angryisokay:

elfwreck:

glitz-addams:

hey

you know why forty hours a week is considered the standard maximum?

because for SEVENTY FUCKING YEARS, unions demanded a forty-hour week and worked their asses off trying to get it.

SEVENTY YEARS workers organised, communicated, educated, protested, screamed at the establishment. They stood defiant, they persevered in the face of violent opposition from their employers, they went on strike to the point where one fifth of america’s labour force was on strike in 1919. 

Organise. Unite. Stand up.

Stop listening to the bullshit about unions as a concept being corrupt or bad. Stop listening to the bullshit that capitalists invented these things and gave them to us out of the non-existent goodness of their slimy black hearts.

Unions gave you the labour rights you have. A minimum wage, a 40-hour week, Saturdays off, meal breaks–all these basic things were fought for by unions. UNIONS did that. I’m not asking you to feel guilty I’m asking you to BRING IT BACK. We have the power if we unite.

Please support your local unions, even if you can’t be in one.

In 1970, my dad worked at the post office, and they went on strike. This wasn’t permitted – the laws at the time didn’t cover that kind of collective bargaining. But they struck anyway, and marched around with signs in front of the post office, and so on.

One woman started to head into the building, realized they were on strike, and stopped. And my dad told her, “you can go in; there’s people staffing the windows.” And she said, “oh no; my husband’s a Teamster; he’d never speak to me again if I crossed a picket line.” And she left.

That’s how unions work. You support each other’s goals. You don’t casually break the picket line – you accept that the only reason people would be standing around outside waving stupid signs is that there’s something very very wrong with this business, and the workers understand it better than an outsider could.

Even if you’re not in a position to strike, you can be supportive. I know, it’s all fucked-up now; you can be working in an office and your actual “employer” is six states away, and your cubemates are also working for a company somewhere else but a different one, so no amount of waving signs is even going to be noticed by the companies that might actually be able to grant you better pay and medical coverage and so on.

But you can say, Unions are awesome. You can be grateful that unions won the 40-hour workweek. That they won OSHA standards. That they organized to stop “company towns” where you’d be paid in “script” that was only good at company stores. (Imagine working for McDonalds and only being paid in McDonald’s coupons.)

You don’t have to join a union to support union efforts – speak out in favor of them, don’t cross picket lines, and if you have the resources, help the strikes where you can: bring coffee, bring donuts, bring sunblock; let them know that the community has their backs.

Unions are not inherently corrupt, but do not turn a blind eye when corruption does rear it’s ugly head.

Be active in supporting your fellow workers, be active in keeping your union strong and not populated with self serving jackasses. Speak out when some fuckwad tries to use the power of the union to benefit themselves. Speak out when the union gives you a fucked up contract and calls it ‘the best they can do’. If you know about abuses within the union, speak out, even if they punish you, even if your union brothers and sisters tar and feather you, speak out against corruption within the union because that’s the only way to drive it out.

Build a union that is strong but not selfish. Build a union that communicates freely with the membership, with transparency and honesty.

I say this as a union member. I say that as a union member who regularly hears the griping and whining and pessimistic ‘nothing we can do about it now’ attitudes from other union members.

My union has decades of being fucked up and self serving, and has regularly thrown the membership under the bus. I won’t post a huge list of shit from our contract, but I will mention this: We contractually no longer have strike rights. Our union negotiated contract says we cannot strike.

That’s what happens when you are not vigilant against scumbags abusing the powers of the union.

Acknowledge the power of collective bargaining and unionizing, get people to understand and feel empowered to stand up for themselves, but do not become complacent and lazy. Like anything else, good people need to keep constant watch to keep the shitbags out.