So far this series has drawn from the experiences of migrant labor activists focusing their work in three main areas: trade unions, works councils, and worker centers. Of course, what is most interesting is not so much any one form or institution of organized labor but rather the ways in which different approaches can be combined to supplement each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s shortcomings. In part four of the series, we are going to continue looking at community-level organizing with an emphasis on addressing the needs of workers at their root causes.
Aju John is a lawyer, researcher, and activist who has been living in Berlin since 2019. His activities have included running Café Rummana at the Spore Initiative, hosting the Delivery Charge podcast, writing about the struggles faced by South Asian workers for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and coordinating the Migrant Worker and Student Canteen which provides free counseling, advice for job seekers, and (I refuse to omit the point) incredible food. Aju previously worked as a lawyer in India, and he has dedicated much of his time over the years to training and supporting labor activists.
Addressing the “full lives” of workers
I met with Aju at Café Rummana to talk about his efforts to support migrant workers in Berlin. “Supporting them with a small set of tools that would improve their capacity to make claims on their own behalf is one of the things that I’m focused on right now”, he says. “Whether it’s through providing immigration counseling, through providing German language lessons, through providing support with rental agreements—these are some of the things that we are focusing on right now.” Aju’s approach to organizing goes beyond the immediate subject of labor rights, emphasizing the social challenges which prevent migrants from fully participating in or benefiting from labor organizations and German labor rights.
For Aju, one of the biggest problems in Berlin at the moment is the fact that many migrant workers do not possess the resources to support themselves. “Of late, what we have been doing is paying special attention to the living conditions of workers and not necessarily the working conditions alone,” says Aju. “We look at what we can do in the arena of housing, what we can do in the arena of immigration rights, and what we can do in general to improve the life conditions of workers so that they are able to one day aspire towards self-organizing and demanding rights for themselves.”
Of course, like the worker centers discussed in part three of this series, Aju’s community-level work is not meant to replace formal labor organizations but to supplement it. “I believe it’s essential that German unions also pay attention to these things, see workers not simply as workers, but as people with full lives who have entered into rental contracts, who have entered into scam educational institutions, who are part of tenuous visa regimes,” notes Aju. Emphasizing the challenges migrant workers face outside of the workplace itself is not only a moral consideration, but a tactical necessity if organizing campaigns are to be effective. Migrant workers face a number of unique obstacles which hinder their ability to participate or take initiative in labor campaigns. “No one is going to be capable of organizing in those circumstances, and unions need to pay good attention to this problem”, says Aju.
On the subject of involving migrants in formal organizing, Aju questions whether the current makeup of staff in Germany’s trade unions adequately represents the diversity of the country’s working class. “If you look at low-wage work in Berlin, it is disproportionately migrant, composed of people from all around the world”, he says. One key element of representation is accessibility, and Berlin is composed of very diverse communities of workers who need to be accommodated if any kind of progress is to be made. “Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali—all these are languages of low-wage work in Berlin today,” says Aju, “and we need to ask if the unions, as currently constituted, are capable of addressing the needs of this multilingual working-class population.”
Of course, labor organizations have finite resources and translating materials into multiple languages can be a massive task. This leads many to insist on prioritizing English as a lingua franca, though Aju is quick to point out that the primary lingua franca of low-wage work in Berlin is not English, but German—at a learner’s level. “English is the language of the internationally mobile elite—it’s not the language of low-wage work in Berlin. It is English among very new migrants who have started coming in from the Commonwealth nations like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. That is one language that they use to communicate amongst each other,” Aju explains. However, “if you look at the generations of migrants who come from Arabic-speaking lands, or from Turkey, from Eastern Europe, from Southern America, English is not necessarily the language that gives them access to any of these things.”
Therefore, Aju insists that while translation services are of course beneficial, a better way for labor organizations to increase accessibility for migrant workers would be to increase the number of German texts available in Leichte Sprache—a simplified form of German which caters to those who are still in the process of learning the language. “Even somebody who is just a year into the language should be able to understand some of the basic things if they are drafted and written properly,” he insists. This approach would more adequately take into account the incredible diversity which exists within Berlin’s working-class in a way that is more practical to implement.
Aju’s projects, such as the Migrant Worker and Student Canteen, offer free services to support migrants with their language skills, help them to find employment, and provide counseling on migration law. “I think it’s the immigration system that is holding the organized power of workers back”, says Aju. “I would say the majority of low-wage work in a city like Berlin is done by workers who are under a permanent threat of deportation.” This is why labor organizations must push not only for better labor rights, but for a reform of the immigration system if they wish to effectively defend the interests of their members—be they domestic or foreign-born.
“When that threat exists, there is no way that even the best organized working-class can be a match for capital,” Aju continues. “You cannot have a balanced negotiation between capital and organized labor when this threat of deportation hangs over your head.” Union density in Germany has been declining for decades, and migrant workers increasingly fill roles in key sectors of the economy. The capitalist class benefits from the ability to cheapen labor costs by hiring workers who do not possess full protections from the law or trade unions. Simultaneously, the suppression of wages and the “precaritization” of the economy creates a race to the bottom which has a negative impact on the living conditions of all workers—regardless of where they were born.
For Aju, the way to help the working-class as a whole is to address the disharmony between migrant worker visas and union membership benefits. “What’s happening in low-wage work in Berlin these days is that a large number of the workers do not have the permission to live in the country for longer than six months or a year,” he explains. “So, when you’re having this conversation with unions, the union is asking you to patiently continue to pay for six months and reap the benefits after that. This is leading to a lack of understanding about what unions are and what they can provide for migrants,” hindering the progress of the labor movement as a whole.
A global perspective
Aju explains that one of the first things that made an impression on him upon moving to Berlin was a wildcat strike (a strike initiated by rank-and-file workers but not endorsed or supported by the leadership of a union) by the Gorillas Workers Collective. “What I heard about Germany was that this is the home of formal work, where everyone is represented by unions, everyone has a contract, and strikes are supposed to be bargained upon between the employer and organized groups of workers,” says Aju. “I found it extremely interesting because I was thinking about informal work in India and the ways in which workers would organize in the Global South. I found reflections of what was happening in the Global South inside the heart of Germany.”
Workers immigrating to Germany from the Global South are often presented with few options aside from dubious and exploitative job contracts. “All these exploitative arrangements that they enter into […] are both the rope that you can use to pull yourself out of absolute hell, but also the rope in which you hang yourself,” Aju says. “Without this job you cannot survive and at the same time, this job is what is going to keep you from prospering in this city, in this country. This job will not give you the time to learn German. This job will not allow you to put down roots in the country. This job will not let you develop the professional networks that you need to get a better job. This job will keep you in those circumstances.”
For far too many, those circumstances amount to a twice-yearly trip to the Auslanderbehorde for a six-month visa extension that is only valid for the same kind of dead-end, low-paying work one was already engaged in. In other words, the precarity that has been imposed upon the workers within Global South countries is being increasingly recreated within the Global North through precarious, informal work arrangements. “You have this permanently temporary population which goes from one temporary visa to the next temporary visa without ever being able to develop roots in these countries,” says Aju. “They’re forced to make these concessions to both states and employers in the Global North, where they’re forced to develop this persona of being a politically dormant and compliant workforce.” The downward pressure on wages created by this labor arbitrage is a consequence of capitalism’s need for endless expansion: when profits from economic exploitation in the “peripheral” countries of the world begin to diminish, the system turns towards its own “core,” cannibalizing itself through austerity measures while directing public outrage towards migrant workers as a convenient scapegoat.
Aju and I discuss the global backdrop to this phenomenon, and the historical sources of precarity that are impacting all workers, but particularly migrants. “What countries are compelled to offer giant corporations in the Global North is low-wages and union busting. [Countries do this] in order to attract investment, and because of the economic conditions in which [low-wage workers] find themselves, they’re unable to say no to multinational corporations from the Global North,” says Aju. On top of the artificially cheapened labor of workers in the Global South, their economies are also compelled by Western-dominated international institutions, like the International Monetary Fund, to prioritize the needs of Global North economies through extractivism and other kinds of imperialist plundering. Trade arrangements develop which deter Global South countries from industrializing in ways which would benefit their own populations, preferencing the needs of transnational corporations that operate with the force and backing of those states in the Global North.
Aju explains that one of the chief consequences of colonialism has been the disparity between growing, highly educated populations of people in the Global South and the lack of an industrial base capable of providing them with economic opportunities sufficient to their needs. As a result of colonial exploitation and imposed underdevelopment, Aju notes that “countries of the Global South are not able to guarantee the quality of life that aspirational populations demand, and the educated population in the Global South is looking for better conditions elsewhere.” He adds that “once they go outside they bring with them debt, they bring with them the sunk cost of migration, and they are forced to make compromises with employers in the Global North and concede to work in terrible working conditions as well.”
I asked Aju about his thoughts on the relationship between domestic workers in Germany and their migrant peers, given the rise in anti-immigrant politics led by groups such as the AfD. “There is no political majority that exists in favor of low-wage migration,” he says, continuing “at the same time, you will see that the vast majority of low-wage work in Berlin is being done by migrants from outside the European Union.” Aju points to the contradictory reality that Germany is able to take advantage of migrants to complete its low-wage work while simultaneously rejecting them. Of course, by rejecting migrant workers as “others” and manufacturing unequal divisions within the working-class, reactionary political parties diminish the ability of even their own workers to struggle for a decent livelihood. In this way, they make inevitable precisely what they were trying to avoid: the suppression of wages, increased austerity, and a stagnant economy teetering on collapse—for all!
Aju insists that what is now lacking in the German labor movement is a long-term vision. “If you just look beyond the tip of your nose, you can see what’s coming in the future—even for German workers with long-term contracts—which is a fully depleted pension and health system with governments and employers teaming together to erode the welfare state,” he says, making a point to note that this welfare state had to be won by the struggles of previous generations of workers. “I wish that organized unions and workers in the core of the German economy would be able to look a few years ahead and see what is coming if the peripheral workers continue to remain outside of their solidaristic embrace,” he says. “Do not look at this group of precarious workers as a threat to the welfare state, but as an opportunity for the welfare state.”
Thanking Aju for his time, I ended the conversation by asking him about what has motivated him to dedicate so much of his time to the labor movement. “I would get calls and emails and texts every day,” he tells me. “Hundreds of people were approaching me for help on the one hand, and I felt completely useless to the formal part of the economy on the other hand. So I had all the time in the world to help people—and that was all the motivation I needed.”
