarity with un-documented workers, who are clear that immigration controls serve primarily to make their lives as workers fundamentally precarious. Undocumented workers labour under the worst conditions, with health and safety safeguards won by previous generations of the labour movement being denied them, because they have no formal status as workers or indeed as humans. Their rates of pay are an outrage, often less than the minimum wage, with widespread unpaid forced overtime, non-payment for ‘normal’ hours worked, no sick pay or holiday pay, no pensions. Because they lack status, who knows who pockets the tax and national insurance deductions that they make; the workers themselves certainly have dangerously limited access to social services that are supposed to be funded by such contributions. When they organise, they can be sacked and deported by immigration controls.

Previous waves of migration to England in the capitalist period -Irish, Jewish and post-colonial – have taught the same lesson. The working-class must see itself as an international exploited class and reject divisions of nationality; action around the principles of equality and solidarity is the only way we can win. For sure, under capitalism where the maintenance of a massive surplus labour force is key to undermining working-class solidarity, freedom of movement is not really any freedom. Unless the labour movement stands together and fight for jobs for all, organising all workers regardless of immigration status and nationality, desperate migrant workers will be used to displace existing workers and undermine what gains their organisation has achieved, as in the construction industry. Apart from this, migrant workers are used as slave workforces creating an ostensible caste system where migrants do cleaning, catering and care work, traditionally work doled out to women in our sexist society, or other menial and demoralising work, in a division of labour which corrupts all of society, even those who believe themselves to gain from being exempted from such work. We must not just fight for a “living wage” for those forced to occupy the lowest tiers of employment but fight to eradicate degrading and dehumanising divisions of labour altogether.

All of us learn through struggle. The SOAS protests and occupation is a good and heartening example of the kind of resistance we need, and provides useful lessons for us as we take the next steps to secure justice for the SOAS cleaners and to generalise the struggle for freedom of movement and equal rights for all.