Okay, okay, I can’t stand it anymore. Rant incoming. Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your fucking chains.
I don’t care what sort of job you have. You – yes, you. Reading this. Us happy few, us band of brothers still trying to reach each other in this cursed and dying space. You, dear reader, you need a fucking union. Unless you are self-employed, find out if you have a union.
How do you know whether your job has a union? Well, there’s a couple places to look. First, ask your H.R. department if your job has one. Second, ask a coworker. Third: dol.gov or: unionfacts.com/cuf/ Or, y'know, use a seach engine.
(Yes, this is U.S.-oriented, I don’t know a damn thing about other countries and their labor stuff.) Why on earth do you need a union? BECAUSE COMPANIES ARE ENTITIES DESIGN TO EXTRACT LABOR FROM YOUR BODY AND GIVE THE PROCEEDS TO SHAREHOLDERS.
(Yes, this is U.S.-oriented, I don’t know a damn thing about other countries and their labor stuff.) Why on earth do you need a union? BECAUSE COMPANIES ARE ENTITIES DESIGN TO EXTRACT LABOR FROM YOUR BODY AND GIVE THE PROCEEDS TO SHAREHOLDERS.
You, you wreck your body and your life and pour yourself into a job and distilled money is squeezed out the other end into the hungry maws of shareholders and owners.
Corporate profit is at a level well beyond what we have ever seen, and it’s expected to keep growingmarketwatch.com
“The fact is that in the 1980s and beyond, public companies began embracing a very different idea as to the purpose of a firm: the idea that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value.”
How To Fix Stagnant Wages: Dump The World’s Dumbest Ideaforbes.com
Workers are EXPENDABLE COMMODITIES to companies. This has accelerated over the course of my lifetime and it is still going, a graphed j-curve straight into hell.
You need a union because you can be replaced. All of us, we can all be replaced. If we die or are disabled or get burned out or suffer moral injury or just quit, if we just fucking quit, there are scads of others of us who are desperate for that job. Yes, even the shitty jobs.
It’s only when all the nurses, all the pilots, all the teachers, all the cafeteria workers – it’s only when all of a given pool of people in a region qualified to do a particular task all quit working TOGETHER, AT THE SAME TIME, that we can get companies to listen to us.
How do we stop the slow removal of young people, queers, women, BIPOC, disabled folks from really good jobs? (Not that they are FIRED, no, but, you know, they are just not a good fit for the company, right, the company wishes they would stop being so needy all the time, right?)
We stop that trend (tech, gaming, comics, journalism, I am fucking looking at YOU) by UNIONIZING. We stop that by saying that we, the workers, will collectively protect EACH OTHER.
How do we stop the firings of service workers on pretexts because the workers wanted to unionize? BY FUCKING UNIONIZING. Unions bargin for rules that protect workers, and then when those rules are violated the UNION fights for you.
I can’t I can’t – I just cannot EVEN with how important this is. Every shitty job you’ve had where your manager treated you unfairly? You needed a union rep to report that manager to.
Every time you were let go because you got sick or just were pregnant, just had a damn kid, well, a union makes rules that allow you to have sick days, that protect you from being fired when you develop a chronic illness. (Or just have a kid, for chrissake.)
I just, I just, I just want you to know that you don’t have to be alone. You are NOT alone. Management wants us all to be alone, to fight with each other for literal scraps, to fight each other over small differences. And the divisions they sow have worked for generations.The Silent Generation was the last truly strong unionized generation. Boomers and GenX, well, we did not defend our unions. And, well, Reagan broke the unions in 1981. He fired all the striking air traffic controllers and hired in folks, largely from the military, to work.
And the lesson folks learned was to play nice with management or else they might fire everyone and ask the government might swoop in and replace the workers. The P.R. trick was almost worse, though. Strikes in the 70s and 80s were all reported on as “stubborn workers refuse reasonable requests at jobs, continue to make your life a hell.” And that is ALREADY what is happening with the strikes and labor actions today.
If we are mad and scared because of the strike, if we are scared of what happens to us without food, without healthcare, without medications, if we get mad because we are scared, it’s all to easy to get mad at the people we see in the news, the folks on the picket lines.
Don’t fucking fall for it, I beg of you. Do Not Get Mad At Strikers. Get mad at the corporations. Get mad at the rail companies who won’t give a SINGLE paid sick day. Get mad at health care corporations who refuse to staff hospitals safely. Get mad at universities that won’t compensate their employees with a wage they can live on. Get mad at companies.
Unions, workers, they are not arguing for unreasonable perks. They are BEGGING to be treated as human beings, with human needs and limitations. The packages you order are delivered by human beings who piss in jars and die of heat stroke, because a corporation demands it.
When one party is asking for be allowed to recover from covid and the other party inists that you work until you literally die at your job, it’s not a negotiation. It’s extortion, it’s brutality, it’s hostage-taking.
So join your fucking union. If you don’t have a union, form a fucking union.
If another set of workers unionize, support them.
When unionized workers engage in workplace actions, get mad at the companies that refuse to terms of basic human decency. Do not cross picket lines, not even virtually, if you can possibly avoid it. (I know this gets complicated.)
“Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite, Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might? Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight? For the union makes us strong.”
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