this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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When working conditions are getting worse and people are being fired, that’s when you need a union more than ever.
In the fable of the and and the grasshopper the grasshopper needed food stored up more than ever when the winter came, but the time to be preparing for winter was the spring, summer, and fall when you plant, tend, and harvest. By the time winter comes it's too late.
The best time for someone with a variable rate mortgage to refinance as fixed rate would have been 2020. You didn't need a fixed rate back then because variable rate was in some cases less than 1%, but you need one now because mortgages are around 7%. If you refinance now it won't help.
The time to unionize was when labor had power by being in demand. 2020 would have been a good time, but maybe even the mid 2010s.
There’s a Chinese proverb that goes like this: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
We can’t go back in time to plant the union tree. But we can do it TODAY. Doing it late is better than never doing it at all.
Planting a tree isn't going to war (and unionizing is in a sense mobilizing for a war). Both you and the seed want the tree to grow. If you go to war and the time is not right, then you will be wiped out and history will be written by the victors.
The Fable of the ant and the grasshopper I'm referring to comes from Aesop's fables, a work collected around between 500 and 600 BCE.
It's been told and retold in many different languages around the world, and in virtually every example of the Fable being told, the story is basically the same: the ant works through the summer, and the grasshopper dances. Eventually the winter comes, and the ant survives and the grasshopper dies of starvation. For over 2,000 years the moral of the story has been but there's a work time for work and there's a time for play, that you need to work hard in the summer or you will starve in the winter.
It's wonderful that somebody reinterpreted the Fable for a modern kid's movie, but that does not change the original meaning of the fable. Aesop was a slave born in Greek society, a society that utilized slavery. It's not likely that greek society would have been super into a slave teaching their kids that one day the slaves would overcome their Athenian masters.
Aristophanes wrote many plays criticizing greek society a few hundred years after Aesop. The following was from his play "Ekklesiazousai", which was a comedy about what would happen if women took over the government. It's a sort of hilarious example of the difference between greek society and modern society for many reasons, especially this exchange:
In Orwell's 1984, the main character's job was in the ministry of truth, ironically changing history to better suit the party. In this sense, replacing a 2500 year old fable with a 25 year old movie sounds more like that 1984 than simply citing the original fable.
We just bought a house and went with a 5 year ARM instead of 30 year fixed to get a 5.5% rate. Sure hoping that rates go down a little in the next 5 years so we can refinance and lock in at a decent fixed rate. Rolling the dice... : (
My condolences. It's a very tough time to be stuck with a mortgage.
At this point, I’m hoping for there to be a spree of unionization.
Maybe a millennium from now we’ll have better means of keeping corporations in check, but in our species’ current and primitive state, unionization might be one of our only options.
It didnt work though
These things are measured in decades.
Imagine where they'll be 5 years later if they do nothing