We could be looking at an Honest-To-Gawd Strike Wave
More than 10,000 John Deere workers could be on strike by the end of the day.
An astounding 96% of 18,000 west coast Kaiser Permanente workers have voted to go on strike. They are joining 20,000 other Kaiser workers across the nation that have voted to strike.
About 60,000 TV and film production crew workers (IATSE) are likely to go on strike Monday.
In all, over 100,000 workers are getting ready to go on strike. I cannot recall unions being this active in my lifetime.
“This is the capitalist system that has driven us to the brink,” she added. “Inequality is just getting worse and worse. ... We think unions are the solution.”
...Labor groups point to a Gallup poll from September showing that Americans’ approval of unions is at a 60-year high. More than two-thirds of those surveyed — and 77 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 — voiced support for organized labor.
We are facing a legitimate rejection of the status quo by the entire working class. That's not the same thing as revolution, or class war, but it's something, and that a lot more than what we've seen for ages.
This is real.
You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.
...Another clue: Americans are also quitting their jobs at the highest rate on record. The Department of Labor reported on Tuesday that some 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9% of the workforce – up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting.All told, about 4 million American workers have been leaving their jobs every month since the spring....
Corporate America wants to frame this as a “labor shortage.” Wrong. What’s really going on is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a healthcare shortage.Unless these shortages are rectified, many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon. I say it’s about time.
And in middle of all of this, comes a coincidentally, fantastically timed call for a general strike. It's been months in the planning.
Newton's Third Law of Motion states, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." It appears that we are finally seeing a long-overdue reaction to this.
the middle 60% of American households by income now cumulatively hold less in assets than the top 1%. It's the latest data point in a trend of increasing wealth concentration for the top and stagnation for everyone else.
Comments
What, no
mention of SouthWest Airlines?
Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .
Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .
If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march
Y'know? I think I read about that...
...funny as hell to those who actually get it, although I do fret about the implications of Anonymous being this generation's W.I.T.C.H. (and the real disappointment is that I seem to be the only one so far who recognizes the lineage).
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
How many
Haymarket and Blair Mountain battles will be coming?
Judging by the militarized police responce to BLM, OWS, and Standing Rock pipeline protests, something evil this way comes.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
It could be different
Do you recall the great 1946 strike wave?
We think unions are the solution
This is good news. People are being pushed to the brink. Fight back!
Amtrak and SW Airlines are in there too.
Maybe Amazon and healthcare workers.
Throw some sand in the gears of commerce.
Lucky the Fed didn't fail funding payrolls at the same time?
Oh, Mr. Bidden, we have a problem here
question everything
Apparently
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lg4gGk53iY]
gjohnsit, the 73,000 IATSE workers are going to strike in a day or two.
We had some reliable and thorough research presented yesterday that differs. So I am eager to see how this goes.
UPDATE!!! the answer has already been posted. Nest post.
NYCVG
I found out about the discrepancy
.
The number of members of IATSE directly in negotiations is 40,000. But I saw a public statement from IATSE's Matt Loeb saying that all the members covered by the Area Standards agreements around the country would be asked to join in the strike. Ordinarily those contracts are negotiated after the Basic Agreement is completed.
Again, as strategy I do not think putting all your troops on strike at once is smart, but he is the Main Man and I am a raggedy ass renegade. I can testify to this one reality -- Running a strike is a very painful job. You are playing poker with people's ability to feed their families.
.
I led five strikes during the first half of my career. At job interviews two decades later, I would tell the story of a 120 day strike against Safeway in 1984. While trying to get a job working for one California union, after finishing my tale of guerrilla tactics and ultimate victory, the interviewer said, "Wow. That sounds like a fun strike to have worked."
No, it was not fun. It was great to win at the end but those four months were excruciating.
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Risk and conflict are in front of us now. Not fun, but even worse to pretend it is not necessary.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
First Starbucks, then Dollar General?
https://inthesetimes.com/article/dollar-general-workers-store-connecticu...
One store. 6 workers. DG is coming down hard, naturally. If it goes through, DG will probably close the store.
But...pre-Covid, I wouldn't have expected anything like this at all.
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
The Unknowable Factor Now
.
The unknowable factor now in the erstwhile "free" world is what people who do not pay any attention to the internet are thinking about all this. You cannot really trust even "honest" polling because there is no longer any reliable way to contact people to ask them their opinions. And polling is just as corrupt as everything else now.
I have represented low wage workers at several of my ticket punch stops around the labor movement. As a whole, they are just like everybody else in every way except cultural. They speak a different dialect of English from us college educated smarty pants, and they are for the most part ignorant of the conventions of formal logic -- unlike most of my peers who took and passed tests proving that they could be logical to get where they are, and then ignore logic for the rest of their lives.
Many people do not relate to a keyboard. It does not mean they are dumb. Certainly no dumber than anybody who believes the main stream media.
I believe the mass of people who are not engaged with the "world" as seen and heard on flat screens will hold the balance of power in the dispute to come over what kind of lives we want to lead.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.