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mostlysignssomeportents · 17 days ago

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General Strike 2028

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/11/rip-jane-mcalevey/#organize

Trump is a scab.

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/2/shawn_fain_2024_election

Trump is a scab and the Dems need unions. While working class votes were all over the place – lotsa turkeys voting for Christmas – union voters voted against Trump with near-unanimity.

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, and the Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris campaign advisor – her brother-in-law Tony West – is Uber's chief legal officer and the architect of Prop 22, California's scab law that formalized "gig work" labor violations. The fact that when the eminently guillotineable union-buster Howard Schultz tries to win a presidential nomination he does so in the Democratic party speaks volumes. If your political party has room for Michael Bloomberg, it doesn't have room for workers. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful friends to unions, and unions keep the Dems honest. The #RedForEd teachers' strikes of 2018 kicked off a wave of public support for unions – and worker interest in unionization – that has only grown in the years since:

https://theweek.com/articles/764828/teacher-strikes-could-future-alt-labor

Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling.

It's falling! This one is on the union leadership. Unions are sitting on gigantic warchests that they are resolutely not spending organizing the workers who are clamoring to join unions:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/ten-times-this

Unions have historic high cash reserves and are doing historically low organizing. This part is the unions' fault:

https://www.radishresearch.org/_files/ugd/2357dd_135794f88aa140f2962ee5c71ac31ff0.pdf

Or rather, it's the union bosses' fault. Union leadership in America, broadly speaking, sucks. Bosses love shitty unions, and the biggest unions obliged bosses for decades, with leaders who established suicidal practices like "two-tier contracts." That's a union where all the workers have to pay dues, but only the senior workers get protection from the union those dues fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

If you sat down and said, "Let's design a union contract that will ensure that every worker hired from this day forward hates unions," this is the contract you'd come up with.

Those shitty union bosses? They're on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried the steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union's own rules and keeping the vote going:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we've got the makings of a general strike.

That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it's going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.

Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you're not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there's some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time bosses figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle.

"Law-and-order" candidates want to throw millions of our neighbors in jail. By the way, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except for prisoners. American imprisons more people than any other country in the history of the world. We make Stalin's gulags and Chinese Cultural Revolution "re-education camps" look unambitious. American prisoners produce $9b worth of services and $2b worth of goods every year. The average US prison wage is $0.53/hour, but six states ban prison wages altogether and North Carolina caps them at $1/day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

If you think immigrants are bad for American workers' wages, wait'll you see what legions of newly imprisoned slave laborers earning $0.53/hour do to those wages. Also: Californians just voted down a ballot measure to abolish prison slavery:

https://www.kqed.org/news/12013392/californians-voted-against-outlawing-slavery-why-is-prop-6-failing

The GOP are not on workers' side, and workers will not earn more under Trump's policies. Workers will earn more if they join a union, which they will only do if union leaders focus on organizing, which will only happen if we get rid of shitty union bosses. Start with this asshole, who belongs on the scrapheap of history:

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/16/nx-s1-5041345/teamsters-president-sean-obrien-addresses-the-republican-national-convention

With the GOP running the country for the next four years, it's tempting to look for hope in social movements. Maybe Trump will be so terrible that people will band together in informal solidarity networks and #Resist. History teaches us otherwise. The people who need the most help under Trump will be too embroiled in the fight for their own survival to put together the kind of movement that can make a difference.

As Astra Taylor reminded us on the Know Your Enemy podcast, Occupy and Black Lives Matter formed under Obama, when things were eleven kinds of fucked up, but at least ICE wasn't raiding our neighbors' homes:

https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/voting-what-is-it-good-for-w-astra-taylor-olufmi-taiwo-malcolm-harris-teaser

Occupy and BLM arose in a moment when people had just enough breathing room to think beyond their immediate survival. Even deeply flawed progressive administrations provide that breathing room.

By contrast, the #RedForEd teachers' strikes were a creature of the Trump years. Even if social movements struggle to find their power under authoritarian, far-right regimes, these are the conditions in which organized labor movements are renewed:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/to-unfuck-politics-create-more-union

Trump won the election because white men, especially young white men, voted for him, but he couldn't have done it without the votes of white women, and Black and Latino men. These voters may even conceive of themselves as being in favor of women's rights and of the rights of racial minorities, but they still voted for Trump, because some facet of their identity - their maleness, their whiteness - mattered more to them than everything else.

Bosses have always excelled at this game, bringing in Irish scabs to break strikes of German workers, or Polish scabs to break Irish workers' pickets. The Pinkertons relied on Black workers who were excluded from the lily white unions.

Our identities are complex and ever-shifting, and men who worry that women's power comes at their own expense, or whites who worry that this is true of Black and Latino power aren't entirely wrong. As the saying goes, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

But there's one part of your identity that is inherently solidaristic: whether you are a worker or an owner. If you own the business, you make more money when your workers earn less. If you work at the business, every dollar you earn is a dollar your boss doesn't get. Workers' gains are bosses' losses.

That's why they want us to "vote with our wallets." It's not just that those votes are rigged for the people with the fattest wallets. By tricking you into thinking of yourself as a "consumer" who benefits from low prices, they get you to stop thinking of yourself as a worker who suffers from low wages.

This remains true even after decades of "market based pensions" that forced workers to flush their savings into the stock market casino, to be the perennial suckers at the table in a game where their bosses had an unbeatable house advantage:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Even after generations of this, the share of the stock market owned by workers is a negligible crumb. This is how GDP can rise, the stock market can surge, and you stay poor. Workers' fortunes don't rise and fall with the stock market. They're not owners.

You're a worker even if you're well-paid. Tech workers are just figuring this out, after a generation-long con in which bosses convinced techies that they were temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who definitely didn't need a union:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#sell-job

Tech workers' power came from scarcity, and scarcity is brittle. Tech fired 260,000 workers in 2023, and another 100,000 in the first six months of 2024. Tech bosses have smashed their workers' power, and we know what comes next.

We know what comes next because we know how tech bosses treat workers they can replace. Amazon warehouse workers piss in bottles and get maimed on the job at a rate that outstrips any other warehouse worker in America. Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy didn't welcome coders with pink mohawks, facial piercings and black t-shirts with incomprehensible slogans because they liked tech workers and hated warehouse workers. Amazon coders owed the privilege to pee whenever they felt like it to their bosses' fear that they couldn't be replaced. Now that coders are replaceable, their kidneys are on the firing line.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." If you want to see the future of a replaceable Amazon coder, look at the working conditions of a replaceable Amazon delivery driver, monitored by a fucking AI that punishes them if they open their mouths while driving:

https://jalopnik.com/amazon-bans-its-drivers-from-moving-their-own-lips-too-1851639312

Remember lovely Tim Cook, the guy who took over Apple from its sainted juice-cleansing cofounder Steve Jobs? Cook's accomplishment, the one that earned him the CEOship and a personal net worth in excess of $2 billion, was to figure out how to offshore Apple's production to Chinese factories where the working conditions were so terrible that they needed to install suicide nets to catch workers who couldn't face another minute on the job:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

That's how Tim Cook treats workers he's not afraid of. Apple workers, no matter how well paid, no matter how pampered, need a union, because the instant Tim Cook can treat you like a Chinese iPhone assembly-line worker, he will.

Tim Cook had some choice words for Donald Trump this week:

Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.

It wasn't just Cook. Every tech boss lined up to kiss Trump's ass: Bezos ("Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success"); Zuck ("Looking forward to working with you"); Pichai ("We are in a golden age of American innovation"); Nadella ("Congratulations President Trump"):

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

You don't just deserve a tech union, you need one, now:

https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union.html

Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won't be easy. Workers won't be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.

The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn't call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA #RedForEd Teachers' strike, the teachers didn't just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students' parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.

In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that's how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can't deliver and workers don't vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too.

McAlevey died last summer. But she left behind a legion of people she taught and inspired, and a playbook we all can follow:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

We've got four years. Join a union. Take over its leadership. Create solidarity with your fellow workers and your community. Bargain for a contract. Make it expire in 2028. Get ready.

Because in 2028, we're having a general strike.

#pluralistic #labor #politics #democrats in disarray #one big union #general strike 2028 #fascism #hamilton nolan #organizing #jane mcalevey

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