#unions for all

[stonerbughead]

obligatory post by your friendly @leftistteendrama podcast host

[millionmovieproject]

All corporations

[leftistteendrama]

Hell yeah! Full solidarity with the WGA! We wouldn’t have teen dramas to make a podcast about without your hard work and talent and you deserve everything you’re fighting for in your contract. Give ‘em hell and hold the line!

[prolibytherium]

I will say I get the vibe that a lot of peoples interest and support for strikers is a bit too much for a vicarious ‘burn it down’ thrill, rather than for the actual goals of a strike.

Like UPS has agreed to come back to the table and it is very possible they will concede to Union demands and avert a strike. And if that happens (so long as the union does not make concessions on its key demands) it’s a good thing. It’s a victory for the laborers. It is the same ultimate conclusion that a strike would intend to produce except without the workers having to go on (not so great) strike pay for a week or two.

[littlebigmouse]

"What if my favourite show is delayed due to writers strike?"

With respect, no one cares about your favourite tv shows.

This is about real people fighting for their real livelihoods, for their futures.

I cannot articulate sufficiently how unimportant the production of some tv show or other is.

[fjordfocused]

can’t get over how fucked the three city blocks of Baldur's Gate we explore is. vampire den, mummy lord, hag lair, no less than two cults, haunted mansion, a demon lord whoring it up, evil clowns. is the rest of the city normal. why do they have a Spirit Halloween district.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Do you guys notice how when Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, started planning a general strike, he did it by a) targeting his messaging towards unions with the ability to safely and effectively strike in large numbers, b) laid out a clear, actionable plan for those unions to follow (setting contracts to all expire at the same time, since many unions cannot strike while under contract), c) is using union contracts to set clear, actionable demands that can be met in order to gauge success and provide an end goal, and d) started organizing FOUR YEARS before the proposed strike date to give people the chance to plan accordingly, because it takes a really freaking long time to get tens of millions of people organized?

You notice how he didn't do it by slapping a message on Twitter saying 'hey nobody go to work on Monday, that'll really show 'em'?

[left-reminders]

[fans4wga]

WHY THEY STRIKE: Ke Huy Quan (SAG), 2023 Winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Roughly 87% of members earn less than the minimum requirement of $26,000 yearly, making them ineligible for health coverage through the union. The studios' refusal to pay union members a living wage and share their streaming revenues via residuals has made this a difficult ask for performers nationwide. For reference, "in most jobs, that [amount] would be considered a part-time job," according to SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher.

[ultragooner89]

x

[stonerbughead]

Stand with Condé Nast United on Met Gala Day

Did you know that the people who make Condé Nast run have been fighting for union recognition? These hard working individuals will be making the Met Gala happen tonight while fighting for their right to a union so they can bargain for a fair contract. I highly recommend you read their thread, screenshotted below and retweet it here.

image description below the cut

image description = a screenshot of a thread from @/condeunion on Twitter.

tweet 1 = "Tomorrow is a special day, so we thought we’d give you a special edition of THE ISSUES all about (you guessed it!) the Met Gala. What's Inside:" with a picture of a mock issue of VOGUE

tweet 2 = +An Invisible Workforce—While the cameras are pointed at the red carpet, there are countless invisible hands making sure every moment goes off without a hitch. These are freelancers, assistants, and producers who work tirelessly starting months before events like the Met Gala

tweet 3 = but receive no spotlight or recognition for their work. It’s the universal Condé experience on an even larger, more intense scale, proving that there would be no @condenast—or Met Gala—without us.

tweet 4 = +Overwork, but no Overtime—Making the Met Gala takes hours of extra work from the entire @voguemagazine team, not to mention other employees throughout the company. Yet Condé believes that prestige is enough to cover the incredible amounts of unpaid labor.

tweet 5 = If we do a job, we deserve to get paid for it, even if it is something as incredible as the Met Gala

tweet 6 = +24/7 with no breaks—Events may end at a certain time, but that doesn’t mean the work ends. With events like the Met Gala, the Oscars, the Grammys, and more, the all-night news coverage and viral video moments come from somewhere

tweet 7 = —the computers of hard-working writers, video editors, and social media managers who have to stay up until the early hours to bring you content. Burnout is endemic to Condé Nast, and events like these do nothing but make it worse.

[millionmovieproject]

In this episode, Jared & I cover the rapidly-developing news about the growing divest/cease-fire protest movement, the need for union growth & expansion past labor, and the wildly-unpopular rogue moves by the US gov to create conflict around the world & ban TikTok.

[frodo-a-gogo]

Let us be brutally honest with ourselves and with eachother for a moment. If he weren't obese you motherfuckers would be capable of percieving evrart claires sexy sexy moral ambiguity and complex charms

[bepisdrink]

[assorted-aesthetics]

ds9 is like. i want to go home. can't go home. i want to be among my people. i cannot abide and am sickened by the actions of my people. i am completely alone. this station is too crowded. anyway have i told you about my homeplanet

[iberiancadre]

I've talked about this before but I have a deep dislike of sentiment like this within "leftist" circles, regarding unions. And it's practically always from USamericans, go figure.

(Before anyone interprets this post on bad faith, which is inevitable, I am not against being in a union and I am not telling people not to join a union, it's the most inmediate form of protection workers have and that is, in fact, good)

It's this overbearing insistence on joining unions, treating it like the best (and only) way of achieving workers' liberation, and I think that shows either a bad understanding of what unions are or a bad understanding of how capitalism works. Unions are bargaining bodies for workers, that's it. They aren't revolutionary, and they aren't going to kill your boss. And I want to really hammer in this point. They aren't revolutionary. Precisely because their role is to bargain, and to achieve better conditions within the system of salaried work.

You are never going to "liquidate the ownership class" by getting longer breaks, paid holidays and an excellent health plan. Keep in mind, bargaining with the capitalist is necessary, and that in itself isn't non-revolutionary, not necessarily. But the only purpose of a union is to bargain. I really don't think people get this. A union's only purpose is to bargain, it is to negotiate. Negotiations also necessarily imply compromises and unsatisfactory deals. Unions are not a magic key to not being exploited, and they especially are not the way to liberation.*

I think this is especially prevalent in the US because of two things:

Their labor movement is so fucked that any kind of opposition to capitalism is by default radical. And therefore some people feel it's enough to just tell people to join a union. However, this isn't unique to the US and many places have it much, much worse

Living in the imperial hegemon makes it very easy to ignore any other place outside of their little sphere. People can go years engaging in left-of-DNC circles but without ever leaving their USamerican community, they end up not knowing who James Baldwin is, to give a topical example. This affects the US labor movement by allowing them to ignore other places' struggles, so it's very easy to see anything they do as the horizon of political action. They only need to look to their own country for examples in action, and the truth is that the labor movement in the US has been largely very mild. In the cases when it has not been mild (notable exceptions include the Black Panthers), it's largely forgotten, demonized or revised in bigger circles.

So you get people who call themselves communists just for being unionists. But a communist is someone who identifies the core of exploitation to be the very structure of capitalism and work and attacks it. You are not a communist, however, for believing the core of exploitation is your shit boss who refuses to pay for dental.

And what's funny is that 90% of what people on here claim to be communist and anti-capitalist is just the norm on most of the world. People will hype up the DSA or VoteSocialist2024 as if they're breaking ground, and then you read their programs and they're just socialdemocrats. They are nothing more than reformists, just another manager of capitalism.

My father works for one of the biggest textile manufacturers and distributors in the world, and unionization is the norm, it's a "union job" but it's still shitty and exploitative. There are in fact 3 unions, and they engage in petty electoralism within the workplace, only sometimes actually protecting worker's rights, and that's a country-wide norm. This is what unions end up becoming when they become established, especially with a friendly government in place.

CCOO was a union created in the late fascist dictatorship in Spain, and they were genuinely fighting (with guns!) against the dictatorship. And the moment the dictatorship ended and they became the largest union in the country, they slowly became less and less radical, and more complacent. Last year they signed a labor reform that legalizes highly precarious and inconsistent forms of work contracts. That's not "liquidating the ownership class", that's just social-democracy when it doesn't need to be the opposition anymore

To wrap up, a note on syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

Unions are by their very nature an organization that only operates within one aspect of the life of the working class, the workplace. Sure, it's the main one and the part that defines us as a class, but it isn't the only one. In order to actually "liquidate the ownership class", you have to take power by force, and that will have to involve intervening outside of the workplace. What syndicalists used to claim is that unions can be the base of a socialist society and organize the entire working class to destroy capitalism. However, at that point, you have created a party and called it a union. And not only a party, but a myriad of them, each with their own characteristics and desires. So a multi-party system. I will not get into the viability of multiple parties in socialism in this post, but they are not unions in anything by name.

Footnote under the cut:

*I know I'm repeating myself a lot these days on this topic, but if you live in an imperial core country, there is no way to have prosperity (as the example above puts it) without some of that wealth coming from imperialism. It does not matter if your particular country never had colonies, it does not matter if your country is stereotypically nice (fuck the Nordic countries). And no, the expoliated wealth does not only remain within the capitalist class, there is always at least some circulation of wealth from the capitalist to the workers within any welfare program. If your workplace can afford to have long breaks, that is at least in part because your capitalist is profiting from the exploitation of the third world, and because the entire economies of imperial core countries uses the wealth extracted to support their deficits and to stabilize their currencies.

It's not a hard concept. If you can understand that it's basically impossible to manufacture batteries for renewable energy without exercising violence on places like the Congo, it's not that hard to understand the same is true for most things.