cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24998458
You can not put an end date on it that defeats the purpose
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
UAW is calling for all unions to align their contracts to end on May 1st 2028 and calling for a general strike to start that day. That gives us 3 years to get organized, set up local strike funds for our communities, and make sure we have representation at the negotiating table whether we're in unions or not.
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/general-strike-2028-unions-labor-movement/
How can we help?
Get organized with a progressive or socialist organization. DSA, PSL, or just you and some homes. If you're completely isolated, an org like DSA is good because they have a lot of "at large" members that aren't in formal chapters, but at large members have access to national resources too (not in day 1, its a political org, but DSA is good for at large membership). But the people who seem "the most organized" in your area, who have good politics and active membership, is the best org for you to join since these things can vary drastically from place to place.
From there, get involved in local labor organizing, your group might even have like a labor group that focuses on it.
If you live in a place where you can get a job that is a part of UAW Union, you can try to get it and "salt", which means adding radical militant labor organizers to existing stagnant or bureaucratic unions, and start mobilization campaigns.
A pretty easy thing that would be super helpful, would be to fundraise for materials to create "strike-ready" kits, basically 5 gal bucket and lid full of supplies for an extended period, since strikes are long, difficult, protracted affairs. People get hungry, they get cold and wet, etc., mutual aid has a very low barrier to entry. I'm not a mutual aidist, but its something you could start basically today and have a bunch ready by that time.
If you can, don't go alone, bring like minded people in or find like minded people. The best individual thing you can do is to educate yourself so when the time comes you can educate others. Read! Class Struggle Unionism is a classic, but there are probably books about UAW specifically. Another favorite of mine is "Teamster's Rebellion" if you can find it
Who the hell can afford to go one day without pay, let alone 10?
Start saving now, start learning how to fix things, grow food, make do with less.
A whole lot of people may not have any choice about going without pay for awhile, much less one day, the time to start preparing is now. I tell people as often as I can, especially my trans and bipoc friends; now is the time. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities, learn how to to grow food and repair things.
The police will not protect us, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety. Iran was a secular, liberal state until almost 1980 when they (mostly legitimately) elected an Islamist theocracy; it could happen here.
Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them.
This is a pretty intense topic to get involved with.
I dithered a little bit about getting a firearm. I still do not have one. I know how to use them, in a cursory kind of way.
Part of why I've held back on getting one is this: Imagine playing a board game for the first time, and if you lose, you're going to die. Or sitting down at a poker table to play for the first time in your life. How well are you going to play? Are you probably going to win? Also, the game only lasts for fifteen seconds.
Having a gun sounds like not a bad idea for what's coming up in this country. Having a gun and no experience at all in the types of situations you might get yourself into, if you have a gun, sounds almost worse than just not having one. People freak out, they fuck up, they take the wrong decisions. It's what naturally happens when you're playing an adversarial game for the first time in your life. After a while, you learn the game, and you start making generally good decisions a lot more of the time. But the first time...
I'm not saying having a gun is a bad idea. There are days when I think I'm being stupid for not having one. But also, you need to know what you're doing, and if you don't have some kind of military or other professional training, you're not going to know what you're doing, and you can walk yourself into situations there's no good way out of if you don't know what you're doing.
They would start killing you until moral improves
A strike that has a scheduled end date is a strike that's has scheduled its own failure. A ten day strike would achieve nothing except the suffering of it's participants.
Yes, the economy would grind to a halt, yes people would likely die, yes it would financially hurt the powerful people in charge.
But do you really think those powerful people will give a shit? They know after ten days the gravy train will resume, but only for them and not the people who lost their jobs, got arrested, were injured, etc. The rich and powerful can afford to be patient, meanwhile everyone who sacrificed for ten days is going to have to question whether they can survive doing it again.
No, we're way past the point where our society can afford another failed effort to affect change. We need a general strike that doesn't end until the government capitulates to the needs of the people. It's all or nothing, now. ☹️
A strike that has a scheduled end date is a strike that’s has scheduled its own failure.
A flex of power is a great way of demonstrating to both your own union members and your bosses/administrators. Proving that coworkers can and will dictate the terms of economic activity is an incredibly powerful statement that illustrates exactly who is in charge of the workfloor.
No, we’re way past the point where our society can afford another failed effort to affect change.
People are going to try things and those things are going to continue to have a mixed chance at success. The idea that an ill-defined indefinite general strike will work better than a highly coordinated short-term shutdown is predicated on a number of your own personal theories about how oligarchs will respond and how long union organizers can effectively maintain a work outage.
You're rolling dice just like the rest of us. Nothing you're suggesting guarantees a particular outcome.
The strike is not the end of the exercise, oh, no! To pull off a huge action like this will take coordination, spreading awareness, cultivating relationships of trust, establishing lines of communication, laying the foundations by organizing, and getting people primed for action. That's what we lack now.
Right now, we could all just choose to disobey together, and there are so many of us that they couldn't stop us. But it would take a lot of people; only a few here and there taking action would simply leave those few destitute or in jail.
A general strike is not the goal, it's the announcement that we're organized. That awareness, those relationships, that trust, doesn't just have to go away...
We need a general strike that doesn’t end until the government capitulates to the needs of the people
Many cannot afford to strike but that is the way the system was set however we only need 10% participation to send a powerful message - any more is icing on the cake. Those who cannot fully can participate by cutting back 10% or more. Everyone should be able to cut back to some extent. Yet, expect the corporate controlled MSM to NOT report on the effects or participation of a general strike. Look for your news on independent sites, some reliable foreign sources and the Fediverse only.
Reddit protest be like. Huffman literally said 'You only protest for 2 days? Sure, we'll wait'.
That's not always accurate. A strike where people sit at home and watch TV might have this result, but a 10 days of people on the streets talking and hyping each other up, can easily grow revolutionary, especially if during those 10-days people use direct action for their mutual aid to cover their needs
1-day strikes and random marches on the other hand are practically useless
What about canceling a specific day of work every week? That would spread out the pain on both sides, but in a way that makes it less painful for workers because some may have sick days they can use. If literally nobody shows up on every Friday it sucks pretty bad for the bosses, even if they show up all the other days.
It is both.
Voting is a good system. The alternative is "let's just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there's a disagreement."
The problem is that we delegated the process of informing people what to vote for, to absolutely rotten media. And we delegated the process of figuring out the details of putting some candidates forward, to an absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don't give a shit about the people.
We need to fix those things. And yes, getting organized labor to fight back whenever they are fucking us, which is pretty much every day, to add some bite to all those polite ballots we're sending in, sounds great.
But voting, as a concept, is good. It doesn't have to be either or. It can be a 10-day general strike, and also voting to get rid of the guy who wants to nuke Iceland, and also organizing our politics better, for some candidates that aren't so shit as these ones generally are. Each one will help the others get done.
There is also the issue of massive-scale gerrymandering, party politics preventing candidates we want from being given a chance to run in general elections, the electoral college, and widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement as well-documented by Greg Palast and others. If they actually counted our votes we might get a more representative democracy, but what we have now is not that.
Yeah. That's why I agree with the general strike. Like I say, we've delegated the details of wielding political details to a whole class of exclusively-political people, and they've been rigging the game and keeping all the power for themselves. Fuck that.
4 Boxes of liberty, use in order.
Maybe some amendment after the first ome need to be considered 👀
I think you're opening up a false dichotomy here: it's not about voting vs. the law of the fist. It's about how the democratic systems are set up to keep the powerful in power.
The system is set up to promote those "absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don't give a shit about the people". And "fixing" the media to not promote those things is like trying to teach a cat not to hunt mice.
There are more ways to have a democratic stucture of politics than "we decide onsour ruler every four years".
“We need both” “It doesn’t have to be either or”
“I think you’re opening up a false dichotomy here”
Voting is a good system. The alternative is "let's just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there's a disagreement."
Show me how this is not a dichotomy. Why are these the only options?
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy. I am very clearly discussing why both voting and also using other means of people power, together, is the way.
What do you think is my main argument? If not that both together are the way?
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy
Yes it is. It presupposes that parliamentary democracy is the only way of democratic governance.
You are literally demonstrating the effect of the media landscape that you're criticizing: you're acting like there's no other democratic alternative than a parliamentary democracy.
Tell you what: Tell me more about the other democratic alternatives you say I am missing. I didn’t think that my examples at all presupposed the existence of a parliamentary democracy, but if I know more about your counterexamples, I can better make sense of whether or not I overlooked them.
While I don't have a perfect plan on democratic governance (sorry, I'm just a small, little boi), these examples came to mind right away:
What I also want to adress is that the things you're criticizing in your first comment are structural problems of a liberal democracy. That means that they don't stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up. Members of parliament have a free mandate and are under no direct obligation to enact policies on which they ran in elections. Yes, they can not get elected the next term, but this can also be an incentive to "get away with it" by e.g. manipulating the media landscape, lying, covering your tracks, searching for excuses, etc.
Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you're voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That's why I don't (or at least not completely) agree with "it needs both". A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.
So I think I said "voting," and you heard "the current system of parliamentary democracy." I am all for changing the current structure of political establishment in the United States, because the one we've got sucks ass. I am simply saying that:
- The concept of having individual people tally up their opinions, and formalizing the idea that the sum of those tallies is what we all agree to do, is a good idea.
- Refusing to engage at all with the current system of liberal parliamentary democracy (in theory), in the United States, won't make it go away, and we need a strategic decision about what will best remove it and replace it with something better. We can't just use a panacea "if we don't vote then they won't be able to get away with it." They will. People not voting is completely fine with them. I definitely don't think voting is enough, in general but in particular in our current corrupt-to-the-brink-of-disaster implementation of a theoretically voting-based system.
That means that they don’t stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up.
This, in particular, I agree with a lot. I would actually expand it a little bit further, and say that the nature of power and manipulation in human beings naturally will tend to try to abuse any "system" that is set up for deciding who gets to take charge. I think the history of large-scale human state power is that however good it sounds at the beginning, people who want to abuse it will inevitably be able to figure out how to bend it to their own ends and corrupt it. Which I guess is the whole point behind anarchism+friends wanting to do away with state power at all.
Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you’re voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That’s why I don’t (or at least not completely) agree with “it needs both”. A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.
They sure voted the system away in Germany, in 1932. This part of your statement seems to have some very obvious counterexamples. Plenty of places in the world have had a parliamentary system that then went away, and in quite a lot of cases, voting was involved in how that got done. It wasn't enough. It was involved.
I think the important questions are firstly, how would we go about changing the parliamentary system in the US? How has it worked when people have tried that in other places in other times? And, when they did try it according to whatever strategies and principles, how did it work out? What happened next?
Bravo for spending your time arguing with a pedant, truly more patient than I would've been. People like that make lemmy insufferable. They're just looking to score a point in a debate and will find any angle to do it. Productive discussion isn't as important as SLAMMING the "opponent" with a gotcha, it's exhausting.
It's interesting to me. I learned some things from the link about democratic confederalism. But yea, "exhausting" is a pretty good word for it over the long term, I often don't really engage with it. The whole pattern of "I'm going to tell you what YOU think, and what you said, and why the strawman is all wrong" is pretty difficult to interact with, and requires this incredibly tedious process of endlessly clarifying and repeating what it was that I actually said.
I have had it happen where after going through that process for some time, someone realizes that we're actually largely on the same team as far as some big issues, so maybe it is worthwhile. That's definitely a minority of the times, but it does happen.
The media will always exist and people will always base their decisions on the information they receive in the media. This is inevitable in any society with the degree of complexity we have today. It is just not possible to gather all the information ourselves about any but the most personal of topics. That is why free, unbiased, and independent media is an extremely important part of liberal electoral democracy. And for the greater part of the past two centuries, this is what we more or less had. Yes, major media outlets have always been somewhat controlled by the upper class (whether in the form of media companies or local media magnates), but until quite recently, most of them didn't care about using those outlets as propaganda pieces; they just cared about continuing to collect their subscription money, which is likely the best-case scenario for privately owned for-profit media. It is astonishing that this system lasted as long as it did.
There used to be a requirement of giving equal air time to opposing opinions - that was one of the earlier things Republicans successfully targeted. I've no idea how to make that work with the virtually unlimited possible sources available today.
That just opens you up to false balancing. See: the media landscape on climate change for the last 70 years.
And also only works when there are only two sides to represent to begin with, so it would reinforce the two party system
Electoral politics doesn't get the job done, but failing to attend to electoral politics can sure as shit make the job harder.
The question of "Who are we negotiating with" is all-important in every scenario except "Complete and total unconditional victory".
Failing to attend to electoral politics is also a great way to ensure that blood has to be spilled again to re-win battles that were already fought, as has been seen with many of those left of center sitting out elections for half a century, which just so happens to coincidence with decoupling of wages from productivity, increasing wealth inequality, and erosion of workers' rights.
If I thought people were consistent enough, I'd say that the founding of anti-electoralism was a right-wing, authoritarian conspiracy, but I don't think that's super likely.
The rich can wait it out longer than you
Not if their plumbing needs fixing
Scabs exist. And fascism, the original one in Italy, rose as an answer to the left wing.
You can draw your own conclusions from this.
Ok, let me rephrase, not if their plumbing needs fixing and a specific green-hatted plumber is taking the job.
Yeah, with all those general strikes we've had they must be really easy to organize!
This is what bothers me so much about the constant calls for general strikes on social media. They’re almost never paired with serious organization (ex: where are the strike funds to support people who otherwise can’t afford to miss paychecks?)
Not to mention a large chunk of the public won't agree with the idea to begin with. Especially the top 20-30% of income earners.
Additionally, emergency/medical personnel not working would mean people are directly dying as a result of it, creating easy negative PR against the movement.
Asking 180+ million people to coordinate on anything is a farce, and for something like a general strike it is an absolute fantasy.
Have you noticed they’re always paired with messages encouraging voter apathy and disparticipation ?
I mean, I have 5 kids who need to eat. I would absolutely participate, but I just can't afford it.
We’re in a country with very little organized labor compared to other countries in Europe or Latin America where strikes are common. Also cops here are highly militarized. Plus we are a massive country. Still, I think Americans need to consider a general strike and organize if need be. Is it easy? Obviously not. But I’ll happily take some optimism in these dark times.
You need to go vote too. Probably for Democrats, if you’re reading this here.
Actions speak louder than words