The Gaming Den

Couldn't find a US news thread, the big news thread is for non-US, and the Biden Administration thread is about the Biden Administration instead of general US news. Instead of muck up some other thread or make a US news thread (I do not want to talk about mass shootings, and that's basically all we do in this fucking country) let's have a thread about news that is usually good, a labor news thread! There's been lots of labor news lately, with SAG, WAG, UAW, Starbucks, Amazon, teachers in CA, and so on and so forth all engaging in action.

What I'm thinking about right now is the UAW, they have tentative deals with the Big Three and some of those deals are really fucking good (getting them to reopen a plant and shit like that, genuinely impressive stuff). These deals have not been ratified by membership, but wow the rolling strike strategy seems to have worked incredibly well. I suspect we'll see more of that sort of action from well-established unions now that we've seen it work. I'd love to see Starbucks or Amazon go for something similar, though I suppose it works best in manufacturing since you can target weak points in their supply chains to fuck over many locations with action in just one factory/warehouse.

I hope it does increase but I will be a downer and remind you that a far left crazy radical that is very stupid and doesn't know how things really work ran a campaign against the tired centrist establishment pragmatists who know how things really work, won, and then implemented the successful strategy.

So it's very possible that before a working strategy can be used elsewhere we first have to have a bunch of union heads unseated in elections.

From the little I've read it sounds like unions in the US were much more radical (and effective) in the 1910s-1950s then in the 60s/70s/80s they got crushed or fell in line due to all the anti-communist shit the USA got up to, is that the gist of it? I could be all fucked up on the history here.

Hopefully the workers can rid themselves of any shitty union heads and get their power back. And maybe those newer unions (looking at you, Starbucks and Amazon!) won't have these problems. Lots of young people are involved in the organizing too, particularly at Starbucks, and I am excited to see if they adopt these new tactics as they should not be held back by entrenched very smart moderates.

PseudoStupidity wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 31, 2023 7:35 pm

From the little I've read it sounds like unions in the US were much more radical (and effective) in the 1910s-1950s then in the 60s/70s/80s they got crushed or fell in line due to all the anti-communist shit the USA got up to, is that the gist of it? I could be all fucked up on the history here.

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act is my pick for an inflection point where legal protections for unions entered a decline. Many of the most effective tactics unions had used up to that point suddenly became illegal.

Oh that's fucked, thanks for sharing that. No wonder unions have a hard time exercising power, it's literally illegal for them to do shit like solidarity strikes.

There might be some movement on bypassing the solidarity strike ban by just aligning a bunch of union contracts to expire at the same time:

UAW President Shawn Fain wrote:We invite unions around the country to align your contract expiration with our own, so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,” he said in a recent message to members. “If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many, it’s important not only that we strike, but that we strike together.

Arguably, the best thing to unlock would be secondary boycotts. It's genuinely stupid that the UAW can't picket car dealerships much less in general not being able to picket banks that give companies union-busting bridge loans. It's also the reason WGA/SAG picketers had to let workers in non-union media (like commercials and daytime TV) onto the production lots through a "neutral gate".