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I am utterly convinced that, if there were massive retail strikes (like there should be) in the US and/or the UK, that public opinion would totally be against the workers and that the corps would be easily able to undermine them in the media. People have been conditioned to look down on service staff and that they deserve the miserable wages that they are paid despite the fact that they are absolutely necessary to the function of an economy. People would be inconvenienced by picket lines and longer waits or even no service at all and would blame the workers despite them obviously being the exploited party. There is nothing that capitalists fear more than the proles working together in numbers; good thing for them that people are too stupid, petty and selfish to do so.
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Sep 18, 2018 05:33
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JustJeff88 posted:I am utterly convinced that, if there were massive retail strikes (like there should be) in the US and/or the UK, that public opinion would totally be against the workers and that the corps would be easily able to undermine them in the media. People have been conditioned to look down on service staff and that they deserve the miserable wages that they are paid despite the fact that they are absolutely necessary to the function of an economy. People would be inconvenienced by picket lines and longer waits or even no service at all and would blame the workers despite them obviously being the exploited party. It absolutely would be, and scabs would be a dime a dozen.
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Sep 18, 2018 06:00
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Strikes also require that the target industry or company is healthy enough that the strike won't just sink it. Brick-and-mortar retail isn't particularly healthy now, and it's even less healthy in the chains that Wall Street clowns are bankrupting for fun. Target/Walmart workers should strike though.
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Sep 18, 2018 06:45
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Amazon workers should strike imo, if we're talking about industrial action
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Sep 18, 2018 08:45
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As I posted before, most (or a significant portion) of these Amazon warehouses are built in economically depressed areas. No one will be willing to strike if they are already accepting the conditions highlighted in various expose articles. Even the very process of leaving and entering these facilities can take an hour+, stripping you of agency under the auspices of preventing theft and fraud.
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Sep 18, 2018 13:14
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JustJeff88 posted:Forming solid unions in many states to ensure workers' interests: illegal That is actually the opposite. It is not illegal to form a private sector union anywhere. Right to Work makes it illegal to make a "union shop" where you can only work there if you join the union and pay union dues. Lots of people think it is "illegal" to form a union and many employers are fine about not correcting that assumption. It is also illegal to fire someone for talking about forming a union, but 95% of time they get away with it because people don't know, don't want to spend the time fighting it, don't have the resources to spend fighting it, don't have enough of their coworkers backing them to do it, or some combination of all the previous. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Sep 18, 2018 |
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Sep 18, 2018 13:29
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:That is actually the opposite. That's a lotta words to just say "pretty much right"
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Sep 18, 2018 14:38
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Just because starting a union is difficult doesn’t mean it’s illegal.
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Sep 18, 2018 14:39
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HEY NONG MAN posted:Just because starting a union is difficult doesn’t mean it’s illegal. Which is just how the businesses like it. After all, make it difficult enough and people will quit instead of organizing.
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Sep 18, 2018 14:51
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Have we talked about how the Sears CEO blames the retirees for the company's problems? https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/14/news/companies/sears-pension-retirees/index.html
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Sep 18, 2018 16:23
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HEY NONG MAN posted:Just because starting a union is difficult doesn’t mean it’s illegal. More of a 'de facto' vs. 'de jure' argument. And always good to remind people that discussing working conditions, including wages/salaries is protected by the NLRA
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Sep 18, 2018 17:28
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SimonCat posted:Have we talked about how the Sears CEO blames the retirees for the company's problems? I like how he shuns online retailing but is also selling off every physical location. 
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Sep 18, 2018 18:54
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I definitely had one of those anti-union videos in my orientation for Lowe’s back in 2011. I’m a unionized stagehand now though, and it loving rules, so suck it Lowe’s!
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Sep 18, 2018 19:21
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The Maroon Hawk posted:I definitely had one of those anti-union videos in my orientation for Lowe’s back in 2011. Hi five union buddy
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Sep 18, 2018 19:28
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My parents raised us to hate unions (my dad had a hateboner for the UAW for some reason). My mom told us that unions were useful for a time but they’re no longer necessary. Now two out of three of their kids are in union jobs and one of those (my sister) organizes labor in Pennsylvania while door knocking for DSA candidates. It owns.
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Sep 18, 2018 20:03
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HEY NONG MAN posted:My parents raised us to hate unions (my dad had a hateboner for the UAW for some reason). My mom told us that unions were useful for a time but they’re no longer necessary. I was in a union once while working for AT&T. Probably not a coincidence that that job had, for the time, very good pay, commissions, perks and benefits.
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Sep 18, 2018 21:24
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HEY NONG MAN posted:My parents raised us to hate unions (my dad had a hateboner for the UAW for some reason). My mom told us that unions were useful for a time but they’re no longer necessary. Your father's a racist.
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Sep 19, 2018 23:54
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EdithUpwards posted:Your father's a racist. I mean probably. He was a fed in Detroit for 8 years and now he’s retired and won’t see a therapist so 
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Sep 20, 2018 00:28
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https://twitter.com/washingtonian/s...ingawful.com%2F lol
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Sep 21, 2018 21:37
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The Retail Collapse of 2018: Murdered by Trump
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Sep 21, 2018 21:46
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Taylor Gourmet had some of the best sandwiches in America, but that headline is very misleading. They were already on the way out of business about 2 years ago and all of their locations except for the Dupont Circle shop have been bleeding money since 2015. They went bankrupt because they expanded incredibly fast after their initial location was a huge success. Then, the owner fell into massive debt and couldn't even live in his house anymore because he spent $900,000 on a house in D.C. and immediately tried to fully renovate it. He ran out of money and couldn't finish renovating or live in the house for over a year. He tried to make a lot more money by just opening new Taylor Gourmet locations all over and went into even further debt. They went from 2 locations to 17 in three years. He couldn't maintain the cash flow to keep 17 locations running when only 2 or 3 of them were profitable. The 2 or 3 profitable locations were massively profitable and there was nothing wrong with their business model, but the owner's need for fast cash doomed the whole thing.
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Sep 22, 2018 06:29
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So still a Trump style venture capitalist who hosed up a good, stable thing because they are an idiot.
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Sep 22, 2018 07:02
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Crabtree posted:So still a Trump style venture capitalist who hosed up a good, stable thing because they are an idiot. Yep. Checks out.
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Sep 22, 2018 07:44
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Crabtree posted:So still a Trump style venture capitalist who hosed up a good, stable thing because they are an idiot. He wasn't a venture capitalist. They are going out of business because the venture capitalists who bailed him out 2 years ago are pulling the plug after the business was still unsustainable with 17 locations, but didn't close any. He was the co-owner and being unable to agree on what the strategy should be with the other co-owner + getting bailed out by a VC company that wanted to have input made it hard to do anything. The VC wanted to close some of the locations and focus on profitable ones and he didn't. The other co-owner helped found Taylor Gourmet, but isn't super involved anymore. So, he probably got screwed the most.
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Sep 22, 2018 23:33
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Yeah, their rate of expansion did seem kind of crazy. Fuckin RIP good sandwich place
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Sep 23, 2018 04:42
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prisoner of waffles posted:Yeah, their rate of expansion did seem kind of crazy. Fuckin RIP good sandwich place The irl equivalent of an overstretched kickstarter project that doesn't have the sense to limit the number of preorders when they haven't figured out a supply chain yet.
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Sep 23, 2018 10:43
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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I had my suspicions when the one nearest us, right in a nominally busy area with lots of traffic, closed down for several months for "repairs". If that decision made sense, they weren't turning nearly as much profit as they needed to; if that decision didn't make sense, holy poo poo they were letting good commercial real estate sit vacant when it could've been making them cash.
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Sep 23, 2018 20:12
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OneEightHundred posted:I don't think it's really true that "an individual can only consume so much," people just find increasingly wasteful things to spend it on, luxuries become normalized, and the downside of that is mostly environmental catastrophe as the effects of that wastefulness pile up. JustJeff88 posted:Here is my take... Communism/socialism is theoretically viable but has so far not been sustained in the real world and has too often fallen into despotism and dystopia. Capitalism doesn't even work in theory but is propped up in the real world despite being blatantly unstable and doomed to collapse in on itself. From this, I've come to the conclusion that human beings, at least for now, are too inherently selfish to accept a utilitarian/egalitarian system and the wealthy elite will do anything in there power to stop it from coming about, because they have too much to lose. Cicero posted:It's also true that the standard of living for everyone went up though. Even poor people usually have access to many technologies that eventually became cheap, sometimes surprisingly quickly. It took under a decade before smartphones went from something for the nerds and the affluent, to something even a majority of lower income people own. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 16:20
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People can afford more toys and less homes.
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Sep 24, 2018 16:21
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Ghost Leviathan posted:People can afford more toys and less homes. *stannis baratheon voice* FEWER
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Sep 24, 2018 16:31
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It's ridiculous to say everybody being able to have a smart phone is improved standard of living. You could probably afford one just scavenging cans and dropped change a few hours a month. Of course the poor and/or homeless have them. You basically can't exist in contemporary western society without a phone and the internet. Phones got classified as a utility decades ago for a reason. Hey you might be living in a box under a bridge but at least you have YouTube!
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Sep 24, 2018 17:23
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's ridiculous to say everybody being able to have a smart phone is improved standard of living. You could probably afford one just scavenging cans and dropped change a few hours a month. Of course the poor and/or homeless have them. You basically can't exist in contemporary western society without a phone and the internet. Phones got classified as a utility decades ago for a reason. I strongly agree. Older people still poo-poo it, but when the Internet became common, fast and relatively inexpensive, so much information goes there that not having access to it is crippling oneself. If some hypothetical desperate, unemployed person is trying to find a job using only word of mouth, job centres and newspapers, good loving luck to him because he is missing out on a huge percentage of posted vacancies. This will never happen, but as much as I hate the constant "WE MUST CREATE NEW JOBS!" narrative in a society which is rapidly running out of work to do, I wish sometimes that there was one nationalised job search site where every single non-internal job posting had to be posted by law. I frequent far too many sights and am constantly wondering what I'm missing out on; I can't be the only one.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:34
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JustJeff88 posted:I am utterly convinced that, if there were massive retail strikes (like there should be) in the US and/or the UK, that public opinion would totally be against the workers and that the corps would be easily able to undermine them in the media. People have been conditioned to look down on service staff and that they deserve the miserable wages that they are paid despite the fact that they are absolutely necessary to the function of an economy. People would be inconvenienced by picket lines and longer waits or even no service at all and would blame the workers despite them obviously being the exploited party.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:45
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's ridiculous to say everybody being able to have a smart phone is improved standard of living. You could probably afford one just scavenging cans and dropped change a few hours a month. Of course the poor and/or homeless have them. Gadgets are expensive: what's the point, poor people can't even afford them Gadgets are cheap: why even bring it up when poor people can afford them?? quote:You basically can't exist in contemporary western society without a phone and the internet. Phones got classified as a utility decades ago for a reason. Halloween Jack posted:Gadgets are a terrible proxy for standard of living; that this is a classic Fox News argument should tell you something. You say "gadgets" specifically to make them sound inconsequential, but things like washing machines and fridges and cell phones definitely represent an increase in standard of living for at least those domains. If you wanna say that despite tech improvements, things suck in other ways go right ahead, although the context was Marx' time period so even if you bring up something the US really sucks at like healthcare, well it's still undoubtedly better now than 150 years ago. Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 17:54
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You're basically using an analogue for 'there's little children starving in China' arguments there. And imagine life without a fridge for a minute.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:00
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lucky ducky!!!
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Sep 24, 2018 18:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:You're basically using an analogue for 'there's little children starving in China' arguments there. And imagine life without a fridge for a minute.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:10
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Halloween Jack posted:
Be wary of this argument. Usual old appliances are worse, especiall for efficient use of resource. There is also the bias of survivorship, when you have 50 year old refrigerator that is working, you just see it worked for 50 year, without seeing the other 100 fridge built at same factory of same model on the same day that went into landfill many years prior.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:18
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JustJeff88 posted:I strongly agree. Older people still poo-poo it, but when the Internet became common, fast and relatively inexpensive, so much information goes there that not having access to it is crippling oneself. If some hypothetical desperate, unemployed person is trying to find a job using only word of mouth, job centres and newspapers, good loving luck to him because he is missing out on a huge percentage of posted vacancies. This will never happen, but as much as I hate the constant "WE MUST CREATE NEW JOBS!" narrative in a society which is rapidly running out of work to do, I wish sometimes that there was one nationalised job search site where every single non-internal job posting had to be posted by law. I frequent far too many sights and am constantly wondering what I'm missing out on; I can't be the only one. When I was job hunting after college there were people who kept telling me to just beat the pavement and keep putting in paper applications everywhere you could find. I just looked at them with the most annoyed expression I could muster before just telling them I was sending applications and resumes out through the internet as that's how it's done now. Any place that you can actually still apply to in person points you at a kiosk that just goes to that website in the end. Paper applications are a thing of the past and, guess what, it isnt 1973 anymore. Getting a high end gadget is expensive but you can get a free phone by just signing an agreement for two years. Won't impress anybody but it'll make phone calls and look at websites. We had and maybe still have official state job boards here that the state mostly used to justify loving up unemployment bennies. Long story but you'd hear about how many jobs there were posted on them so why do we have so many unemployed people? First snag was that most of them were nursing or trucking but lol gently caress you if you couldn't afford to train for either or couldn't do them. Second was that they pointed to state wide openings while ignoring that a lot if unemployed people were nowhere near them, couldn't afford the move, or couldn't afford the commute. It isn't required by law to post there but a lot of places won't even put up now hiring signs as the job market nearby is so horrid they'll get a deluge of apps. I tried the state job board was a long time ago. The only lead I got was a government job for $8,000 a year 40 miles away. I got told to apply for all the nursing jobs anyway even though it would have been a horrid waste of time. Yes, I'm sure they'll consider a high school graduate with no nursing certs for jobs that require certs and college degrees. Totally. Get right on it.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:24
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The unquestioned assumption of the Gadget Debate is that capitalism has provided these things, so what we're debating is the "tradeoff" between the good and bad aspects of capitalism. Workers develop new technology under any economic system. Plenty of poo poo was developed in the Middle Ages, yet no one is arguing for guilds and manorial feudalism. "Where will the next generation of Johannes Gutenbergs come from without the wise leadership of the Holy Roman Empire?" nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Be wary of this argument. Usual old appliances are worse, especiall for efficient use of resource. There is also the bias of survivorship, when you have 50 year old refrigerator that is working, you just see it worked for 50 year, without seeing the other 100 fridge built at same factory of same model on the same day that went into landfill many years prior.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:35
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