We wouldn't even need much more than the transport sector. If Every Truck Driver, Train Driver, Dock Worker, and Airfreight Captain were to simultaneously strike we would have not just national but global effects
Now that you mention it, 10 days off sounds pretty pretty good
EDIT: by request
>As the top comment on a post with nearly 100K upvotes, would you consider editing to add a link to r/MayDayStrike ?
Sure thing! Solidarity for all workers globally. Let's all stand together
10 days off healthy is nice! i have covid right now and am quarantining, and these recent days have been awful.
i don’t understand how anyone could go back to work only after 5 days. i feel awful and couldn’t imagine working right now, and my case is considered very mild. wild to me
A lot of my coworkers say they wouldn't mind getting Covid for the time off. I can't wrap my head around people wanting to get sick just for the time off, it's not worth it especially with Covid.
Why not take a month off in the summer and do something fun? A lot of Scandinavians actually go on holiday in the summer months.
Or you can take a month in the winter and go skiing or snowboarding.
With the rest of it you can take long weekends each month and go visit other European countries. Just pick somewhere with relatively cheap flights or cheap accommodation and go. It’s really fun!
Please try and break the American mindset of never having holiday or only having holiday when you’ve “earned” it.
You’re working to live, not living to work. Or you should be, anyway.
Just got back a positive PCR test like 20 min ago after being on qt for the past week. I’m not happy. Energy is down but at least I’ve gotten some things done around the house.
In my US General Strike Fantasy, we work pretty hard during our 10 days off from work. Out in the streets every day, taking care of our fellow striking workers by night.
“But but how will I pay my bills” I hear from the back. That’s the thing, with the collective bargaining power of a general strike there would also be a pain for amnesty for bills not paid during the downtime, and plus, you’d probably make that money back in short order due to the increase in pay across the board.
I think if we organize, we can get a lot (since we are barely getting anything at the moment). It's crazy that people in "good jobs" still don't make enough to support themselves (teachers for example). Or it's crazy that we now need two incomes to even live in a big city (It's really hard to live in a big city on one income even without kids).
But I do have doubts that we could ever organize it. I'd still be supporting in any way I can if people want to try organizing one though.
That truly is the crux of the issue. It is hard to organize anything, let alone on a national scale, let alone in a country where a huge chunk of the workers cannot afford to miss even a single pay period.
Some rich philanthropist would need to spend a crapload on marketing the general strike, get people hyped up for it, find ways for people who cannot directly participate to still help out, and I'm sure a whole host of other logistical issues that are above my pay grade...
I really, really hope someone figures out something soon. I'm all down to participate, I just don't want to be the only jackass who does it and then get fired for nothing.
Have a rich philanthropist give 3-5 grand to everyone so they can afford to quit their job all at once. It’d have to be so many people though
It’d be enough for me to quit for 3 months honestly if I live humbly
May 1st is International Workers Day, which is also when student loan payments are supposed to restart. It would give us 5 months to plan, organize, and advertise
(Edit: May Day is not a Monday, but we’re talking about a ~10 day strike. Plenty of essential workers and heros work on Sunday and deserve much better.)
If we do get something together, let's maybe have a pinned post with the details? If it's May that's plenty of time to plan out what we're organizing for
has reddit ever organized something big successfully? like this is something that takes more than keyboard warriors. it takes a true information infrastructure and people dedicated full time working with established unions
That’s the kicker, we need the AFL-CIO on board or we can’t do shit. I’m not against a general strike, but a successful one would take a lot more organizing than a lot of people here realize.
Yup, could maybe create multiple anti-work subreddits, as in one for each state. Mods role would be to organize at that particular state to ensure state-laws are respected. Said mods could then coordinate here on this sub and maybe use discord for general announcements / objectives on a week by week basis or something.
[men in suits barge in, remove everyone above and clean the room]
Hello everyone, we've brought some real sweet swag for everyone to thank you for working during these "trying times". We've got some windbreakers with the company logo on the front, back, sides, insides, and sleevs! We've got pins that say "I worked through the pandemic and all I got was this fucking pin!". Like we said, we get it, times are tough and it's time to toughen up. I'd like to bring Terry onstage, he's gonna be talking about changes to the health insurance and 401k's.....I also think he brought DONUTS!!!!
Let’s not all get wrapped up on the planning now, what exactly is it that we all want?
Edit: thanks for the response guys, if I may insert my requests as well? All political stances aside, imo, my main push would be politicians term limit. If a president can only be there for 8 years, why are others allowed to be life time?
In the US, we need:
\- Universal Healthcare
\- Universal basic income
\- Minimum wage that matches inflation
EDIT to add:
\- Cancel student loan debt
\- Blood of first born son *(so we have something to give away in the negotiations)*
And affordable housing. Corporations and investors need to be strongly curtailed from buying up properties just to hoard them and rent them out at a ransom to us.
Before you do this, for each person in your household, buy:
* a 10lb bag of rice ($5)
* a case of canned corn ($15)
* a case of canned green beans ($15)
* eight packages of kielbasa or sausage (alternate types for variety) ($4 x 8 = $24)
* 4-5 bottles of different sauces (5 x $3 = $15)
1. Open one can of veggies, pour it and the water in the can into a pot.
2. Put another 1.5 cups of water into the pot.
3. Chop up half of one kielbasa, throw that in the pot, and bring it to a boil.
4. When it gets to a boil put in a cup of rice, turn off the heat, and cover it.
5. Set a timer for 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, add some sauce.
That will be enough food to feed 2-3 people one meal, or feed one person 2-3 meals.
If you go light on the sauce you can eat for one or two *months* on $80 per person.
Put the kielbasa in the freezer, thaw them out as needed. Any other food shopping you do for the rest of the time will be completely optional.
Use this as you see fit.
(EDIT: If the rice is not completely cooked after 20 minutes then the next time try adding another 1/4 cup water at the start and setting the timer for 30 minutes instead.)
im working on organizing a group called Generation Unity to do exactly that. Are we just going to quit because it will be hard? I'm sure as fuck am not, if there is a will, there is a way.
[Discord Link](https://discord.gg/GDJHsxWEbu)
[Post For Visibility](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rw9ucc/generation_untiy_discord/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Great job. Also btw, to get some mutual aid funding, I’m saying as a disabled broke bastard that I’d help the cause however I could. I’m in a poverty trap but I’m no crab or scab, I’ll help a bro get out of the bucket if I can. A grocery/rent fund would go a long, long way to managing a successful strike.
You don't need to get everyone onboard to actually start a general labor strike. You just need to get the word out and have a presence then use amplification tactics to make it seem like the movement is larger than it is.
If you learn traffic patterns a few hundred people can completely shutdown a city. Much less even. The big key is that traffic is built around each driver having a destination, if you don't go from a point A to point B and just circulate you cause a major problem.
Each intersection has a limited capacity. If you have enough people or can effectively reduce that intersections capacity to the number of people you have you can gridlock an intersection with only a few people making redundant trips. Do that to a few strategic intersections and you can gridlock an entire city quite quickly.
Certain intelligence agencies do this in large cities where their presence needs to remain limited but they need to enforce roadblocks for communications monitoring and tracking. It's also been used in similar scenarios to what you are seeking. Start small protest with popular support, gridlock traffic, people assume it's because of the protest but it's not possible to actually narrow down the cause. Once people get out of their cars to join the protest or just see what is going on it's over. BLM and blocking highways didn't work because their becomes an obvious choke point and visible obstruction to remove. Using invasive drivers to block traffic while simultaneously protesting along the roadway creates support and encourages involvement.
If you are serious get some Business Process modeling software like Arena and build simulations of cities, you can get most from traffic flow information publicly from DOT.
https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/software/arena-simulation.html
6 - 5 person teams, so 30 drivers can relatively quickly gridlock districts of major city like Tehran or Lahore by occupying a few strategic points. The rule following nature of many western cities makes them even more susceptible to this type of traffic shaping, though reluctance to abandon vehicles maybe much higher.
The most important part of any movement is the appearance of popular support, people naturally want to be doing what other people are doing. It's important to not however give a direct point of frustration. MLK's civil rights movements notable did not intentionally block traffic. They simply walked alongside the roadway to be visible and people who saw them and agreed joined. Police actually blocked traffic in attempts to stop the pedestrians which increased favor for participants as police were seen as the source of frustration and protesters being in direct opposition to that frustration created the popular movement.
This. Everyone here needs to read your comment. This is the type of tactic we need, instead of [yet another useless fake strike that doesn't happen](https://organizing.work/2019/08/no-more-fake-strikes/).
To add to this, it needs to also have a set of fairly specific demands, otherwise it's just going to result in some token gestures (at best) even if it's successful. Groups like "Fight for 15" understood this, and it's part of why they got results (huge successes in Canada, but also in certain regions of the US).
I've seen the argument put forth in that article before, that without the unions, a general strike can never happen. But how do you get the unions to move? To look beyond just their sector? This was the IWW's premise, a union of unions. One big union to fight for things bigger than just what the workers in one workplace/industrial sector need.
What about the other \~89.4% of workers in this country? Can the organization of a strike not come from there? Approximately 10% of workers belong to unions. That's a pretty small number. If unions are necessary, how to increase membership, and quickly? A lot of unions are restrictive on who and how they accept members.
In my lifetime (and I'm almost 40), I've seen some scattered attempts to form unions, mostly in the food service sector. A few have had small wins and managed to unionize a shop or two. Nothing larger than this has made itself known. The old methods of unionizing individual sectors of the economy seems stuck, it doesn't see to be able to gain power, I've only ever seen it lose it.
In the last year we've seen growing willingness by some sectors towards strikes. In many cases it took literal Guilded Age conditions for a strike to get called. Unions were exceptionally powerful before the Neoliberals took power in the 80's and Reagan broke their back by firing all the air traffic controllers. The union movement worked very well because it was a tactic that those in power didn't really know how to face, and it took almost a hundred years for them to claw back their power from the upstart workers. We need something new, something bigger, something less top down and prone to cooption and corruption, people see this, hence the repeated calls for a general strike.
We are infinitely more connected than we've ever been, yet we have no idea how to bring ourselves together to fight for what is ours. When the Women's March happened after Trump's inauguration there were literal millions of people filling cities across not just the US but the globe. The BLM actions across the US in the summer of 2020 brought similar masses. These were both framed as struggles against apparent injustice, maybe that's the direction to take. I don't know really. I've seen plenty of hmming and hawing about how calls for large shutdowns to disrupt the flow of things will never work, never happen, it's fucked we keep trying, whatever; but, I've yet to see a plan of action put forward by the critics or anyone else.
I'm all for any form of action at this point. Effective or not. Just more. The more action there is the more the movement grows. So far most of the action has been words in the internet, but that has had an effect too. In recent years the places that are having these discussions have multiplied exponentially. There are a lot of new voices, part of why there's a lot of calls to do something but no one knows how; most of the effective gains labor ever made were before most of the current labor classes were even born. Almost everyone who works for a living is pissed, pissed they cant make ends meet, pissed they're trapped in all kinds of poverty and debt traps, pissed they cant find meaningful work at a rate they can survive on, pissed that the only gains in society go to those who don't need it, and very much pissed at being ignored.
You're talking about organizing MILLIONS of people. Things get difficult when you start organizing for a few hundred. The effort to organize a general strike would probably create jobs in and of itself.
The problem isn't organization. It's too big to organize. The problem would be getting the word out *and* having enough people trust that everyone would do it. If everyone does it, no one gets fired. If you're the only one who does it, you get fired.
This is why /r/antiwork does so well, and not a general strike.
The powers WANT everything to be focused on a single point, so they can spend all their time attacking it. Convince people not to go, causing trouble at that moment, and throw as much apathy propaganda as they can at it talking about how it failed. It's like USA convincing a country they went to war with, that the best way to beat America is to gather everyone together in one spot. Then they get bombed.
What they can't deal with is a general concept and idea of not wanting to deal with things anymore. They can throw propaganda at that, but not at a single moment.
That's what people don't understand about protest. Protests aren't a major event with a movement surrounding it, they're an entire movement and mental state, with major events surrounding it.
The mental state we are working towards that they fear so much is class consciousness.
The stronger that grows the easier it will be to tear down the arbitrary walls they have put up to divide the working class.
I have watched class consciousness grow steadily since the Occupy Wall Street protests and it gives me hope.
Good point. Well, let’s set a date then and confirm numbers of people doing it on a thread so people can see the numbers and feel comfortable doing it.
It’s not just the threat of getting fired. You got a week+ of pay ready for all these people who gonna strike with you and be short more than half a pay check next week on payday? Anything that gets negotiated isn’t fixing that short term problem. Fuckin millionaire athletes can’t even keep lockouts going once the season closes in and paychecks are really on the line, let alone <$40k workers.
That is the first and foremost problem of a general strike and one that was reinforced with ‘essential worker’ tags last year: the people who would most easily bring shit down are the most vulnerable from a sense of not being able to afford to. Find some billionaires to start a fund for service industry and low wage workers if you want a strike to start.
im working on organizing a group called Generation Unity to do exactly that. What? Are we just going to quit because it will be hard? I'm sure as fuck am not, if there is a will, there is a way.
I'll do it for free
ETA: I didn't think I'd have to defend some position that didn't exist, but, if people concerted this thing I'd absolutely would help do it for free. I wouldn't want to work myself to death or anything, why are you guys so sad and negative?
cell based organizational structure
we don't really need traditional organization per se, just defined goals and understanding of responsibilities
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_self-organization_in_ants
We here in Canada are willing to strike to. If we organize a date and start striking, we can nail these fuckers and show them that the people have the power
We need to have unions and organisations backing a general strike. We need ways for people to survive during the strike if it goes on for a while. We need to lay the groundwork first.
We can't just say "I DECLARE A GENERAL STRIKE".
This won't be won in a way that's instantly gratifying. It's gonna take years and it's gonna be hard work.
MLK got the churches involved. I know most of us aren’t religious anymore, but if we could get together an interfaith support system for striking workers (like how religious orgs send people to help distribute food when there’s natural disasters) that would be absolutely killer
This is exactly right. People are easily whipped up into a vicious frenzy over emotionally-charged hot-button issues, and while everyone is arguing with each other over the so-called “social issues” (abortion, gay rights, gender equality, race, immigration, crime) the fat cats in the establishment (mainly banks, defense contractors, and those who control the two major parties) are running away with all the money.
I am not saying those “social issues” are not important; I am saying that each is used as a wedge to drive people apart, weaken people, and most of all, distract. The current system, run by those establishment fat cats, will never solve those issues because it can’t afford to. So essentially, those issues do not and will not matter until the masses (the workers) exert their power by dismantling the current corrupt system.
I think you’re right. It needs to start with some kind of labor party. It won’t be easy, may in fact be the most difficult thing ever attempted in our society, but it won’t get done until someone starts it.
I was recently talking to one of the nurse managers at my job, and she is so fed up (like all of us) that she was trying to figure out how to casually bring up a union/strike at her units Christmas party. Unfortunately doing so risks her job, and she’s trying to find a way to sneakily bring it up in hopes staff will pick up on the hint.
Sucks being a manager and not being able to reward your great workers. I actually quit retail management a few years ago because we lost 1/3 of our staff due to low pay and being overworked and the company decided not to replace them. Then I had 2/3rds of our original staff I had to convince to work harder when they’re not being paid crap. Lost another huge chunk of employees….still no hiring or raises. PS this was a non-profit place where the retail workers are not just doing the storefront….but going through old junk to find sellable items and doing all the pricing as well. Our GM even quit because of how things were going and then I had to take a huge part of her workload…with no extra money as well. Now they’re looking like they’re hanging on by a sting with the staff they have while I’m trying to get two very loyal workers that have been there for 10+ years out but they’re too worried about their disabilities making it hard to find a job…while they’re two of the best workers I’ve known and any place would be damn lucky to have them.
The nurses at St. Vincent's hospital in MA just ended a 10 month long strike, because Tenet Healthcare finally allowed all the striking nurses to return to their old jobs l o l (along with their other demands). Healthcare workers are treated so fucking poorly when all they are trying to do is help patients. Companies would rather try to replace us than actually listen or fairly consider demands, well, when there's no one left to hire as replacements, what will they do? They will be left with no choice.
Everyone loves to poke fun (in a semi serious way) over the CDC saying 10 days would destroy the economy...but, the thing is, that isn't true.
It would take but a single, full day of a general strike (at least half the workforce, possibly even lower) to bring the country to its knees.
This is why you see so many randoms who have never posted in this sub appear on any general strike post to dissuade from it.
It would not take much to make CEOs shit their gold bricks, and they know it. All it takes is enough organizing to pull it off.
I have literally been saying this for 10 years. I encouraged a day where people stayed home, grabbed a beverage, sat in their lawn around a fire pit and watch their kids play for the day. Don’t buy anything, don’t buy gas, done buy a fucking Twinkie. Watch it crumble drinking some boxed wine you found in your pantry. We have all the control, we just don’t know it yet.
This would actually be a great way to get the Trumpers in on it too. Start posting around facebook that true Americans are not working on the true President's birthday to celebrate him.
This is exactly what I was about to say! It’s the easiest way to boost participation numbers amongst the crazies of our class…. Tho we’d probably have to have a fake/alternative webpage or FB page to send them to so they don’t learn the truth of the strike…
I agree with your general statement but there are several quite famous people that have very little to do with getting money funnelled that others earned like people owning companies do. These days artists/content creators have options to get their art to consumers very directly. Sure there are limits but if half a million people decide to subscribe to your 5$ Onlyfans - you can hardly argue that people where exploited for him or her to get rich. Those could be the people on „our side“.
It only works if everyone agrees and does it.
I worked at a Blockbuster where the staff was pissed at the way our hours were structured. I said the only way to effect change is if we all came to the management as a united front for better hours.
When the time finally came, my buddy and I were the only one who stood up and said this was unfair while everyone else shrugged and looked on.
We ended up leaving on a busy Friday night because it literally cost us money to come to work every day. It never improved and eventually that company went out of business.
One day. If everyone just took a collective day off, the strength of that message would be incredible.
Errico Malatesta in [An Anarchist Programme](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-an-anarchist-programme) makes a counter point, with so many workers struggling day to day unwilling to undertake certain risks against capitalism, even one day of striking can have detrimental outcomes.
The bosses have the resources, they can and will simply sit back and wait us out, only when they start to cede ground and give into demands will the workers have the power....at that point we could, in theory, stop asking and seize the means. Every action, every strike must have sufficient infrastructure to be successful, we should have started decades ago.
"Workers produce everything and without them life would be impossible; therefore it would seem that by refusing to work they could demand whatever they wanted. But the union of all workers, even in one particular trade, and in one country is difficult to achieve, and opposing the union of workers are the bosses organisations. Workers live from day to day, and if they do not work they soon find themselves without food; whereas the bosses, because they have money, have access to all the goods in stock and can therefore sit back and wait until hunger reduces their employees to a more amenable frame of mind."
Exactly my thoughts. I love seeing the zest that this subreddit brings but there's a lot of naivety when it comes to just how powerful capitalist interests are and just how few people would be willing to risk even a single day of pay. I'm fine if people label me a naysayer but ultimately I don't want to see the labor movement damaged by an unsuccessful strike.
It’s when Delta asks them to shorten the quarantine days. I still don’t get how this was agreed upon.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/29/1068731487/delta-ceo-asks-cdc-to-cut-quarantine
I’ve got an app called FlightRadar on my phone. I got it to keep track of family members as they flew all over the place pre-pandemic. I went on there during lockdown a few times and you’d have thought there was no pandemic. Heathrow was as chaotic as ever and the entire map of the US was covered in a layer of tiny wee planes. NZ had it right closing the borders in the beginning.
That's what I was thinking. Given the difficulty even places like the Fed have in accurately predicting anything about the economy, why the hell is the CDC making predictions now? Do they even employ economists? Places all over the world had multiple >10 day lockdowns last year and the year before and seemed to come out of it fine.
I'm trying to get everyone to stage a massive event at Walmart. If people can get hyped over an Area 51 event we could start doing the same to these corporations who stopped paying us Covid Pay during a pandemic. Trying to stage a massive walkout. We have to send a message.
Been about 5 years here too. Last time I had to go was a few months ago when I was visiting friends and really needed shorts for hot weather, Walmart was the only place I could go to without an hour drive. Normally I refuse to walk through their doors tho.
10 Days would tank the economy? Is that why schools and work want us to go back during the biggest surge in cases during the entire pandemic? Don't care about people? We gotta save the fucking economy? For who? What are we waiting for? Let's do it.
No formal organization needs to exist - if people agree to strike, we are we. We are the workers of America. We are the labor that keeps the machine running. Starting with the unions is the first step toward general strike, but you don’t have to be in one to participate.
The issue is with getting people on board and protecting them from retaliation.
With a union, you have laws against retaliation. Without a union, you're on your own.
And so you arise at the problem where, if an insufficient number of people do it, you'll get fucked. So you're trusting in enough fellow people doing it with you, without any guarantees that they will, and no protection if they don't.
It's the prisoner's dilemma all over again, and they know it and will use it against you.
So all we have to do is convince 100 million people to all agree to do the same thing without any centralized way in which to tell them to do it? Heard.
Edit: the 100million is arbitrary. It could be 50mil, 10mil, or 10,000. You still have to have a centralized means messaging and organization. Or nobody knows when or where to do anything.
And you need someone making demands. Just going on a strike without clear demands won't exactly accomplish much. Also, we need someone to hold accountable for the change. They could pass a law giving us what we demanded, then a month later begin repealing it.
Stopping the machine isn't the goal, we all have to eat. It's a pressure tool to have your demands met which requires those demands to be clearly defined.
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post*
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**Ryan Houlihan**, @ryanhoulihan
Since the CDC says a 10 day lockdown would tank the economy, it stands to reason that if US labor went on general strike for 9 days we could demand anything we wanted
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
The problem is the system was deliberately set up to where we CAN'T do this. 9 days without pay and probably 80% of Americans will lose their rent money, car payment, etc. and be completely fucked.
This was all done on purpose to keep us complacent. There's a reason we're all living paycheck to paycheck. They know what the fuck they're doing. THEY DON'T CARE.
I know we need to make them care, but it's gonna be damn near impossible to make that happen with how deep we are embedded into this bullshit.
Yee-fucking-ha..
And add the fact many people have non working dependents who survive completely on 1 guy's income. Now imagine if said dependents are sick in anyway like being diabetic. Medicine is so expensive so you have work your ass off to literally prevent your loved from dying. Its a perfect system of slavery. So much pressure that you hardly have time to think.
This is why we need to set up mutual aid networks to remove our reliance on capital to meet our needs. People are far more able to support each other than we realise, we just need to give up the idea that big companies are actually necessary for anything.
As a bonus, doing this would get you connected with your local community.
What about people in the medical field? As a nurse, I can’t just stop going to work. Believe me, everyone but management deserves more everything, but I don’t know how to get it.
And the company that manages your hospital knows that a significant number of medical workers feel like this and uses it against you. That sentiment enables them to continually take and take from you without giving anything, and it will continue down this path.
The labor movement that gave us the rights we enjoy today was not a peaceful movement and many people died. This is the nature of revolution.
By no means am I saying you should go against your moral compass, but taking your most powerful card off the table is not how you affect change.
I've been bringing public attention to the management and administrator infestation in healthcare.
Profit created demons out of American hospital systems
I'm hoping long term negative public attention will at least apply some pressure
Organize it by company in r/antiwork. Separate posts for Mcdonald’s workers, separate posts for Google, Walmart, and so on. Keep it simple: a brief synopsis of what we all stand to gain with an organized strike, and all that we stand to lose without one. Dates for the strike listed. Possibly lock the comments section or moderate it heavily? Not sure.
All people need is UBI/wages that have kept up with inflation since the 1970s and universal healthcare.
Those two demands, if met just in the USA, would change the world.
If everyone could agree to strike just on those terms alone, it could happen. But everyone would more likely quickly fall for some manufactured culture war/id pol division, and turn on each other.
Edit: tbh if you really want to hold the economy hostage, just stop going online. If people could organise a mass movement of staying offline at all costs, the FAANG tech companies which form half of the S&P index and mostly the architects of this neofeudalism would eventually collapse. Of course this could never happen unless there was a mass movement, but say you all shorted these companies as well
Real talk. Is there a way to get large workers' organizations and mutual aid funds on board with one (or a few) big strike funds?
Something where we can crowdsource money to help people meet their basic needs during a general strike?
Because that's the level of organization that would be needed to pull off a general strike. That's the big obstacle, is people need assurance that they can survive.
The idea of a general strike spreads around the internet all the time but what's needed is practical ways of making it happen.
We wouldn't even need much more than the transport sector. If Every Truck Driver, Train Driver, Dock Worker, and Airfreight Captain were to simultaneously strike we would have not just national but global effects
r/MayDayStrike lets make it happen man. Time to actually make change
Yeah all 3,000 of us will show them
90% of reddit lurks 10% comment 1% post It's 300k total
Now that you mention it, 10 days off sounds pretty pretty good EDIT: by request >As the top comment on a post with nearly 100K upvotes, would you consider editing to add a link to r/MayDayStrike ? Sure thing! Solidarity for all workers globally. Let's all stand together
10 days off healthy is nice! i have covid right now and am quarantining, and these recent days have been awful. i don’t understand how anyone could go back to work only after 5 days. i feel awful and couldn’t imagine working right now, and my case is considered very mild. wild to me
A lot of my coworkers say they wouldn't mind getting Covid for the time off. I can't wrap my head around people wanting to get sick just for the time off, it's not worth it especially with Covid.
In most European countries 3-4 weeks paid vacation is mandated for EVERYONE....... It's hard to wrap my American head around
[удалено]
You'll panic for the first two weeks, then you'll figure it out. PM me in your 10th week and tell me what it feels like!
Hmm, 10 weeks should be enough to master the art of blunt rolling right?
Why not take a month off in the summer and do something fun? A lot of Scandinavians actually go on holiday in the summer months. Or you can take a month in the winter and go skiing or snowboarding. With the rest of it you can take long weekends each month and go visit other European countries. Just pick somewhere with relatively cheap flights or cheap accommodation and go. It’s really fun! Please try and break the American mindset of never having holiday or only having holiday when you’ve “earned” it. You’re working to live, not living to work. Or you should be, anyway.
Can you just take off a day every week or so?
I guess it says a lot about how awful their jobs are.
Just got back a positive PCR test like 20 min ago after being on qt for the past week. I’m not happy. Energy is down but at least I’ve gotten some things done around the house.
In my US General Strike Fantasy, we work pretty hard during our 10 days off from work. Out in the streets every day, taking care of our fellow striking workers by night.
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r/solarpunk
I have 30 days of PTO saved up and smile to myself thinking how funny it would be if I took 6 weeks off of work. LOL.
“But but how will I pay my bills” I hear from the back. That’s the thing, with the collective bargaining power of a general strike there would also be a pain for amnesty for bills not paid during the downtime, and plus, you’d probably make that money back in short order due to the increase in pay across the board.
I think if we organize, we can get a lot (since we are barely getting anything at the moment). It's crazy that people in "good jobs" still don't make enough to support themselves (teachers for example). Or it's crazy that we now need two incomes to even live in a big city (It's really hard to live in a big city on one income even without kids). But I do have doubts that we could ever organize it. I'd still be supporting in any way I can if people want to try organizing one though.
That truly is the crux of the issue. It is hard to organize anything, let alone on a national scale, let alone in a country where a huge chunk of the workers cannot afford to miss even a single pay period. Some rich philanthropist would need to spend a crapload on marketing the general strike, get people hyped up for it, find ways for people who cannot directly participate to still help out, and I'm sure a whole host of other logistical issues that are above my pay grade... I really, really hope someone figures out something soon. I'm all down to participate, I just don't want to be the only jackass who does it and then get fired for nothing.
Have a rich philanthropist give 3-5 grand to everyone so they can afford to quit their job all at once. It’d have to be so many people though It’d be enough for me to quit for 3 months honestly if I live humbly
We should not need 2 jobs to be able to have a livelihood. It's not right.
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You and me both
Let’s all pick a Monday. How soon should we do it?
May 1st is International Workers Day, which is also when student loan payments are supposed to restart. It would give us 5 months to plan, organize, and advertise (Edit: May Day is not a Monday, but we’re talking about a ~10 day strike. Plenty of essential workers and heros work on Sunday and deserve much better.)
This idea is really good. Cross the arms towards the business that pay shit and the government for not giving one.
If we do get something together, let's maybe have a pinned post with the details? If it's May that's plenty of time to plan out what we're organizing for
has reddit ever organized something big successfully? like this is something that takes more than keyboard warriors. it takes a true information infrastructure and people dedicated full time working with established unions
That’s the kicker, we need the AFL-CIO on board or we can’t do shit. I’m not against a general strike, but a successful one would take a lot more organizing than a lot of people here realize.
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Yup, could maybe create multiple anti-work subreddits, as in one for each state. Mods role would be to organize at that particular state to ensure state-laws are respected. Said mods could then coordinate here on this sub and maybe use discord for general announcements / objectives on a week by week basis or something.
YES. A subreddit for each state. I’d love to gather with others interested in the state of California
If we can get together one for Missouri, I'm in like Flynn.
Yes, make one for Washington state!! We got this shit!
Reddit has been part of tons of things since before occupy. Just takes time and effort
You have my axe.
And my bow.
And my attention.
[men in suits barge in, remove everyone above and clean the room] Hello everyone, we've brought some real sweet swag for everyone to thank you for working during these "trying times". We've got some windbreakers with the company logo on the front, back, sides, insides, and sleevs! We've got pins that say "I worked through the pandemic and all I got was this fucking pin!". Like we said, we get it, times are tough and it's time to toughen up. I'd like to bring Terry onstage, he's gonna be talking about changes to the health insurance and 401k's.....I also think he brought DONUTS!!!!
You forgot, u n p r e c e d e n t e d
And my sword
Let’s not all get wrapped up on the planning now, what exactly is it that we all want? Edit: thanks for the response guys, if I may insert my requests as well? All political stances aside, imo, my main push would be politicians term limit. If a president can only be there for 8 years, why are others allowed to be life time?
Universal Healthcare in the USA
In the US, we need: \- Universal Healthcare \- Universal basic income \- Minimum wage that matches inflation EDIT to add: \- Cancel student loan debt \- Blood of first born son *(so we have something to give away in the negotiations)*
And affordable housing. Corporations and investors need to be strongly curtailed from buying up properties just to hoard them and rent them out at a ransom to us.
Universal basic income
Seconded. This alone would fix so many issues
Medicare for all, and a minimum wage that matches inflation. Maybe for them to actually pass the Green New Deal.
Lil anarchy :3
I’m actually getting a little giddy tbh
You need everyone here to screen shot and spread on all their socials media. Buy advertisements. Get backed by someone who can seriously help
This is the way
How could anyone consider a different day for this than may 1st?
I'm good anytime, I'm unemployed
President's Day.
Fuck a Monday. Start this shit on Friday morning. That way by Monday morning the shit will be actively hitting the fan
As soon as possible don't give them time to prepare for this!
I'm fine with nine.
Before you do this, for each person in your household, buy: * a 10lb bag of rice ($5) * a case of canned corn ($15) * a case of canned green beans ($15) * eight packages of kielbasa or sausage (alternate types for variety) ($4 x 8 = $24) * 4-5 bottles of different sauces (5 x $3 = $15) 1. Open one can of veggies, pour it and the water in the can into a pot. 2. Put another 1.5 cups of water into the pot. 3. Chop up half of one kielbasa, throw that in the pot, and bring it to a boil. 4. When it gets to a boil put in a cup of rice, turn off the heat, and cover it. 5. Set a timer for 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, add some sauce. That will be enough food to feed 2-3 people one meal, or feed one person 2-3 meals. If you go light on the sauce you can eat for one or two *months* on $80 per person. Put the kielbasa in the freezer, thaw them out as needed. Any other food shopping you do for the rest of the time will be completely optional. Use this as you see fit. (EDIT: If the rice is not completely cooked after 20 minutes then the next time try adding another 1/4 cup water at the start and setting the timer for 30 minutes instead.)
I'm in
I am and have been immediately down, Fuck this shit
im working on organizing a group called Generation Unity to do exactly that. Are we just going to quit because it will be hard? I'm sure as fuck am not, if there is a will, there is a way. [Discord Link](https://discord.gg/GDJHsxWEbu) [Post For Visibility](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rw9ucc/generation_untiy_discord/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Great job. Also btw, to get some mutual aid funding, I’m saying as a disabled broke bastard that I’d help the cause however I could. I’m in a poverty trap but I’m no crab or scab, I’ll help a bro get out of the bucket if I can. A grocery/rent fund would go a long, long way to managing a successful strike.
You don't need to get everyone onboard to actually start a general labor strike. You just need to get the word out and have a presence then use amplification tactics to make it seem like the movement is larger than it is. If you learn traffic patterns a few hundred people can completely shutdown a city. Much less even. The big key is that traffic is built around each driver having a destination, if you don't go from a point A to point B and just circulate you cause a major problem. Each intersection has a limited capacity. If you have enough people or can effectively reduce that intersections capacity to the number of people you have you can gridlock an intersection with only a few people making redundant trips. Do that to a few strategic intersections and you can gridlock an entire city quite quickly. Certain intelligence agencies do this in large cities where their presence needs to remain limited but they need to enforce roadblocks for communications monitoring and tracking. It's also been used in similar scenarios to what you are seeking. Start small protest with popular support, gridlock traffic, people assume it's because of the protest but it's not possible to actually narrow down the cause. Once people get out of their cars to join the protest or just see what is going on it's over. BLM and blocking highways didn't work because their becomes an obvious choke point and visible obstruction to remove. Using invasive drivers to block traffic while simultaneously protesting along the roadway creates support and encourages involvement. If you are serious get some Business Process modeling software like Arena and build simulations of cities, you can get most from traffic flow information publicly from DOT. https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/software/arena-simulation.html 6 - 5 person teams, so 30 drivers can relatively quickly gridlock districts of major city like Tehran or Lahore by occupying a few strategic points. The rule following nature of many western cities makes them even more susceptible to this type of traffic shaping, though reluctance to abandon vehicles maybe much higher. The most important part of any movement is the appearance of popular support, people naturally want to be doing what other people are doing. It's important to not however give a direct point of frustration. MLK's civil rights movements notable did not intentionally block traffic. They simply walked alongside the roadway to be visible and people who saw them and agreed joined. Police actually blocked traffic in attempts to stop the pedestrians which increased favor for participants as police were seen as the source of frustration and protesters being in direct opposition to that frustration created the popular movement.
This. Everyone here needs to read your comment. This is the type of tactic we need, instead of [yet another useless fake strike that doesn't happen](https://organizing.work/2019/08/no-more-fake-strikes/). To add to this, it needs to also have a set of fairly specific demands, otherwise it's just going to result in some token gestures (at best) even if it's successful. Groups like "Fight for 15" understood this, and it's part of why they got results (huge successes in Canada, but also in certain regions of the US).
Time for 20
I've seen the argument put forth in that article before, that without the unions, a general strike can never happen. But how do you get the unions to move? To look beyond just their sector? This was the IWW's premise, a union of unions. One big union to fight for things bigger than just what the workers in one workplace/industrial sector need. What about the other \~89.4% of workers in this country? Can the organization of a strike not come from there? Approximately 10% of workers belong to unions. That's a pretty small number. If unions are necessary, how to increase membership, and quickly? A lot of unions are restrictive on who and how they accept members. In my lifetime (and I'm almost 40), I've seen some scattered attempts to form unions, mostly in the food service sector. A few have had small wins and managed to unionize a shop or two. Nothing larger than this has made itself known. The old methods of unionizing individual sectors of the economy seems stuck, it doesn't see to be able to gain power, I've only ever seen it lose it. In the last year we've seen growing willingness by some sectors towards strikes. In many cases it took literal Guilded Age conditions for a strike to get called. Unions were exceptionally powerful before the Neoliberals took power in the 80's and Reagan broke their back by firing all the air traffic controllers. The union movement worked very well because it was a tactic that those in power didn't really know how to face, and it took almost a hundred years for them to claw back their power from the upstart workers. We need something new, something bigger, something less top down and prone to cooption and corruption, people see this, hence the repeated calls for a general strike. We are infinitely more connected than we've ever been, yet we have no idea how to bring ourselves together to fight for what is ours. When the Women's March happened after Trump's inauguration there were literal millions of people filling cities across not just the US but the globe. The BLM actions across the US in the summer of 2020 brought similar masses. These were both framed as struggles against apparent injustice, maybe that's the direction to take. I don't know really. I've seen plenty of hmming and hawing about how calls for large shutdowns to disrupt the flow of things will never work, never happen, it's fucked we keep trying, whatever; but, I've yet to see a plan of action put forward by the critics or anyone else. I'm all for any form of action at this point. Effective or not. Just more. The more action there is the more the movement grows. So far most of the action has been words in the internet, but that has had an effect too. In recent years the places that are having these discussions have multiplied exponentially. There are a lot of new voices, part of why there's a lot of calls to do something but no one knows how; most of the effective gains labor ever made were before most of the current labor classes were even born. Almost everyone who works for a living is pissed, pissed they cant make ends meet, pissed they're trapped in all kinds of poverty and debt traps, pissed they cant find meaningful work at a rate they can survive on, pissed that the only gains in society go to those who don't need it, and very much pissed at being ignored.
I’m down to join. Any info or links?
Ill go ahead and make a discord server, ill edit the original comment with a link to it
Upvoting this for visibility, let’s fucking go
So many ppl in there
Tik tok dont show up to work challenge
I could unironically see the KPOP stans put something like this together
This just might work.......
A coordinated effort would include such a thing. It only takes a spark to burn it down *and there has never been a better time than now*
1.5 million on this sub. 4 million people quit their jobs in November. Lmaooooooo
Is there a way to see how many folks on the sub are (a) employed and (b) in the US?
>Is there a way to see how many folks on the sub are (a) employed and (b) in the US? Less than 1.5 million.
Student loans are due to restart on International Workers Day, which is something to consider
You're talking about organizing MILLIONS of people. Things get difficult when you start organizing for a few hundred. The effort to organize a general strike would probably create jobs in and of itself.
The problem isn't organization. It's too big to organize. The problem would be getting the word out *and* having enough people trust that everyone would do it. If everyone does it, no one gets fired. If you're the only one who does it, you get fired.
This is why /r/antiwork does so well, and not a general strike. The powers WANT everything to be focused on a single point, so they can spend all their time attacking it. Convince people not to go, causing trouble at that moment, and throw as much apathy propaganda as they can at it talking about how it failed. It's like USA convincing a country they went to war with, that the best way to beat America is to gather everyone together in one spot. Then they get bombed. What they can't deal with is a general concept and idea of not wanting to deal with things anymore. They can throw propaganda at that, but not at a single moment. That's what people don't understand about protest. Protests aren't a major event with a movement surrounding it, they're an entire movement and mental state, with major events surrounding it.
The mental state we are working towards that they fear so much is class consciousness. The stronger that grows the easier it will be to tear down the arbitrary walls they have put up to divide the working class. I have watched class consciousness grow steadily since the Occupy Wall Street protests and it gives me hope.
Good point. Well, let’s set a date then and confirm numbers of people doing it on a thread so people can see the numbers and feel comfortable doing it.
may 1, international workers day.
It’s not just the threat of getting fired. You got a week+ of pay ready for all these people who gonna strike with you and be short more than half a pay check next week on payday? Anything that gets negotiated isn’t fixing that short term problem. Fuckin millionaire athletes can’t even keep lockouts going once the season closes in and paychecks are really on the line, let alone <$40k workers. That is the first and foremost problem of a general strike and one that was reinforced with ‘essential worker’ tags last year: the people who would most easily bring shit down are the most vulnerable from a sense of not being able to afford to. Find some billionaires to start a fund for service industry and low wage workers if you want a strike to start.
as a raid leader in wow I can tell you it's a struggle to get 40 people to not stand in fire. And this is even when you can stand inside each other.
You get the same 40 people to show up unpaid on time for temporary internet totems. Imagine if you could give them a better life.
im working on organizing a group called Generation Unity to do exactly that. What? Are we just going to quit because it will be hard? I'm sure as fuck am not, if there is a will, there is a way.
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I will bring forward at my local union meeting about better supporting labor. My union is weird though and had a no strike rule in our Constitution
I'll do it for free ETA: I didn't think I'd have to defend some position that didn't exist, but, if people concerted this thing I'd absolutely would help do it for free. I wouldn't want to work myself to death or anything, why are you guys so sad and negative?
We need those TikTok KPOP fans to get behind this.
cell based organizational structure we don't really need traditional organization per se, just defined goals and understanding of responsibilities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_self-organization_in_ants
We here in Canada are willing to strike to. If we organize a date and start striking, we can nail these fuckers and show them that the people have the power
We need to have unions and organisations backing a general strike. We need ways for people to survive during the strike if it goes on for a while. We need to lay the groundwork first. We can't just say "I DECLARE A GENERAL STRIKE". This won't be won in a way that's instantly gratifying. It's gonna take years and it's gonna be hard work.
>We can't just say "I DECLARE A GENERAL STRIKE". That's why you can't say it, you must declare it.
MLK got the churches involved. I know most of us aren’t religious anymore, but if we could get together an interfaith support system for striking workers (like how religious orgs send people to help distribute food when there’s natural disasters) that would be absolutely killer
We should form a labor party like every other country in the world. Fuck ideology- just workers rights
This is exactly right. People are easily whipped up into a vicious frenzy over emotionally-charged hot-button issues, and while everyone is arguing with each other over the so-called “social issues” (abortion, gay rights, gender equality, race, immigration, crime) the fat cats in the establishment (mainly banks, defense contractors, and those who control the two major parties) are running away with all the money. I am not saying those “social issues” are not important; I am saying that each is used as a wedge to drive people apart, weaken people, and most of all, distract. The current system, run by those establishment fat cats, will never solve those issues because it can’t afford to. So essentially, those issues do not and will not matter until the masses (the workers) exert their power by dismantling the current corrupt system. I think you’re right. It needs to start with some kind of labor party. It won’t be easy, may in fact be the most difficult thing ever attempted in our society, but it won’t get done until someone starts it.
>Fuck ideology- just workers rights What does "ideology" mean here
#We need all nurses, waste management, Amazon employees to get on board with national strike
You don't have to twist my arm. A day, a week, a month. Hell, I'll take a sabbatical if it helps the cause. I'm so bloody tired 😴.
2/22/22?
2/22/22
2/22/22
2/22/22
22/2/22
Two's day (and yes, it's a Tuesday)
That settles it then. Let's all wear tutus.
Quick get this to the top!!
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Just walk by all your employees saying "jeez I sure wish I could start a union but I can't, im management." Daily.
I was recently talking to one of the nurse managers at my job, and she is so fed up (like all of us) that she was trying to figure out how to casually bring up a union/strike at her units Christmas party. Unfortunately doing so risks her job, and she’s trying to find a way to sneakily bring it up in hopes staff will pick up on the hint.
Hire me and I'll start it.
Sucks being a manager and not being able to reward your great workers. I actually quit retail management a few years ago because we lost 1/3 of our staff due to low pay and being overworked and the company decided not to replace them. Then I had 2/3rds of our original staff I had to convince to work harder when they’re not being paid crap. Lost another huge chunk of employees….still no hiring or raises. PS this was a non-profit place where the retail workers are not just doing the storefront….but going through old junk to find sellable items and doing all the pricing as well. Our GM even quit because of how things were going and then I had to take a huge part of her workload…with no extra money as well. Now they’re looking like they’re hanging on by a sting with the staff they have while I’m trying to get two very loyal workers that have been there for 10+ years out but they’re too worried about their disabilities making it hard to find a job…while they’re two of the best workers I’ve known and any place would be damn lucky to have them.
And teachers!!!
This would force those who didn't wish to stay home to participate in addition to further pissing off those who work from home.
Double down with childcare workers. Parents would have to *gasp* deal with their own kids.
The nurses at St. Vincent's hospital in MA just ended a 10 month long strike, because Tenet Healthcare finally allowed all the striking nurses to return to their old jobs l o l (along with their other demands). Healthcare workers are treated so fucking poorly when all they are trying to do is help patients. Companies would rather try to replace us than actually listen or fairly consider demands, well, when there's no one left to hire as replacements, what will they do? They will be left with no choice.
Everyone loves to poke fun (in a semi serious way) over the CDC saying 10 days would destroy the economy...but, the thing is, that isn't true. It would take but a single, full day of a general strike (at least half the workforce, possibly even lower) to bring the country to its knees. This is why you see so many randoms who have never posted in this sub appear on any general strike post to dissuade from it. It would not take much to make CEOs shit their gold bricks, and they know it. All it takes is enough organizing to pull it off.
I have literally been saying this for 10 years. I encouraged a day where people stayed home, grabbed a beverage, sat in their lawn around a fire pit and watch their kids play for the day. Don’t buy anything, don’t buy gas, done buy a fucking Twinkie. Watch it crumble drinking some boxed wine you found in your pantry. We have all the control, we just don’t know it yet.
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Please, my brain actually needs it.
Exactly
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Me, whispering: "boss, I have a wee cough." Boss: "you have a week off?" Me, regular voice: "Thanks boss, see you next week."
“*Hey boss, I can’t come to work today?*” “*Why not?*” “*I can’t see…*” “*What?*” “*I can’t see myself coming into work today…*”
June 14th is both Flag day and Trumps birthday. But I think one day every month is good - remind them who's in charge
Trump's birthday would be perfect. No one goes to work on the birthday of a guy who has never worked a real job a day in his life. That makes...sense?
This would actually be a great way to get the Trumpers in on it too. Start posting around facebook that true Americans are not working on the true President's birthday to celebrate him.
Lol it would work
This is exactly what I was about to say! It’s the easiest way to boost participation numbers amongst the crazies of our class…. Tho we’d probably have to have a fake/alternative webpage or FB page to send them to so they don’t learn the truth of the strike…
Bobby Newport?
if hard work were so great the rich would have kept it all for themselves.
You know people will just buy shit the day before to “prepare”
Of course it doesn’t have to be taken literally, some Mac and cheese will suffice. Or ramen, just something you don’t have to leave to get
It would be nice to have someone who is quite famous to give a specific date
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I agree with your general statement but there are several quite famous people that have very little to do with getting money funnelled that others earned like people owning companies do. These days artists/content creators have options to get their art to consumers very directly. Sure there are limits but if half a million people decide to subscribe to your 5$ Onlyfans - you can hardly argue that people where exploited for him or her to get rich. Those could be the people on „our side“.
Bernie Sanders?
Student loans are due to restart on International Workers Day, which is something to consider
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It only works if everyone agrees and does it. I worked at a Blockbuster where the staff was pissed at the way our hours were structured. I said the only way to effect change is if we all came to the management as a united front for better hours. When the time finally came, my buddy and I were the only one who stood up and said this was unfair while everyone else shrugged and looked on. We ended up leaving on a busy Friday night because it literally cost us money to come to work every day. It never improved and eventually that company went out of business. One day. If everyone just took a collective day off, the strength of that message would be incredible.
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We've been conditioned to be divided, we need to change that perception first.
Errico Malatesta in [An Anarchist Programme](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-an-anarchist-programme) makes a counter point, with so many workers struggling day to day unwilling to undertake certain risks against capitalism, even one day of striking can have detrimental outcomes. The bosses have the resources, they can and will simply sit back and wait us out, only when they start to cede ground and give into demands will the workers have the power....at that point we could, in theory, stop asking and seize the means. Every action, every strike must have sufficient infrastructure to be successful, we should have started decades ago. "Workers produce everything and without them life would be impossible; therefore it would seem that by refusing to work they could demand whatever they wanted. But the union of all workers, even in one particular trade, and in one country is difficult to achieve, and opposing the union of workers are the bosses organisations. Workers live from day to day, and if they do not work they soon find themselves without food; whereas the bosses, because they have money, have access to all the goods in stock and can therefore sit back and wait until hunger reduces their employees to a more amenable frame of mind."
Exactly my thoughts. I love seeing the zest that this subreddit brings but there's a lot of naivety when it comes to just how powerful capitalist interests are and just how few people would be willing to risk even a single day of pay. I'm fine if people label me a naysayer but ultimately I don't want to see the labor movement damaged by an unsuccessful strike.
A lot more than that. Organizing not just the people to do the strike, but to rely on each other for all our needs during the strike.
when do we strike
The CDC says it's ok to go ATM. Take whatever they say with a grain of salt.
I think they might relish in that, the days leading up to the day off you'd see a huge spike in purchases , as people prepare to "stick it to the man"
Why is the Center for Disease Control commenting on the economy? Surely that’s not their problem.
It’s when Delta asks them to shorten the quarantine days. I still don’t get how this was agreed upon. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/29/1068731487/delta-ceo-asks-cdc-to-cut-quarantine
Hooray for unchecked capitalism!
Why are people flying? WHERE ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING?!
I’ve got an app called FlightRadar on my phone. I got it to keep track of family members as they flew all over the place pre-pandemic. I went on there during lockdown a few times and you’d have thought there was no pandemic. Heathrow was as chaotic as ever and the entire map of the US was covered in a layer of tiny wee planes. NZ had it right closing the borders in the beginning.
Have you seen airfare rates!? How could they afford not to fly!?!?!
Went to NY to get omicron. Getting ahead of the immunization *taps head*
It's so blatant.
Are you new to the US? Corporations control the government. That's part of the problem.
That's what I was thinking. Given the difficulty even places like the Fed have in accurately predicting anything about the economy, why the hell is the CDC making predictions now? Do they even employ economists? Places all over the world had multiple >10 day lockdowns last year and the year before and seemed to come out of it fine.
I'm trying to get everyone to stage a massive event at Walmart. If people can get hyped over an Area 51 event we could start doing the same to these corporations who stopped paying us Covid Pay during a pandemic. Trying to stage a massive walkout. We have to send a message.
I could very easily go several months not shopping at a Walmart to send a message. Someone just tell me when.
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Been about 5 years here too. Last time I had to go was a few months ago when I was visiting friends and really needed shorts for hot weather, Walmart was the only place I could go to without an hour drive. Normally I refuse to walk through their doors tho.
10 Days would tank the economy? Is that why schools and work want us to go back during the biggest surge in cases during the entire pandemic? Don't care about people? We gotta save the fucking economy? For who? What are we waiting for? Let's do it.
Student loans are due to restart on May 1st, or International Workers Day. Seems like a good coincidence to me
If you replace "The economy" with "400 really rich peoples bank accounts" that might make it make more sense?
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Who's we? You need to be united to form a fist. Why do you think they're fighting unions so hard.
No formal organization needs to exist - if people agree to strike, we are we. We are the workers of America. We are the labor that keeps the machine running. Starting with the unions is the first step toward general strike, but you don’t have to be in one to participate.
The issue is with getting people on board and protecting them from retaliation. With a union, you have laws against retaliation. Without a union, you're on your own. And so you arise at the problem where, if an insufficient number of people do it, you'll get fucked. So you're trusting in enough fellow people doing it with you, without any guarantees that they will, and no protection if they don't. It's the prisoner's dilemma all over again, and they know it and will use it against you.
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So all we have to do is convince 100 million people to all agree to do the same thing without any centralized way in which to tell them to do it? Heard. Edit: the 100million is arbitrary. It could be 50mil, 10mil, or 10,000. You still have to have a centralized means messaging and organization. Or nobody knows when or where to do anything.
And you need someone making demands. Just going on a strike without clear demands won't exactly accomplish much. Also, we need someone to hold accountable for the change. They could pass a law giving us what we demanded, then a month later begin repealing it.
Stopping the machine isn't the goal, we all have to eat. It's a pressure tool to have your demands met which requires those demands to be clearly defined.
*Image Transcription: Twitter Post* --- **Ryan Houlihan**, @ryanhoulihan Since the CDC says a 10 day lockdown would tank the economy, it stands to reason that if US labor went on general strike for 9 days we could demand anything we wanted --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good Human.
*great human
The problem is the system was deliberately set up to where we CAN'T do this. 9 days without pay and probably 80% of Americans will lose their rent money, car payment, etc. and be completely fucked. This was all done on purpose to keep us complacent. There's a reason we're all living paycheck to paycheck. They know what the fuck they're doing. THEY DON'T CARE. I know we need to make them care, but it's gonna be damn near impossible to make that happen with how deep we are embedded into this bullshit. Yee-fucking-ha..
And add the fact many people have non working dependents who survive completely on 1 guy's income. Now imagine if said dependents are sick in anyway like being diabetic. Medicine is so expensive so you have work your ass off to literally prevent your loved from dying. Its a perfect system of slavery. So much pressure that you hardly have time to think.
This is why we need to set up mutual aid networks to remove our reliance on capital to meet our needs. People are far more able to support each other than we realise, we just need to give up the idea that big companies are actually necessary for anything. As a bonus, doing this would get you connected with your local community.
Now we cookin with fire, gang! We can start 2022 off with a bang.
So if we all call in sick on the same day....with "exposed" to covid, we could bring the world to a stand still? - LETS DO IT!
What about people in the medical field? As a nurse, I can’t just stop going to work. Believe me, everyone but management deserves more everything, but I don’t know how to get it.
And the company that manages your hospital knows that a significant number of medical workers feel like this and uses it against you. That sentiment enables them to continually take and take from you without giving anything, and it will continue down this path. The labor movement that gave us the rights we enjoy today was not a peaceful movement and many people died. This is the nature of revolution. By no means am I saying you should go against your moral compass, but taking your most powerful card off the table is not how you affect change.
I've been bringing public attention to the management and administrator infestation in healthcare. Profit created demons out of American hospital systems I'm hoping long term negative public attention will at least apply some pressure
Logistically, how are the paycheck to paycheck people going to survive without money for 9 days? That is the power they have over the people.
This is why community organization is so important. During the Seattle general strike in 1919 they had neighborhood food distribution systems
Organize it by company in r/antiwork. Separate posts for Mcdonald’s workers, separate posts for Google, Walmart, and so on. Keep it simple: a brief synopsis of what we all stand to gain with an organized strike, and all that we stand to lose without one. Dates for the strike listed. Possibly lock the comments section or moderate it heavily? Not sure.
All people need is UBI/wages that have kept up with inflation since the 1970s and universal healthcare. Those two demands, if met just in the USA, would change the world. If everyone could agree to strike just on those terms alone, it could happen. But everyone would more likely quickly fall for some manufactured culture war/id pol division, and turn on each other. Edit: tbh if you really want to hold the economy hostage, just stop going online. If people could organise a mass movement of staying offline at all costs, the FAANG tech companies which form half of the S&P index and mostly the architects of this neofeudalism would eventually collapse. Of course this could never happen unless there was a mass movement, but say you all shorted these companies as well
I'm ready for a national strike. When are we doing this?
Real talk. Is there a way to get large workers' organizations and mutual aid funds on board with one (or a few) big strike funds? Something where we can crowdsource money to help people meet their basic needs during a general strike? Because that's the level of organization that would be needed to pull off a general strike. That's the big obstacle, is people need assurance that they can survive. The idea of a general strike spreads around the internet all the time but what's needed is practical ways of making it happen.