cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59378754
The calls for a nationwide (US) shutdown this Friday (Jan 30) are growing louder
honestly where the fuck r the unions? we need them
They were captured decade ago, first by organized crime and then by the industries. Unions have never modernized for the digital age.
There has also been a huge, prolonged campaign of union busting specifically to weaken their power in these political scenarios
But that has been happening since unions first started, when they burned strikers and their families alive.
literally illegal in the US for unions to call for a general strike, its insane
It is and I wasn’t saying this in expectation of them calling for a strike right out of left field like this but unions have political weight and i haven’t seen any union leaders stepping up and speaking out in a meaningful way.
Unions are made of normal people and the normal US citizen pretends to be a millionaire thus doesn’t need to be in a union.
Also the ratio of people that want to be in a union to positions available in a union is like 1000:1
You can just join a union, they don’t have a wait list…
Tell that to all the people who’ve been on Union wait lists for years.
https://www.iww.org/membership/ It’s literally the easiest thing in the world to become a member. There’s strength in numbers, so please join.
How will this help me get off the waitlist and into a union job?
This will get you to be a union member and you will be able to bargain collectively.
The high paying jobs will come once enough people are organized in your industry. You can’t have it the other way around.
In my area the only union jobs are government employees and a few contractors that contract with the government. My wife has a union job but they’re almost impossible to get. I’ve never been able to land one.
I’m curious what made US companies that much more successful at destroying unions than the companies in my home, Denmark. It’s not like companies weren’t trying their hardest to fight unions in the early 1900’s. People died at the strikes and protests.
In my area the only union jobs
what you do is join a union independently of your job
Good question. NLRB would be nice to have, too.
Even if the unions aren’t involved, this is a walkout/boycott, not a general strike.
There need to be actual demands before life returns to normal for the government to feel actual pressure.
So how did the general strike go?
Never even heard of it till now, so it probably didn’t work the way they wanted it to.
There is no union in my industry.
I am in the pot industry. None of those will help me.
AFL-CIO is the umbrella = every industry falls under it
It’s planned for one day which sounds less than useless. Only sustained strikes and protests are effective.
A one day general strike across the US would be an amazing achievement. If we can pull that off it’s a great place to start. Would a more sustained effort have to be planned? Probably, but being able to achieve this shows that the people are serious about this and the threat of a more sustained strike can be taken seriously.
This. Don’t forget how uncultured civil action is in the US. They literally replaced it by 2A. Buy a gun and ammo, and you never have to protest. A one day general strike would bring awareness to the OPTION of civil action to way more than we care to admit.
Exactly. We need to build these muscles and demonstrate to other would-be protesters that acting en masse is possible. Otherwise, everyone new to this just feels like they’re sticking their neck out.
If it has a set end date then it’s a party not a protest.
Finally it’s on a day I actually don’t have to be at work. I can do this one.
…do you not know how strikes work?
The reality for most people is that they can’t afford a strike. Rent, food, gas are all blockers. Criticizing those who can’t strike and aren’t scabs will only hurt your movement and cause people to just not want to help.
then join a union! they can supplement your pay when on strike.
I’m in a union (SEIU) and they are definitely not going to supplement my pay. Also- I do caregiving. I don’t know how it works to strike when my client would die if no one showed up. Work without clocking in? That seems counter productive…
medical fields usually have some sort of clause that prevents complete strike, like the postal service. you can still strike but in that case it’s without union authorisation.
here the metalworker’s union is paying striking workers at tesla 125% of their regular salary and have the funds to continue doing that for about 200 years.
The vast majority of Americans don’t have that option.
why not?
Because most places in the USA have atrocious worker protection laws. Even if you’re in a name brand, corporate job with thousands of people on board with unionizing, they can close your office or fire everyone with no repercussions.
Just look at Blizzard, Google, Starbucks, etc… They take a chainsaw to any union talk and have never been bothered with consequences. If you’re employed by a tiny, family owned business you have even less leverage. Your personal relationship to the owner is much more important to achieving your goals than paperwork solidarity with the 2 other employees.
but i mean… the entire reason unions work is because of a mandate from the masses. if they close an office the only reasonable counter-action is for every other office to unionise too.
Because of a lack of said unions
from what i hear there are unions everywhere in the us. why are they not doing anything?
It’s not that simple unfortunately. Sure there are national unions, but they’re very specific in the industries they operate it. They are long standing institutions with the influence and funding to boot, your local tenant union or random coffee shop “union” does not have the resources or influence to make any of that happen. I knew some people in FL who tried to unionize their coffee shop they worked for and the owners just straight up shut the business down instead of capitulating, they were all out of a job after that.
i mean national unions exist to strengthen the local chapters.
I guess I’m more nihilistic in my viewpoint. I’ve only seen small unions fail whether through inaction, ineptitude, or busting. In non multimillion dollar industries, they basically are impossible to form successfully. That shouldn’t mean forming them shouldn’t be attempted, it’s just the reality that I observed.
The reality for most people is if we went on strike we would be the only one at our job to do it and we would be reprimanded or fired.
We all live paycheck to paycheck and if we miss a day of work then we don’t get paid and we can’t pay our bills and we die.
All the very best to all of you who stand for what is right. You have my respect.
I dont really get this. I actually like my workplace and my manager is an awesome guy. I’m supposed to just not do my work? Idg what that helps.
We need to cause pain to politicians and billionaires. I already dont use popular social media or shop at Amazon or Walmart. I dont have streaming. Im doing more than 98% of Americans already.
What would be FAR better than this are tech literacy classes to ween the idiot public off the techno corps. Get a few thousand people to quit streaming, using Amazon, and shutting all their phones off or at least all using vpns and ad blockers would be a huge revenue hit to corporations.
I guess I can work tomorrow then play video games at home after. I dont see how this helps.
It works so well they made it illegal for unions to do this in most circumstances in the late 1940’s That is what you need to understand. Now after successfuly convincing a few generations unions are bad, no one understand the power we all have if we just sit down and stop working until they fix this mess.
Stopping the entire economy in its tracks is your only weapon against fascists (because no one wants to shoot them in that fat disgusting faces), but sure, liking your boss is more important…
But 1 day of me not getting my work done isnt going to do a thing. Its a LOT more effective if people stop buying shit altogether from any corporate store as long as they can.
This mentality is why your worker rights in the US are fucking attrocious.
Imo id respect someone more who set up local groups to start learning more about tech literacy and opposing the techocracy, rather than just skipping work and sitting at home.
The reason our rights are shit is because people would rather live with that then be homeless. No one here is going to strike with you. It would take all of Amazon to strike to make a difference. I think something more direct, like congregating outside of every politicians house and making their lives hell, would be much more effective than a strike against my employer who is one of the best in the region.
This won’t actually do anything.
In order for a strike to be a strike, it need to be organized and it needs to achieve a specific goal. If there’s no demands then it’s not a strike, it’s a boycott or a walkout.
Currently there is no movement, just a national level reaction. A movement requires leadership, a significant level of coordination and mobilization, very specific set of demands and goals, and an underlying message/philosophy that is backed by the general public. We currently have non of this.
In order to get to the point of a national level general strike, there needs to be a series of much smaller strikes that do all of the above, and have those localized strikes merge with each other to eventually have the size to pull of a national strike.
You’re right. We should do nothing until a self-organizing, grassroots, independently funded organization gets enough signatures to get enough permits and consent to formally complain.
You didn’t have to write anything. Instead, you argued semantics. Then you argued that progress needs to be made on your terms. (Also what is the difference between a national reaction and movement if not just time and effort? Most movements are reactions). This is exactly how you counter-message and push people away from the concept of activism.
I do agree that effective long-term change likely comes through critical and organized methods. But that is not to dissuade anyone from participating in resistance or activism. Change is rarely graceful, and does not need to conform to anyone’s prescription.
You can’t go from 0 to a 100 and expect results. The national strike that the post is talking about is going to result in absolutely nothing. Barely anybody is going to participate if at all.
Why? Because most people aren’t even aware this is a thing, and to the small minority that is, they still won’t participate because they’re going to be the only people doing it. If one or two people from your workplace participate, they’re going to be penalized for not showing up. Same goes with boycotting or whatever else is planned.
My point is that there is currently no foundation to support such a strike. You can’t scale up if the people aren’t mobilized and onboard. How about instead of calling for a national strike, you work to convince your local unions to buy in? Two people participating at a workplace will do nothing, but if 70% of workers don’t show up at then that means something. It will send a message to the local community and might even make it to the local news. Then from there you coordinate the unions and other orgs (churches, schools, universities, nonprofits, etc) to organize a city wide strike, then a statewide strike, and then a regional strike, and if that succeeds then you can think about doing something on a national scale. However, trying to skip all the steps usually doesn’t result in real change, which is what’s going to happen here.
Yeah, this is armchair, if not just rationalization. Stay proud that it’d all have just worked had they just followed the steps like you told them.
I’m not giving steps, I’m merely stating a very basic fact. Movements need substance, that’s just reality. They need foundations to stand on to do anything meaningful. That’s the most basic of observations.
Like do you seriously think that the civil rights movement happened overnight because MLK decided one day to do a big march and everybody decided to randomly join? No the civil rights movement and all the other movements in history took decades of independent grassroots movements organizing, mobilizing, and coordinating with each other. That’s how they eventually consolidated to form unstoppable national political force.
You can be butthurt at what I said or deny it all you want, but reality isn’t going to change because what I said is a simple truth. If I was wrong then something would’ve happened today, but nothing did. January 30th is already over, and there was absolutely no impact or buzz surrounding this “strike”, not even on social media.
Nobody’s butthurt here. I’m saying your rhetoric carries water for fascists. And every time you say “it’s just facts”, you reinforce that in everyone’s mind. It’s not about winning an argument about how progress gets made, its pointing out how the way speak identifies our politics. Its ok, lots of people agree with you. And more people will be shot in the streets while you’ll be correct about how progress works.
Me: “These hollow performative stunts have no impact and resulted in zero results. We need to work establishing a real opposition with true roots to get actual results in the most effective way possible!”
You: “iS tHiS fAsCiSm?”
Like come on, you gotta be a troll. There’s no way anybody is dim enough to think a small collection of individuals posting random “national strike” pics on Reddit and Lemmy is going to actually produce anything substantial nationwide. It’s Jan 31st, we literally saw this fail because it wasn’t a real attempt to begin with. Nobody knew about it, nobody is backing it, nobody is leading it, there’s no goals, there’s organization, there’s no coordination, there’s literally nothing… and what do you know? Nobody fucking participated. How much further into tyranny do we have to slip before you mouthbreathers understand that you can’t virtue signal your way out of authoritarianism.
Let’s set aside the ridiculous bad faith restatement aside as just an emotional reaction.
Here are things that are occurring: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/ice-out-of-everywhere
This is 10 seconds of typing into a browser to attach to a single organization effort. Yet “nobody knew about it, nobody is backing it, nobody is leading it, etc.”. You’re objectively wrong. You’re willfully ignorant. You would know this if you even attempted to look. It’s the coldest its been and people are in the streets across the country. Get up, go outside, and find out. And repeating this the futility of it all is exactly how you support the current tyranny facing us.
You seem so frustrated that people are patting themselves on the back for sharing jpegs, yet you sit here doing significantly less than the bare minimum. You are working against it.
Currently there is no movement, just a national level reaction. A movement requires leadership, a significant level of coordination and mobilization, very specific set of demands and goals, and an underlying message/philosophy that is backed by the general public. We currently have non of this.
Which is why I’m so pissed at the democrats and not just the liberal right wing corpo ones but in particular AOC, Bernie and the other members of the progressive arm. They should be leading a general fucking strike.
And not just them but those adjacent to the party ie Jon Stewart, Colbert and Steph (and all the rest of the YouTube / social media sphere talking heads). Not only have they made incredibly lucrative careers attacking Trump, speaking truth to the insanity of the last ten years (because even under Biden it was always still about Trump), making it clear trunp is a clear and present danger to all.
I’m sick of their never ending jokes and serious moments.
A call to fucking action is required. The world is watching whilst you say your pretty, empty, words.
The time is now.
I realized years ago that the progressives in this country a complete joke. They constantly put their own careers ahead of the greater good, they talk big but their actions never match, when push comes to shove they cower, and the most infuriating thing is that they always choose to uphold the status quo.
If they were the real deal then they would’ve worked day and night to build a coalition to stop Trump in 2016, but they didn’t. They would’ve build a strong opposition during his first term and stopped him from passing anything, but they didn’t. They would’ve use their opportunity under Biden to prosecute Trump and his gang of criminals after Jan 6th, but they didn’t. They would’ve at least fielded real candidates to stop Trump from returning, but they didn’t. Now that Trump has been in office again and literally dismantling the country, they’re still not doing shit. I lost all faith in them. If change were to happen it has to come from the people.
Agreed.
The no shopping seems weird to me when I mostly go to local breweries or friend owned bars or small independent coffee shops where the owners and workers are leftists (all my usual third places). Supporting local helps my community. If this lasted longer and many people did this, then it would have a financial impact on these places. If they closed, some corpo owned bar/brewery/coffee could come in and just take their spot.
Can someone help me understand if protesting and hurting local is worth it?
Nice that you have downvotes but no one had anything to say to you.
I dont know personally but if i had to guess i would say it might be harmful to local businesses but thats the only way it can be harmful to the people it needs to be. How do you police which businesses are not corporate owned? Do we rely on good faith? Word of mouth?
Plus i am not sure a business that cant afford to do without a day of business is doing very well.
Expanding on this, smaller businesses are also customers for larger ones
It’s not nice that I have downvotes for asking a question I want to understand how hurting local businesses helps? Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong?
For my local businesses that I go to, I know the owners. Technically that’s still good faith to make sure they’re not actually owned by a mega conglomerate that has 51% invested in them, but still.
Even if your local shops are good, odds are their suppliers would be companies like Aramark.
Very true! It all funnels up. That helps me understand a little better. Thanks!
How about a general strike for our entire country’s system and the fact that we’re bought by Izrabaal… whatever man… yeah let’s strike
If we stop their influence a whole lot MORE will come of it besides stopping ICE
I am a nurse and work at a hospital. I can’t even ethically participate in this as abandoning the sick is against our moral code. Imagine if there was no staff at your ER after getting clubbed, beaten and gassed at your General Strike Day Protest nor no one there for Meemaw who is half demented and needing hip surgery. I respect the ideal of a General Strike but this the US and we all live on a budgeting razor edge that has gotten more and more sharp since the morons elected this asshole.
So sure, all you “non-essential” personnel stay home. We saw how useless your jobs were during COVID. After this day, your companies will see that too and well, you can easily participate in more of these without fear of losing the job you don’t have.
I would advise you look at past instances where general strikes were called, see what nurses did back then. And to be clear, i’m not saying i know the answer to that, just sayin that might be a good place for inspiration, whatever decision u make.
You should perhaps read up on how general strikes function before taking the time to write out that word salad. You are not inventing the wheel here, it has already been invented long ago, and tested and tried out many times.
There are such thing as medical personnel strikes. Typically, public sectors organize so-called “minimum services”, so they leave a minimum of people to stay in the hospitals / trains / buses for obvious reasons, and the rest go out to protest. A day with fewer nurses and doctors may be bad, but fascism is lethal too.
Hope you feel better soon!
His/She’s right perhaps best to just keep working while the government slowly turn into a Nazi state. No offense I have high respect to those in healthcare. Though I do notice God complex tends to shows up in that field. Perhaps the way you brought it up might be a bit too blunt.
Strike nurses are a thing ;)
Okay…
So sure, all you “non-essential” personnel stay home. We saw how useless your jobs were during COVID. After this day, your companies will see that too and well, you can easily participate in more of these without fear of losing the job you don’t have.
I respect the ideal of a General Strike
It really doesn’t seem like you do, to be fair.
Stfu.
I’m all for protesting in any way possible but a general strike in three days seems really ambitious. Most strikes take months to arrange since people will need to stock up on food and household items or they risk the strike ending before the strikers get their demands.
These kinds of strikes are intended to be short term, it’s a single day strike. It’s not about stopping work until demands are met, yet. It’s about proving to those in charge that there are enough people in agreement that the next step will be much more costly if things don’t change.
Sometimes they are smart enough to get the message, other times they either think they’re smarter because they are narcissistic or inherently will win because of money.
At this level though if you actually manage to coordinate an effective strike day, what you usually end up with is hundreds or thousands of smaller organizations that can’t survive and prolonged strike siding with the strikers and getting changes made, because the cockweasels at the top still rely on the smaller companies they stepped on to get there.
That’s how I see this as well. It’s a shot across the bow much like the one day strike in MN.
Many people in the US have no experience participating in this sort of thing. I hope that this is a wake up call for the citizenry as much as for the corporations and oligarchs running the country.
The problem with a “shot across the bow” is that to the enemy it can just look like you are missing and wasting ammo.
Yes, a warning shot does rely somewhat on the intelligence of the opponent. But that is their problem.
In this analogy, though, if you even get 10% participation in a one-day cessation of economic activity, that is something the companies and therefore the governments notice. It is not something they want to repeat, or get more popular participation. It is in fact better than a warning shot in that respect. It is an attack on the money.
I think you are ascribing a lot more importance to 10% than economists and capitalists do.
Nearly 60% of of day to day spending is by the top percentage of the wealthiest. I am trying to be a realist here. The bottom 60% of Americans make up about 20% of the spending, 10% participation would be about a 4% change in profit which recent Tariffs have been higher and more impactful.
It is not a good idea to keep purposefully missing while the enemy isn’t wasting their shots. Cause they are landing most of theirs.You’re talking about a boycott. A strike is people refusing to work
And yet most of the comments in here are talking about doctors appointments and going out for dinner. I am confusing it but it seems I’m not alone in that.
We are not in the right crowd to organize a strike, which would be better with actual business owners involved, but I understand we should get what we can.
Why is it so bad to take an honest look at what we are trying to accomplish and our methodology? I thought Lemmy liked science and actual data. I’m peer reviewing this so we can adjust the methodology and try to focus better.
I want to succeed I am just not gonna pretend we get there without effort.
As far as I understood it’s supposed to be a one day strike but repeating every friday which is a great way to build up the necessary momentum.
How much food do you need to eat in 24 hours that this is a concern for you?
That’s not the concern. A 24 hour strike isn’t a strike. That’s a protest. Most strike last for days or weeks because you want to get something out of the strike.
A general strike doesn’t last for weeks. A strike and a general striker different things.
Striking workers are trying to change business decision, but if everyone participates in a general strike it causes enough damage in a day that it’s effective. The threat is you’ll do it again if things don’t improve.
A general strike doesn’t last for weeks.
A Finnish general strike in 1956 lasted for 20 days.
In 1905 the strike lasted 7–9 days depending on the city, and the shortest one we’ve had was 6 days.
What’s the point? Anything you delay doing that day we will made up with spending in the future.
These strikes don’t really work. If you’re stocking up in anticipation then you’re not really striking because you still contributed a day earlier.
A better option would to just go local.
General strikes are illegal in the US. The people coordinating them could be arrested. Also, jobs can fire workers on the spot for participating in them, even if the workers are part of a union and the union want to participate. There are no protections for this. Not to mention, national guards have been sent in to shut down general strikes in the past. There’s a reason they never happen. The likelihood of one ever succeeding is highly unlikely considering the current situation. Doing it multiple days? You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck? Nobody wants to tell their kids they’re going to be homeless.
General strikes are illegal in the US.
It’s not illegal to strike on a date with other people. It’s illegal for unions to call for a “general strike” because it’s considered them calling a strike on behalf of other non-union employees for other businesses.
Also, jobs can fire workers on the spot for participating in them
Not always, (though yes, it would probably be likely for many people) since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right, or if they’re backed up by a union, they might have a contract that helps to prevent at-will firing without certain specific causes, excluding striking.
However, if enough people strike, it’s kind of hard to enforce coming into work via firings, as it’s similar to if an entire unionized company goes on strike. What are you gonna do? Fire every single worker and shut down for good the next day because the only person running every single operation is the remaining CEO?
even if the workers are part of a union and the union want to participate.
As long as the union doesn’t say “this is a general strike” and just says “we are striking on this date for better working conditions”, and that date happens to be the same day other unions are striking, it’s legal. There is no law preventing different unions from striking on the same dates, and it would take very long for any legal process to try and make that claim before the strike has already occurred.
national guards have been sent in to shut down general strikes in the past.
This is the most likely outcome in my opinion. However, it’s still kind of hard to actually enforce the end of a general strike. It’s one thing to arrest someone, or to stop them from doing a given thing, but it’s another to forcibly remove people from their homes and make them work no matter their condition or reason.
Essentially, I’m saying it’d be messy.
Doing it multiple days? You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck? Nobody wants to tell their kids they’re going to be homeless.
This is the biggest hurdle, though there is a degree to which it can be mitigated, at least for a little while. For example, there are a lot of people with backyard and community gardens, small businesses with stockpiles that are willing to support their community as we’ve seen with the current situation in Minnesota, not to mention that if the situation got bad enough you’d probably just see people stealing from their nearest billionaire-owned store because fuck it, why not screw them over more?
To clarify, I’m not like, disputing your actual overarching thesis here, or saying a general strike is easy or likely to succeed, I’m just saying it’s not entirely impossible :)
since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right
American workers live in such a different world. Not once in my 34 years on earth would it have occurred to me to go on sick leave or spend one of my holidays on strike. Absolutely insane.
By all means, people should try. Not saying people shouldn’t. The mountain to overcome fascism isn’t going to get any smaller as we dive deeper into it. And a strike wouldn’t even have to happen in every area or even every state. It just has to happen enough to shut stuff down across the US. I just worry that most things tend to start out small and grow with time. For all of the reasons I stated, this can’t start out small. It has to start loud and strong. If it starts out small, it will get crushed in a way that scares people away from trying again.
You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck? Nobody wants to tell their kids they’re going to be homeless.
People have to realize the alternative is having their kids growing up in a fascist regime, where they can be murdered on the streets without consequences simply because some “regime official” is having a bad day.
I am not saying it’s easy but it also won’t get any more easier when people don’t act now. In the end stage people trying to resist the regime will be insta killed or worse. Now you can still talk to like minded people and organize. Tell them you want to strike but are afraid of the consequences, maybe they will offer help.
General strikes are illegal
This is fucked up beyond belief. Strikes should be a right for every single worker
Apparently this just applies to unions and federal workers, though. At least as it was written in the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. But yeah, the fact that it’s illegal for unions to call for general strikes is indeed fucked up beyond belief. Unions are an essential part of organizing strikes.
You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck?
Yes, that’s why it takes months to organize a normal strike, let alone a general strike. A one day strike isn’t a stike, it’s a protest.
The difficult thing is people need to organize it outside of work. If management gets wind of that kind of stuff, they can fire and replace any workers they know are participating long before it actually happens.
That’s highly illegal if we’re going by the NLRA.
Now whether those companies get a wrist slap for firing people in today’s political climate? That’s a different question entirely but firing someone for striking or organizing a strike has been illegal for almost a century.
In a right to work state, they don’t need to give a reason. Any rules against firings are pretty much unenforceable, and the company is considered innocent unless proven guilty.
Right to work laws make it so workers in a union shop don’t need to join the union.
Are you thinking of at-will employment? It’s a common mixup.
While that’s true, every state except for Montana has at-will employment. Despite that, unions often negotiate contract requirements that effectively guarantee job security. But if you live in a right to work state, chances are there isn’t even an option to join a union at your job, giving you no means of collective bargaining.
They don’t need to give a reason but if a company fires someone who is organizing a strike and that person has been a decent employee then the labor board is going to side with the person, not the company since it’s obvious why they were fired. Amazon keeps getting in trouble for this exact thing. Which is why amazon et al are trying to get the NLRB dismantled.
Going homeless at the same time as many others opens the possibility to make communities helping each other out (food, protection, communication).
I know, it is wishful thinking, but building such communities in a peaceful way during a general strike with enough time is better than a sudden brutal civil war scenario, I think.
You won’t get food easy if you have to fear getting shot as soon as you leave your house and they can’t run companies efficiently only with AI and MAGA workers.
That is a very short amount of time to organize a nation.
It’s also ineffective in the short term as a strike, because the rich will just wait it out. One day of slightly lower productivity isn’t going to grind things to a halt. What makes a strike powerful is that it continues until grievances are remedied. A true strike takes months or even years to organize, and it takes a lot of unionized money to keep people from going broke during an extended strike. After all, the strikers need to be able to wait out the rich and powerful. Those union dues are largely to allow the union to pay striking workers.
However, with all of this being said, this kind of thing is good for normalizing strikes. America largely doesn’t strike. But if you can establish a new normal for protests, it makes the larger things much much easier to organize in the long term.
This is what I commented elsewhere. We dont even need organized strikes. We need organized tech classes to get the general public out of the hands of the technofacist oligarchy. The reason they have power is 98% of the population is addicted to x, fb, insta, and being spied on their google phones 24/7 for ad revenue and surveillance, and people are fucking stupid about technology. They have no idea the billionaire corporations glean off them from their ignorant use of their phones.
If people keep striking every Friday it will be noticed. Sure, it won’t be as impactful as striking every day, but it starts a good foundation to build on while having some immediate impact.
This sounds like a wildcat strike to me. Not perhaps the most effective means to an end, but important when there’s no other outlet. A good outcome may be establishing better unions. The mere threat of a strike should have capital shaking in their boots.
I wouldn’t expect many people in an actual union to take part in this because that _would _ be a wildcat strike.
In my experience with CWA it was like the ending of Animal Farm - could not see much difference between them and management. There are so many things that must happen before you would even hear the whispered hint of a strike.
I hear a lot about IWW. All hype?
Yeah, I guess they have to start somehow.
It doesn’t make sense to me, I honestly doubt retailers will even notice.
Everyone who does actually participate will just buy their stuff the day before or the day after.
An ongoing boycott of a specific vendor makes much more sense to me. Easier for everyone to do, and more impactful.
Read up. Last Friday was no purchases, this friday is no work and no purchases. This is not a short term thing (unless we decide to have a general strike with clear demands soon.
I am happy to hear it’s supposed to be a regular thing. This can lead to great momentum. Reminds me of fridays for future which became a huge worldwide movement (sadly disrupted and essentially killed by Covid).
Oops, I didn’t realize last Friday was a no purchase day. I only spent $5 at a secondhand store, so the spirit was still there.
I bet the second hand store owner used that $5 to go and buy a baseball bat to beat up puppies and seals. You’re a monster, I hope you know that.
Ysk, this isn’t a general strike. It’s a protest, at best.
It’s not a general strike if it doesn’t come from the Generél region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling absenteeism.
Obviously its both
A general strike is much longer.
Do you have a copy of the rule book by chance?
“The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country—and the first general wildcat strike in history—was May 1968 in France.[105] The prolonged strike involved eleven million workers for two weeks in a row,[105] and its impact was such that it almost caused the collapse of the de Gaulle government.”
This entire wiki article is a list of HUGE events in history that were affected by general strikes and what was involved in organizing and challenging them.
A one-day protest is fine, but it’s not a “general strike.”
With the amount of indoctrination that has happened in the US, it makes sense that most don’t know how to adequately protest or strike.
At this point in time, it finally appears people are slowly understanding protests as a means to signify discontent. However, the line remains blury as to what is a protest and what is a strike.
A general strike should leave a long lasting mark resulting from halting of the economy - but a single day will only reinforce the fact that strikes which are effectively just protests aren’t going to work.
I started watching network nightly news again after throwing it away for years and years, because I want to see what the average American who isn’t stuck online sees every night while cooking dinner for 3 screaming kids and having to juggle two jobs. NBC, ABC, even CBS.
It’s so bad. It’s dishearteningly bleak when you realize how much of the population catches blurbs and snippets of actual issues sandwiched between stories about weather and a local boy-scout who grew the biggest pumpkin, and of course the required nightly “true crime” story about a spouse who murdered their partner and had an affair.
I have nobody to scream at, nobody to shake. They didn’t even MENTION the strikes (protests) so far on any network, they have not shown the scale of the marches and the chaos on the streets of American cities. To say nothing of the neutral, blameless tone they use.
They only just barely started taking the people’s protests against ICE like an actual news story after Alex Pretti was murdered, because at a certain point, even the hand of the state can no longer dismiss or avoid actual reality.
This is because there are three forces of political capital in the country broadly. The strongest is the liberal masses, the majority. Farmed cattle used for the labor and attention spans and purchasing power. Middle-class America holds ALL the power because they have the most money and keep the system moving… as a result, they are manipulated and sedated the hardest.
The second force is nationalism. About 20% - 30% or so of the population are illiterate, rural or wannabe-rural grown toddlers screaming and waving guns and hating everything that moves, while worshipping the flag and kissing the king’s ass. Armed groups of nationalists have been the driving force of political capital for thousands of years, it’s no different now.
The last group is progressivism. Arguably the weakest, almost not worth mentioning it has so little power now, but is still technically on the list because we’re still here, still trying.
But it’s all shifting, as leftists start taking up arms and marching in larger and larger numbers, the networks and marketing companies have no choice but to notice it. This is because the liberal middle class is now noticing it, and when THEY shift, everything shifts.
To this end, I support continued protests and marches, even if they’re utterly pathetic by historical standards for moving systems.
General strikes aren’t things you can use your PTO for to get a three-day weekend. That’s like protesting a brand by buying their product and then destroying it.
