793
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
793 points (96.8% liked)
Work Reform
9857 readers
1 users here now
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Remember: Workers make the machinery. Then, workers use the machinery to make more things. It may be different workers at different stages, but workers are the only means of production. Everything is produced by someone working to do so.
Join a union.
Keep in mind most of that machinery nowadays is made by workers elsewhere in the world, primarily in China, where the union membership rate is something like 45%.
If workers rights in China improve capital may simply move on to idk Mexico, India, lots of places with cheaply exploitable labor and pliable governments.
The majority of those unionized employees in China belong to government-controlled unions. The Chinese government has the last word on all this, and the employees’ “rights” are ultimately subject to the CCPs whims. Basically both the company and the union are ultimately controlled by the same entity.
It’s absurd, as it defeats the whole point of a union.
This is what eventually seems to happen under every attempt at communism that we’ve seen so far.
Source? For all three claims please.
That is the thing with states, i.e. the USA, the state power enforces laws. Just as Max Weber's theories go.
However in the USA it often seems that corporations and economic elites do have quite a say in things that are related to doing away with employee laws, without many push-back.
Anyhow, are you in a union? Make your friends get into unions. However if you do you have to be willing to strike, willing to be internationalists and willing to organize. Try to achieve 45% union membership rate within your company and the subcontractors working with you.
There is no universe in which Chinese labor unions are even remotely the same thing as labor unions in the western-style industrialized democracies. China is an authoritarian top-down quasi-capitalistic system which means that there is no management for workers to negotiate with apart from a single massive structure that's ultimately controlled by Xi's government.
Contrast that to western-style industrialized democracies wherein unions are meant to use organized labor as a ballast against the power of privately owned industrial management.
It's just not the same thing at all.
Furthermore, while virtually all modern machinery contains Chinese-made parts, it's just a fact that in the western-style industrialized democracies, tradesmen vastly prefer power-tools made in places like the US or Germany or Japan because they tend to be much better in terms of quality and reliability and lifespan then are their Chinese-made counterparts.
Go to any big construction site in the US and you'll immediately see that the workers prefer brands like Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Hilti, Husqvarna and Bosch over the cheaper Chinese-made alternatives, for example.