finnglas:

tzikeh:

iopele:

queerspeculativefiction:

heidiblack:

pillowswithboners:

luchagcaileag:

This isn’t because Burger King is nicer in Denmark. It’s the law, and the US is actually the only so-called “developed” country that doesn’t mandate jobs provide a minimum amount of paid vacation, sick leave, or both.

kinda debunks that claim that they can’t afford to pay their workers those sort of wages and still make a profit

Its corporate greed, plain and simple.

It is the same in Sweden. It is so funny every time an american company opens up offices here and then tries to do it the american way and all the unions go “I don’t think so”.

Like when Toys ‘r Us opened in sweden 1995.

They refused to sign on to the union deals that govern such things as pay/pension and vacation in Sweden. Most of our rights are not mandated by law (we don’t have a minimum wage for example) but are made in voluntary agreements between the unions and the companies.

But they refused, saying that they had never negotiated with any unions anywhere else in the world and weren’t planning to do it in Sweden either. 

Of course a lot of people thought it was useless fighting against an international giant, but Handels (the store worker’s union) said that they could not budge, because that might mean that the whole Swedish model might crumble. So they went on strike in the three stores that the company had opened so far.

Cue a shitstorm from the press, and from right wing politicians. But the members were all for it, and other unions started doing sympathy actions. The teamsters refused to deliver goods to their stores, the financial unions blockaded all economical transactions regarding Toys ‘r Us and the strike got strong international support as well, especially in the US.

In the end, Toys ‘r Us caved in, signed the union deal, and thus their employees got the same treatment as Swedish store workers everywhere.

The right to be treated as bloody human beings and not disposable cogs in a machine.

and that story right there? is exactly why Republicans in the US work so hard to bust unions. it’s because unionizing WORKS and they’re terrified of workers actually having some power.

It makes me despair for Americans that so many of us are so fucking ignorant of how badly we’re treated. People are proud of the fact that they manage to work three jobs to get by, without any understanding of the fact that they shouldn’t have to. But they’ve been sold a bill of goods that anyone who can’t hack it is a lazy freeloader taking “good people’s” taxes like a thief.

It’s almost as if the country was born to abusive parents, and has never known any other life, so it can’t imagine not being abused….

It kills me how thorough the anti-union indoctrination is in the US, too. Talk to pretty much anyone who’s been in retail a while (and probably who hasn’t gone to a liberal arts college because let me tell you about how pro-union liberal arts professors are), and try to get them to unionize.

You’ll be met with a lot of resistance, and most of it will be vague, non-logical, emotional “unions are bad, aren’t they?” responses, and it’s because wow, they’ve been fed a lot of bull. “Unions would make us raise our prices so you can’t buy as much stuff,” Walmart says to its suffering workers who have to go to the foodbank to afford to eat. “Unions are bullies that destroy healthy companies,” Starbucks says as it fires anyone who so much breathes the word.

It’s no accident that the GOP is against a living wage and affordable college educations. The Rabble might get Ideas if they were educated and not exhausted all the time.