this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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This seems like a good place to post this reminder that in the last 50 years income has lost to inflation by 137 points. That's decades of prices rising faster than wages. It's not rocket science. They walked away with all of the productivity gains, and gave the entire country a pay cut at the same time. You want a boring dystopia? How about stealing your paycheck a couple percentage points a year until suddenly we realize we can't afford to live without 3 full time incomes in one household.
Without violent pushback there is no reason at all to improve things. Cant afford to live?.. fuck you, we'll find someone who can. Piss off, peasant.
All we would need is 3 days of a general strike with at least 10% participation.
But unfortunately there are several factors that prevent this, some human nature, some deliberately manufactured.
Almost no one I know can afford missing a week's worth of work: This is manufactured with stagflation and at-will work laws
The rich inflaming radical partisanship with traditional and social media to distract from who the real enemy is, reducing social cooperation
American culture has become largely an 'observer culture', where the world is treated as a thing to passively watch while feeling disconnected, this is probably the worst contributor.
So many of the labor movement gains our forefathers bled and died for have been trampled by an owner class hell bent on recapitulating european nobility on American soil and they have been WILDLY successful the last 30 years.
Either we organize a general strike, or there will be food riots within a decade.
Shawn Fain (United Auto Workers president) has been calling for unions across every industry to align their contracts to end at the same time on May 1st, 2028 (International Labor Day), specifically so that we can prepare for a general strike. Gives the already organized unions time to build up a strike fund and non-organized folks time to get organized.
If there was an IT workers union with presence in my state I would absolutely do the same, though to be fair I could probably just take a week off that might not end until the owner class comes humble to the table.
Might be worth your while to look into Locals in your area that aren't necessarily IT focused unions. Some unions (like the Teamsters and others) will still help you organize under their union even though they typically represent workers in a specific industry. I don't have an office workers union local in my neck of the woods, but I've been giving it some thought as well.