This latest attack on the rights of workers is the culmination of a decades-long assault on the working class in the US, which has been caught between an economic system hemorrhaging jobs and a political system that refuses to address their problems.
The farmers told us that when there are disagreements about how operations should be run, they call a meeting and discuss until an agreement is reached, making the working lives of the people who live in the commune far more democratic than anything we’ve experienced in the U.S.
Why does any legislator believe railroad workers should be forced to use what few vacation days they may have if they fall sick and request permission to be absent days in advance, as if illnesses are scheduled events? Congress members and their staff do not work under these conditions.
Deposing monarchies and freeing serfs often just resulted in the replacement of one overlord with another, as wealth transferred from the landed gentry to a new moneyed elite (who in some cases were the same people), and businesses were incentivized to keep their workers poor and powerless.
At what point does a beleaguered population living near or below the poverty line rise in protest? This, if history is any guide, is unknown. But that the tinder is there is now undeniable, even to the ruling class.
The [UK] Conservative government is looking for ways to beef up these anti-worker laws and is considering how to break these strikes, including allowing the hiring of workers as strikebreakers. It’s a response to how this current strike wave expresses the full power and centrality of the working class in the economy, nationally and internationally.
Since being elected to office in 2013, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and her socialist party have been locked in a bitter battle against the city’s moneyed elites, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a corporate PAC called “A Better Seattle” and saturated television and digital platforms with negative advertising. Sawant is hated because she is effective.
While labor market trends have had an inflationary impact, the disproportionate focus on them, without mention of the underlying conditions that lead to labor shortages in the first place, erases the culpability of corporations.
" ...progressive organizing focus on the working class and unions - human civilization depends on it."
Power dynamics to break free from to create biggest vision of humanity possible, a dynamic process, 100-year vision.
Trump’s plans unsurprisingly represent a threat to our global environmental conditions and the rights of workers domestically and abroad.
Tracing Labor Day’s conservative roots, we’re reminded that the holiday was established in 1894, by President Grover Cleveland “as a way to de-escalate class tension following the Pullman Strike, during which as many as ninety workers were gunned down by thousands of US Marshals serving at the pleasure of railway tycoon George Pullman, one of the time’s most hated industrial barons.”
