#Republicans appear committed to politically dying on a number of hills that time has passed by. Their commitment to gutting voting rolls and restricting #votingRights, their obsession with women’s reproductive abilities, and their hatred of #regulations and #democracy in the workplace are increasingly seen by average American voters as out-of-touch and out-of-date.
Neil Bierbaum (a performance coach) on why the key answer to workers' travails is to revive the idea (practice) of the workplace union.
Like others (here perhaps more implicitly) he recognises that unions have historically presented (in JK Galbraith's term) a 'countervailing power' in the workplace & this has been (wilfully/purposefully) lost in the right-wing attack on unionisation.
Time to take a different (older) road back to unions!
The GMB is right - Amazon is out of control in its ongoing & extensive campaign to fight unionisation here & elsewhere.
When a firm (here Amazon or elsewhere such as in the gig economy), so fears unionisation, you know that whatever their claims around technology, really their business model is built on exploring & under-paying labour.
I wasn't aware of this. However, 9/11 and all the (increasing) extreme-weather events show that they are indispensable.
During the last decade or so, I have come to the conclusion that labor/trade unions are indispensable to counter robber-baron capitalism/#TechnoFeudalism. Tge right to self-organize is a key element of any democracy. Even if I were a brnign dictator, I wouldn't know where even to start reforming them. 🤔
as i have said before, if you are in #tech you mostly likely were in work environment that looked down on other workers & rejected #labor#unions as unnecessary because, well you don't need them because you make the most money as a worker.
but guess what: you're still a worker. you're still from the working class.
we need y'all high-earners organizing and demanding your #unemployment benefits.
THIS IS POLITICAL PRAXIS. students in campuses are in tents, you're at the unemployment office 🧵
"We've had our greatest pay increases under Joe Biden.
"We've negotiated some of the biggest contracts with the most generous settlements in decades. Our members are moving forward economically. Biden has created so many jobs."
there is a reason Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated in 1968.
1968 was a pivotal year for the whole world; for how USA's Civil Rights Movement and #antiwar movement against the Vietnam War came to a head in France's country-wide rebellion of Mai 1968.
a rebellion, btw, facilitated by #Labor#Unions strikes & wins.
#EU#Sweden#SocialDemocracy#Unions#ClassWar#ClassStruggle: "The Social Democratic–led trade unions organized 80 to 90 percent of the workers, the vast majority of whom voted Social Democrat. Large sections of the middle classes also supported the party’s policies. The broad Social Democratic movement was extraordinarily well organized. It was, to use [Antonio] Gramsci’s phrase, a party with a great capacity to produce and educate its intellectuals itself. The leadership was recruited mainly from the working class, and it soon acquired extensive experience in leading struggles and movements. [. . .]
But the conquests of the Swedish working class are also linked to waves of radicalization, recurrent periods of strikes, increased social struggles, and the emergence of new social movements and revitalization of existing ones. Virtually all important democratic and social reforms can be linked to such periods of intensified class struggle. The democratic reforms after World War I were a direct consequence of the massive hunger demonstrations initiated by working women, who were largely unorganized either politically or as laborers.
The social reforms initiated in the 1930s came about amid the threat of widespread strike movements, a surge in trade union organization, and women’s struggle for the right to work and for basic social security. The spectacular peak of the solidarity-based welfare state in the 1960s and ’70s coincided with the emergence of a series of new social movements with transformative ambitions, in which the women’s movement played a decisive role, and with a strong radicalization of the traditional labor movement, mainly expressed in a wave of spontaneous strikes.
Certainly, the Social Democratic Party has often played a central role in these processes."
Today, like many other West Australian teachers, I'm not going to work this morning.
It's interesting that our industrial action is represented in the media as about pay. We're not striking over salary - we're striking because the system is broken.
My son has had no Phys Ed teacher all year. He's had a procession of relief teachers which, for a special needs child, is extremely distressing. He attends an inner city public school, but staffing shortages are statewide.
Speaking of special needs students, I'd like to look after my own without having to skip lunch to ensure their needs are met.
I'd like the Education Department to give me a personal device so I can do my job
(more efficiently). If I want a laptop, I have to lease one.
I'd like an acknowledgement of how teaching has recently become more difficult and demanding, especially during #COVID19, when we kept schools open and tried to keep students safe.
I enforced the mask mandate far more often than a rank-and-file police officer. I've probably been threatened and assaulted more times than many police officers too. And the statewide mobile phone ban? Guess who enforces that every single day.
So many of my colleagues have left teaching: re-trained or resigned due to burnout and stress. Who suffers? The students.
It's not about the pay. We're tired, and we need support. We're underfunded and under-resourced. We need to improve conditions for students. We need to fix the system.
"After union membership peaked in the 1950s at 1/3 of the US workforce.. overall income inequality was close to its lowest level since its peak before the Great Depression, and was continuing to fall. Over the subsequent decades, union membership steadily declined, while income #inequality began to steadily rise after a trough in the 1970s. In 2022, union membership plateaued at 10%, while the top 1% received almost 20% of total income" https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions-and-the-us-economy
— #economics#unions#useconomy
The UAW’s historic win in Chattanooga shows the power of the sort of multi-racial coalition of workers that has terrified Southern aristocracy for centuries.
@lolgop #RedState govs try to discourage auto-workers from unionizing with the "threat" that if they do, automakers will just move/open plants in states where there are no #unions.
THAT is an argument for forming a #union IN all 50 states, NOT trying to talk workers into continuing to work for less money out of fear of losing their jobs.
“Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., passed a historic vote to join the United Auto Workers on Friday, becoming the first Southern auto factory to approve a union with an election since the 1940s.”
TIL that in the 1930s Communist organizers and local farmers #unions in rural #Alabama hid their weekly meetings from #police by calling them “Bible meetings” and recorded meeting minutes by underling relevant words and phrases in a Bible #history#labor