#Labor Relations

[irradiate-space]

saw the post and didn't comment at the time, but you know what you do with a surplus of cucumbers?

you feed your surplus cucumbers to your pigs or goats, and then you slaughter your animals when there isn't a surplus of food.

The workplace phenomenon of union labor shoving cucumbers through managers' mail slots is because of a failure to integrate the whole diversity of farming into backyard grow operations. Of course you have a surplus! You built a machine to generate organic materials and you didn't scale up your organic materials processing to match!

[racefortheironthrone]

Would you say covid is having a black plague style effect with the rise of more militant labor leadership, or are there any other factors playing a role?

Not really, no.

I think the fundamental change has been a longer-term post-Great Recession tightening of the labor market that started around 2016 and (with the exception of a brief blip during the lockdown) has continued to the present, along with even longer-term changes in public attitudes about unions and inequality.

I would argue that the changes in union leadership and the increases in strikes and organizing drives we've seen recently are essentially a lagging response to that shift in worker leverage vis-a-vis the bosses.

[emptyanddark]

"Instead of imagining a world without work that will never come to pass, we should examine the ways historical struggles posited an alternative relationship to work and liberation, where control over the labor process leads to greater control over other social processes, and where the ends of work are human enrichment rather than abstract productivity. furthermore, these struggles point toward the only vehicle for a liberation from capitalism: the composition of a militant struggling class that attacks capital in all its manifold domination, including the technological".

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller

[davidaugust]

Part of why the actors strike continues without resolution is this person: https://bit.ly/CeoShameEater

[severianrising]

[myra-bird]

I feel like being a sleepy little baby should be a protected class

My boss: This is not a productive use of Human Resources time

[countesspetofi]

Every time I hear people complaining about how workers striking for fair compensation and working conditions are denying them convenience or entertainment or something like that, I can't help thinking of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Yes, I need the roses as well as the bread just like everybody else, but can I really enjoy them knowing some of my fellow members of society have to be treated unfairly to make sure I get them?

(The link goes to the Wikipedia article, because the only links I could find to the full text were PDFs, and I know they don't always play nice with everybody's browser. One of them is at the internet Archive, which should be easy enough to find for anyone who hasn't read it and wants to.)

[its-not-easy-with-love]

Thought I would only be able to dream about it, but then you came and gave me exactly the love I wanted.

[brehumphres]

lovey dovey ❤️ 🕊️

[thelovingbird]

5 ways to make your partner happy

Show appreciation and gratitude by expressing thankfulness for the things your partner does for you and for being a part of your life.

Good communication is vital, actively listen to your partner, make sure they feel heard and understood, and express your thoughts and feelings clearly.

Physical touch is important, hug, kiss, hold hands, give a massage, etc. to show your love and care for them.

Make time for each other by planning regular date nights or special outings to spend quality time together.

Show interest in your partner's hobbies and interests, understand what they enjoy and make an effort to be a part of it. Always be willing to work on your relationship and make your partner happy.

[vkindiagold]

The 1 thing men are most obsessed with is not what you think. It’s an elusive combination of emotion and biological drive that is very rarely satisfied in life or love. When a women can satisfy this obsession, a man will please and pursue her to the ends of the earth. Info https://vkindiagold.bio.link/

[paulinedorchester]

[emptyanddark]

Industrial methods of worker control were prefigured on plantations, which sought to maximize the labor of enslaved Black people otherwise unmotivated to produce value for those who kept them captive. While the relationship between industrial and plantation worker control is foundational, it is essential to recognize that there is no easy equivalence between the terror-enforced racialized labor regimes of plantation slavery, and industrial labor processes that drew on technologies developed on plantations.5 Plantation management—and the relations of domination that structured the plantation—was anchored in a view of Black people as commodities, as something-not-quite-human. And the conditions of bondage on the plantation defined the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classified as “free.”

...

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne demonstrates that power over enslaved people was executed through bureaucratic technologies that divided enslaved workers, prescribed their routines and motions, and calibrated their movements with the goal of managing and controlling “every moment of enslaved life.”11 Her work clarifies the interplay between the strict division and quantification of life and labor on plantations, and how such segmentation served to make enslaved people observable to overseers and managers.12 The fragmentation of production, whether in the field or the factory, shifts power away from those doing the work to owners who benefit from defining and overseeing a coherent view of workers and the labor process. Such a view doesn’t emerge on its own. Rather, it is produced through records, metrics, and standardized assessments—and we must understand the term “record keeping” to be a synonym for “surveillance.” Monitoring and quantification of work and workers was the first, and arguably most important, step in populating plantation records. And these records’ demands for data and information in turn shaped how labor was divided and managed, in service of making work and workers as visible and quantifiable as possible.

...

Iskander illuminates how designations of skill—and the power that capital claims to define what is and is not “skilled”—work to produce and naturalize conditions of bondage, creating a hierarchy of “deservedness” that justifies conditions of precarity and domination for the “unskilled.”20 The concept of skill is also racialized. In a “free” labor context, “skill” is narrated as something (white) workers possess and serves as an index of the wages a worker can deduct from the profits desired by capitalists—a sum they can, in theory, negotiate or refuse. On the plantation, enslaved Black people were not ascribed the capacity for skill. They were narrated as incapable of possessing skill, and any prowess they displayed was attributed to biological differences that nonetheless marked them as inferior—animal capacity, not human ingenuity. Racial categories structure who is deemed able to possess skill to begin with, while marking a lack of skill as a condition of unfreedom and thus a condition of Blackness.21

[townpostin]

Former Tata Steel VP Meets Tata Workers’ Union Leaders

Suresh Dutt Tripathi Visits Tata Workers’ Union Office Retired executive commends union’s achievements during cordial meeting with officials. JAMSHEDPUR – Suresh Dutt Tripathi, former Vice President (HRM) of Tata Steel, paid a visit to the Tata Workers’ Union office, engaging with key union officials in a friendly gathering. The meeting brought together prominent union leaders, including…

[hislop3]

Friday Feature: You Will be Hated

TGIF! I found this piece on LinkedIn and thought it was quite good and worthy of reposting in its entirety. I know what this is about, personally.  I was an administrator, moreover, a senior living and healthcare CEO for many, many years. I ran large organizations primarily but the parallels within this story, don’t change. At times, I was hated for doing the work I had to do and, in some cases,…

[mexicanistnet]

Mexico accepts the US review request on alleged labor rights denial at Autoliv Steering Wheels. Committed to enforcing T-MEC provisions, a 35-day internal review by the Ministry of Labor will follow. Crucial moment for international labor relations.