Random chance actually means it is very likely there are random clusters of users even in small groups who are closer together than others who could do more locally together. Some kind of mechanism to help figure out if we have a critical mass of protestors/mutual aiders/whatever (without giving away those protestor's names) for a project would be a good idea, and wouldn't necessarily have to be very complicated. Maybe a single page that just asks for location and what kind of project you are interested in?
There are also some forms of work that lend themselves really well to being online. Coding, writing, news, encouraging people to vote, sending money to workers on strike. I firmly believe the most effective way to combat unethical companies is simply to start and support worker owned companies where every employee gets a vote on their wages, and 'starve' the big companies. I found myself looking at the massive amounts of money raised and wasted in political campaigns by single dollar donations and found myself thinking - damn, with a million dollars, you could start a really small company with that. The second most effective way is probably striking, which, yes, you need people on the ground for that.
We could use an ethical version of Amazon, with a collective of shops that people can visit (the offline side of warehousing is a whole other bundle of issues), and an ethical Paypal. I know that credit unions exist, but I don't know of any credit union that has a Paypal-like API and easy convenience of simply clicking to pay for things. Uber and other apps. There is a huge amount of labor that we could 'take back' simply by providing another venue for people to practice it. Unfortunately, I don't think the fediverse way of doing things is quite appropriate when it comes to systems dealing with money. It's one thing to duplicate posts or ads for content for sale, but you don't want to duplicate credit card information. Open source it maybe and use 'semi centralization'; the Paypal-esque site can handle logins and money, and the Amazon-esque sites can perhaps do some form of federation and handle actual showing of items.
TLDR: it is definitely possible to do quite a bit online, and I think work reform has some avenues via it that have been severely under-utilized and neglected in the information age, as we tend to think of action as just being about protest. Protests can certainly be useful, but should not be our sole course of action if we want a paradigm shift. I find it extremely striking that when most people talk about action, they almost always mention protests and strikes first, if they mention anything else at all.
I actually had a much longer post, but it complained it was too long. So I think I will make my own thread.
I went HAM on my most recent one. They’re anonymous but I’m sure my direct manager can tell my writing style. But the place I work for has been in refusing to do any hiring including backfills so now I’m a team of 1 doing what 7 people used to do and I let them know I’m not pleased.
The guy is already giving honest feedback on “anonymous” surveys… He’s probably on that list. At least he could try to improve his situation, and look for a new job at the same time since it’s clear they don’t respect his efforts.
Just FYI, they’re not really anonymous. These surveys get reported back to each individual manager with the responses, ratings given, and counts of staff completed; so it is very easy for managers to discern who wrote what.
I figure they aren’t. I didn’t curse or name anyone by name, I just made it pretty clear that the understaffing is job performance at a pretty severe level and that the workload has everyone miserable
Effective, sure. But, if a company is truly engaging, listening, adapting to the employees needs and feedback, unions would be a lot less needed or effective. When companies are exploiting workers, lowering wages and benefits, causing more problems and not listening to employees, unions can really make a huge difference. If the people are looking to unionize, the company is failing and the workers aren’t being listened to and they want change to happen.
Unions can do a lot of good. I’m very pro-union. But, people don’t go looking to unionize if things are going great and the company is really listening and adapting to employee concerns.
I always get super triggered at the "Do you have a best friend at work?" question that my old organization used to roll out during engagement planning. No, you motherfuckers, I already have a best friend. They don't happen to work here.
So I answer no every single time. And then in the interview afterward they go on about how "well, it's not LITERALLY if your best friend works here. The survey just asks the question like that because blah blah blah...". Trying to over examine what it means to "have a best friend at work". To interpret that question in some other way to maybe get me to answer yes next year.
I don't care what the intent behind the question is, they will never convince me to not answer "no", unless my best friend happens to join our team. I feel like they're trying to gaslight me into feeling more connected to the team or some bullshit. Drives me up the fucking wall.
It really depends which billionaires. Believe it or not, some billionaires aren’t bad people (probably). Billionaires are just people with a ton of money and power at the end of the day, and we should judge them on their actions, not their bank balance, regardless of our suspicions of how they got so rich.
However, if we could stick (for example) the Sacklers, Kochs and Murdochs in a sub and send it to Challenger Deep with just enough oxygen to get there and plenty of ballast, we’d definitely be doing the world a favour. These scumbags have a huge amount of blood on their hands, and while it would be better to see them in jail, we never will, so fantasising about their horrible demise is the most we can really do.
Don’t carry water for people who would let you die to increase their mountain of gold a little. What you’ve described might be true of millionaires, even multi millionaires; but no one gets to a billion dollars without stepping on those below them in the pursuit of more money than one person could ever spend in their lifetime.
Being a billionaire is pathological, if the human race was a biological organism and one part of it started hoarding that many resources, we would call it cancer and cut it out.
The part I don’t understand is why it’s important to hit the “replacement level”. Wouldn’t it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?
If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can’t have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.
Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can’t even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it’s expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.
For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it’s not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.
And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise…
The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It’s a dangerous game.
Work Reform
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