I am dead serious: If you are a Walmart employee, at any level and in any store — like if you are a high school kid with a part time job stocking shelves — message me any question you have about unions. Like ask me “What’s a union” if you want. I will explain it to you.
I am a grievance chair for a white collar union whose workplace only unionized within the last five years and whose management fought as every step of the way, but in the end we fucking won. It can be done, and I can tell you how.
I like how it’s described as a union could “cripple American Capitalism” when more precisely it’s just that a union would be so powerful as to force WalMart (or any other company) to pay their workers like human beings. That’s not going to break Walmart. They’ll barely notice.
They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”.
But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.
Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.
Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.
But thousands of people, millions of people? Better chances.
Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.
Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.
So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.
Cause if you, an individual, complain, they just fire you and laugh about it. A union is a collection of hundreds up to MILLIONS of people, supported by lawyers, going against employers for you.
In Denmark, due to union negotiations & refusal to work for slave wages, the McDonald’s basic pay comes out to about $20 US / Hour. The big mac there costs about 60 cents more.
In ASL and SSL, this is the gesture for "Inshallah," which means means "God willing"; it's used to express hope that a specific future event will come to pass.
In a few hours, a temporary ceasefire or "humanitarian pause" is going to start
Shortly after posting this, the "pause" began—and the IOF immediately broke it by opening fire on Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza.
A true, permanent ceasefire is one of the most urgent demands, but WHEN a ceasefire is declared, nobody gets to pat themselves on the back.
And end to the violence can't mean a return to business as usual, where the occupation and apartheid continue and Palestinians are still getting displaced on their own land.
israel must be abolished. They, the US, Canada, the EU, must be made to pay reparations.
Inshallah, we will not stop at a ceasefire
Inshallah, we will see complete liberation for Palestine
🇵🇸 Things you can do below 🇵🇸
🍉 SHARE posts from Palestinians, especially journalists on the ground (copy link on IG works just as well as sharing?). They're literally dying for that footage 🙃 let's make sure it counts
🍉 DONATE an E-sim @connectinghumanity_ on IG
🍉 DONATE to @CareForGaza (Twitter; donation links should be on their profile too). A lot of donation drives are just... making a grab at clout but this one is legit; a number of Gazans confirm that the food/produce is getting to them. The organizer seems to be Palestinian and living there as well
🍉 BOYCOTT brands listed by @bdsnationalcommittee on IG
Official boycott targets: AXA, Puma, Carrefour, Siemens, Ahava, HP, Sodastream, any products from Israel
🍉 PRESSURE your governments & officials to call for a ceasefire and #InvokeGenocideConvention at the ICJ (rootsaction.org)
🍉 PROTEST. If there are mobilizations in your area, show up to be part of the count. No heroics—do what you feel safe doing and listen to the organizers.
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it was also important to me to include an Al-Qassam fighter in this, because they're often scapegoated by Western media, and also by well-meaning allies who say "but civilians are not Hamas"; there's this attempt to separate militant resistance from the process of liberation as a whole
Yeah, most civilians are not Hamas, but they don't denounce them either. Palestinians call them freedom fighters, protectors.
because the resistance is not a bunch of evil, violent outliers; they are as much victims of the occupation as the women, children, and non-combatants are. Most if not all of them were born under the occupation; a good percentage of them are also orphans.
I will never condemn boys who live along the coast but have never seen the sea.
please note that while progenitor, guardian, spawnpoint etc are all respected titles, they are more the equivalent of mother/father than an affectionate nickname you would scream through the house multiple times a day. gimme something we can use people
i was going to add something else to this but instead i got to thinking and i was like huh. what could you use.
in most languages the word for ‘mother’ usually starts with an M, because phonetically [m] is one of the easiest sounds for a newborn to make when they start babbling, and mothers tend to be the one most around the child. so in my mind that crosses M off the list, because it’s automatically associated with a feminine figure
similarly, ‘father’ tends to start with D, T, P, or B. (phonetically these sounds are very close together; [p, b] and [d, t] are all only different because of being voiced or unvoiced.) these are also phonetically easy letters and ones kids pick up on earlier.
now the hard sounds for kids are the following: [ɹ, d͡ʒ, tʃ, θ, ð] or in normal speak: the English R, the “j” or “dge” sound in “judge,” the “th” sound in “thigh” and the “th” sound in “the.” and we don’t want kids unable to say their parent’s name for years, so those are also off the list.
additionally, it’s easiest for young kids to just repeat the same sound twice rather than figuring out the tongue gymnastics of putting different sounds together, which is why kids will say Ma-Ma or Da-Da and not Ma-Mo or Da-Po. and we’ll want to stick with low back vowels like “ah” and avoid ones like the hard “i” or “ee.”
so what does that leave us? when we want a sound kids can learn easily and early but don’t want to just put a funky spin on “mama” or “dada”?
my suggestions: G, K, W, L. i personally lean towards W and L. they’re called liquids, since they’re the consonants that kind of aren’t consonants, and kids (and ESL learners) will tend to swap out the English R for a W or L until they can learn the R.
if i ever have a child, they’ll start calling me Wawa. then when they get older, they’ll call me Wala, or maybe even Wally.
and then, once they’re finally phonetically developed, they can call me by my true title as their nonbinary guardian for their 18+ years:
The most annoying thing with ADHD impulsiveness is when you finally have motivation to do something and then it turns out you can't.
Like, I just went "I'M GONNA MAKE SOME FUCKING MUFFINS" and I was preheating the oven and then WHOOPS I'm out of vegetable oil.
I can run to the store or have it delivered, but both of those are likely to take so long that by the time I get my veggie oil, I'll have lost the motivation to bake.
hey writers if you want to make a metaphor for racism, please maybe remember that racism is literally based on nothing. Africans weren’t enslaved en masse because the Robo-Musa threatened to destroy the world, they were enslaved because it was economically rewarding and politically convenient. If at any point your allegory for racism includes “so <oppressed group> did this major catastrophe and” then you have not only missed the point but you are literally reinforcing the ideas that racism have let racism self-perpetuate (that e.g. black people are naturally dangerous and violent and must be contained or begrudgingly accepted by the Nice White People)
Just a personal note on this, ‘cause I’ve had some folks ask me how orogenes in the Broken Earth trilogy can be an allegory for oppressed groups, given that orogenes actually are dangerous.
I was completely aware of the Unfortunate Implications of orogenes as black people/Jewish people/closeted queer people/neuroatypical people and having Special Powers. That was the point, actually. At the time I was early in THE FIFTH SEASON, I was watching Ferguson unfold, and listening to Darren Wilson’s bullshit about how Mike Brown seemed superhuman (or subhuman) to him. And the whole time I kept thinking, “So-the-fuck-what if he was a demon? He was still an unarmed 18 year old whom you shot 10 times while he was running away.” From that to stories of doctors assuming black people aren’t capable of feeling pain to the same degree as white people – I was just done with it. Fucking done.
Because it should not matter if we are big, or dark-skinned, or wearing “villain clothing” like hoodies, or whatever. All that shit’s just an excuse anyway; racist white people are scared of us when we’re small and light-skinned and wearing business suits. The problem isn’t us. The problem is chickenshit white people and the imaginary monsters they carry around inside them.
And over the course of the Broken Earth trilogy I poked at this notion. The society of the Stillness could at any point choose to accommodate orogenes in a way that is safe for all… but it chooses not to. Orogene parents have no trouble raising orogene kids. Orogenes in communities police each other the same way non-orogenes do – because at the end of the day, they’re all people. Even if some of those people are extraordinary, they can live together if there is respect.
Black people are extraordinary in so many ways. Not superhuman, obvs – but we aren’t white, which is what this society insists upon calling “normal.” We will never be white, and that’s fine. We will never be “ordinary” in the eyes of racists – and we shouldn’t have to pretend otherwise. We shouldn’t have to stoop if we’re naturally tall, or speak softly if we’re naturally deep-voiced, just so that small-minded people will be less afraid in our presence. Our children shouldn’t have to think and act as if they’re older than they are, just because white people misjudge their ages. The problem isn’t us. And a good, diverse society, one that actually accommodates and respects all of its members, should be able to handle both the ordinary and extraordinary with no trouble.
So: I agree with the OP; don’t reinforce racist notions in your worldbuilding. Or if you do, make sure you interrogate the fuck out of them, and make it clear that the problem is still racists, not race.
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