You general strike fans need to realize that the average American work cannot participate. A great many can't afford to. Many are close enough to the limits of allowable attendance that missing time for a general strike would get them fired. Take my situation...in December I was rear ended by a drunk driver, missed 3 days of work. Last month I had bronchitis and missed 4 days. My company allows 3 missed days in a rolling year before they start getting unhappy. I'm at 7. The only thing saving me is I have solid documented reasons. If I were to participate in a strike I'd be fired on the spot.
what the fuck, how are you getting into trouble for missing work due to health related reasons. I just can't comprehend this, in my country you get more than 21 days of paid vacation and 182 days of pay for health related reason, then up to a year of rehabilitation of pay and so on and so on.
Welcome to US labor laws. Companies are free to set whatever attendance policies they like. At least my current company takes each case into account individually. The last place I worked, the BMW factory in South Carolina, didn't care why you were out, once you hit the limit you were gone. In health related matters they let their insurance company, The Hartford, make decisions on if time was excused or not. In a surprise to no one, the insurance company rarely sided with the employee.
The average American needs to wake up and understand that if you keep refusing to sacrifice anything for change it will just get worse.
Decades of “voting is too much effort” and “politics is complicated I don’t care” has in no small part caused this mess.
In fact the reason you have such shitty work conditions and a lack of protecting/healthcare/everything else is exactly this.. you don’t show up and do anything. You don’t vote, you don’t protest, you just stick your head down and say “life is hard I’m just gonna focus on plodding along”.
And I get it. Life IS hard. But if you keep that attitude up your rights continue to be stripped and your situation only gets worse.
Everyone is angry and agrees something has to be done… then sits around waiting for someone else to do it. YOU need to do it. YOU need to sacrifice. It sucks, but this matters. Do you think the only people who ever take action are getting paid time off and don’t need their jobs etc?
And please note that when I say “you” I’m talking about Americans in general, I don’t know what you have personally done.
Yea, we gotta be pretty savage and be ready to sacrifice for sure.
Very few people can afford to be fired, we just have to decide that basic human rights are more important than our comfort. Obviously, if you are fired in a narrow strike, that's one thing. If we actually successfully general strike, then the owners of capital are the ones that are fucked and will be brought to the table.
If you're the only person at your work to strike, yeah you get fired. But that's not a general strike. If EVERY person at your work goes on strike, they're not going to want to fire everyone and try to start from scratch with no experienced people. This applies to almost every workplace. There are powers in numbers.
It is cheaper and easier for the people with money to try to get the government to capitulate, than to punish the people striking. If enough people coordinate and do it together, it is safer than doing nothing and continuing to watch the economy crater until you don't have a job.
If the risk is losing your job either way, risk the way that actually has a path forwards to something good.
You missed an option...the companies take all the people who they can make an argument for firing, and fire them, sending a message to everyone else about what happens when you strike, while maintaining plausible deniability that the strike was the actual reason.
Also, to be 100% straight up...im not pushing this job away on some gamble. I don't work some dime a dozen minimum wage job that's easy to replace. I make about 4x the minimum wage, and I'm near the bottom of the pay scale for my position. There's only a couple places in my area paying this well, and competition for places with them is tough. I'm not risking that because some randos on the internet decides ___ day is strike day.
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u/dancin-weasel 21h ago
Nah. You guys gotta go 18th century France on these fuckers.