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Justice for Refat! The Uprising of Bulgarian Migrant Workers in Duisburg-Marxloh
The Uprising of Bulgarian Migrant Workers in Duisburg-Marxloh In the last five decades the economy of the Ruhr region in West Germany had undergone massive restructuring, from a hub of coal and steel production to a lower-productivity, lower-margin service sector employment site. Rounds of cost-cutting strategies and excess capacity restructuring in steel production have resulted in thousands of job losses, as well as in the neoliberalisation of employment relations and the mass spread of temp work and other flexible contract arrangements. These changes had been paralleled by the mass exodus of the native workforce and the liberalisation of EU-ropean migration policies, substituting former ‘gastarbeiter’ cohorts with re-newed flows of low-cost…
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Warum starb Refat Süleyman?
Konzerne wie Thyssenkrupp heuern Leiharbeiter an, um massiv Kosten zu sparen. Lohnraub, die Missachtung von Sicherheitsbestimmungen und katastrophale Arbeitsunfälle sind die drastische Konsequenz dieser Strategie. Warum der tragische Tod des Leiharbeiters Refat Süleyman kein Einzelfall ist. Еs ist spätnachmittags am Freitag, den 14. Oktober: Eine Gruppe von Menschen versammelt sich um einen kleinen Kaffeetisch in einer Wohnung im Zentrum von Duisburg-Bruckhausen. Am Abend reicht der Berg an Schuhen, der sich vor dem Eingang der Wohnung anhäuft, bis zur Holztreppe, weil immer mehr unangemeldete Besucherinnen und Besucher eintreffen. Alle stellen die gleiche Frage: »Wo bleibt Refat?« Vor einigen Stunden, am selben Tag, war der 26-jährige Refat Süleyman, ein bulgarischer Leiharbeiter türkischer…
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Social Mobilization in the Absence of Infrastructure and Services on the Urban Margins: Toward “Societal Infrastructures”
Author: Philipp Lottholz Philipp Lottholz is a postdoctoral fellow at the DFG Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 “Dynamics of Security” and the Institute for Sociology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. His main interests are peacebuilding, security and social mobilization practices, and their implications for statebuilding and social ordering in societies across Central Asia, Eastern Europe and beyond. Further working areas include cooperation between academia and practitioners; researcher safety; and the relevance of post- and decolonial theory in the post-Socialist space. How do communities deal with the decay, failure or complete absence of infrastructure? In the fourth decade after the collapse of the Soviet and other Socialist states, this question is of…
