If white working class folks could get past their racism and close ranks with poc working class, nothing could deny such a force.
The GOP uses racism to keep that from happening. It’s base readily votes to diminish their fortunes and wellbeing as long as their hatreds are pandered to.
Take a look at anti-union propaganda from the 60s to present. You’ll find all the dog whistles.
“It pains me to say this, but I feel as though I must get something off my chest. Whatever is left of the Republican Party has become a haven for liars.”
There isn’t anything egregiously wrong with the philosophy of republicanism or conservatism, but the GOP has wholeheartedly abandoned these classical philosophies to make a new world of lords and peasants. - DW
I watched this documentary in the dark one night on summer vacation at like 1am, and it’s such a brutal and powerful look at community, labor, the power of unions, and the absolutely-ugly ways in which bosses respond.
Boss Baby Bezos is at it again! Amazon opened a union busting website for people to report workers unions, so lets do the world a favor and waste Jeff’s time, money, and life energy (I hope) by spamming his website with bogus reports.
Eat shit, Jeff.
Y’ALL THEY DON’T HAVE A WORD LIMIT
I JUST SENT THEM THE ENTIRE BEE MOVIE SCRIPT
update: did you guys know all of les mis is online for free
did you know it takes roughly 5-10 dedicated minutes of clicking and holding to copypaste the entire thing
take a wild guess what i sent our old pal jeff
UPDATE update:
That’s all fun and good but I guarentee their systems are filtering out spam.
According to what other people have suggested, include keywords which will make sure your submission gets through, and avoid keywords that might filter it.
Expletives are probably filtered, as well as major meme keywords like “Shrek”, “meme”, “Script”, “Bee”, “Furry”, “Fanfiction”, “Gay”, also “Bezos” is probably filtered too I bet.
Keywords that are hypothetically more likely to get your post noticed: “Pamphlets”, “Unions” and “Unionization”, “Capitalism”, “Wages”, “Profit”, “Labor”, “Workers”, “Emails”, “Rights”, etc. Things that would be mentioned in union emails or pamphlets. Also, use keywords that identify you as an actual employee: “Warehouse”, “Company”, “Employee”, “Coworker”, “Shift”, “On Break”, etc.
So, sentences like these will help increase legidimacy: “Another employee in the warehouse has been handing out pamphlets on unionization and talking about workers rights.” or “I’m getting emails from someone in the warehouse about labor laws and criticizing the company’s wages.”
Use things like U(state letters)(number) in the tagline and at the start. Make the name and email seem legit. Flood their systems with useless info.
So say you get past filters. Someone’s gonna read your submission, and you want to get them going. Have a strong, in-character intro and conclusion, since those will be skimmed first. Include your misleading content in the body of your submission, and try to hide it well. For instance:
yes, again, your memes and jokes arent going to be as helpful. please actually waste THEIR time. not YOUR time.
If you still want to copy paste something, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could source unionisation pamphlets from the industrial revolution and just copy paste them? Probably have a lot of the keywords you need in them.
I still very much plan on submitting better ones, but I really just wanted to let out some steam. Amazon literally let a family friend of mine die in front of everyone working and when another friend, who witnessed the first get her skull crushed, had a panic attack and stress fall which cracked a vertebrae, they fired her.
I wonder if work just.. got harder in the 2000s, comparatively.
So like… ok. I haven’t researched this and I’m mostly thinking out loud, so forgive me.
I entered the working world in 2005. I had a few odd jobs for a few years and then finally just bit the bullet in 2009, got a job at a grocery storeas an inventory clerk. My job was to count surplus items in the backroom and update the counts. Additional responsibilities included helping stock the front end. I left that job in less than a year.
A friend of mine now works at the same chain, different location, same job title, in 2022. But where I shared that title with two other people, he’s the only one with that job title. Additionally, there are less stockpersons, and he is often called out to the floor to help them, which impedes his primary job function. He is also expected to clean bathrooms and some other maintenance things that I cant imagine doing as an inventory clerk.
And I thought maybe it was just that his location is understaffed, but looking back on the past few years where I was expected to do everything (be the front end, the dispatcher, the manufacturer, the teacher, trainer, janitor, delivery driver, account handler… christ, how did I do all this?) I’m looking at the issue with fresh eyes.
I hear sometimes about the ‘slim down,’ where a lot of companies took on a trend of hiring less people than they need to cut down on the cost of labor, and I look at how fast a person can burn out at a job. And how many jobs are considered 'high pressure sales’ when they dont need to be.
Like I’m looking at the possibility of starting a business and I’m looking at the jobs I’ve had that burned me out and why. And it’s almost always been 'I was always juggling responsibilities because we needed more staff’.
Like it seemed like I was doing everything, but getting paid the same.
And I think about that backroom job, where occasionally i would have to help out the stockers on big days, but mostly my job was one function.
It’s not like that anymore, is it?
So when I hear someone bemoan that 'no one wants to work anymore’ I just think… y'know, work ain’t what it used to be. When you’re working the work of 3.5 people because someone at corporate decided it was right and good to hire less people than they need because it saves them 20$ per hour per store, but you still dint get your bonus because shrinks too high or they didnt make the amount of money they thought they would or you gave too many coupons ONCE. And it’s like they’re actively trying to chase people away, and then threaten you with automation but they do t make work attractive enough for people to show…
Work dont want no one anymore.
Oh damn, the notes on this. Apparently it’s not my imagination and y'all have lived some horror stories.
I feel like we should be able to do something about this. Like we should be able to say 'no’ to lean staffing and we should have a say in what our responsibilities are.
I’m thinking about all the times i should have just straight up said something. Like I think I had it in my head that if I took on all the responsibilities in the shop, eventually I would be rewarded with higher pay. But it doesnt work like that anymore. The reward for digging the best hole is a bigger shovel.
That’s no way to live, though. And I just put up with it like it was normal to be so tired at the end of the day that I couldnt move. Maybe I should have just said 'no, you do it’ when they started making me work outside my title.
Because that took a serious toll on my mental health.
I HAVE A UNION JOB AND LET ME TELL YOU SOME THINGS
It is part time, contract, hourly, full remote. Because it’s union? They have to offer me a minimum of 25 hours a week. If I *voluntarily* go under, that is on me, but they ALWAYS offer me up to that. If I ask for the hours, they HAVE to give them.
Overtime doesn’t trigger until 40 hrs/wk… but any time spent on emails, spreadsheets, my timesheet, ANY admin task that’s more than 15 min? I can bill for that. ALL training, meetings, etc? I bill for that.
I get holiday pay. Seperate from vacation, sick leave, personal time; if it’s a federal or state holiday I *automatically* get 5 hours of pay for that day. Period. Unlimited. I got paid 5 hours to do nothing on MLK day and presidents day, no questions asked, nothing taken away from my other pay.
I get sick leave, vacation leave, “personal” leave (anything that isn’t the former two – like, “my friend had an accident and I need to drive them home”). I get health insurance, dental insurance, life insurance. I get access to the credit union. I get access to job search help if my position gets dissolved / I get laid off!
It costs about $80/month in union dues, but I MORE than get that back in terms of benefits and peace of mind, and it’s automatically deducted from my paycheck.
U N I O N S.
Unionize, also there’s a metric fuckton of research on this subject, it’s not your imagination, most people are doing the work that two or three or four people used to do, unions help but fighting this is tough even with a union, also talk to your Union reps, let them know that workload is a key issue for you, they need to hear from their members to know what to do, workload is one of my union’s big concerns right now
To expand on this: Sometimes people don’t understand how a union can help with stuff like this, because obviously the union can’t force them to hire more people, right? That would be crazy.
And yes, unfortunately, the union can’t do that. But also we don’t have to.
What a union can do is make sure that every person who works there has a formal job description. The company sits down with the union and they all agree on what the job duties are for each position and how much the company is required to pay for that work. That work. Not other work.
In the scenario that @libraford describes above, where the company is asking people to cover other positions and take on more duties because it allows them to keep the store understaffed? Yeah, that doesn’t fly in a union shop. Your job description is the only work they can require you to do. And usually there’s a little bit a flexibility baked in – like something that says they can ask someone to fill in for another position for up to two weeks while they’re hiring someone new – but a good union contract will ensure that it can never be a viable replacement for just hiring more people and fully staffing the location.
Not to be a drooling socialist cuck, but if a full day’s labour can’t purchase three square meals, 24 hour’s worth of rent and utilities, a fraction of a month’s clothing budget, and a reasonable portion to be saved for when you can no longer comfortably work, what the fuck are we doing shit for
Many of us are aware of the stories of harmful working conditions in the games industry (mass layoffs, crunch, harassment, etc) but a better space *is* possible and it starts by us putting in the effort to make that change. This Thursday, we’ll be joined by Emma Kinema and Kristen Perez. We hope to see you there! #hotline #helpline #goodtipsforhardtimes #game #games #videogames #union #unions #workerrights #workplacesafety #unionizing #unionize #organized #organizing #voltage #voltageentertainment #visualnovel #writing #codecwa #cwa #tech #techwork #techology #techjobs #gamejobs
An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States
“We’ll fire you if you tell others how much you’re making” The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can’t reveal someone else’s wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)
“If we can’t fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we’ll just fire you for something else the next day.” This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn’t retaliatory.
“Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination” Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren’t allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they’re obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.
“If you unionize, we’ll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off” Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.
“We can have any rule we want, it’s only illegal if we actually enforce it” Any workplace policy or rule that has a “chilling effect” on employees’ willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.
“If you [protected action], we’ll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again.” Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone’s job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.
“Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye.” Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you’ve been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.
“We’ll deny that you ever worked here” not actually possible unless they haven’t been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they’re guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there’s nothing they can do about that.
