Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

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https://www.vox.com/2019/4/22/18511066/stop-shop-workers-uni...

This article is about a recent supermarket employee strike but it also makes the argument that there's a larger labor movement that's sweeping across America that started last year. Importantly the general public is overwhelmingly supportive of the labor unrest. This Uber shutdown furthers that argument.

So expect to hear about more worker stoppages, protests, walkouts, and strikes in the near future.

>The [positive response from the public for striking supermarket employees] echoes the support for public school teachers who launched major strikes across the country in 2018 to protest low pay. It also suggests the labor unrest, which swept across the US last year, is nowhere close to dying down

>Within 24 hours, the stoppage became the largest private sector strike in at least three years, showing that last year’s spike in work stoppages across the country was not an isolated phenomenon.

>A record number of US workers went on strike or stopped working in 2018 because of labor disputes with employers, according to data released in February by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A total of 485,000 employees were involved in major work stoppages last year — the highest number since 1986.

There is no reason for this not to happen.

US corporations have record revenues/profits, US markets have never been at higher highs...yet the gap between executive pay and common employee has never been greater, social mobility has never been lower, wages have been stagnant for workers for 30 years.

Unfortunately strikes are to little to late...look toward google who fired organizers of the Google worker walkout, the powers that be have to much power, don’t give a shit about legal rights/laws, and know they could replace anyone with unpaid interns if needed because well that’s the state of desperation already.

know they could replace anyone with unpaid interns if needed because well that’s the state of desperation already.

Is this true, given how low unemployment is? (With respect to Google engineers being in a different situation from supermarket workers, teachers, uber drivers, etc.)

I would think workers have more power now than ever in recent memory given low unemployment and the current administration's aversion to immigration. Where are these replacement workers coming from? I disagree that unpaid interns is tenable solution.

> the gap between executive pay and common employee has never been greater

This is by design. Meatpackers in America used to make the equivalent of $55/hour with benefits, putting the meatpacker, an otherwise unskilled worker who trained on the job, solidly in the middle class. Capitalists found this wage for unskilled labor to be too expensive and so they shamelessly used the rhetoric of both the Left (diversity!) and Right (free markets!) to their advantage, successfully lobbying to increase the supply of unskilled labor, increasing legal immigration limits and opposing measures that would limit illegal immigration.

To a lesser extent this has also happened with skilled labor via the H1-B visa program (among others) and attempts to raise the cap. Zuckerberg doesn't want a higher H1-B cap because he has a huge heart: he wants the increase to reduce his labor costs and thereby increase FB's operating margins.

> Importantly the general public is overwhelmingly supportive of the labor unrest.

I doubt this. And Uber's strike just pushes consumers to Lyft, so the consumer doesn't care that much of that case, the same way consumer doesnt care about paying public teachers more (their pay is disconnected from the consumer paying).

Most people are and always be reluctant to unions, because they represent a minority that is asking things from the majority.

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