99 points

Man, Unions in America are anaemic. I REALLY wish our labor force would grow that kind of spine and stand up for each other that aggressively.

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58 points

This isn’t even aggressive, they’re literally showing they won’t work for the company if the company isn’t willing to work for them. All the unions in the US have to play politics with the government and corporations in order to keep things flowing smoothly, one false move and the corporations have the upper hand. With that kind of advantage, it’s the corporations who are aggressive here.

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54 points

I’ll never understand how the railroad workers union was only allowed to strike on a specific day for a specific time and then were forced to go back to work. Apparently they are labeled “critical” for the nation and then can’t strike??

Like, uh, that’s literally the point of the strike. Highlighting how critical they are and that you should give them the meager asks they wanted. If some low-wage earners can shut down the entire country because they are upset about earning peanuts - well then maybe it shows they shouldn’t be earning peanuts.

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28 points

Just watched on tv a documentary about strikes a hundred years ago in the US. Facing the Rockefellers, Carnegies and alike. Police was shooting them down. That’s the US. Railroaders are on strike just today in Germany.

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22 points

Propaganda works. Think of how many of our union workers support Trump.

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28 points

No thank you, I just ate.

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16 points

There is a push for American unions to set their next contract expiration dates to 1 May 2028, specifically to enable a general strike.

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2 points

Important to note that this is a workaround. Solidarity strikes (which normally include general strikes) are illegal, but there’s no law that prevents every union from happening to strike on their own behalf at the same time.

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9 points

American unions are kneecapped by the government. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act made solidarity strikes (and several other forms of labor protest) illegal. It also opened the door for states to enact “right-to-work” laws.

This law is still standing in part because US courts have been anti-labor for their entire existence, aside from a brief period during FDR’s administration.

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30 points

Beautiful. This is what happens when people actually have each other’s backs.

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26 points

The delicious irony here is that U.S. corporations want the government out of regulating worker rights and company obligations, and having actually encountered that, Tesla said, “no, we don’t like how that turned out, either.”

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22 points

Three days later, on November 20, the Seko union, which represents postal workers, will stop delivering letters, spare parts, and pallets to all of Tesla’s addresses in Sweden.

It seems troubling that there aren’t regulations in place requiring postal workers to deliver mail indiscriminately.

What if the postal union decided not to deliver mail-in ballots they thought might support a policy they disagreed with, for example?

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26 points

Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but the postal thing has already happened during the USA 2020 election.

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2 points

Hi, can you clarify what you mean or provide a source? I’m not away of any widespread examples of this but it could be that I’m misunderstanding or misremembering.

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10 points

Louis DeJoy, the U.S. Postmaster General who was installed by Trump in May 2020, spent the months prior to the November elections undermining voting by mail and sabotaging the Postal Service. There were multiple lawsuits about it.

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3 points
*

The Trump government shut down automated mail sorting machines, cut overtime for workers (so if they weren’t keeping up with the workload, they’d just stop delivering mail instead of working a longer shift), replaced a bunch of air mail delivery routes with road ones, added delays to re-delivery attempts when a letter couldn’t be delivered and removed mail collection boxes.

Supposedly all of this would “improve the efficiency” of the postal service. Yeah right.

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