Pluralistic: General Strike 2028 (11 Nov 2024)

Originally published at: Pluralistic: General Strike 2028 (11 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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The Wobbly One Big Union graphic, depicting several workers with raised fists, their fists all merging into a single giant fist. The giant fist has sent a man flying: he wears a loud checked suit and carries a carpet-bag, and his head is a skull with a human face that has been pushed back like a hat. The face has Trump's hair. In the top corners of the image are the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant.

General Strike 2028 (permalink)

Trump is a scab.

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/2/shawn_fain_2024_election

Trump is a scab and the Dems need unions. While working class votes were all over the place – lotsa turkeys voting for Christmas – union voters voted against Trump with near-unanimity.

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, and the Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris campaign advisor – her brother-in-law Tony West – is Uber's chief legal officer and the architect of Prop 22, California's scab law that formalized "gig work" labor violations. The fact that when the eminently guillotineable union-buster Howard Schultz tries to win a presidential nomination he does so in the Democratic party speaks volumes. If your political party has room for Michael Bloomberg, it doesn't have room for workers. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful friends to unions, and unions keep the Dems honest. The #RedForEd teachers' strikes of 2018 kicked off a wave of public support for unions – and worker interest in unionization – that has only grown in the years since:

https://theweek.com/articles/764828/teacher-strikes-could-future-alt-labor

Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling.

It's falling! This one is on the union leadership. Unions are sitting on gigantic warchests that they are resolutely not spending organizing the workers who are clamoring to join unions:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/ten-times-this

Unions have historic high cash reserves and are doing historically low organizing. This part is the unions' fault:

https://www.radishresearch.org/_files/ugd/2357dd_135794f88aa140f2962ee5c71ac31ff0.pdf

Or rather, it's the union bosses' fault. Union leadership in America, broadly speaking, sucks. Bosses love shitty unions, and the biggest unions obliged bosses for decades, with leaders who established suicidal practices like "two-tier contracts." That's a union where all the workers have to pay dues, but only the senior workers get protection from the union those dues fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

If you sat down and said, "Let's design a union contract that will ensure that every worker hired from this day forward hates unions," this is the contract you'd come up with.

Those shitty union bosses? They're on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried the steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union's own rules and keeping the vote going:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we've got the makings of a general strike.

That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it's going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.

Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you're not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there's some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time workers figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle.

"Law-and-order" candidates want to throw millions of our neighbors in jail. By the way, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except for prisoners. American imprisons more people than any other country in the history of the world. We make Stalin's gulags and Chinese Cultural Revolution "re-education camps" look unambitious. American prisoners produce $9b worth of services and $2b worth of goods every year. The average US prison wage is $0.53/hour, but six states ban prison wages altogether and North Carolina caps them at $1/day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

If you think immigrants are bad for American workers' wages, wait'll you see what legions of newly imprisoned slave laborers earning $0.53/hour do to those wages. Also: Californians just voted down a ballot measure to abolish prison slavery:

https://www.kqed.org/news/12013392/californians-voted-against-outlawing-slavery-why-is-prop-6-failing

The GOP are not on workers' side, and workers will not earn more under Trump's policies. Workers will earn more if they join a union, which they will only do if union leaders focus on organizing, which will only happen if we get rid of shitty union bosses. Start with this asshole, who belongs on the scrapheap of history:

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/16/nx-s1-5041345/teamsters-president-sean-obrien-addresses-the-republican-national-convention

With the GOP running the country for the next four years, it's tempting to look for hope in social movements. Maybe Trump will be so terrible that people will band together in informal solidarity networks and #Resist. History teaches us otherwise. The people who need the most help under Trump will be too embroiled in the fight for their own survival to put together the kind of movement that can make a difference.

As Astra Taylor reminded us on the Know Your Enemy podcast, Occupy and Black Lives Matter formed under Obama, when things were eleven kinds of fucked up, but at least ICE wasn't raiding our neighbors' homes:

https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/voting-what-is-it-good-for-w-astra-taylor-olufmi-taiwo-malcolm-harris-teaser

Occupy and BLM arose in a moment when people had just enough breathing room to think beyond their immediate survival. Even deeply flawed progressive administrations provide that breathing room.

By contrast, the #RedForEd teachers' strikes were a creature of the Trump years. Even if social movements struggle to find their power under authoritarian, far-right regimes, these are the conditions in which organized labor movements are renewed:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/to-unfuck-politics-create-more-union

Trump won the election because white men, especially young white men, voted for him, but he couldn't have done it without the votes of white women, and Black and Latino men. These voters may even conceive of themselves as being in favor of women's rights and of the rights of racial minorities, but they still voted for Trump, because some facet of their identity – their maleness, their whiteness – mattered more to them than everything else.

Bosses have always excelled at this game, bringing in Irish scabs to break strikes of German workers, or Polish scabs to break Irish workers' pickets. The Pinkertons relied on Black workers who were excluded from the lily white unions.

Our identities are complex and ever-shifting, and men who worry that women's power comes at their own expense, or whites who worry that this is true of Black and Latino power aren't entirely wrong. As the saying goes, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

But there's one part of your identity that is inherently solidaristic: whether you are a worker or an owner. If you own the business, you make more money when your workers earn less. If you work at the business, every dollar you earn is a dollar your boss doesn't get. Workers' gains are bosses' losses.

That's why they want us to "vote with our wallets." It's not just that those votes are rigged for the people with the fattest wallets. By tricking you into thinking of yourself as a "consumer" who benefits from low prices, they get you to stop thinking of yourself as a worker who suffers from low wages.

This remains true even after decades of "market based pensions" that forced workers to flush their savings into the stock market casino, to be the perennial suckers at the table in a game where their bosses had an unbeatable house advantage:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Even after generations of this, the share of the stock market owned by workers is a negligible crumb. This is how GDP can rise, the stock market can surge, and you stay poor. Workers' fortunes don't rise and fall with the stock market. They're not owners.

You're a worker even if you're well-paid. Tech workers are just figuring this out, after a generation-long con in which bosses convinced techies that they were temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who definitely didn't need a union:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#sell-job

Tech workers' power came from scarcity, and scarcity is brittle. Tech fired 260,000 workers in 2023, and another 100,000 in the first six months of 2024. Tech bosses have smashed their workers' power, and we know what comes next.

We know what comes next because we know how tech bosses treat workers they can replace. Amazon warehouse workers piss in bottles and get maimed on the job at a rate that outstrips any other warehouse worker in America. Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy didn't welcome coders with pink mohawks, facial piercings and black t-shirts with incomprehensible slogans because they liked tech workers and hated warehouse workers. Amazon coders owed the privilege to pee whenever they felt like it to their bosses' fear that they couldn't be replaced. Now that coders are replaceable, their kidneys are on the firing line.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." If you want to see the future of a replaceable Amazon coder, look at the working conditions of a replaceable Amazon delivery driver, monitored by a fucking AI that punishes them if they open their mouths while driving:

https://jalopnik.com/amazon-bans-its-drivers-from-moving-their-own-lips-too-1851639312

Remember lovely Tim Cook, the guy who took over Apple from its sainted juice-cleansing cofounder Steve Jobs? Cook's accomplishment, the one that earned him the CEOship and a personal net worth in excess of $2 billion, was to figure out how to offshore Apple's production to Chinese factories where the working conditions were so terrible that they needed to install suicide nets to catch workers who couldn't face another minute on the job:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

That's how Tim Cook treats workers he's not afraid of. Apple workers, no matter how well paid, no matter how pampered, need a union, because the instant Tim Cook can treat you like a Chinese iPhone assembly-line worker, he will.

Tim Cook had some choice words for Donald Trump this week:

Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.

It wasn't just Cook. Every tech boss lined up to kiss Trump's ass: Bezos ("Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success"); Zuck ("Looking forward to working with you"); Pichai ("We are in a golden age of American innovation"); Nadella ("Congratulations President Trump"):

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

You don't just deserve a tech union, you need one, now:

https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union.html

Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won't be easy. Workers won't be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.

The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn't call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA #RedForEd Teachers' strike, the teachers didn't just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students' parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.

In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that's how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can't deliver and workers don't vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too.

McAlevey died last summer. But she left behind a legion of people she taught and inspired, and a playbook we all can follow:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

We've got four years. Join a union. Take over its leadership. Create solidarity with your fellow workers and your community. Bargain for a contract. Make it expire in 2028. Get ready.

Because in 2028, we're having a general strike.


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#20yrsago Asimov’s magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons https://web.archive.org/web/20041020235706/https://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0412/onthenet.shtml

#15yrsago MPAA shuts down entire town’s muni WiFi over a single download https://web.archive.org/web/20091114054844/http://www.coshoctontribune.com/article/20091109/UPDATES01/91109015

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#15yrsago EFF to represent Yes Men in Chamber of Commerce lawsuit https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/11/11

#15yrsago Pratchett’s “Unseen Academicals” – a gift to Discworld lovers and an argument for the importance of sport https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/11/pratchetts-unseen-academicals-a-gift-to-discworld-lovers-and-an-argument-for-the-importance-of-sport/

#15yrsago Slow News: designing reflection and contemplation into the news-cycle https://mediactive.com/2009/11/08/toward-a-slow-news-movement/

#15yrsago Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals https://www.inquisitr.com/46786/epic-win-news-corp-likely-to-remove-content-from-google

#15yrsago Ebook license “agreements” are a ripoff https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/08/amazon-kindle-licence-orwell

#15yrsago Epoch: podcast of my story about the death of the first AI https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/09/epoch-podcast-of-my-story-about-the-death-of-the-first-ai/

#15yrsago How EFF saved Indymedia from an unconstitutional subpoena for all its visitors’ IP addresses https://web.archive.org/web/20091122074424/http://www.eff.org/wp/anatomy-bogus-subpoena-indymedia

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#10yrsago Creative Commons and Aaronsw’s sweet hack https://web.archive.org/web/20141108110122/http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/11/06/how-celebrate-aaron-swartzs-legacy-go-hackathon-weekend

#10yrsago Net Neutrality activists blockade FCC Chairman Wheeler’s house https://popularresistance.org/breaking-net-neutrality-activists-blockade-fcc-chairman-tom-wheelers-house/

#10yrsago DOJ helps local cops get around state limits on civil forfeiture https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/nov/10/asset-forfeiture-article/

#10yrsago New KKK organization open to people of color, Jews, LGBT https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ku-klux-klan-opens-its-doors-hispanic-blacks-jews-gays-1473907

#10yrsago Italian scientists acquitted of culpability in L’Aquila quake https://web.archive.org/web/20160826014632/https://www.dw.com/en/court-acquits-natural-disaster-experts-over-laquila-quake/a-18055155

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#10yrsago Senate races were won by dump-trucks full of “dark money” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/dark-money-helped-win-the-senate.html

#10yrsago The Oatmeal to Ted Cruz: Net Neutrality is not Obamacare https://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality

#5yrsago AOC really plays in Iowa https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/turns-out-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-huge-in-iowa/

#5yrsago Bill Gates just accidentally proved that even “unsuccessful” antitrust enforcement works https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/11/bill-gates-just-accidentally-proved-that-even-unsuccessful-antitrust-enforcement-works/

#10yrsago Net Neutrality activists blockade FCC Chairman Wheeler’s house https://popularresistance.org/breaking-net-neutrality-activists-blockade-fcc-chairman-tom-wheelers-house/

#10yrsago DOJ helps local cops get around state limits on civil forfeiture https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/nov/10/asset-forfeiture-article/

#10yrsago New KKK organization open to people of color, Jews, LGBT https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ku-klux-klan-opens-its-doors-hispanic-blacks-jews-gays-1473907

#10yrsago Italian scientists acquitted of culpability in L’Aquila quake https://web.archive.org/web/20160826014632/https://www.dw.com/en/court-acquits-natural-disaster-experts-over-laquila-quake/a-18055155

#10yrsago Expat activists and journalists leave USA for Berlin’s safety https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital-exiles-tech-activists-escape-nsa

#10yrsago Senate races were won by dump-trucks full of “dark money” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/dark-money-helped-win-the-senate.html

#10yrsago The Oatmeal to Ted Cruz: Net Neutrality is not Obamacare https://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality

#5yrsago AOC really plays in Iowa https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/turns-out-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-huge-in-iowa/

#5yrsago Bill Gates just accidentally proved that even “unsuccessful” antitrust enforcement works https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/11/bill-gates-just-accidentally-proved-that-even-unsuccessful-antitrust-enforcement-works/

#5yrsago UK spies secretly granted power to spy on journalists and lawyers https://web.archive.org/web/20141107223052/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/06/uk-surveillance-of-lawyers-journalists-gchq/

#5yrsago Blizzard’s president apologized for suspending Blitzchung, but the suspension is still in force https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-president-clarifies-decision-to-ban-hearthstone-player-and-two-casters-over-hong-kong-controversy/

#1yrago The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

#1yrago Biden wants to ban ripoff "financial advisors" https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

#1yrago "Brand safety" killed Jezebel https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety


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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

1 Like

What’s your source that Union voters voted against Trump with near-unanimity? The exit poll numbers I saw showed 45-49% of unionized workers voted for Trump, which was disheartening to say the least.

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By tricking you into thinking of yourself as a “consumer” who benefits from low prices, they get you to stop thinking of yourself as a worker who suffers from low wages.

This is bad thinking. Nearly 100% of Americans are consumers. Less than half are workers. Yes, it’s a “trick” to make many American consumer-laborers think they’re “investors”. No, it’s not a trick to think of oneself as a consumer. Many millions more Americans are consumers-not-workers (~170M, something like 60%) than workers-not-consumers (basically 0).

The primary trick in this realm is convincing idiots that all prices are higher because of inflation, rather than the only way real prices get higher other than natural disaster: monopoly.

I wonder if there’s any way to “unionize” the unemployed, because that seems to me to be the key problem standing in the way of progress. Unions are largely nice for those who are in them, and slightly not-nice for those without. Even if we had a single super-union of all workers, I think things would still suck for the simple reason ~60% of people are unemployed.

This is exciting but I can’t fathom what the country (the world?) will look like after four years of ironclad GOP rule. The rule of law won’t apply to the next administration and I have to assume union organizers, particularly the good ones, are going to be at the top of some very bad lists. In four years we might need a revolution, not a strike!

Harris’ campaign advisor

America imprisons

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-population-ratio.htm

WTF? The unemployment rate is 4%… some number of the population NOT working are children (but at least the GOP is pushing for greater invovlvement of children in the labor market! Wouldn’t want those kids to be lazy takers!!!)… Some are married people who stay home to care for children, which… BTW, IS work, it’s just not counted as such. And many of those people contribute in various ways via volunteering. Some people not working are college students who are focusing full time on their studies (like my own kid, who I guess is also a “taker”). Some people (lots of boomers, for example - my mother, her husband, etc) are retired and are not in the labor force. Some people are disabled and can’t work.

There is a problem with UNDERemployment, but that’s not unemployment and is a very different discussion. But no, half the population is NOT unemployed.

The “unemployment rate” you speak of isn’t the rate (ratio) of unemployed Americans to total Americans. That’s the unemployment rate I speak of, and the only one that has relevance in most contexts, including this one. The rate you speak of is the ratio of unemployed Americans in a specific age range with specific qualifiers like “actively looking for work” divided by Americans in a specific age range with specific qualifiers like “actively looking for work”. It is totally irrelevant to every context I can imagine, and certainly irrelevant to this discussion.

But no, half the population is NOT unemployed.

Correct. More than half the population is unemployed, about 60%.

You seem to be emotional. I’m just stating facts. I’m not stating that kids should work (and not be “lazy takers”). But my statement includes the truth that kids don’t work, and therefore are unemployed people.

There is a problem with underemployment. I don’t think it’s relevant to this discussion.

The important thing is that most people are NOT workers, and the ratio of workers to people is falling over time, so organizing workers can’t solve the problems facing people, and it’s becoming a less and less complete solution to the problems we (people) face. Cory is wrong to say that it’s a “trick” to view ourselves as consumers instead of workers. Essentially all of us are consumers. About 40% of us are workers, and falling.

I’m aware of that… That being said, saying it’s 60% is just wrong. There are lots of reasons why people aren’t in the job market, some of which I listed above.

no, you’re not.

That is just wrong.

And those reasons are irrelevant. Why someone isn’t in the job market doesn’t make them employed. Every person is either employed or unemployed, and the reason why they are (either) has no effect on the (un)employment rate.

no, you’re not.

What non-fact did I state?

That is just wrong.

It is correct. The amount of Americans who are NOT workers is about 180,000,000. The amount of Americans who ARE workers is about 160,000,000.

Do you disagree with either of these approximate numbers? Do you disagree that 180M > 160M? Or do you disagree that Americans aren’t “most people”? Because, if you agree with those three facts, you inherently agree that most people are NOT workers.

More American people aren’t workers than are.

This is a plainly true fact. If you don’t like it, tough. There’s no discussion to be had with someone irrational who denies this plain truth.

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