this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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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.
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A full time job should never result in being close anywhere close to any assistance programs.
We've let our society fail all of us.
We let corporations take over without limit or recourse.
Walmart pays a wage to people whose job it is to help other Walmart employees apply for government assistance. That's way cheaper to Walmart than paying people more. Then the government assistance comes from the lower 90% who do pay taxes.
Minimum wage hasn't been raised in decades. It has increased a bit only in a few places.
Over half (guesstimate) of prepared food workers do not have a steady income. They rely on a few customers to tip. And very rarely have any sick time or vacation time or health benefits.
You've eaten food that has been handled by someone sick with a fever because they were highly discouraged from staying home sick.
You know what? Fuck this. I'm so godamn sick of seeing people say "we let this happen" as if we can just suddenly not let it happen. This happens because our current society is just a rebranding of feudalism, and to not give the rich their due on responsibility is downright wrong. We did not let shit happen, WE attempted to survive and got fucked, and continued to get fucked. I've seen this enough times now that everyone one of you reading this better expect to read it again the next time you or I see anything remotely close to "WE lET ThIS HapPen"
I want to put this edit here because I didn't expect your comment to get nuked after mine, and because you do raise a lot of good and productive points. I was drunk when I wrote this and it came with a lot of anger that I should have held back. I just think you should reevaluate the first part, other than that, you're spot on.
It's less "we let this happen" and more "we were duped into fighting against our comrades over crumbs instead of banding together to ensure our right to more than just crumbs in the first place." The 1% benefits from every culture war that sows division amongst us. We're too busy and distracted to organize or build guillotines.
I long for the day we can get over culture wars, at least temporarily, and come to agreement on how we're all getting fucked over by the rich. I always think about ways to get involved but I come up short. I know a general strike is the game plan, but as an engineer my professional has strayed away from unionizing. Need to get more involved there. Change happens slowly until it doesn't I suppose.
I'm a power plant operator. Most of my coworkers have chugged the Kool aid in terms of hating unions. We're well paid but the benefits aren't good and the schedule is life-wrecking for the average person. Bad unions exist, but I think that they don't understand the core concept of the power behind collective bargaining. I've seen one person get fired in the 3 years I've been here, so jobs are generally secure, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to gain from unionizing.
They also very much eat up the culture war slop and aren't particularly literate. They're "common sense" forward, which means they don't understand things like tax brackets or geopolitics, but they're very upset about them.
Society did let this happen. You know how many rednecks I run into who think billionaires are just success stories who did a good job? You know how people chose to listen to the anti union propaganda back in the 1950's onward? Up until around 5 years ago back on reddit I was in the minority on being pro union. The population absolutely allowed this to happen. We have 80 year olds running the country because the 20 year olds are 100% straight up too lazy or apathetic to vote in elections. When only around 30% of the eligible under 30 crowd vote in elections. Go try and do something that'll change it.
Have you seen what happens when people try to change this? I really don't understand how you can hand me the list of reasons why this isn't the case, then turn around and say it is.
The rich have massive wings of propaganda, the rich have the police to beat the fuck out of us for protesting, the rich have access to union busting companies, the rich live in a different world when it comes to access and laws, the rich can buy lobbying.
For us, money is a tool to survive, and we work tirelessly for it. For the rich, money is a tool to protect their control, and they do not work for it. They get to use their time to either relax or to plot new ways to fuck us. So again, no we did not let this happen.
Society allowed themselves to be lead around like sheep and fall for the propaganda. The rich kept saying unions were bad, and you fell for it. They said socialist ideas were bad, and you fell for it. They allowed for all sorts of things that were bad for society, because they said and advertised they were bad for society, and you all bought into it. The people here just fall for the propaganda. For decades and decades. Society allows all the propaganda to shape their opinions instead of thinking for themselves and now we're neck deep in shit from corruption and greed. The oligarchy needs eliminated and we can't even manage to get a 25 year old to a voting booth.
It's easy to discount it that way but the blame is way more on the rich than it is on the other 99%, and if you can't see that it means you either are trolling, haven't looked, or are lying.
To play devil's advocate -- Liberalism, or the idea that the people who are ruled should have a say in the rules, started coming about ~500 years ago. The elite's were all always evil and bad to the masses, enslaving us, paying us very little, even clocks and timekeeping were used to trick workers into more hours and when pocket watches became available, they were just banned in early industry.
A lot of people fought and died to establish the idea of Liberalism all the way up to unions and workers rights. So, in a way, 'we' did fight for those things and earned them over a long time. It does kind of feel like now the same 'we' has forgotten the value of that stuff and the sacrifice it took to get there.
I still don't really see this as our fault. We live in gilded age II where money is virtue no matter how its acquired. The internet broke the stable propaganda machines and we're in flux of stabilizing around the new ones and kicking out the smaller bad actors.
You're right, many people worked hard and tirelessly to prevent this. And we'd be even worse off without the work of those caring people.
Can't forget to mention that those Walmart employees usually turn around and use those food stamps and government assistance at Walmart due to whatever meager employee discount they get.
So now Walmart not only gets to pay their workers far below a living wage, they also get reimbursed by the government for all those food stamps their own employees spend at their stores. These corporations are the biggest "welfare queens" the world has ever seen.
Reminiscent of owing one's soul to the company store, eh?
This is how societies have traditionally operated. Far from failing, they are correcting back to the exploitative mean.
With no more free real estate to conquer and no frontier to expand into, we're boxed in by limited resources and forced to choose between socialism or barbarism.
Since we categorically and unequivocally proved Socialism Doesn't Work back in the 1980s, that only leaves one option.
They're not assistance programs for people, they're basically a wage subsidy for corporations.