EXPLOITATION OF THE IMMIGRANT WORKER

There are nearly ten million immigrant workers in the Common Market and the authori. ties even patronizingly describe them as a 'tenth member-state'.

If they do form such a state, it is a submerged tenth, for immigrant labour is used throughout Europe for the dirtiest, most badly paid and most menial jobs.

The Common Market authorities prefer the immigrants to come as what are euphemistically referred to as 'migrant workers' rather than as 'settlement immigrants'-that way they don't bring their families and they are no charge on the social services.

In other words, immigrant labour, according to the neat theories of the Brussels bureaucrats, will form an internal colony of docile workers working long hours for low wages and costing next to nothing to the capitalist state.

This ideal has been avidly pursued by the EEC employers for years. From the industrial centres of West Germany, the monopolists send recruiters to the remote mountain villages of Turkish Anatolia, to the colonels' Greece and to the impoverished peasant populations of fascist Spain.

Their recruits are frequently induced to sign contracts committing them to work for a particular employer for a period of say, a year or even more, at a specified (low) wage. Even if they have no legal force, such contracts are a potent means of terrorizing workers who often do not speak the language of the country they are working in and have no idea of what rights they have.

Germany attracts by far the biggest immigration of all the EEC countries. Over 500,000 workers from Turkey, 470,000 Yugoslavs, 270,000 Greeks, nearly 200,000 Spaniards, have been driven by poverty, unemployment and economic necessity to leave their homelands and move to Germany for work.

These workers have no rights to speak of. Frequently they cannot speak German, are housed in special barracks, often under conditions which are extremely poor, and they have no right to organize. Foreign workers are allowed— though definitely not encouraged—-to join unions. But they cannot hold office in them.

Subjected to constant surveillance by a special department of the West German police force, the foreign workers (called 'guestworkers' by the German Press) can be hustled out of the country at a moment's notice without any right of appeal.

At the time of the Munich shoot-out, when Chancellor Willy Brandt's government wanted to curry favour with Israeli premier Mrs Golda Meir, Arab and Palestinian workers in Germany were systematically harassed, political activists were arrested and deported without formality and many were held by the police for questioning without even being allowed access to lawyers.

In France, another country which has a large intake of foreign labour--more than 1.2 million workers are immigrants, compared with Germany s total of over 2.3 million—the majority of foreign workers are equally without rights. The recent strike of immigrant workers at the key Renault plant in Paris demonstrated the dependence of French industry on immigrant labour.

But it also showed that, as in Germany, the official leaders of the workers' movement want as little as possible to do with these workers' problems. The Stalinist union leaders, who for years have tolerated rampant non-unionism among immigrants, began belatedly to talk about dealing with the situation facing them.

But their concern did not extend to fighting for the demands put forward by the workers at Renault, whose demands were not satisfied by the compromise eventually forced down their throats by the union chiefs. The strikeone of a number recently involving workers from outside France-lifted a corner of the hellish conditions under which these men live and work.

Many of them, are forced into bidonvilles (shanty towns) which fester on the outskirts of Paris, Lyons, Marseilles and other industrial towns. They are herded into the worst housing at high rents, hounded by the police and subject to racialist attacks.

In these shanty towns live workers from the former French colonies and those with the one-way special relationship which makes them the object of licensed plunder and gives their workers the 'right' to come to work for the west European monopolists.

And even this so-called right -which in practice conveys an almost total deprivation of other rights—is not automatic. There are horrible stories of the desperate stratagems used to bring men illegally from former French Africa, Mali, Senegal and the Arab countries of the Mediterranean, into the metropolis.

Earlier this month the French Press reported on three black Africans whose bodies were found in the snows of the Pyrenees: they died ot exposure after their guide had abandoned them on the mountain route of illegal entry into France. Others were found last year packed like sardines into the false bottom of a truck.

There is a similar traffic in immigrants to Britain who are barred from legal entry by the Tory government's racialist immigration laws. Once they have entered the country, these immigrants are caught in a trap. They must avoid contact with the authorities at all costs.

If they are detected they can ler

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