If not for labor unions we would still be working 12+ hour days. The 8 hour workday and the weekend is all thanks to the courageous efforts of labor advocates.
And now kids in Arkansas get to experience the grind.
We have so much to be thankfull for to those that came before us. Standing on the shoulders of giants, how easily we forget.
The goverment started recognizing some of these rights after they were won by unions. Then they regulated unions to death, since we’ve got these nice laws now. Then they started rolling back the legal protections.
And people still have the nerve to say the government is protecting workers rights.
Doesn’t stop certain big tech companies from building giant campuses with cafeterias and housing so that employees can literally live, eat, and sleep at work.
Imagine if they let us work from home instead. I already live, eat, and sleep at work, and it doesn’t cost my company a dime! In fact I pay for all of it!
What if we all just didn’t go in? They gonna fire everyone?
And they can sell the office too (good luck lmao), we are doing the company a service 😌
This is what unions are for!
What if we all just didn’t go in? They gonna fire everyone?
That is called a strike and why they work
The US, at least, is far too individualistic to effectively do something like this without the people involved being far from unified, and without there immediately being scabs who are more than willing to take their place.
These people have been so indoctrinated into believing that unions, the very thing that would allow them to effectively do what you suggested, are bad. There is no sense of solidarity in this country.
Damn. Thought you were advocating for reformism or some other non-syndicalist approach until I noticed the icon. Do you have a favored approach for building that solidarity?
Edit: it’s unfair for me to ask this question. A better way of posing it would have been for me to propose a few and to discuss / develop them.
So, I’d say, I guess organizing outside of the workplace through creating non-hierarchical institutions that meet people’s needs, ie, dual power, is essentially what I’ve arrived at.
Honestly, I don’t know how we fix it.
I’m not sure I would identify myself as a socialist or syndicalist. That said, my politics have been continuously pushed to the left throughout the past 20 years, so you’re probably not too far off.
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I have to go into the office. I literally do about 1 hour of work a day. I have every capability of doing it at home. It’s crazy.
My office lets me work from home- half the day. And then I come in and do exactly the same thing I did at home. I like the half day at home, but it makes no sense.
Working from home 2-3 days makes 100% more sense than working from home half of each day. Means you still need to get dressed and do that damn commute every single day.
Neither option makes much sense to me. Especially when I’m doing the same work either way. It makes literally no difference where I do it from.
And to make it more bizarre, it’s 25 hours at the office and 15 at home. So I do 8-11 at home 4 days a week (not counting lunch) and 8-12 on Friday.
Fucking weird!
And this is why you support your labour unions.
Dudes wearing Oakley’s and Fox Racing hats would be saying they’re better than you because you don’t work 22 hour days.
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I don’t understand that culture. You get looked down upon if you say something and when I said we need at least 100k yearly in America, they laugh as it too much for them. We need more confidence as workers to demand more and unions.
Yeah, and these are the same dipshits that think there shouldn’t be a min. wage.
Minimum wage might not be needed if we instead used universal basic income. Low paying jobs wouldn’t be automatically exploitative since they would still have a minimum income. Perhaps some of those low paying jobs may even bd desireable for certain people over the current minimum wage jobs (e.g. lower or very infrequent hours).
Yeah but then the working class might threaten the rich by being able to live a basic life!
It’s almost as if decades of identity politics fed to the uneducated masses is super effective.
I’ve literally had a relative say shit like “only construction workers need unions” and other nonsense because he just does not understand that for society to function for more than 100 years, you need to be able to tell your boss to fuckoff or do fuckall and get paid for it. I think people assume that wage earners are the latter but like security cams and bullshit metrics and shit have eroded any semblance of humanity from modern workplaces.
All of this stems from a few areas that keep labor prices down artificially: Agricultural worker exemptions, prisoner exemptions and corporate personhood. You might be like “why the last one” but its the one that says you are functionally equivalent to a corporate charter in the eyes of the government.
The last one was specifically to allow corporations to (effectively) vote. We’ve been living with the political results of that since; it’s one reason why the rest of the world laughs when anyone calls Bernie Sanders a leftist extremist.
I hate that everything that is not the opinion of the Republicans is just labelt left and therefore bad. Your politics is just a very weird shit show of two old people screaming at each other that the other one stinks.
I did 24hr shifts a minimum of two days per week. Most times I did three days per week with 24hrs of OT. I did that from 2000-2017.
Now I do simple 4 x 10hr days.
Why would you ever do that? And allow it to happen for 17 years???
Good question. I did enjoy my work 90% of the time. I gave up emergency work when I turned 50. Now I do “uber” ambulance.
Wtf is uber ambulance?
And thanks for your service.
Ha! “Uber” ambulance is non-emergency transport. We take patients that are at rehabilitation facilities and bring them to medical appointments.
What job and country? I need to stay far far away from that
Paramedic, U S. Most EMS and fire departments run 24hr shifts. It’s a choice.
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They are. It’s a choice.
How is that possible?
Paramedic. Possible by trying to sleep between emergency calls.
Doctor?
Paramedic
Were you the one driving? This sounds so dangerous! My heart goes out to you
We would take turns. We had an office where we could sleep until the emergency call comes in. Not quality sleep, but, kept you functional. Was only rare occasion you might be busy for a full 24hrs.
Must be bliss working (still slightly long) 10 hour days now
Also the transition from drunk to sober would suck more.
I feel like people would drink themselves to death more, or at least pass out. Been a few times years ago that sleep was my reason to stop drinking
Oh hell no. Permanently drunk it is.
Omg I actually had this same thought the other day and wrote it down.
I just thought about how cool it would be to not need to sleep. You could have a whole 8-or-so hours to do whatever you want. But then I realized that if we didn’t need to sleep we would likely be required to work longer hours or be otherwise productive during those 8-or-so hours. It’s crazy how arbitrary productivity really is.
https://www.powernapcomic.com/ deals with a fictional world where a drug makes this corporate dystopia possible but a small percentage of people cannot take the drug making them effectively disabled from a normal worker perspective.
Wow this is great thanks for the link! Just spent the last hour reading and it flew by
if aliens invaded and forced us to work for them they’d probably have better work culture than us
Literally was a post with a picture of Henry Ford with the caption “this man brought us the M-F 9-5” and someone replied “boooo this man”
But, even with sleep requirements, Henry Ford reduced it from the norm of 7 days a week, 12-15 hours.
So I’d imagine that without sleep you’d just never go home.
I mean Ford did under threat of his wife leaving him. He literally had henchmen beating up union organizers.
My FIL’s father bolted machine guns on the roof of the Dearborn plant to deal with strikers. Henry Ford was not a good human.
While it was a change for the better back then, it was a century ago. It’s high time the work week gets reduced again while keeping the wages intact. It’s totally doable.
South Korea is closely looking at your thread probably trying to figure out if there’s another way 🥲
Congratulations on having the world’s most depressing shower thought.
On the other hand, it would feel pretty normal to us.
Perhaps even our time perception would be probably a bit different. As someone coming from world where bodies require about 8-9 hours of sleep, the perception of time is naturally affected (if not dictated) by having series of waking periods of about the same length every day.
If there was no such thing as sleep (which might be a bit different than just “not requiring sleep” as you suggest) then we’d just be conscious in one continuous chunk from birth to death. Given what problems our brains solve by sleep (learning, sorting memories / feelings), if the brains were to do these things continuously, the consciousness itself would probably be at least quite a bit different experience.
And they’d be mad that the damn dirt Labor union won’t let them have 24 hour shifts.
And there will be beaten and abused workers agreeing with them because they’ve been convinced that working 24 hr shifts would be better for them.
The willingness of people to lick the boots of their oppressors is scary as fuck.
More job areas would have cafeterias, and I think we would see a lot of 24 hour employees
