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?
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
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
When there is nothing left for the poor to eat, they will eat the rich.
If you had enough organization to implement a general strike, Trump wouldn’t be president.
True,
But also consider the possibility that: anti-government sentiment might be stonger than pro-Harris/anti-trump sentinment
Yeah, but people went back to Trump.
trump voters did not increase, democratic voters slacked off
that is not a pro-trump sentiment, that is the anti-Biden/Harris sentinment
And the response from the public was apathy. There were third party candidates or even people voting “none of the above”. And it affects downballot initiatives and races.
It would look beautiful
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.
Probably like trump sending the Pinkertons and police in to crack heads where there was any public demonstration in front of workplaces.
Stop withholding tax from paychecks. Pay quarterly and make a bunch of small errors. If a million people do this they will be so overwhelmed, that the only reasonable choice will be to tax the rich.
Or they pass a law mandating withholding.
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.
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.
Someone (possibly a government agent, under the orders of trump admin) will throws a bomb to a the white house, and BOOM, trump use this as excuse to invoke insurrection act nationwide, declare martial law, suspend the constitution. Democracy is over,
GG. Actually not even GG, many went AFK.We would need some spokes people and demands.
If you can, start organizing those around you. Into anything really as the skills translate. Organizing a bowling club is closer to unions than most people think.
The USA going down the tubes wouldn’t affect the billionaire class one bit.
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.
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.
I think most people, if they simply didn’t show up to work for a day or two, would be fired. This is exactly why a lot of people would not strike. How many people are going to strike if it means they’re evicted next month?
Yeah exactly. I get that people are outraged at a lot of things, but I think many people calling for a strike don’t realize what is at stake for a majority of people. You would have to do some serious organization among each individual workplace in order for it to be successful.
I’m guessing that’s why it seems that many times when I see people protesting or calling for strikes, it seems to be students. Since they often don’t yet have things like a full time job, a family to support, etc. they have far less on the line and far less potential consequences for doing so.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not against the idea of protesting/striking, etc. I’m just trying to say that it’s a difficult thing to navigate, and not a simple “no brainier” like many people on the internet seem to think it is.
If enough people do it at the same time it’s a strike, and firing them would cripple their business. If you’re in a position where you aren’t able to do that personally, and can’t change your position, there are other ways to contribute to organized labor. Plan for it well in advance, coordinate strikes to maximize impacts to supply chains and logistics, and when they try to negotiate in bad faith add more strikes. Look at the recent UAW strikes.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/12/1211602392/uaw-auto-strike-deals-ratified-big-three-shawn-fain
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.
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.
