#worker's strike

[felinetotallyfine]

Labor unions support innocent American civilians, while they make it clear that they are explicitly against ICE.

America's largest labor movement says ICE is a danger to 'innocent working people'

The AFL-CIO, which represents some 15 million workers across the US, says ICE is a threat to workers as local unions plan an economic blacko

Finely good to see an organization that is on the American people's side. 🥰 There is also apparently a economic blackout and worker's strike on January 23rd in Minnesota.

[gemtales]

Challenging Humanity?

Created on December 23, 2024

By @gemtales

Excerpt Summary of Amazon Faces Strike as Workers Demand Labor Agreement | AP News

[jackoshadows]

When McDonalds Came to Denmark

Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

In these discussions, relatively little is said about how this all came to be. This is sad because it’s a good story and because the story provides a good window into why Nordic labor markets are the way they are. 

When McDonalds arrived in Denmark, the labor market was governed by a set of sectoral labor agreements that established the wages and conditions for all the workers in a given sector. Under the prevailing norms, McDonalds should have adhered to the hotel and restaurant union agreement. But they didn’t have to do so, legally speaking. The union agreement is not binding on sector employers in the same way that a contract is. You can’t sue a company for ignoring it. It is strictly “voluntary.”

McDonalds decided not to follow the union agreement and thus set up its own pay levels and work rules instead. This was a departure, not just from what Danish companies did, but even from what other similar foreign companies did. For example, Burger King, which is identical to McDonalds in all relevant respects, decided to follow the union agreement when it came to Denmark a few years earlier.

In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple McDonalds operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.

Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in it. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.

Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonalds folded pretty quickly and decided to start following the hotel and restaurant agreement in 1989. This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.

If we are ever going to get to Nordic levels of equality, it is really hard to imagine doing it without building a similarly powerful labor movement. You can certainly get some of the way there, such as by copying certain welfare programs, but without the unions, you’ll always be missing a key piece.

And while legal and policy reforms can help build the labor movement some, the power of organized labor is not ultimately rooted in the state, but rather in the ability to halt production and wreak havoc even when the state is aligned against it.

McDonalds doesn’t pay Danes high wages because of a statutory wage floor or even because the state stepped in to enforce a collective bargaining agreement. They pay high wages because back in the 1980s, Danish unions flipped a switch and turned the whole business off, and McDonalds doesn’t want to find out whether they would do it again.This is where we need to get to.

More at the link...

[womanistgrrrl]

Today, all over the country, workers are striking for Black lives.

The strikers demands are:

Justice for Black communities.

Elected officials and candidates at every level use their authority to rewrite and reimagine the rules so that Black communities can thrive.

Corporations take immediate action to dismantle racism, white supremacy and economic exploitation wherever it exists, including in our workplaces.

Every worker has the opportunity to form a union, no matter where they work.

Stay up to date on the #StrikeForBlackLives and the fight for racial and economic justice here.

[drakansa]

I work in a store that is half Union employees and next week they may go out on strike

Here are a few of my thoughts on it:

The workers are terrified. They do not want to go on strike. They make more than minimum wage, which is moderately higher in my state than the federal minimum, but many are still living paycheck to paycheck.

They do not know any more than an uninformed person on the street about this process. This decision is not being made by then and they are frightened.

Does that mean I'm against the strike? No.

I am a non union manager in a mostly unionized department. This means that when they leave I will be left, one of only two people in the department of sixty, trying to run every single thing myself.

They will call non Union workers from other departments. It will be my task to give them a crash course in doing a union workers job. The company is already posting for "temporary workers" to fill in during this potential strike. It will also be my job to give these scabs a bare minimum amount of training so we can stay in business.

The company leaders are saying we need to be extra friendly to customers because they will be coming to cross the picket line. They are saying we will get less business, but in the area our store is in I do not see how that's a possibility. There is no where else to shop.

I will be working 7 days a week, 12+ hour days, running every imaginable position in my section while also trying to make time to train new people and help people with a frighteningly small amount of training. They took a class that should be 24 hours long and shortened it to 4. It's going to be frightening.

The level of pressure on the store in general and me in particular is going to be unbelievable. I am not looking forward to it. If possible I hope it is avoided.

BUT

If this is what it takes to maintain decent living wages and fair treatment then so be it.

Strike.

The loses to the company will be unbelievable. The cost of my over time alone would break the store's labor budget, but adding on every single other managers' over time pay, the loss in sales, the mistakes in cash handling from lack of training, the costs of hiring and training so many new people all at once... Times the number of stores involved in the strike... It's astronomical. You have to consider that almost every one of the stores this company has on this edge of the country will be striking at the same time. I had a conference call with people from three districts getting informed on what we will do if this strike goes through. There were over a hundred people in on the call.

This is direct action of the workers and I hope this company and every one like it learns it's fucking lesson.

[soundoftheday]

Organize the working class to support the JBS meatpacking strike!

While the war in Iran and attacks on democratic rights at home show an American ruling class plumbing the depths of barbarism, a different a

[feeling-solar-punk]

so like, what if the 50+% if USAns that didn't support the aid of "Israel" decided to not pay their taxes? like I'm not a historian or scholar of this kind of thing but has that happened before?

like I can only imagine this would incur state violence through the IRS, but as the primary funding for these organisations and with it being a majority of the country, doesn't the legal system have very little it can do. And then, even if they do whatever they do, isn't it with dwindling funding.

but this is obviously not in the interest of the billionaires that rely on states violence to keep their workers in check and also bailouts, so they fund out of their companies or personal funds or whatever the case may be. however, this majority is also their workforce. so if this movement coincided with a workers' strike, the retaliation would be difficult, no? because first of all it's not as easy as a street protest where you unleash the hounds and brutalise people in the street.

there would need to be legal ramifications, but this is majority of people and this possibly includes the people that would investigate these things (tax workers).

idk has this happened. calling historians and leftist scholars and all that.

[hifi-walkman]

The only actual reasoning you need to support or not support the writers strike is that it isn't your fucking job, it's theirs, and they can strike if they want to, or not strike if they want to, and you don't get any say in it. So could you all respectfully shut the fuck up about it, from both sides, you are all screaming into an echo chamber anyways. This shit isn't Twitter, please don't try to make it Twitter.