Y’all gonna unionize or what? It has to get old listening to edicts from the folks who filter up to the top.
Could also investigate a constructive dismissal class action in the interim if you can find someone willing to take it on.
Could also investigate a constructive dismissal class action in the interim if you can find someone willing to take it on.
Otherwise the deal will always change and the screws turned tighter, forever the boiled frog.
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-wor...
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-issues-d...
there is a reason they kept coming back to the US, and it wasn't just remote stuff.
If you ever saw Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" biopic (or know about Malcolm X through other channels), there is a scene where he talks about the existence, during US Slavery, of "field" and "house" slaves, who tended to live in those same places they worked. Here is a real X speech that is very similar to what is in the movie, though the movie script distills it better for modern ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo
Now if you take three groups at Amazon - warehouse workers, tech workers, and C-level executives, they all kinda slot into those roles very well, don't they? Again, not that we're slaves. But then, Jim Crow wasn't slavery either, right? Oppression comes in many flavours, some of them stronger, some of them weaker, but it has the same features, always, including the divide and conquer strategy. The axe's handle being recognizably wooden.
This is all very old stuff. Ancestral. Atavistic.
The problem runs deeper still. Even among the lowest working class, they have been fed on tidbits of heady turkish delight which says that if they do everything right, they can be one of the oppressor class. Like the midway lackey whose job is to walk around carrying a giant teddy bear that nobody will ever actually win, they are even given high-profile examples, lottery winners, pop stars from common backgrounds, tech "mafia" who live as monied dilletantes on megayachts, tipping their hats to Saudi princes and Russian gangsters.
In the end, the workers of tech are just well-kept poodles who will heel to their masters and be loyal to the point of abject moral failure, just like the house slave. Look how much better we are treated than him.
Fagedaboudit. If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles.
Basically, if you aren't an independent trades/craftsperson, you're being handled by the same corpus of institutional knowledge that kept ye olde plantation running smoothly. Less outright violence. Still there though.
https://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Col...
a good read through. Many, many facets of labor relations didn't change one iota from far before WWII. There's an elitism inherent in American culture that is just a right pain in the arse to shake off.
Take Ames dumping on Reagan with a grain of salt, but he does a fantastic job of extending the line of labor relations culture quite a ways back beyond merely WWII. Though I won't argue that things got very turbid around that time specifically because of the perceived existential threat the War created.
I still maintain, however, that no matter how unpopular labor movements were at the time, that they dug in was still an invaluable act of civic courage. It is at such times that resistance is most important, as the majority is all too eager to turn a blind eye to the suffering they have wrought.
Hubris.
Now maybe they'll figure out they've been the janitors all along. They thought they were changing the world. All they were doing is making a boatload of money for somebody else. Tale as old as time.
Socialism and Marxism were tried in 20-th century several times -- Russia, China, "Socialist Block" of East European countries under Soviet control, Cuba, etc. Somehow every attempt at creating a decent non-capitalist society quickly evolved in horrendous anti-utopia. I am genuinely interested in understanding why Marxism and Socialism never worked out as intended (might be with the exception of small North European countries)?
What part of this sounds like Socialism, exactly?
Sure technically most things are hybrids, but to act like what almost the entire world isn’t mainly capitalist is incorrect.
Also they are sort of binary. The means of production are in the hands of the workers in socialism and in the hands of the bourgeoisie in capitalism.
Has socialism been tried without American and western interference?
The Nordic countries aren’t socialist.
Have you read Marx? What do you find is the issue? I haven’t read too much myself but I don’t see why you think capitalism will keep working out the way it is now when we have never been at this point in history with technology and globalization with the continued western hegemony?
The Nordic countries have strong elements from socialism. It's the balance that's the best.
Cuba has seemingly fared really well since you pointed out the issue with the country being handicapped. Cuba has medicine to stop lung cancer I heard. Americans die every day from lung cancer.
As to whether it's been tried, I would say that the Socialism I'm referring to was implemented quite successfully in the United States in the 30s, and its benefits persisted into approximately the 70s, at which point the cohort which remembered why The New Deal happened had aged out and their children started dismantling all the apparatus in a fever dream of capitalist ideology, which they've been promising would produce a utopia, but which if you look out of any window in the USA, you will has done quite a good job of producing that same anti-utopia you referred to.
As I said, humans gonna human. Agent Elrond talked about this in The Matrix. His machine empire perspective was that we don't want to be happy. I think that chaos provides opportunities for opportunists, and there are those who know this and seek to create order, and there are those who know this and seek to create chaos, for exactly the reasons you might suspect. [edit: and then of course, there's the endless herds of prey who do not know this.]
If you read 1984, you know that "If there's hope, it's in the proles" is kind of a mantra that Winston repeats to himself throughout the story, and one which ultimately is replaced by a boot crushing a human face, forever.
At the same time, Orwell was a Socialist.
The 20th Century is a set of chapters in a story that runs back through the centuries, and that endless war that goes hot and cold and on and on is the real story there. To pin the blame for the dystopias of that time on the ideology that ruled over them is to miss the plot; I could as well say that free market economies are inherently dystopic based on the evidence outside your American doorway, and be just as wrong.
America struck the right balance for a while, and everyone benefitted, and then the corporate raiders took over, with Ronnie McRaygun as their exuberant figurehead. And they just keep hitting that corporate welfare pipe to keep the party going, but the hangover is coming, boyo, and it's either gonna go socialist or it's gonna go fascist and then socialist. Let's skip the unpleasant part this time.
Narrator in 2050: They didn't.
Socialism has worked as intended in many places. Look at the nordic countries (as others have mentioned). Features of socialism are good and we should implemented the best parts.
The Nordic countries aren’t socialist. They’re capitalism with some welfare.
I'm willing to explore the way we would do that on a practical level, but bottom line for me, if someone is sitting in a room somewhere doing nothing that has fuckall to do with my project, fuck them if they get any of the take. I don't care whose daddy their daddy got fucked with a broomstick at the mason lodge by.