Zug Zug

Facebook keeps telling me about a year in review video it thinks I would want to share, fuck that this year was terrible.

On the topic of labor, how much it sucks, and how it could be better:

So Universal Basic Income is probably a pipe dream for the time being, so we have to turn our attentions towards increased wages and worker protections. The problem is there is no real large scale union type organization to advocate for service industry workers. Why am I talking about the service industry in particular? Because that is where the jobs are, there are tens of millions of service workers, those who flip burgers, run a cash register, wait tables, answer phones, or any of the other things that make modern life comfortable for most of us. However outside of a few small businesses like Powell's here in Portland, they are mostly unrepresented. This despite the fact that the US economy would come crashing to a halt if we didn't exist.

There needs to be a large scale, powerful, union or similar organization that can go to bat for people in those positions but forming one is nearly impossible, in almost all these jobs you can be terminated from your position for any or no reason, they call this "at will" employment, because each party is in this relationship"at will" it is something that when you read your orientation packet or even the employment laws, sounds like something where both parties have equal power, but we all know that isn't true, try quitting your job for no reason and then using that employer as a reference for the next one you apply for, then try getting fired and doing the same thing, in both situations you are screwed.

The point is, employers don't like unions, in my job there is a posting on the wall that claims to be the procedure for escalating grievances, but after a couple of bullet points just turns into a list of reasons not to have a union, including such gems as "dues are bad" and "it is a barrier to communication between the employee and management"

You can bet if anyone starts trying to organize in most shops, they will mysteriously not have a job shortly after.

Another problem is if the union isn't big, then no one will really care about it, so you have to start with the chains, if McDonalds starts paying it's workers a living wage and scheduling them humane hours, it becomes a lot harder for a small business to justify paying less when their employees can simply go flip burgers instead. Getting one of those companies on board might be tough though, there is no practical way that I can think of to unionize from the bottom up without getting tons of people fired and ultimately failing, but if the idea could be sold to management as a PR move as well as a sound financial decision (and paying employees more tends to be, from a retention and customer service standpoint) then that might have possibilities.

Another option is to back door it in a way, a nonprofit backed by donations that goes to bat for employees in these industries could serve as a de facto union in that the employee would have help backing them up if the employer was abusive. To be honest an organization like this might not be legal at all, I really am not an expert on employment law like, at all. But it might be something that works.

It's a question of power, the employer has an organization behind them, with money, knowledge, and resources that an employee on their own just can't match without a union. And of course, business has a voice in politics, while the laborer does not, the vote is not comparable with the influence of money and platform that large businesses have.

That's the problem, the system is broken so thoroughly that an astonishingly large amount of stuff has to happen to even start fixing it, I mean an entire national organization, or organizations, needs to be formed against what would likely be the vicious opposition of the business owners to even start balancing the scales.

I don't have a conclusion here, just shouting into the void I guess