Being stuck on a 40 hour work week, but just doing four tens, I can say the 32 hour concept needs to continue having traction. More and more people are waking up to the reality that work is just work. There’s life to live and we have the means nationally to allow for a meaningful life. When considering employment, only getting two days off is a dealbreaker.
You better block a lot more than Lemmy. The workforce is sick of executive boots stomping on our necks. There are good employers out there, I acknowledge that, but they’re the exception not the rule from the way corporate America functions. To me they seem as rare as drops of water in the Sahara. Until employers start giving some dignity back to the worker en masse, expect things to get a lot more hostile.
For now it’s just nasty language, soon it’s going to be molotovs and worse. Eat the rich.
I’m extremely antagonistic, yes, especially toward scab motherfuckers that have helped get us into the housing crisis, healthcare crisis, and climate crisis. You’re also right that I spit at a 25% raise, 40% motherfucker and then I stop using such harsh words.
I’m here to tell you that seeing “good perspective on each end of this” can fuck right off. Yes I’m going into full on asshole combative mode, and I am here to tell you unequivocally that you may go and fuck yourself!
And to eloquently point out why, I’m going to carefully explain why the employer side can eat shit: We have a massive climate change issue, and having workers commute is exacerbating on so many levels. Even if we electrify the transportation entirely with carbon free sources, there’s still a tremendous environmental impact issue by way of the public transportation or the car production itself. One of the best ways to mitigate this is encouraging remote work WHENEVER POSSIBLE! I realize pilots, EMT’s, and firefighter’s won’t have this luxury but if all the office workers are working from home, this removes a huge amount of congestion from our roadways, decreases the non-carbon pollutants resulting in dramatic air quality increase, improves emergency service response times, reduces the fucking taxes we have to pay on transportation infrastructure maintenance, and a host of other psychological benefits.
We have a huge pay gap - CEO’s are making hundreds of times more compensation than their average worker, and the time involved in commuting EVEN FURTHER dilutes the “amount made per hour”. If I have an hour commute each way, I get to take my day’s pay and stretch it over two more hours. What could anyone possibly have an issue with that for? Oh I don’t know, childcare? A dentist appointment that requires additional burned time off? This is why people call scabs motherfucking shithead scumbags. BuT tHe EmPlOyEr iSn’T ReSpoNsiBle, bull fucking shit. The employer chooses to be in some shitty downtown location so the uber rich CEO can walk from his cocaine penthouse to the HQ. For the life of me, I see this happen time and time again where HQ’s bitch and moan about attracting talent but they position themselves in some fucked up location where they don’t compensate even a fraction of what they should so their employees could afford housing.
We have a mental well being crisis - people are treated like shit and trampled on enough as it is. Many companies take this indifferent approach and focus solely on the business itself, with little to no regard for the people that make it successful. People are spending hours every day commuting instead of looking after their own personal well being. Commute times cut into exercise, family time, self actualization, and pretty much everything people care about.
The best way to mitigate this is by being on the clock from your front door to the workplace. As it was well put elsewhere here in the comments, fuck you, pay me. I will get the world’s tiniest violin out for the employer side of the argument and then stomp on with heavy work boots. Then I’ll light it on fire and piss on the goddamn ashes. Fuck the employer’s argument.
I realize that many people’s retirements are tied up in stocks as well. That doesn’t make us “shareholders”. Without voting rights or a say, we’re not really vested in the same manner executives are. When our 401k’s go off to a fund manager that makes the decisions for us, we’re not really “in the game” as it were. Ideally a company’s stock price should be tied to the health of the company, instead what we have are artificial prices inflated by mechanisms such as stock buybacks or the stock price is speculative.
Either way, it’s a shit show for us (you know, regular people) and only great for the 1%'ers. I think tying up retirements like we have been is a mistake, look at the many examples of people who lost their retirement assets due to MCI Worldcom, Enron, and Madoff.
What shareholders want isn’t what the customers want, what shareholders want isn’t what personnel want, what shareholders want isn’t what the public wants either.
The shareholders want to fuck the customer, they want to fuck the employees, and they want to fuck the business itself. Fuck the shareholders. They didn’t make the business successful, they didn’t have the vision that created the value in the first place, they’re leeches that ruin the business for short sighted goals.
I mean, I can see a utopian vision of Communism where dignity is forefront, but I’ve also seen where it’s dystopian. Correct me if I’m wrong but the basis is to each according to their need and from each based on their abilities. Dignity isn’t mentioned, but the happiness and contentment of all is the goal so I suppose it’s inferred but not specified.
Either way, it doesn’t have to be viewed with any kind of social opposition. If we keep following the slippery slope of late game capitalism, who’s to say companies don’t just purchase legislation that re-establishes full on slavery? We have a fucked up oligarch system, and moments like this where workers unite is a good thing in any system. Free market my ass, and this is a moment where arguing for semantics is a side-discussion, for now it’s us against the oligarchs.
There was a lot of the same thing back in the Roman Empire. The reason many more emperors weren’t gutted like a fish was due to their Praetorian Guard. If we had a solid way to get past the tear gas and national guard en masse, there’d be much less rhetoric and a lot more action. Hopefully we co-opt them, much like what happened back then. The Praetorians killed quite a few shitty emperors, hopefully we get after the oligarchs in the same manner.
What the UAW is doing here is fighting for all workers. This sets precedents that ripple across all industries. What formed the UAW back in 1937 took some balls, and so does this.
It’s not communism to fight for dignity and a living wage. We’re practically fighting for some more table scraps, but the rich are acting like we’re threatening social fabric.
Go and get it Shawn, this is exactly what we all need right now. Support the UAW.
The problem is that the billionaires never starve. They just end up with slightly less fathomless oceans of cash while we can afford rent or a mortgage.
If this doesn’t work, it’s time for some guillotines, then nobody has to starve at all.
Agreed, whether it’s pay by mile, from when the door’s shut, when boarding, or set off by the time a certain phone call dispatches you, that’s just semantics. If you’re making a good wage or salary, what of it? The real issue is 24k-27k a year. That’s 13 bucks an hour on the top end. 13 bucks an hour when you have 2k a month rent for the cheap roach infested slums in most cities.
Good, fuck em. What doesn’t get talked about is what a huge ripoff the stock buybacks are and how they incentivize the race to the bottom we have now. CEO’s don’t answer to customers but to shareholders now, and their income is directly tied to share price as opposed to the company’s KPI’s.
A company can be healthy, profitable, and showing robust financials…but the investors can always say it’s not profitable ENOUGH, and demand further measures be taken to increase profits even more. Therefore the company is now directly pitted against both customers and employees. They are incentivized to deliver the least possible to the customer, while charging the most they possibly can, with the absolute least amount of employees delivering it while also paying employees the least they possibly can get away with, regardless of anything except the sole goal of basically fucking everyone that isn’t an investor.
Fuck the customers, fuck the workers, fuck the thing that created the success of the company in the first place.
What the UAW is doing is forcing the companies to change the nature of the operations and compensation packages. Either give the employees the same access to the cash drip feed from the stock performance or stop executives from being tied to stock price and go back to only partaking of the business revenue.
Either way, fuck the execs. I’d rather there be no company than those motherfuckers running it the way they have been. Now’s the time for it all to burn down or change for the improvement to the employees.
