I keep seeing articles about the tech sector billionaires going mask off. I remember there being rumblings of a tech sector union. Also in the last 4 years there have been some ground gained for unions in the service sector too.
Wages are suppressed and with the looming tarrifs goods will be more expensive. Also anyone earning under 300k is going to see an increase in taxes with the proposed tax structure.
It seems around 30% of the population are really excited about Trump, 1% of that are funding efforts to support his platform. So what do the other 70% do? Do they strike?
It would look like monkeys flying out of millions of butts. Too many people are afraid of eviction, no dinner, taking a hit on their credit rating, etc.
There’s more revolutionary spirit in the average african child than in an average american. That’s their legacy now, history’s greatest pushovers.
I think it’s more sinister than that.
People with nothing can act recklessly because they have nothing to lose. People with more than enough can act recklessly because they’ll survive.
So they’ve let us have just enough to be scared of losing it, but not enough to be comfortable or have the capacity to cause problems.
It’s genius really.
I love a good portmanteau, but I’m sad this one exists.
A considerable amount of police brutality.
I wonder how they feel about the j6 release. If I were a cop I’d be just that little bit less confident that my coppiness would be worth providing.
The orange fuck will probably rope on national guard for extra measure, not because it’s needed, but because he would look stronger to his base
There is a decent push for unions to try and sync their contract negotiations to 2028 right now. https://socialistcall.com/2024/07/15/are-we-up-for-a-general-strike-in-2028/
We have laws prohibiting general strikes so we have to have work arounds to be fully effective.
For directly working class facing work Im in favor of people working, helping and serving each other but just refusing to do work related to taking payments. Maybe hand them food in the first window and have the next window just say closed on strike.
The largest tech sector union I know of is the Tech Workers Coalition that got a shout out last year at the DefCon keynote. Which I feel with the tech oligarchy and a fascist government working towards a public private partnership is more needed now then ever.
We could have already done this.
We all watched as the price of EVERYTHING went higher, but how many of us actually changed our daily habits?
We just kept doing what we do, but the paychecks didn’t last as long. We told those companies, “No matter how outrageous these prices get, WE WILL CONTINUE TO PAY!”
And so they kept testing that, by raising them more and more and we kept buying and paying.
When we finally noticed that things were out of hand, and we asked what had happened, those companies (from atop large cartoonish thrones of money) said that immigrants and trans people were to blame.
And 30% of us fucking believed it.
Who’s going to run out of food first?
The people with more money than God?
Or the people living paycheck to paycheck?They would just wait it out until we had no choice but to go back to work, and we’d have to agree to far worse terms than we have now.
We’d be better off just dragging the rich out of their homes to preheated barbecue grills.
A similiar proportion of companies are in the same ‘paycheck to paycheck’ boat. There’s tons of zombie companies. It’s the big 7 that prop everything up
A national general strike will bring corporations to their knees first. Of course they don’t have to worry about food. Are you stupid? They have to worry about the fincial ruin it would bring.
Losing a week of profit, two max, isn’t going to bankrupt a company, especially if they’re not paying out anything for labor during that time. If it does, maybe they should cut back on the avocado toast.
The place I work for had to shut down for 11 days after an ice storm a few years ago and they paid us our full wages the entire time, didn’t go under.Just-in-time supply chains mean that a day of lost work fucks things up for a week.
It’s not about bankrupting a single business. It’s about the delays in service and opportunity cost. Shutting down supply lines. Loss of major investments. We are talking about shutting down an entire country.
If they can shut down the government we can shut down our jobs and industries, how panicked would they be after a month? Pretty sure a lot of us can do a month or two of canned soup and ramen.
There’s a long history of strikes being very effective, less frequently in the US after 1947, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it or not going to be effective.
When there is nothing left for the poor to eat, they will eat the rich.
It would look beautiful
Probably like trump sending the Pinkertons and police in to crack heads where there was any public demonstration in front of workplaces.
Considering a majority of my coworkers are brainwashed into the MAGA cult, I’d lose my job if I was the only one striking lmao. I have a really good job and it’s hard to find another like the one I have now because I work in a very very small field. So I’m not personally interested in doing that. Sorry.
Strikes and related activities can come in all kinds of forms, there is no “main” kind except for what is resorted to the most. Which is good because it’s one of those “think smarter not harder” activities where wit helps more than brutality. Do you remember when the Catalonians went on strike against the government of Spain and formed a human circle around their desired independent territory? The reason we continue to talk about that today is precisely because it wasn’t just another “let’s go hit people with signs” type of thing. The Basques, another territory, are stereotyped as the opposite “extreme” than the Catalonians, and it’s not exactly a great look.
The first hurdle is getting over the fact that the US is huge and fragmented. Organizing a general strike so vast would be difficult, especially once you consider that any company, big or small, will have bootlickers, not just employers, that will actively work against you. Not a chance you could get more than 10% of the population on board. But, let’s say you get that far. Now you have the do everything “legally.”
Legally protesting is getting harder and harder to do. You have to strike in the right place, at the right time, in the right manner. Even then there’s a chance you get shut down with little ability for legal recourse without immense resources. Many protestors will likely end up in prison and many more will lose their jobs and probably homes. Trust me, the employers won’t care. There are thousands of applicants ready to take their place. But, if you can keep it going even after that, what happens next?
You might get a few “peace talks” that result in a 3-5% bump in wages, a stipend for childcare, and free coffee. Maybe some industries get a few small protections. There’s too much money from businesses flowing into Congress for anything more to happen.
And that’s that! You end up with wages that barely keep up with inflation, lots of people losing their jobs and homes, and most assuredly a more active and higher funded militarized police force than ever.
The days of American workers being able to make real change happen through striking are just gone.
10%
You just wrote off 35 million people.
Legality should not be a question. No way we are going to mind a system that is fucking us over at every corner.
The point isn’t some grand negotiation. It’s to hit them where it hurts. If you pull it off, you’ve already won. You just showed them 35 million people ready to act.
You’re delusional.
I hope you’re right.
Doesn’t matter. Just like with RCV or anything that actually threatens the oligarchy it gets shouted down before it can ever grow. You would think on a site like lemmy people might find solidarity with other working class people but end of the day it’s much more fun to trample someone elses garden bed then it is to go plant your own tree.
The USA going down the tubes wouldn’t affect the billionaire class one bit.
If they’re making less money, any less money, that will hurt their feelings really bad.
There have been billionaires with billions of units of a worthless currency before. No one remembers them. They starved like anyone else.
Billionaires are insulated from almost every consequence of their actions. But the almost is important.
Our current crop of billionaires have lost any awareness of the almost, and they hope we will too.
The new tech has given the 0.001% access to a banking system that will shield them form all consequences.
Unless you’re willing to burn everything down and go back to simple barter, the rich will float above any uproar.
I mean, fair point. But their super yacht still won’t be quite as nice as it could have been.
You’re getting downvoted but it’s probably true. They have so much money they could jump ship and just buy any other country. It seems like a lot of them are already planning for that in New Zealand.
That being said, I fully endorse giving them hell and taking back your country, even if they dip
There’s a funny thing going on in the USA. The rich are buying up vacation homes in Red states like Wyoming. The rich come in and f**k up the local economy/landscape and suddenly the capitalism loving natives have to deal with being outspent.
It looks even less feasible than it does in countries with a far greater social conscience than the USA ever had. Come on, get real. Even a hundred years ago in Europe, with mass unionization, with the de-facto religion of communism running riot, with millions of angry factory workers empowered by their role in a recent world war - even then, general strikes never came to anything. What are you guys reading - or smoking?
The only way to change things for the better - I mean to really change them, not to turn society upside down and end up worse off than when you started (c.f.: communism) - is slowly, incrementally, patiently, by persuading people, by getting involved in politics locally, by being the change you want to see. The rest is pipedreams and delusion. It’s too boring and “milquetoast” and “sell-out” and “bootlicking” (etc etc) for you guys but unfortunately history is very clear about this.
History forget about the revolutions that took place? History forget about the great depression? History forget about robber barrons?
Gtfo
Changing the system from the inside is one piece of the puzzle, that on it’s own can have limited effectiveness.
Protests and occupations, sometimes in the form of rowdy riots are an important factor of how Dutch people got their bike lanes. The 70s oil shock pushed the government to the goal, but they might have just stayed the course towards building cities for cars instead of people, if there were no protests.
You need a bit of both. Like protests groups disrupting the Davos meetings, and other young representatives participating in the same meetings.
Sure, nothing to disagree with there. Direct action as a spearhead to party politics and lobbying. Good cop, bad cop. I know the Dutch example well. Throughout history the Dutch have been the ultimate pragmatists. They became one of the world’s richest and most equal countries without ever needing to have a revolution or make war on the neighbors. Respect.
I was just pushing back against the (many) ignorant American wannabe revolutionaries on this forum who really think that rioting and assassinations and guillotines will somehow lead to the promised land of perfect equality, rather than make everything even worse than it already is.
