Truly Fantastic: Domestic labour union revolution in the Netherlands

At the end of last year, after additional “belt-tightening”, a new wave of strikes and pickets began. After heated debates and countless smaller actions, after seven rounds of unsuccessful negotiations and mass rallies in all major Dutch cities (called “Angry Marches” and “Marches for Respect”), on February 27th 2012, around 2000 cleaners occupied the University of Utrecht with the support of students. Like many other public institutions, the universities had began to cut spending “at the bottom”.

February this year saw the conclusion of a large two-year project by Casco, the Dutch Office For Art, Design and Theory, called the Grand Domestic Revolution. It included a group art exhibition, artist residences, public interventions and a string of collaborations between artists, theoreticians and activists. It closed with the Futurist Writing School, a week-long workshop in which a dozen attendees tried to join their forces in writing a novel, dedicated to the main issues of the Grand Domestic Revolution: a more equal sharing of domestic and care work, the legal and social recognition of paid domestic labour, architectural innovations for easier communal living, collective urban design, urban gardening, the right to use unmaintained or abandoned private property, the sharing of intellectual property, bartering, and the improvement of relationships on the level of (extended) families, residential communities and neighbourhoods.

Our literary venture was ambitious even by science fiction standards, not to mention the standards of actually existing politics. The curators’ (Binna Choi and Maiko Tanaka) request that the narrative should portray a near future that most of us would live to see (Utrecht in 2032), alleviated my fears since I had been afraid that I wouldn't be able to stand up to the challenge of a more long-term vision. How could I, I wondered during my trip to the Netherlands, when I live from day to day, from hand to mouth? At the same time, the decision to write about a future only twenty years away disappointed me, as I was reminded that my feeling of powerlessness wasn't mine alone.

I thought of Luisa Passerini’s essay “Utopia” and Desire (2002) where she compared the European perception of utopia after the year 1968 with the one that emerged after the year 1989 when the discourse about the “death of utopia” and the “end of history” became quite common . She wrote that the social movements of 1968 did not understand the subjects of history exclusively as subjects of action and knowledge but also as subjects of desire. Activists of both genders could hope for a better future and “demand the impossible”, because they decided that the object of desire counted less than the state of desire. Instead of a politics that would gravitate towards the fulfilment of needs, they advocated a politics that would demand more and more after every activist victory; they would demand something that no one had achieved before. In accordance with the pessimist belief that the future cannot not be different from the past or the present, the neo-conservative ideology of the early 1990s dismissed the utopian political imagination as something impossible or even absurd. Luisa Passerini concluded that in these conditions, utopian thought survived only in the shape of “nostalgia for rebellion [that] looks more to the past than to the future, it is a memory more than a hope; hope is mentioned but remains vague and unexpressed”.

In Utrecht, our writing was based on the exhibits, past public interventions, existing debates and tried and true social experiments, but the collective phrasing of such a wide field nevertheless – and despite the not-so-distant future setting – turned out to be too difficult. We were constantly carried away into fantasy, into scenarios that failed to establish a cognitive distance from the here and now (which is one of the definitions of speculative literature). On the contrary, our writing was based on free association, playing with genre conventions and escapism. So instead of writing about the mechanical glasshouse (the Meal Machine by Doris Denekamp and Arend Groosman, that simplifies the cultivation of vegetables), Experimental Kitchen Pharmacy (for which the artist Wietske Maas collected and processed a number of local medicinal herbs, following the advice of neighbours), housekeeping robots, the collectivization of routine domestic chores ( Kateřine Šedá’s project There's Nothing There), uninvited read-ins in people's living rooms and speaking trumpets (portable megaphones, made from recycled waste), we wrote about post-gender astronauts, cloning, cryogenics, cannibalism, mutations, lab-grown food and a ruling coalition, consisting of seventy-four parties that frolic on picnics while Utrecht slowly sinks into a toxic sea. Domestic revolution? No sight of it.

After two such sessions I began to ask myself who had stolen our utopian imagination. Was it Hollywood and its apocalyptic exploitation of science fiction, was it dishonest gibberish about sustainability or was it conservative politics – the only politics that still dares to call upon the benefit of “future generations”? Or did we take hope away from ourselves when we started thinking only about ourselves and the things that are within our reach? How can we save ourselves from the deterministic understanding of history, how can we resist generalizations and instead, raise a toast to the future perceived as a promise of surprise, as something unpredictable, unique and unrepeatable? How can our stories accommodate actually existing grandpas and grandmas who do not want to be associated with a future, filled with individual endings, but continue to tend to the orchard, the fruits of which they'll never taste?

Since I am used to Slovene ideas about what's possible, the real surprise came the next evening, when Casco was hosting the founder of the labour union of United Migrant Domestic Workers in the Netherlands (UMDW), Coring delos Reyes. By the way, the term “domestic work” includes all chores that are performed in the home of the employer, usually cleaning and washing clothes, babysitting, caring for the sick and elderly, shopping, cooking, small repairs, maintenance work and gardening. The UMDW union uses the English term “domestic work” and the Dutch term “schoonmakers” (“cleaners”, literally “beautifiers”) as synonyms for the above-mentioned feminized, undervalued and underpaid work, which is carried out at home, but also in private companies and public institutions. Both in the Netherlands and in Slovenia, domestic work continues to be largely performed by members of the most vulnerable social groups; by migrants and (older) women.

When Coring delos Reyes moved from the Philippines to the Netherlands in search of employment fifteen years ago she realized that – being an unregistered migrant – she couldn't even open a bank account. Because Dutch households that don't hire help more than three times per week don't have to register the payments with the tax office, she could get work on the black market. Nevertheless she couldn't rent an apartment, because the landlords are obliged to register their tenants. Due to strict laws tenants must provide their landlord with personal identification, the residence permit as well as the number of their bank account.

In 2002 she joined a cooperative which lent money to unregistered migrants with low interest rates. Four years later she founded the UMDW, which took the goal of protecting all migrant domestic workers regardless of their gender or legal status, no matter whether they worked in households, private companies or the public sector, and no matter whether they worked directly for an employer or through an outsourcing agency (a cleaning service). The self-organized and legally unrecognised labour union began collecting money through donations and founded several solidarity funds for deported workers, for emergency assistance (usually to pay for medical assistance to workers without a health insurance), for education and recreation. Because of their status and because they wanted to protect their members’ anonymity, the UMDW wired money to them through registered non-governmental organisations. Later, together with other migrant groups and unions, they started to educate and mobilize non-unionised workers and offer them a support system that included micro-credits as well as legal help.

Khadija Tahiri-Hyati, the president of the Schoonmakers labour union, who works as a cleaning lady in one of Amsterdam's hospitals stressed that even the cleaners with a contract and residence permit don't have it easy in the Netherlands: “The work that used to be done by eight people must now be done by four!” At the end of the 1990s, during the privatisation of the service sector, a fight broke out between the biggest agencies (Hago, Facilicom, Asito and ISS – the latter employs around 1300 workers in Slovenia as well, 90% of whom are women) in which the employees obviously took most of the beating. The lowering of hourly rates, raising norms (shorter times for cleaning larger areas) and cutting compensations for medical leave hit the cleaners in private companies first. With the economic crisis and austerity measures (freezing salaries in the public sector) the next in line were the employees who did maintenance work for governmental companies, public institutions and local municipalities.

In the summer of 2009, Schoonmakers and UMDW started a campaign to improve working conditions, raise the hourly rates and achieve paid sick leave.(1) At first, the Schoon genoeg! (“Quite enough!”, literally “Clean enough!”) campaign was met with resentment in the public sector because of the frozen salaries. The large unions, known for their careful negotiation tactics, also remained silent. In April 2010,(2) when the cleaners of the Dutch Railways decided to go on strike, a story began that, as mentioned, sounds rather fantastic from the Slovene perspective. The strike began with the physical occupation of the railway station in Utrecht, the busiest station in the country. Around 1500 contract workers came to work but instead of cleaning they sat in the station in the style of the Occupy! movement and unfolded their picket signs.(3) Three days later, the passengers had to try really hard to avoid the piles of trash and the question of what was going on. After six(4) days the leaders of the cleaning company and the railways agreed to negotiations during which the unions, speaking on behalf of around 150 000 workers, demanded – and after nine weeks achieved – a new collective contract. The contract included a 2.75% raise of the hourly rate, paid sick leave from the first day of absence from work, a paid course in Dutch for foreigners and the chance to attend vocational training. The cleaning company lost a legal battle and had to rehire the employees fired during the strike. Furthermore, the responsibility to sustain the newly gained working conditions is now equally shared between the outsourcing agency and the railway company, which practically means that neither can alleviate the higher costs of work by raising norms and putting a larger burden on the cleaners.

The strike was exceptional even by Dutch standards. Firstly, because the majority of the strikers consisted of the most vulnerable groups of workers; of migrants and women. Secondly, because the strike was advocating the rights of precarious workers, hired by outsourcing agencies, and because it was organised by two grassroots unions that received the support of legally and publicly recognised unions only after the negotiations. Schoonmakers and UMDW connected with Abvakabo/FNV and(5) FNV Bondgenoten, the latter of which represents around 470 000 workers from the service, industrial, metallurgic, agricultural, technical and transport sectors and is thus the largest Dutch union. Its speciality (and from the Slovene point of view another fantastic move) is that it represents temporary contract workers alongside permanent employees. Last but not least, the strike was exceptional because it succeeded. Historians say that such a strong movement had not been seen in the Netherlands since the year 1933, when dock workers decided they had had enough. This claim is supported by the fact that the achieved rights gave momentum to other workers: soon after the railway cleaners, the sanitation workers of Utrecht and Amsterdam went on strike for an “indefinite period of time”. Even though they work for local municipalities (the “frozen” public sector), the strike ended in ten days with a 1.5% raise for around 200 000 workers.

At the end of last year, after additional “belt-tightening”, a new wave of strikes and pickets began. After heated debates and countless smaller actions, after seven rounds of unsuccessful negotiations and mass rallies in all major Dutch cities (called “Angry Marches” and “Marches for Respect”), on February 27th 2012, around 2000 cleaners occupied the University of Utrecht with the support of students. Like many other public institutions, the universities had began to cut spending “at the bottom”. On March 5th, the occupation of the De Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam followed. The workers are demanding a new collective contract which includes the right to employment for indefinite time after nine months of contract work, the inclusion of domestic workers who work in the private sphere (at home) in the collective contract, the raise of the hourly wage rate for 50 cents, paid sick leave, the right to learn Dutch during work, paid travel expenses, a paid vacation, a 2 € bonus for working in several buildings in one day (or twice a day in the same building), an annual bonus of 300 € for full-time workers (and a proportionally smaller amount for part-time workers), penalties for employers who don't pay on time or pay the wrong amount, mandatory consultation between the employer and the union before the former decides to fire someone, better retirement conditions as well as the employers monthly contribution of 4 € per worker to the labour union.

The situation in Slovenia is not comparable to that in the Netherlands. In Slovenia, the majority of domestic workers, care workers and cleaners who work in the private sphere are paid in cash on hand, and new employers are sought out in informal ways. Despite this circumstance, these workers and contract workers who are “rented out” to companies and public institutions by cleaning agencies, could identify with the demands of UMDW and Schoonmakers easily, given that they work in similarly precarious conditions. After all, the structure of the employees is very similar as well: according to Zdenka Šadl’s study (2006), the majority of domestic workers consists of jobless women, poorly paid employed women, working class women, migrants and younger retired women. In other words: women living on the edge of poverty.

How to organize paid domestic workers in Slovenia when even unpaid chores performed by housewives or unpaid reproductive labour has yet to enter the realm of public debates and general concerns? At this point, the obstacles seem insurmountable. First of all: how to mobilize exhausted and overworked workers for activism? Second: how to connect workers who work for different wages, under different conditions and under different contracts for a wide range of employers and agencies? Third: how can a rebellion be initiated by the most vulnerable groups of workers, who live with the awareness of being disposable on the labour market and the knowledge that the employers have a ready-made answer to all forms of protest: “If you don't like it here you are free to leave”. Finally, the revolution, started by unionised migrant domestic workers in the Netherlands sounds truly fantastic to us in Slovenia because even our union leaders claim – let me quote Lidija Jerkič, the (female!) president of SKEI (union of workers in the metallurgic and electroindustrial sector) – that “women should blame themselves for the position they're in”.

It seems the time is ripe for a politics that will demand something nobody in Slovenia has achieved yet; time for utopian political imagination and “the impossible” struggle.  

First published here. 

The corrections and comments below were provided by Rebeca Pabon (FNV Bondgenoten).

(1) In the strikes of 2010 and 2012, respect was the most widely discussed demand by the workers and the media.

(2) The central train station in Utrecht was a strategic place for the occupation because all trains in The Netherlands pass through it. During the first cleaners' action in 2007, the main target was Schipol Airport (Amsterdam) because many workers there are politically active (and unionized) and because the cleaning agencies consider Schipol to be a very important client.

(3) In 2010, domestic workers participated in the action but did not stay at the station overnight. Compared to the 2010 strike, when both the domestic workers and the unions were hesitant about joining the action due to the risks it implied, many more domestic workers were mobilized in 2012. They participated in all actions during the 2012 strike which lasted for 105 days, including the occupations of universities in Amsterdam and Utrecht. You can read more about the reasons for occupying the universities in the article Struggles intersect at uni occupation in Amsterdam written by Donya Alinejad. 
(4) Negotiations started on the 5th day of the strike. 
(5) Schoonmakers and domestic workers connected with FNV Bondgenoten only. Abvakabo/FNV was not involved. 

Resnično fantastično: sindikalna gospodinjska revolucija na Nizozemskem

Konec lanskega leta, po dodatnem »zategovanju pasov«, se je začel nov val protestov in stavk. Po burnih debatah in neštetih manjših akcijah, sedmih krogih neuspešnih pogajanj in množičnih zborovanjih v vseh večjih nizozemskih mestih (»Jezni pohodi« in »Pohodi za spoštovanje«), se je 27. februarja letos okrog 2000 čistilk in čistilcev ob podpori študentov odločilo za zasedbo Univerze v Utrechtu, ki je tako kot druge javne ustanove začela varčevati »pri dnu«.

Nizozemski Urad za umetnost, oblikovanje in teorijo Casco je februarja letos zaključil obsežen dveletni projekt Vélika gospodinjska revolucija (Grand Domestic Revolution), ki je vključeval skupinsko razstavo, umetniške rezidence, javne intervencije in vrsto sodelovanj med umetniki, teoretiki in aktivisti. Zaključil se je s Šolo futurističnega pisanja, enotedensko delavnico, na kateri je dvanajst udeleženk in udeležencev s skupnimi močmi skušalo napisati roman, posvečen glavnim razsežnostim Vélike gospodinjske revolucije: enakopravnejši delitvi neplačanega domačega, družinskega in gospodinjskega dela, pravnemu in družbenemu priznanju plačanega gospodinjskega dela, arhitekturnim inovacijam za lažje sobivanje v stanovanjskih skupnostih, skupnostnemu načrtovanju in oblikovanju prostora, urbanemu vrtnarstvu, pravici do uporabe nevzdrževanih in zapuščenih nepremičnin v zasebni lasti, deljenju intelektualne lastnine, blagovni menjavi in izboljševanju medosebnih odnosov na ravni (razširjenih) družin, stanovanjskih skupnosti in sosesk.

Literarni podvig, ki je ambiciozen že po znanstvenofantastičnih merilih, kaj šele po realno-političnih, smo sodelujoči na željo kustosinj umestili v Utrecht leta 2032. Dejstvo, da sta se Binna Choi in Maiko Tanaka odločili za obravnavo bližnje prihodnosti, ki jo bo večina od nas doživela, je ublažilo moj strah; bala sem se namreč, da zadani vizionarski nalogi ne bom kos. Kako le, sem razmišljala na poti na Nizozemsko, ko pa živim iz dneva v dan, iz rok v usta? Istočasno me je odločitev za pisanje o prihodnosti, oddaljeni komaj dvajset let, razočarala in opomnila, da moj občutek nemoči ni zgolj moj. Spomnila me je na ugotovitve Luise Passerini, zgodovinarke, ki je v eseju "Utopija" in želja (2008) primerjala evropsko razumevanje utopije po letu 1968 s tistim, ki se je pojavilo po letu 1989, ko se je začelo govoriti o "smrti utopije" in "koncu zgodovine". Družbena gibanja leta 1968, je zapisala, subjektov zgodovine niso obravnavala izključno kot subjektov akcije in vednosti, temveč tudi kot subjekte želje. Aktivisti in aktivistke so lahko upali v boljšo prihodnost in zahtevali "nemogoče", ker so sklenili, da objekt želje šteje manj od stanja želje. Namesto politike, ki bi težila k zadovoljevanju potreb, so zagovarjali politiko, ki je po vsaki aktivistični zmagi zahtevala več; tisto, česar še nihče ni dosegel. V zgodnjih devetdesetih je neokonservativna ideologija v skladu s pesimističnim prepričanjem, da prihodnost ne more biti drugačna od preteklosti ali sedanjosti, utopično politično domišljijo zavrgla kot nekaj nemogočega, celo absurdnega. V teh razmerah, je sklenila Luisa Passerini, je utopična misel preživela samo v obliki "nostalgije po vstaji (...), ki zre bolj v preteklost kakor v prihodnost in je spomin, ne toliko upanje: upanje je nakazano, a ostaja nejasno in neizraženo".

V Utrechtu smo se pri pisanju oprli na razstavljene predmete, pretekle javne intervencije, obstoječe razprave in preizkušene socialne eksperimente, a se je kolektivna ubeseditev tako širokega polja kljub temu - in kljub bližnjemu dogajalnemu času - izkazala za preveč zahtevno. Nehote nas je odnašalo v fantazijske scenarije, ki niso temeljili na vzpostavljanju miselne distance do tukajšnje in zdajšnje resničnosti, od koder bi bilo o njej mogoče razmišljati drugače (kar je ena od definicij spekulativne literature), temveč na prostem asociiranju, poigravanju z žanrskimi pravili in eskapizmu. Tako smo namesto o mehaničnem rastlinjaku (Meal Machine umetnikov Doris Denekamp in Arenda Groosmana, ki poenostavi pridelavo zelenjave), Eksperimentalni domači lekarni (za katero je umetnica Wietske Maas na priporočilo sosedov zbrala in predelala vrsto zdravilnih rastlin, ki rastejo v bližnji okolici), gospodinjskih robotih, kolektivizaciji rutinskih domačih opravil (projekt There's Nothing There umetnice Kateřine Šedá), bralnih intervencijah na domu (pri sosedih - in z njimi - v organizaciji kolektiva Read-In) ter Govoreči trobenti (prenosnem megafonu, narejenem iz odpadnih materialov) raje pisali o postspolnih astronavtih, kloniranju, kriogeniki, kanibalizmu, mutacijah, laboratorijskem gojenju hrane in štiriinsedemdesetčlanski vladajoči koaliciji, ki se zabava na piknikih, medtem ko se Utrecht zaradi klimatskih sprememb počasi ugreza v toksično morje. O gospodinjski revoluciji ne duha ne sluha.

Po dveh takšnih seansah pisanja sem se začela spraševati, kdo nam je ukradel utopično domišljijo. Holivudska apokaliptična eksploatacija znanstvene fantastike, neiskrene govorance o trajnostnem razvoju ali konservativna politika, ki se še edina drzne sklicevati na dobro "bodočih rodov"? Ali pa smo si upanje vzeli kar sami, v trenutku ko smo začeli misliti samo nase, in na tisto, kar je na dosegu naših rok? Kako naj se rešimo determinističnega pojmovanja zgodovine, kako naj se upremo posploševanju in namesto tega nazdravimo prihodnosti kot obetu presenečenja, kot nečemu nepredvidljivemu, enkratnemu in neponovljivemu? Kako naj v naših zgodbah napravimo prostor za resnične dedke in babice, ki nočejo imeti opravka s prihodnostjo, posejano z individualnimi konci, in zato še naprej vzgajajo sadno drevje, čigar sadov ne bodo nikoli užili?

Za slovenske predstave o tem, kaj je mogoče, me je resnično fantastično presenečenje pričakalo naslednji večer, ko je Casco gostil ustanoviteljico sindikata Združenih migrantskih gospodinjskih delavk in delavcev na Nizozemskem (United Migrant Domestic Workers in the Netherlands ali UMDW), gospo Coring delos Reyes. Mimogrede, izraz "gospodinjsko delo" na prvi pogled ni najbolj primeren prevod izraza "domestic work". Pri nas stroka ločuje med domačim, družinskim in gospodinjskim delo, ki je običajno plačano, če ga opravlja najeta delavka (redkeje delavec), in neplačano, če ga opravljajo družinske članice ali sorodnice. Omenjene kategorije zajemajo vsa opravila, ki potekajo na domu (plačnika), najpogosteje čiščenje in pranje perila, varovanje otrok, starejših in obolelih, nakupovanje, kuhanje, mala popravila in vzdrževalna dela ter vrtnarjenje. V sindikatu UMDW se angleški izraz "domestic work" in nizozemski izraz "schoonmakers" ("čistilci", dobesedno pa "tisti, ki lepšajo") uporabljata kot sopomenki za našteta feminizirana, podcenjena in podplačana dela, ki potekajo na domu, pa tudi v podjetjih in javnih ustanovah. Ker jih še vedno po večini opravljajo migranti in (starejše) ženske, ki spadajo v najranljivejše družbene skupine, je asociacija na nevidnost, ki jo vsebuje izraz "gospodinjsko delo", povsem na mestu.

Coring delos Reyes se je pred petnajstimi leti v iskanju zaposlitve preselila iz Filipinov na Nizozemsko, kjer je ugotovila, da kot nedokumentirana migrantka ne more odpreti niti bančnega računa. Ker gospodinjstvom, ki najamejo delovno silo največ trikrat tedensko, izplačil ni treba prijaviti davčni upravi, se je lahko preživljala z delom na črno. A še vedno ni mogla najeti stanovanja, saj so stanodajalci zaradi stroge zakonodaje prisiljeni prijaviti svoje najemnike. Slednji morajo stanodajalcu poleg osebnega dokumenta in dovoljenja za bivanje predložiti tudi številko svojega bančnega računa. Leta 2002 se je pridružila kooperativi, ki je neprijavljenim migrantom posojala denar z nizko obrestno mero. Čez štiri leta je ustanovila sindikat UMDW, ki si je zadal, da bo ščitil vse migrantske gospodinjske delavke in delavce ne glede na njihov pravni status, ne glede na to, ali delajo v gospodinjstvih, podjetjih ali v javnem sektorju, in ne glede na to, ali delajo neposredno za naročnika ali preko agencije za delo (čistilnega servisa). Samoorganizirani in uradno nepriznani sindikat je z donacijami in solidarnostnimi akcijami začel zbirati denar za pomoč deportiranim delavkam in delavcem, za nujne primere (večinoma za plačilo zdravstvene oskrbe delavcem brez zdravstvenega zavarovanja) in za izobraževanje ter rekreacijo. Zaradi svojega statusa in zagotavljanja anonimnosti svojih članov je UMDW slednjim nakazoval denar prek registriranih nevladnih organizacij. Kasneje je začel sodelovati z drugimi migrantskimi skupinami in sindikati, začel je izobraževati in mobilizirati pred tem nepovezane delavce in jim nuditi podporni sistem, ki je poleg mikrokreditov vključeval tudi pravno pomoč.

Predsednica sindikata Schoonmakers Khadija Tahiri-Hyati, ki dela kot čistilka v eni od amsterdamskih bolnišnic, je poudarila, da na Nizozemskem tudi pogodbenim čistilcem z dovoljenjem za bivanje ali državljanstvom ni lahko: "Delo, ki ga je nekoč opravilo osem ljudi, morajo danes opraviti štirje!". Konec devetdesetih let, ko se je začela privatizacija storitvenega sektorja, se je med največjimi agencijami (Hago, Facilicom, Asito in ISS - slednja v Sloveniji zaposluje okrog 1300 delavcev, od tega 90% žensk) vnel boj za naročnike, v katerem so seveda nastradali delavci. Nižanje urnih postavk, višanje norm (krajši čas za čiščenje vse večjih površin) in ukinjanje nadomestil za bolniški dopust je najprej doletelo čistilke in čistilce v zasebnih podjetjih. Z ekonomsko krizo in varčevalnimi ukrepi (zamrznitev plač v javnem sektorju) so na vrsto prišli delavci, ki so vzdrževali državna podjetja, javne institucije in mestne ulice.

Poleti leta 2009 sta sindikata Schoonmakers in UMDW sprožila kampanjo za izboljšanje delovnih pogojev, dvig urnih postavk in priznanje nadomestila za bolniški dopust.(1) Kampanja Schoon genoeg! (Čisto dovolj! ali Dovolj čisto!) je med zaposlenimi v javnem sektorju zaradi zamrznitve plač sprva naletela na negodovanje. Veliki sindikati, znani po svoji previdni pogajalski politiki, so molčali. Ko so se aprila 2010(2) čistilci in čistilke Nizozemskih železnic odločili za stavko, se je začela odvijati zgodba, ki, kot že rečeno, s slovenske perspektive zveni naravnost fantastično. Stavka se je začela s fizično zasedbo železniške postaje v Utrechtu, najbolj prometne postaje v državi. Okrog 1500 delavcev je prišlo v službo, a namesto da bi začeli čistiti, so v slogu gibanja Occupy! zasedli postajo in razvili svoje transparente.(3) Po treh dneh so se potniki morali že pošteno potruditi, da so se izognili vse večjim kupom smeti in vprašanju, kaj se dogaja. Po šestih(4) dneh sta vodstvi čistilnega servisa in železnic pristali na pogajanja, na katerih sta sindikata v imenu sektorja, ki obsega okrog 150 000 pogodbenih delavcev, zahtevala - in si po devetih tednih tudi izborila - novo kolektivno pogodbo. Pogodba je vključevala 2.75 % povišanje urne postavke, plačan bolniški dopust od prvega dne odsotnosti z dela, dostop do tečajev nizozemščine za tujce in možnost poklicnega usposabljanja. Čistilni servis je moral zaradi izgubljene tožbe ponovno najeti delavce, odpuščene med stavko, z železnicami pa je po novem enako odgovoren za ohranjanje izborjenih delovnih pogojev, kar v praksi pomeni, da zvišanih stroškov dela ne more lajšati z višanjem norm in dodatnim obremenjevanjem čistilk.

Stavka je bila izjemna tudi za nizozemske razmere. Najprej zato, ker so glavnino stavkajočih predstavljale najbolj ranljive skupine delavcev; migranti in ženske. Nadalje zato, ker gre za pogodbene delavce, ki jih najemajo agencije za "zunanje izvajanje dejavnosti" ali "izločanje produkcije" (outsourcing), in zato, ker sta stavko spodbudila samoorganizirana sindikata, ki sta podporo priznanih sindikatov dobila šele po pogajanjih. Povezala sta se s Abvakabo/FNV in(5) FNV Bondgenoten, pri čemer slednji zastopa okrog 470 000 delavk in delavcev iz storitvenega, industrijskega, metalurškega, kmetijskega, tehničnega in transportnega sektorja ter kot tak predstavlja največji nizozemski sindikat. Njegova posebnost (in s slovenske perspektive ponovno fantastična poteza) je, da poleg redno zaposlenih zastopa tudi pogodbene delavce. Nenazadnje je bila stavka izjemna zato, ker je uspela. Zgodovinarji pravijo, da tako močnega gibanja na Nizozemskem niso videli vse od leta 1933, ko je prekipelo pristaniškim delavcem. K tej trditvi je pripomoglo dejstvo, da so izborjene pravice dale upanje in zagon drugim delavcem: za železniškimi čistilci so se za stavko "za nedoločen čas" odločili smetarji iz Utrechta in Amsterdama. Čeprav delajo za mestne oblasti, torej za javni sektor, se je stavka po desetih dneh končala z 1.5% povišico za približno 200 000 smetarjev.

Konec lanskega leta, po dodatnem "zategovanju pasov", se je začel nov val protestov in stavk. Po burnih debatah in neštetih manjših akcijah, sedmih krogih neuspešnih pogajanj in množičnih zborovanjih v vseh večjih nizozemskih mestih ("Jezni pohodi" in "Pohodi za spoštovanje"), se je 27. februarja letos okrog 2000 čistilk in čistilcev ob podpori študentov odločilo za zasedbo Univerze v Utrechtu, ki je tako kot druge javne ustanove začela varčevati "pri dnu". Petega marca je sledila zasedba amsterdamske De Vrije Universiteit. Delavci zahtevajo novo kolektivno pogodbo, ki vključuje pravico do zaposlitve za nedoločen čas po devetih mesecih pogodbenega dela, vključitev delavcev, ki delajo v zasebni sferi (na domu), v kolektivno pogodbo, dvig urne postavke za 50 centov, pravico do nadomestila za bolniški dopust, pravico do učenja Nizozemščine med delovnim časom, plačilo potnih stroškov, plačan dopust, 2 € dodatka za delo v več objektih v enem dnevu (ali dvakrat dnevno v istem objektu), letno izplačilo nagrade v višini 300 € za zaposlene za polni delovni čas (in proporcionalno manjši znesek za tiste, ki delajo za polovičnega), kazni za plačnike, ki zamujajo s plačilom ali nakažejo napačen znesek, obvezno posvetovanje delodajalca s sindikatom, preden se prvi odloči za odpuščanje, poleg ugodnejših pogojev za upokojitev pa zahtevajo tudi, da delodajalec za vsakega delavca sindikatu nakaže mesečni prispevek v višini 4 €.

Razmere v Sloveniji niso primerljive z Nizozemskimi, saj pri nas večina plačanih gospodinj in čistilk, ki delajo v zasebni sferi, plačilo prejema "na roko", pri čemer nove delodajalce pridobivajo po neformalnih poteh. Kljub temu bi se skupaj s pogodbenimi delavkami, ki jih podjetjem in javnim ustanovam "oddajajo" čistilni servisi, lahko poistovetile z zahtevami sindikatov UMDW in Schoonmakers, saj delajo v podobno prekernih razmerah. Nenazadnje je podobna tudi struktura ponudnic dela: v Sloveniji po študiji Zdenka Šadl (2006) prevladujejo brezposelne ženske, slabo plačane zaposlene, ženske iz delavskega razreda, priseljenke in mlajše upokojenke. Drugače rečeno: ženske, ki živijo na robu revščine.

Razmišljanje o tem, kako organizirati plačane gospodinjske delavke - o neplačanih gospodinjah oziroma reproduktivnih delavkah se pri nas tako ali tako sploh ne govori - se v Sloveniji ustavi pri ovirah, ki se zdijo nepremostljive. Prvič: kako naj se organizirajo in mobilizirajo delavke, ki zaradi preobremenjenosti in izčrpanosti nimajo časa za aktivizem? Drugič: kako naj se povežejo čistilke in gospodinje, ki za različno plačilo, pod različnimi pogoji in za različne pogodbe delajo za kopico posameznikov in agencij? In tretjič: kako naj se uprejo najbolj ranljive skupine delavk in delavcev, ki živijo z zavestjo o lastni zamenljivosti na trgu dela, in védenjem, da imajo delodajalci za vsak protest že pripravljen odgovor "Če vam tukaj kaj ni prav, lahko še danes odidete". Nenazadnje pa nizozemska sindikalna gospodinjska revolucija v Sloveniji zveni resnično fantastično tudi zato, ker lahko celo iz ust sindikalnih vodij - za primer naj navedem izjavo predsednice sindikata kovinske in elektroindustrije (SKEI) Lidije Jerkič - slišimo, da "smo si ženske za svoj položaj same krive".

Zdi se, da je skrajni čas za politiko, ki bo zahtevala tisto, česar v Sloveniji ni dosegel še nihče. Čas za utopično politično domišljijo in "nemogoči" boj.


Prvič objavljeno na portalu Življenje na dotik.


Spodnje popravke in komentarje je dodala Rebeca Pabon (FNV Bondgenoten).

(1) Leta 2010 in letos je bila najpomembnejša in medijsko najodmevnejša zahteva stavkajočih delavcev zahteva po spoštovanju.

(2)  Glavna železniška postaja v Utrechtu je obveljala za najbolj strateško mesto za zasedbo zato, ker vsi nizozemski vlaki peljejo skoznjo. Med prvo akcijo čistilcev leta 2007 je to vlogo igralo letališče Schipol v bližini Amsterdama, predvsem zato, ker so bili tamkajšnji delavci aktivni in že organizirani v sindikate, in zato, ker je (kar zadeva čistilne servise) Schipol ena od pomembnejših strank.

(3) Leta 2010 so čistilci in čistilke sodelovali v akciji, vendar niso prenočevali na železniški postaji. Tako čistilci kot sindikati so leta 2010 oklevali, ali naj se stavki zaradi visokega tveganja sploh pridružijo, zato je bila udeležba zares množična šele letos. Čistilci so med letošnjo stavko, ki je trajala 105 dni, sodelovali pri vseh akcijah, tudi pri zasedbi univerz v Utrechtu in Amsterdamu. Več o razlogih za zasedbo univerzitetnih poslopij lahko preberete v tem članku (v angleščini).
(4) Pogajanja so se začela po petih, ne po šestih dneh. 
(5) Schoonmakers in gospodinjske delavke ter delavci so se povezali samo s sindikatom FNV Bondgenoten. S sindikatom Abvakabo/FNV niso sodelovali.

Futurist Writing School - Stories from Utrecht 2032

Following on the rich history of feminist utopian and speculative fiction practices that conjured new relationships, languages and agencies for transgressing structural and invisible forces of subjugation, Utrecht's Casco Gallery organised The Futurist Writing School, a week-long workshop in collective writing that ran within and alongside the closing events of the Grand Domestic Revolution. 

I ran the introductory workshop on February 21st 2012. We played Exquisite Corpse and some other Surrealist writing games.The games were applied also to some of the following writing sessions. The final collectively written and edited monster-piece is going to be included in the GDR project catalogue, scheduled for release later this year.

 

The Exquisite Corpses below were written on February 21st by Marina Vishmidt, Abäke (Patrick Lacey), Binna Choi, Maiko Tanaka, Katayoun, Aileen Burns, Allison Guy, Serena Lee, Johan Lundh, Silvia Simoncelli, Tea Hvala, Freyja van den Boom, Yolande van der Heide and Marielle Verdijk.

 

Miffy I

Where is Miffy? On the shore of a cold and unfamiliar sea that day by day is reaching further into The Netherlands. Today the icy water is lapping at the door of the house that Miffy has always called home. She knew this day was coming and that her plans for starting a new life, in a new community, would be put into action but it was surreal nonetheless.

Miffy finally manages to step away from the window to finish packing all of the food and seeds that she has promised to bring with her. For the past two years she has been collecting and storing the life-giving cores of everything she has anticipated she would need for this journey. She had heard of a land far away where she was worshipped as an anthropomorphic talisman, an island where she would be welcome. What could be expected from such a place that celebrated her simple life and ways?

There were no two ways about it; now was the time to embark on the journey to the new Atlantis. Here, Miffies were not only revered as gods, but were actually endowed of divine powers owing to the special climate which made everything easy and enchanting. Besides, the gravity was very minimal at that sea level and had gotten even weaker due to centuries underwater. The very advanced Mermaid scientific researchers were about to make a breakthrough in eliminating this nefarious force altogether. This much Miffy had learned when booking her trip to the new Atlantis through Wikipedia.

Miffy arrived there one balmy afternoon, stepping delicately off a single-propeller aircraft operated by her wealthy older boyfriend, Tex. She was dumbstruck to find the whole seafront full of giant images of her, as if the simple natives had not waited for her arrival in order to set-up their cult. She wondered if they might be afraid of her and Tex? Should they be? She hesitated to answer her own question.

Atlantis, finally. But didn’t it look a bit like Utrecht back in 2032? No, it couldn’t be. She shook the feeling away. Miffy hated Utrecht.


Miffy II
With the flooding of Utrecht in 2019, Dick Bruna (kept alive through being cryogenically frozen – his hands and brain transplanted to a cloned version of himself in 2016) now works from the UFO embedded in the church building. Miffy, for his (its?) whole life had been two dimensional but with developments in bioengineering has now been rendered as a living mascot of the city, the museum has expanded and is now the main reason for anyone to visit this floating city. An ambassador of vegetarianism, Miffy is also an advocate of meat, grown in labs for human consumption. Though extremely expensive because of its high maintenance during its development, it provides nutrients to an underfed population.

His/her dual status as a human and as a bio-form grown unnaturally might suggest that his firm position on animal rights would extend to the biological material and clones that make his life possible but Miffy has yet to find a way to deal with this “internal” conflict. Now the time has come for Miffy to make a decision: to clone or not to clone him/herself.

Miffy was old and growing weaker every day. By cloning him/herself, Miffy could live to see the 2048 mission to the Andromeda galaxy as the first post-gender astronaut. But by not cloning him/herself, Miffy would be able to retire, and live a nice relaxed life, until he/she died ... So Miffy was faced with not just a biological or rather, biomorphic dilemma, but a genuine moral dilemma. Prolonging her life would mean giving hope to thousands of other half-real half-imaginary creatures to perform the same somersault into reality that she once did, but she could not really justify it to herself, as she was really very tired and longed to have time to think in 2-dimensions. One day, while consuming a variety of versions of herself in the Dick Bruna Museum gift shop, Miffy suddenly felt dizzy.

Her broker called: “Miffy?”
“Oh ...”
“Miffy, this is Stephan from Axis.”
“Oh, I don't feel well ... Can I help you? Oh ...”
“Sorry.”



Where did the blue seeds migrate?

I. Sara’s Migrane
After the toxins evaporated form the dandelions, the almost extinct Utrecht honeybees grabbed and bundled as much of the discoloured seeds as they could and took off! We haven’t seen them for days and poor people in the city forgot about the blue seed phenomenon and went on with their everyday activities. Deep in the canal at the bottom of the Oudegracht a seaweed was gloving, also a similar blue tone.

The Oudegracht seaweed shone through the water, sending out messages in different shades of blue, but nobody seemed to hear her calls – until one day, a very depressed, deeply troubled and blue precarious cultural worker stopped by. Sara, the cultural worker, leaned on the rail and started rolling a cigarette when, for a second only, she was blinded by the light coming from the water. She covered her fourth eye, the so-called post-toxic eye, to protect herself. But the seaweed shone through her palm!

“What do you want?” she shouted into the canal.

But the seaweed only illuminated the water source more! Her interrogations only seemed to perpetuate the rapid spread in the canal. Could it be that Utrecht’s hydrology plan was hanging desperately at its wits end? That mere yelling or spoken word would become the energy source for the seaweed? Dumbfound, with eyebrows arched up high, she recalled the architectural plan than was proposed twenty years back in the height of what Utrecht’s citizens then deemed a “Grand Domestic Revolution”.

There was a plan for a floating boathouse which would be fuelled in its levitation by the photosynthetic processes inspired by mind-tropical coastal vegetation. Sara started wistfully into her poly-plastithene cup of blue-goo, the anti-anti-oxidant beverage her homoeopath had recommended for the fourth-eye migraines.

Before they’d divorced, Sara had had to endure endless rehearsed product design pitches by Melissa, in her singular re-brand campaign to use blue dye, that cerulean-teal pigment unique to the combination of Randstad algae and melted Micronesian cell-transistor chips. Melissa was convinced that the blue dye, which never caught on would cure Sara’s fourth eyes migraine. But it only intensified, worsened the pain. Despite the vision and knowledge, she could not finish her plan for a floating boathouse. It was almost perfect. The plan was based on the existing living habit of boat people …


II. Vigration
“Where did the blue seeds migrate?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I think she means ‘vibrate’”.
“What is a ‘migrate’?”
“I don't know. I've never heard that word before. I guess it's a verb.”
“… no, I’ve heard it before. It’s almost like the verb ‘vigrate’, I think that’s why you’re confused.”
“Vigrate; that’s already quite archaic, no? What is that – to shift solid states in order to be transported, to commute through state-shifting, via unofficial channels, or highways …?”
“Highways … those were like roads, really long roads, right? Were they high up? Is that why they're called – ?”
“I don't get it, when did they use ‘vigrate’? Where did people go? Why would you want to shift states, officially or unofficially? I mean, I’ve read about transportation, like the Tube, or whatever, but I still don’t understand why …”

Igor and Isabel were confused, confronting the word they never heard of: “vibrate”. You, readers who’ve settled here through vibration may not remember that Igor, Isabel, Sara, Chulsoo and Mohammed were the very you. Since ‘vibration’ means a total transformation through the increasingly trembling day and days …

What does it mean to be “settled”, you readers may ask? In a time when transportation is no longer how you knew it. Igor and Isabel are also new to this. But Sara and Mohammed are eager to get going on the state-shifting channels and maybe even get a little rowdy! Chulsoo is well aware of the difference between the pairs and decides to make an intervention. You see, “vibration” and “vigration” both came out of the word “migration” and that is something only Chulsoo knows. When migrant labourers in The Netherlands started building the new state-shifting channels for the island city of Utrecht, Chulsoo also worked at one of the vibration intersections, so he knew what he was talking about.

The total transformation of transportation did not only see human beings as a mesh of electromagnetic flesh waves, it perceived both legal aliens and those without papers in the same way, through the same sensory apparatus. And so, distinctions between migrant or non-migrant, between aliens or domestic became irrelevant.

The mechanism was a conclusive paradox in its own right, that is for a long time it was understood that aliens could never be legal, as implied in the term. A population of non-minorities, non-marginalized would create a super-race, one that shared labour equality and honoured domestic chores ensuring that within a working day, time was put aside for domestic work and child rearing.



III. Oracle Danikal
Given the refrigeration development of the last twenty years, the Utrecht-Amsterdam-Rotterdam conurbation was in pretty bad shape. Not only did the piles of trash, gathering in the canals stink of rotten organic vegetables, the fresh vegetables that grew locally from barely fertile ground stank as well. Something had to be done, especially since the climate changes did not bring the promised level of cold.

Barbara Vlees rolled up her sleeves and exclaimed: “Damned right, something has to be done! A floating garden, networking balconies like in the times of The Grand Domestic Revolution is surely the resolution!”

Hot-headed with excitement she meandered her bicycle to Utrecht City, blocking her nose the whole time to protect herself from the city’s stench. Upstairs she climbed, rummaging through tons of paper in search of the floating garden blueprint, a proposal that was once rejected by the municipality on the grounds that it did not follow the code for its use: the abundant but not explicitly obscene use of the colour orange.

Since the cuts, visual and chromatic pollution had been under considerable fire. It might have had something to do with the fact that nutrition-obsessed pet owners were uniformly buying into the beta-carotene craze, feeding terriers and hedgehogs alike, steaming piles of orange mush which would in turn end up on the pavements and lawns as digested steaming orange piles.

Barbara scowled and checked the soles of her shoes as a force of habit, heading into the cold zone, fingers gripping the handlebars of her bike, protesting the sudden artificial shift in temperature. Property taxes in the upper-upper-upper class Wijken have been funnelled towards the Buurt Koelen movement: a neighbourhood refrigeration to freeze the stench of rotting trash until disposal collection started again.

Well, we forgot about – or is it kind of a subconscious repression – that we ate all our lovely dogs and cats and then went to watch them die. Yeah, we chose to eat them. What was great about that was that we created a giant camp-fire as we also had to maximize our ability to generate fire. All of us threw our pets into the fire at once. Hundreds of dogs and cats were in and around the fire. You might say it’s barbarian, gross, cruel, repulsive but for us, it was also a state of exhalation. Despite such cold temperature outside, people started tearing off their clothes. We all got naked but magically nobody saw it.

This new social ritual became all the rage but the Animal Rights Party of the Netherlands was fuming with the total selfishness of humans, disregarding their interrelationship with animals. However, within the new party there was the recently elected secretary who was – little did they know – an oracle of ecology. It was within this party that Oracle Danikal infiltrated their decision by using her magical ability to make people change their minds by the minute by feeding them a special concoction of Nutella.

The Nutella would be the answer to the cold temperatures but it would have to brew for another twenty years before it had any effect. In the mean time, she happily kept feeding her party and observed the schizophrenic changes in society, waiting for the time to come when the ecological answer would be fully fermented.


IV. Empathy Soup
In 2032 in the city of Utrecht, finally a new coalition government is created, consisting of seventy-four parties. These parties include the Banana Trees Delicious, Sea Marina Fish Shell, Fahion Bastard, Damn Old Green Links, DogFoxDolphin, Casco, NoGender Party, Vienamesenoodle Soup, Many Money Monkey, Rainbow Kangaroo, and so on, and so on. All these parties are formed according to a shared rhythm of living which is changing in an improvised yet organized manner, so shifts and adjustments are a natural part of their operations.

Three years ago, all the currencies were destroyed and the Temporary Army of Fantastic Life was created. The president cleaner of the Rainbow Kangaroo Party thought this would be a prime moment to throw a convivial event, a party for parties but where could such an event take place so that all the members would feel relaxed and open? At the same time, the Vietnamese Noodle soup party and The Fashion Bastard party were already looking up a recipe for a collective soup inspired by the recent alliances; an unique recipe for stimulating empathy but spicy enough to instigate.

While the Empathy Soup was holding and sending its delicious smell all over town like seductive tentacles, the supporters of the Casco party were already cleaning an abandoned front yard and decorating it for the party to which all the seventy-four coalition parties were invited. The main decoration element were the empathic and self-sacrificing Banana Tree Delicious Party members. The Fashion Bastard party members accepted the role of the host. They were supervised by the Rainbow Kangarros since, as we all know, their fashion taste is far better than that of the Fashion Bastards.

The celebratory moment was not the conventional kind. Indeed the Fashion Bastard in glamorous pink would be sap to realize that he wasn’t aptly dressed for the occasion. The Casco Party was taking this occasion to introduce a new referendum to the city architecture design. We raised our glasses to toast the occasion (it was important because the parties could seldom gather without breaking into violence) and the Casco Party proposed that we transform our yards into vegetable gardens.

A white SUV rolled up and there was a unanimously shared gasp of indignant shock. SUVs in the parade were so last year. The front doors open simultaneously and two veiled goons emerged, opening the back doors for their veiled occupants to step out. They threw jewelled fingers in the air simultaneously and the front door popped open revealing a rolled-out barbecue, powered by a midget on a station bike.

The party members staggered. This was accompanied by the sound of bass and synthesized drums which seemed to emanate from the SUV’s while leather interior. The Fashion Bastards co-leader leaned on his colleague who muttered a secular prayer under her breath. Could this be the nature of the large, already forgotten PVVVVCV party? The shadow administration behind free eggs and dairy which had revealed itself to be a hoax and actually a massive protein conspiracy ...


V. Where the Children Go to Play
If you took the time to play on the banks of the canal they used to call the Oudegracht (a canal that cut the city of the Utrecht in half; creating halves of those that believed in a Grand Domestic Revolution and those who repelled it) my nostalgia will resonate with you. You will remember a “miffie” plain where girls with blond plaits skipped around its statue and the Ekko dance bar whose noise level would elevate on Thursday student nights. But then, when the noise laws came into effect after the sustainability act took hold, “resonance” took on a whole different meaning.

The first dam that broke was the most lethal; it was widely accepted that most of the victims never heard it coming. Since then, we have seen a major shift in daily surveillance mounting to accommodate this need for “sonic disclosure”. Listening for the flood has become a national obsession! Indeed, it has been the reason that Kanaleneisland was instituted after the former Netherlands was either submerged with the remaining provinces receding them from the European Union, effectively becoming an island with minimum economic or geographic ties to the rest.

Well, we cannot but talk about our almost sublime awe of the transformed Kanaleneisland. All these slab prefab houses were then pillars for the new giant housing complex. Those prefab houses are there for all kinds of fish-monster friends who emerged in the last decades after children started to be eaten by the fish monsters. But mothers and fathers developed the sense to live with and even enjoy this occasional cannibalism!

The interesting thing was that most parents and residents of Kanaleneisland did not know whereas the children and monster fish knew very well what was inside the bellies of the fish: there, a new architecture was being formed! All of a sudden, the children started building constructions from the bones of the fish to make their own playhouses, sandboxes, bicycles and rooms for taking naps as the internally transforming fish started swimming up the canal.

The surviving humans who still lived on land thought they were witnessing a scene from The Bible! (a canonical Catholic text, last seen stuck between a giant eel’s gills). They thought the large fish were whales who swallowed Jonah’s clones! Of course, our readers know better: the fish were the most elaborate, playful and magical architecture ever seen. It was organic, it was self-sustainable, it was slick, waterproof and aerodynamic. At the same time, it meant that Holland did not have to bother building new artificial islands as the fish houses populated the watery areas only. The kids loved it – at least until the fish became hungry ... The parents loved it too: the new fish-cannibalistic ecosystem allowed them to procreate without limits, without responsibility as they could simply reload their newborns into the fish.



What will happen once we are finished writing our sentences?

I. Maureen
Maureen was a bit nervous because it was the first time she was taking part in a group interview for renting a room in a collective apartment building. It was the first time that people would have to touch each others’ hair-implants and other physical abnormalities, but that’s the way it goes with collective apartment buildings based on physical features. She also could have chosen a collective based on hobbies like painting or growing edible fruit trees. Hopefully there would be enough middle aged divorced men with boring jobs to keep her from having sex all the time.

Maureen preferred the indigo tattoos of the girls down at the demolition disco, not this sorry heap of washed-up humanity. Not that Maureen was such a gorgeous example herself. A botched surgery five years ago left her with a few extra fingers and one eye which played only a Spanish sport channel. She sighed. No way her insurance would cover that mistake. The superintendent of the building called her name: “Maureen de Leeuw”.

She decided to go to the porn disco, where everyone is less interested in appearance but more so in having sex on nice melodies. What a way out of this collective visibility into anonymous collectivity. Life is better. People are less judgemental at the porn disco. They believe in a classless society and don’t feel the urge to mispronounce each others names. What a relief to have this corner in society. It could also become a part of the squat culture as it was in the old days. But squatters went nuts.

She could have lived in a squat forever, that’s what she thought when she was younger. But the decision to become vegetarian had made her an outsider in the group immediately. Meat smugglers – that’s what the squatter have become in the last twenty years, at least since the cold era had started and all of Europe had become frozen landscape.


II. The Duchess of Cabbage
What happens after we finish writing these sentences? There, we find a funny figure with a nerve coming out of its right arm. It's not a woman nor a man. Do we fit in there? There is not enough space. The figure is upset but remains funny, like a bunny. It's a way of being. We have to keep writing, otherwise we are lost. We decide to leave the trench to find a nice steak to eat. But all of Europe is covered in ice.

And all cows are rapidly extinguishing. It happened to mammoths hundred thousands of years ago. We are fed up with eating musk and lichens anyway. When I wake up at night my mouth retains the flavor of my dreams, roasted fish or pork. So funny, I can define it so well even though I haven't eaten such food for at least ten years now.

Cooking root vegetables became my speciality, making sculptures of pigs heads or chicken out of mashed Jerusalem artichokes and turnips. Becoming the queen of silver onions, the duchess of cabbage, the crown princess of mushrooms that tasted slightly of meat.

Mealtimes in New Utrecht – Newtrecht in short – were short, cold and rotten. The priests prayed for the return of the reindeer, at least, but everyone knew that they had gone the way of the cows and mammoths. Newtrecht was lucky to have a few men remaining, unlike Rottingdam or Scramsterdam, where people only eat stuff that upset their stomach.

Banana-eating people were dying slowly. We should have better health insurance and security system for banana-eating people.

The lady in red came down the stairs. The masochists feared for their life. They only had a management education and knew nothing about the subtleties of a queen bee. They were hiding behind each chair to protect their own lifeless souls.

The funny figure developed a nerve out of its right arm.


III. Big Green One
What will happen once we are finished writing our sentences? When we finish our sentences we might as well take our clothes off and go outside. The wind will put goosebumps on our legs and we will have to hurry to find a good Turkish sauna. Fortunately, bugs will save us from freezing if we are not able to find one, by covering our arms and legs with a soft, downy coat of warm antennae and vibrating wings. We are certainly grateful that the city government decided to genetically engineer the bees, mosquitoes and butterflies to be such charming creatures.

We are accompanied to the sauna in a gauzy haze of transparent insect bodies. Once we slip into the water, I watch my partner flush red with pleasure. A finger-sized fish swims up to his elbow and begins to pick off flakes of dead skin. After a day of such high emotion, it is a pleasure for all involved to be able retreat in a Turkish sauna.

We decided to go and eat steak, where there is one. This town had run out of steaks. No meat allowed! The only marginal spaces where one can eat meat nowadays is in a squat. What is going on with this world today? How do we define space between life and work? What is Europa without an ice sheet? No more than a melodramatic guerilla enclave with narcissistic ideas about concepts such as autonomy.

The confusion in my mind was mounting. I desperately needed that steak. I couldn’t make up a proper sentence any longer. Just questions I wasn’t able to find answers for. I checked my pill-box. Maybe there were still some animal protein pills in there which could cover for 10-15 minutes of my brain activity so I could reach the closest squat without going completely crazy.

There was the last Big Green One who would last me another three hours at least, so I could even spend some time in the paper library, this special place, almost impossible to enter because of harsh anti-insect rules, and let my brain work for a while on the Big Green One.


IV. The Goons
The goons were coming. We didn’t have much time for school work. The teacher urged us to complete our sentences, but I didn’t feel up to it. My barge was waiting outside our guerilla educational enclave, and I was more than eager to get the engine humming and get my ass outside. If the bombs started falling …

They never fall straight out of the sky. They are strategically falling around you. They creep up on your town, and like cancer cells they multiply. It’s a strange tactic. It’s a faceless ideology to throw bombs. But my ass was going to be saved. I knew it. This system is corrupt!

My guerilla education enclave saved me in the end. The goons are in now way supportive, but miserable. We have to be honest about the situation, we have to face the goons. Sooner or latter it was going to be the time. I know I am not alone.

I have my classmates. I can rely on them. Our guerilla education has made us into a tight and at the same time independent community. We have developed some special skills. After long training, we can now communicate with our minds alone. Even being very far away the one another we know what we are at, what we are thinking. We even started tuning into plants and trees so we could translate what they were seeing around them and transforming it into images projected on walls that we would paint as little screen all around the city. Mini-cinemas to see where the goons were and if we could still beat them at tennis. We pair up, put up the net and prepare our rackets.

My ass was grass. There was no escape barge now. Reluctantly I removed my trans-cyber-reifying racket from its case. Those goons were about to get a dose of feminist theory, served up on the wings of a little fussy green ball. I saw the goons marching through the nibble of the galactagarian church. Sweat ran down my cheeks. We were prepared.

Fuad Sanad.

The Futurist Writing School

Utrecht, February 20th-26th, 2012

The Futurist Writing School is part of The User's Manual - The Grand Domestic Revolution (GDR), Casco's long term 'living research' project developed in partnership with Utrecht Manifest: Biennial for Social Design. The project explores the potential of the domestic sphere as a locus for creating 'the commons', a self-organised form of sharing both material and immaterial resources, by means of artistic, organisational and spatial design operations. 

Following on the rich history of feminist utopian and speculative fiction practices that conjured new relationships, languages and agencies for transgressing structural and invisible forces of subjugation, GDR's Futurist Writing School is organising a week-long workshop running within and alongside the Digest events.

Led by an editorial team consisting of writer, Marina Vishmidt, designers Abäke, and curators, Binna Choi and Maiko Tanaka, along with guest contributors including Merijn Oudenampsen, Quinsy Gario and Tea Hvala, five to seven further participants will collectively write stories imagining alternative forms of living and working organised and intensified in a daily regime. GDR Futurist Writing School will also produce a public reading to close the week-long Digest on February 26th.

The four major themes of the exhibition (Domestic Space, Work, Properties and Relations) will set the major tensions for that near future while the GDR exhibition works will be invoked in multiple ways from catalysts, prompts or props in a story, to historical objects, main characters and offhand references. The GDR library will also serve as immediate reference and resource throughout the week. To accommodate and support this collaborative intensive, Casco, one of three venues for the GDR exhibition, will be transformed into a futurist writing camp. The resulting texts of the school will form the backbone of the GDR exhibition catalogue to be published later this year.