I haven't been here in a while but I logged on specifically to find this post. my mom passed away three weeks ago which isn't something I'm going to elaborate on past the fact that I probably won't be using this account anymore bc life is just too heavy. thanks to anyone reading this who has stuck around this long. tell people you love them while you can.
this 50-second clip is the most precious video in the world to me.
The Coffeyville Daily Journal, Kansas, October 20, 1897
Asako Narahashi - Kotan - Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water (2002)
a local celebrity. Brugge, autumn 2012
what's up. I'm stressed out
favourite thing about hockey: grown men sitting in time out for bad behaviour
Troika, Horizons, 2015, Black Ink on Paper, Galerie Ron Mandos
Title: Weed, Medium: Pen drawing on paper, Artist: Rudra Kishore Mandal
Gustave Baumann
Arroyo Chamisa, d. 1956, color woodblock print
Doug Henwood | February 9, 2017
The strike—labor’s most powerful weapon against capital, except maybe sabotage—is disappearing even more rapidly than unions, which is saying a lot. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that there were 15 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers in 2016. That’s 1 above the average of the past five years, and down 96% from the average of the late 1940 and 1950s.
(Stoppages include both strikes and lockouts—the data series doesn’t distinguish between the two. The overwhelming majority are strikes. Notable exceptions in recent years have been in professional sports, but in a bizarrely hostile and destructive move, Long Island University locked out its employees in September 2016. From here on, I’m using the word “strike” rather than stoppage because it sounds far better with only a minor loss of accuracy.)
It is important to note in this context that part of the reason the unions have been unable to get peole to strike is because they failed to understand the situations of many the most exploited workers.
Cleaners, call centre operators, fast food employees, and so on, these are many of the workers of today. Unlike the factory worker, these workers often work on a smaller workforce where they meet a few dozen comrades at most, and a strike is difficult to organize, while picketing and preventing scabs from reaching the work place is near impossible.
There have been succesful strikes in this kind of work, like the highly succesful Cleaners Strike in the Netherlands in 2012-2013, but they required a lot of reinventing the art of a successful strike.
um i feel like the Internet could solve that organizing problem
Well, it helps. The internet has so far been pretty succesful in getting people to sign petitions, show up for protests, and spread awareness. But often the activism that can be organized online is short-term and symbolic.
And the point of a strike is that it is not symbolic, it creates a real physical inconvenience for the company resulting in a real financial loss and that is what forces the company to accept the terms of the workers.
The problem that spread out workers face is about more than communication and awareness, it is about how to physically impact the profits of your employer in a spread-out workplace situation.
Traditionally, a strike requires:
With these ingredients, a strike is a battle of endurance: who can hold out the longest? the strikers living of a finite strike fund? or the bosses who are losing money because they can not sell their products? Who will give in first? That battle is the essence of a strike.
Modern strikes need to win this same battle but they need to do it differently. When you work in a call centre spread out across small offices in the city, or in fast food chains, or you clean offices, it becomes difficult to organize a clear picket line because the work place is not in one place. It becomes much, much easier for the boss to just hire some other desperate workers to do your job.
Since most workers in these places are not unionized they also lack access to a strike fund, and as a result they lack another key ingredient in the fight.
When the national Dutch union FNV organized the Dutch Cleaners strike in 2012-2013 dealt with these struggles in a couple of ways:
No doubt the internet helped reach the widely distributed cleaners and maybe if FNV hadn’t already made a significant strike fund available, crowd funding could have contributed there.
But that was not what made the strike a success. Real on-the-ground organizing did that. A union prepared to re-create the image of the working class to build a truly inclusive working class movement did that.
Does the cleaners strike hold the one truth on how to organize a modern strike? no. There are other ways. But it shows one way it can be done. It understood the non-symbolic, physical nature of a strike and acted from there.
Summer hours
