squaliformes:

bemusedlybespectacled:

bemusedlybespectacled:

there’s a debate on here right now that goes like this:

“we should strike on election day!”
“but it won’t do anything.”
“but historically strikes had power!”

yes. yes they did. but there’s a slight difference between then and now.

think about it. mill and factory workers in the industrial revolution worked longer hours for less pay and no benefits, and they needed those jobs to survive. why would they strike, when they had so much to lose?

they had a fucking strike fund.

why are people so afraid of striking? because if you’re in poverty, even taking a day off of work is a day without getting paid, and when you have a family to provide for, the thought of being without even those wages is terrifying. how do you alleviate that fear? you let them know that there’s a union-driven safety net. everyone contributes to the fund with their dues, and everyone draws from it according to their basic needs. sure, the funds won’t last forever, but if you plan well and keep it maintained, that gives you more bargaining power. it’s not the employers waiting to starve you out, it’s a game of chicken: your dwindling funds vs. their dwindling profits, who decides it’s not worth it first?

calling for a nationwide strike doesn’t do that because there is no safety net. you’re effectively only asking the people who can afford to take time off to strike, and ignoring everyone else. and if you really want your protests to have power, you can’t afford to ignore all those people.

addendum: this is why it’s called ORGANIZING. it takes time and energy to plan effective resistance. casting your idea out into the abyss of the internet and hoping that people take you up on it without anything to back you up is like calling for the montgomery bus boycott without having any carpools or shoe drives.

I think this particular disconnect with reality stems mostly from bad education.

In school, when I learned about the whole muckraking movement and the civil rights movement, and the variety of boycotts and protests that took place alongside them, teachers mysteriously neglected to add the parts about how people funded these things. It really made protests look like magic, like they just happened and grew naturally, instead of being carefully planned to make sure they didn’t ultimately hurt the people they’re trying to help.

So now we have a bunch of 20-somethings who were never really informed about what a strike is or how it works. They just know “strikes get things done sometimes occassionally” and/or “strikes are when people stand outside their workplaces with signs and yell at everyone and make everything a massive inconvenience”.

So when they feel the need to strike, either they have no idea how to do it, or they don’t want to because they’ve only learned anti-union propaganda and they don’t believe striking works.

So, convenient lapse in modern education or was leaving out key parts of union history intentional? You decide.