A friend of mine fell on hard times after his wife passed away. A master carpenter and cabinet maker, he fell into a deep depression (though he did not really recognize it at the time). It only took a couple of years before he lost his house and hit the economic tipping point where you become too poor to climb out of poverty.
But he's well known around town, and some people and organizations tried to give him some opportunities. One local housing group offered him nearly $40K and full benefits (along with a company-supplied truck) to take care of all their housing projects. But he turned that down because he would have had to join a union.
A few months later, he got a temporary gig at a local manufacturing plant. They liked his work enough that they offered him full-time with full benefits. But because he would have had to join the union, he quit instead.
I lost touch with him around that time because it became clear that he wasn't going to help himself or left himself be helped if doing so clashed with his Rightwing anti-union views. The last time I spoke to him, he was living in Section 8 housing and bitching about his layabout neighbors, and how unfair it was that he could only find part-time work at the gas station/minimart up the street.
J. Fucking Christ. If only someone had said to him, "Dude, unions are as much a part of capitalism as de-fense is a part of football. When they promise you an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, why shouldn't you be part of defining 'honest'?"
I was hearing my grandpa wax rhapsodic beside the firepit about his first job out of the USAF in the early 1950s. He was making cooler cabinets to store milk in houses. He claimed the wages were good & as a bonus all the crafters received a free gallon of milk. But, he goes on, the union came and ruined all that. My uncle, G's son-in-law, chips in "Why don't workers just act more like ants and everybody just does their job without any fuss & nobody steps out of line?" Not wanting to explain the structure of an ant hive to him or, really, the economic and emotional realities of human existence in a capitalist penal colony, I reply, "Right on, you mean like in Stalinist Russia?"
"In my darkest moments I fear a total reversion to Gilded Age wage-slavery as soon as the bastards think they can manage it..."
Already there. It's covered up by public assistance, Medicaid and easy availability of credit. We're already at a point - or more like were before the pandemic -- where ~25% of workers aren't making a living wage with the aforementioned "cheats". Kids graduate colleges with obscene levels of debt. We're already at a point where there's a huge percentage of workers that are debt serfs. Which is to say Feudalism 2.0 is already here. And the post-pandemic economy will be worse than the pre-pandemic one like post-2008 was worse than prior to that financial collapse.
"First up would be employers’ legal immunity from all liability for forcing their workers to return to their COVID-19 death traps..."
These Covid cases would be shitty litigation-wise. Much hard work for little pay off at best; likely losers though. I mean, proving exactly where one got it? Even hospital workers would have a tough time with meeting the burden of proof.
But the problem law drafting-wise is that Dems have been shitting on labor for so long they can't agree to the immunity provision even though Business has it as a practical matter.
"There’s a reason to be optimistic, though."
Uhh... I missed how dissatisfaction with the economy does anything for labor which would require a reversal of the extractive, exploitative economy we have had since the 1980s. I don't see that coming from Old Joe (or, if/when the time comes, Harris). Maybe mitigation, but you know, too little matter. The easy credit noted above is now established interests and the rule has been that established businesses cannot be deprived of a single penny. That's why the ACA could only be so good and it had to be an instrument for routing money to private insurers.
Sorry to be a little shit on the Friday of a big holiday weekend.
Anywhere people work for wages, you hear the usual bitching about how bad they’re treated by the bosses. But posit that things could be better if they only had a way to join together to insist on better conditions, pay and benefits, and one of the biggest gripers will turn around and say, “Oh, you mean a ‘union,’ Mr. Communist?”
This holds true for every job I’ve ever held, especially among physicians.
There was a nice cartoon where the manager says to his employees "I want us to work as a team". And then the employees hold up a union sign, and he says "No, not like that."
I don't find this at all unlikely, but my experience is of trying to convince people it's worth the risk. They're worried they'll lose their jobs, they don't understand that there are protections in place, and they worry they'll get in legal trouble, which may be a problem in mixed-legal-status families. These are motel maids, though, and frequently women who don't speak much English. Just a thought.
Agreed, which is why business has tried so hard to exploit immigrant workers, gig employees, and tie all survival to a job that grudgingly allows you to survive. Slavery didn't get abolished because it was wrong -- it was because wage-slavery costs the capitalist far less...
Our campus has very high membership in our union, but when it came time to threaten a strike, I had colleagues who absolutely freaked out about whether they would have to strike too.
Physicians just build their own specialty hospital and compete with their previous employer while cost of care increases (our tiny burg now needs two of every expensive machine—one at the hospital, one at the specialty hospital!) ... and until the inevitable falling out between doctors at the new place.
I checked out that roster of 2019 top-grossing films, and of those that were in current release I had caught only two (𝘒𝘯𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘖𝘶𝘵 and 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘦), but found myself obscurely gratified to note that a personal favorite of mine—no, really—made the list at #455: 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘣𝘢𝘥.
$66,598 gross, and 7,310 tickets sold, says your link. In the Before Time it was my practice, beginning in 2005, to host “Italian Film Night” dinner parties a few times a year here at The Crumbling Manse,™ but last fall I deviated from the scheme and screened 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘣𝘢𝘥 for a dozen guests, most of whom responded to it with an air of almost plaintive bewilderment.
The little town of Wagner, SD, is having their 120th Labor Day parade this weekend. Granted, I think the focus is more Generic Holiday Parade than it is Workers Unite, but still. (Not sure of the wisdom of holding a celebration in a state that’s a Covid-19 hotspot, but nobody asks my opinion on these things.)
I have been to Wagner, it was OK, back in the day. I don't get any holiday's until Thanksgiving, which sucks, but makes sense due to Covid. I'm also trying to work with our Student Association to get students registered and Mail-in ballots because they should vote and they shouldn't travel
As I always say, and thanks, Roy, for the IWW flag at the top, we could do worse than to look to the example of the Wobs who knew how to talk to the people and make them understand how they're being shafted. Take that toxic populism that is so popular these days and wash it out and turn it around for the benefit of people. We might not be able to get them to sing "Dump the Bosses Off Your Back", but there's an opening now - especially with the Kids who aren't afraid of the word "Socialism" like their parents are - to not wake the masses but get them to realize they've been awake all this time.
Yes. Even here at the Fed the words "collective bargaining agreement" draw a blank from a generation of younger workers. It's like they have no idea where a 40-hour work week came from. (But then again, so many of them are "contractors" it's ridiculous.)
THe FIRE sector of the economy went from 10% in 1947 to 20% in 2018 while manufacturing went down proportionally over the same period. This reflects the well-known divide between "Wall Street" representing the FIRE sector and "Main Street" representing manufacturing and small businesses. "Main Street" is where Labor lives while Capital dominates "Wall Street". As long as this yawning divide exists, the US economy will remaining increasing unstable and extremely unequal.
The growth of FIRE and the rest of the white-collar segment has been a blow to labor too. For one thing, bosses exploit their "exempt workers," particularly younger ones, so they come up thinking the way to end the punishment is "success" -- that is, gaining seniority and skills that confer status and improve their specific conditions. Never mind that, in our increasingly knowledge-based economy, a "management" level worker is basically the intellectual equivalent of a factory hand -- today such a worker thinks he's won at capitalism and is unlikely to even grasp solidarity. The good news is the growth of the clerical, educational, journalistic and other unions, which I hope will change the way those workers think. https://slate.com/business/2019/04/white-collar-professionals-labor-unions.html
Should've noted in the initial old fart rant that when the economy began to recover post-2008 collapse, a shit ton of full time jobs were replaced by part time, benefit-free "gigs". Shitty jobs, in that sense. So jobs came back, more exploitative than ever.
Another problem: The Dems aren't all that pro-labor policy-wise, to say the rock bottom least. Pretty much lip service only.
And of course, the liberal media (a conservative canard based on a very brief anomalous period) is pretty anti-labor for the most part; you know, with exceptions that only prove the rule.
Again, the establishment in charge at present doesn't care at all about over all society; it's all about the Benjamins and absolutely nothing else.
There was an OpEd in today's Baltimore Sun complaining that Maryland was still not a right-to-work state. In my working days. I was a dues-paying member of the NTEU and resented the people who refused to join, but got all the tangible benefits the the union gave us. It's crazy (and stupid) not join a union if one is available. Management is not your friend.
Correct me if I'm wrong--in fact, nah. Don't bother--but this one seems written with a bit more brio than usual. (And they're all written with tons of fucking brio.) That phrase--"They're being cheated"--strikes me as v. powerful. It should be fired like a dart at voters, workers, Dems, Republicans, union people, anti-union people, and everybody else, because a) it's true, b) it's easily understood, and especially c) it's perfectly consonant with what everyone knows about Trump. Even his fans know he lies. Yeah, but guess what, MAGA--you're being cheated.
Speaking their language is surrender. They can't be persuaaded because they're that deep in delusion and resentment. Nothing to persuade, just to pander to -- which reinforces their beliefs, doesn't persuade. And if they wanted anything other than having their delusions reinforced, Trump wouldn't never, could not have won the nomination in 2016. Forget them.
A friend of mine fell on hard times after his wife passed away. A master carpenter and cabinet maker, he fell into a deep depression (though he did not really recognize it at the time). It only took a couple of years before he lost his house and hit the economic tipping point where you become too poor to climb out of poverty.
But he's well known around town, and some people and organizations tried to give him some opportunities. One local housing group offered him nearly $40K and full benefits (along with a company-supplied truck) to take care of all their housing projects. But he turned that down because he would have had to join a union.
A few months later, he got a temporary gig at a local manufacturing plant. They liked his work enough that they offered him full-time with full benefits. But because he would have had to join the union, he quit instead.
I lost touch with him around that time because it became clear that he wasn't going to help himself or left himself be helped if doing so clashed with his Rightwing anti-union views. The last time I spoke to him, he was living in Section 8 housing and bitching about his layabout neighbors, and how unfair it was that he could only find part-time work at the gas station/minimart up the street.
Wow. Just wow.
J. Fucking Christ. If only someone had said to him, "Dude, unions are as much a part of capitalism as de-fense is a part of football. When they promise you an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, why shouldn't you be part of defining 'honest'?"
Rationality doesn't work with those people. They only believe.
I was hearing my grandpa wax rhapsodic beside the firepit about his first job out of the USAF in the early 1950s. He was making cooler cabinets to store milk in houses. He claimed the wages were good & as a bonus all the crafters received a free gallon of milk. But, he goes on, the union came and ruined all that. My uncle, G's son-in-law, chips in "Why don't workers just act more like ants and everybody just does their job without any fuss & nobody steps out of line?" Not wanting to explain the structure of an ant hive to him or, really, the economic and emotional realities of human existence in a capitalist penal colony, I reply, "Right on, you mean like in Stalinist Russia?"
They changed the subject pretty quick.
"In my darkest moments I fear a total reversion to Gilded Age wage-slavery as soon as the bastards think they can manage it..."
Already there. It's covered up by public assistance, Medicaid and easy availability of credit. We're already at a point - or more like were before the pandemic -- where ~25% of workers aren't making a living wage with the aforementioned "cheats". Kids graduate colleges with obscene levels of debt. We're already at a point where there's a huge percentage of workers that are debt serfs. Which is to say Feudalism 2.0 is already here. And the post-pandemic economy will be worse than the pre-pandemic one like post-2008 was worse than prior to that financial collapse.
"First up would be employers’ legal immunity from all liability for forcing their workers to return to their COVID-19 death traps..."
These Covid cases would be shitty litigation-wise. Much hard work for little pay off at best; likely losers though. I mean, proving exactly where one got it? Even hospital workers would have a tough time with meeting the burden of proof.
But the problem law drafting-wise is that Dems have been shitting on labor for so long they can't agree to the immunity provision even though Business has it as a practical matter.
"There’s a reason to be optimistic, though."
Uhh... I missed how dissatisfaction with the economy does anything for labor which would require a reversal of the extractive, exploitative economy we have had since the 1980s. I don't see that coming from Old Joe (or, if/when the time comes, Harris). Maybe mitigation, but you know, too little matter. The easy credit noted above is now established interests and the rule has been that established businesses cannot be deprived of a single penny. That's why the ACA could only be so good and it had to be an instrument for routing money to private insurers.
Sorry to be a little shit on the Friday of a big holiday weekend.
Not at all, Mr. Glass Half Empty!
With backwash
Nah, like the cartoon: This is piss!
Better to pissed off than pissed on!
Anywhere people work for wages, you hear the usual bitching about how bad they’re treated by the bosses. But posit that things could be better if they only had a way to join together to insist on better conditions, pay and benefits, and one of the biggest gripers will turn around and say, “Oh, you mean a ‘union,’ Mr. Communist?”
This holds true for every job I’ve ever held, especially among physicians.
There was a nice cartoon where the manager says to his employees "I want us to work as a team". And then the employees hold up a union sign, and he says "No, not like that."
I don't find this at all unlikely, but my experience is of trying to convince people it's worth the risk. They're worried they'll lose their jobs, they don't understand that there are protections in place, and they worry they'll get in legal trouble, which may be a problem in mixed-legal-status families. These are motel maids, though, and frequently women who don't speak much English. Just a thought.
Agreed, which is why business has tried so hard to exploit immigrant workers, gig employees, and tie all survival to a job that grudgingly allows you to survive. Slavery didn't get abolished because it was wrong -- it was because wage-slavery costs the capitalist far less...
Our campus has very high membership in our union, but when it came time to threaten a strike, I had colleagues who absolutely freaked out about whether they would have to strike too.
Physicians just build their own specialty hospital and compete with their previous employer while cost of care increases (our tiny burg now needs two of every expensive machine—one at the hospital, one at the specialty hospital!) ... and until the inevitable falling out between doctors at the new place.
The MD profession really got screwed over by their own hubris. And now they -- we too -- are paying with corporate medicine.
I checked out that roster of 2019 top-grossing films, and of those that were in current release I had caught only two (𝘒𝘯𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘖𝘶𝘵 and 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘦), but found myself obscurely gratified to note that a personal favorite of mine—no, really—made the list at #455: 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘣𝘢𝘥.
Last Year at Marienbad was the #455 grossing film of 2019?
I couldn't find a list that went that low, but it would take $39 in box office to get to #318. That would be 8 people at a $5 revival show
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?ref_=bo_yl_table_1
sorry this was for 2020
$66,598 gross, and 7,310 tickets sold, says your link. In the Before Time it was my practice, beginning in 2005, to host “Italian Film Night” dinner parties a few times a year here at The Crumbling Manse,™ but last fall I deviated from the scheme and screened 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘣𝘢𝘥 for a dozen guests, most of whom responded to it with an air of almost plaintive bewilderment.
The little town of Wagner, SD, is having their 120th Labor Day parade this weekend. Granted, I think the focus is more Generic Holiday Parade than it is Workers Unite, but still. (Not sure of the wisdom of holding a celebration in a state that’s a Covid-19 hotspot, but nobody asks my opinion on these things.)
https://www.yankton.net/community/article_bf01619c-ed8f-11ea-a3e4-3fa478c0881a.html
I have been to Wagner, it was OK, back in the day. I don't get any holiday's until Thanksgiving, which sucks, but makes sense due to Covid. I'm also trying to work with our Student Association to get students registered and Mail-in ballots because they should vote and they shouldn't travel
I’ve been through Wagner a handful of times, usually just passing through on the way west on Hwy 18
As I always say, and thanks, Roy, for the IWW flag at the top, we could do worse than to look to the example of the Wobs who knew how to talk to the people and make them understand how they're being shafted. Take that toxic populism that is so popular these days and wash it out and turn it around for the benefit of people. We might not be able to get them to sing "Dump the Bosses Off Your Back", but there's an opening now - especially with the Kids who aren't afraid of the word "Socialism" like their parents are - to not wake the masses but get them to realize they've been awake all this time.
Yes. Even here at the Fed the words "collective bargaining agreement" draw a blank from a generation of younger workers. It's like they have no idea where a 40-hour work week came from. (But then again, so many of them are "contractors" it's ridiculous.)
THe FIRE sector of the economy went from 10% in 1947 to 20% in 2018 while manufacturing went down proportionally over the same period. This reflects the well-known divide between "Wall Street" representing the FIRE sector and "Main Street" representing manufacturing and small businesses. "Main Street" is where Labor lives while Capital dominates "Wall Street". As long as this yawning divide exists, the US economy will remaining increasing unstable and extremely unequal.
The growth of FIRE and the rest of the white-collar segment has been a blow to labor too. For one thing, bosses exploit their "exempt workers," particularly younger ones, so they come up thinking the way to end the punishment is "success" -- that is, gaining seniority and skills that confer status and improve their specific conditions. Never mind that, in our increasingly knowledge-based economy, a "management" level worker is basically the intellectual equivalent of a factory hand -- today such a worker thinks he's won at capitalism and is unlikely to even grasp solidarity. The good news is the growth of the clerical, educational, journalistic and other unions, which I hope will change the way those workers think. https://slate.com/business/2019/04/white-collar-professionals-labor-unions.html
Should've noted in the initial old fart rant that when the economy began to recover post-2008 collapse, a shit ton of full time jobs were replaced by part time, benefit-free "gigs". Shitty jobs, in that sense. So jobs came back, more exploitative than ever.
Another problem: The Dems aren't all that pro-labor policy-wise, to say the rock bottom least. Pretty much lip service only.
And of course, the liberal media (a conservative canard based on a very brief anomalous period) is pretty anti-labor for the most part; you know, with exceptions that only prove the rule.
Again, the establishment in charge at present doesn't care at all about over all society; it's all about the Benjamins and absolutely nothing else.
There was an OpEd in today's Baltimore Sun complaining that Maryland was still not a right-to-work state. In my working days. I was a dues-paying member of the NTEU and resented the people who refused to join, but got all the tangible benefits the the union gave us. It's crazy (and stupid) not join a union if one is available. Management is not your friend.
I was a union rep. Tough gig. The hardest part? Working people who revile the union for no real reason.
Correct me if I'm wrong--in fact, nah. Don't bother--but this one seems written with a bit more brio than usual. (And they're all written with tons of fucking brio.) That phrase--"They're being cheated"--strikes me as v. powerful. It should be fired like a dart at voters, workers, Dems, Republicans, union people, anti-union people, and everybody else, because a) it's true, b) it's easily understood, and especially c) it's perfectly consonant with what everyone knows about Trump. Even his fans know he lies. Yeah, but guess what, MAGA--you're being cheated.
Whoa now, you're asking that the Dems act like an opposition party and now just Republican wannabes?
Is that a bad thing? If we want to reach Trump's people, which is already a long shot, we have to speak their language.
Speaking their language is surrender. They can't be persuaaded because they're that deep in delusion and resentment. Nothing to persuade, just to pander to -- which reinforces their beliefs, doesn't persuade. And if they wanted anything other than having their delusions reinforced, Trump wouldn't never, could not have won the nomination in 2016. Forget them.
"but at least, and at last, the folks at home are beginning to look educable." Roy the optimist. I hope you're right.