“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

“Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together” The Nation 17 June 2015

(updated link as of March 2024)

Hey a reminder to all salaried employees in the US that as of today, July 1st, you need to be making at least 43,888 per year or else your employer needs to pay you overtime at a rate of 1.5 per hour over 40 worked, as you are now non-FLSA exempt. On January 1st 2025 this number will increase to 58,655 per year. Don’t let your employer cheat you.

Gravity legally cannot hurt you if you scream "NO GODS NO MASTERS" immediately before impact

I'm so fucking tired of this bicycle helmet discourse. Bike helmets aren't going to do shit to protect you if you get hit by a car

Most of the time... Bike accidents.... Involve things.... Other than cars...... like the ground....also it's safety gear..... Wearing it is non negotiable.... You are one accident away from being permanently disabled..... You need to protect your brain

Not towards OP

Is OSHA and other safety regulations also cop behavior?

*sigh* The belief that OSHA and other safety regulations are cop behavior are common opinions that people have, anarchist or not. Wearing PPE is annoying and often uncomfortable, sweaty, and cumbersome. People also generally hate being told to be careful, because they believe that "be careful" is synonymous with "hey, you're too stupid to do that without hurting yourself".

But all it takes is one time for you to slip up and suddenly the grinder disk that would have gotten stuck in your safety glasses is in your eye, or you're getting treated for lung cancer because you didn't want to wear your respirator while you welded. These are decisions that you were free to make, but might seriously regret later on.

People will scream until they're blue in the face about how oppressive it is to have to wear a safety vest and hard hat on a construction site, but do you really think that the hammer that slipped out of your buddy's hand is going to take that into consideration when it collides with your skull?

No political theory will save you from an accident. You can either wear your PPE, or can die, unexpectedly, painfully, and slowly. The choice is yours. Go argue with a lathe if you feel so strongly about it.

@breelandwalker it is criminal to leave this scorching point in the tags

a few points:

• every safety rule is written in blood

• OSHA exists so the boss can't force you to die for their profits. it was started as a result of union action, as a direct response to the triangle shirtwaist factory fire. OSHA is constantly fighting for worker's rights and protection. whistleblower laws protect any employee who makes an OSHA complaint against their employer, and anyone who reports is guaranteed anonymity and aggressive legal support against retaliation. there is also a separate health and safety administration for miners in the USA called MSHA.

• the people most likely to get hurt on the job are not apprentices or senior workers approaching retirement. the new hire is careful because they're green, and still learning, and still unfamiliar with the tools and the work. the old hand is careful because retirement is within sight and they want to make it there. the person who gets hurt is usually the journeyman at the peak of their career—in their 30s-50s, an expert at their trade, their tools feel like an extension of themselves, and they're so comfortable they forget to be careful. they've gotten lucky cutting corners or using something incorrectly or taking off a guard or leaving off some safety equipment 1000 times but one day they're tired or distracted or too comfortable or too confident and the luck runs out.

• some accidents you cannot just avoid with skill, or you have no personal control over them. sometimes you have to trust your coworkers with your life. the big blue crane collapse killed three ironworkers who were on an observation platform, doing other work, far from the crane, with no ability to prevent or escape the collapse. the crane collapsed as a result of being operated despite adverse conditions, despite the normal crane operator refusing to run the crane due to adverse conditions making it unsafe, and was filmed because a safety inspector was recording the violation and attempting to stop it. the operator of the crane got out safely, but three ironworkers who were hundreds of feet away, who didn't know the crane would be operating despite unsafe wind speeds, and who were trapped in midair anyways with no way to avoid or escape the collapse, and who above all just had to trust that everyone on the job site would be working safely and doing their jobs correctly, died. that footage has been used in every OSHA training i have ever been in.

• every safety rule is written in blood.

Oh my god this story on Ask A Manager’s request for Machiavellian triumphs at work

I'm sorry but "mind altering vegetation" is the funniest euphemism for weed

i feel like the boeing whistleblower case should radicalize more people. a major airline company is producing planes with less and less regard for safety and it's starting to get noticeable. man takes them to court, which would reduce profit at the cost of public safety. he fucking dies the night that boeings legal team asks him to stay an extra day. if nothing happens about this, i hope it gets through to people that america would literally kill you for a few extra cents

worth noting US companies do this quite commonly as well as fund terrorist organizations to protect private property. it's common with fruit companies from the US in latin america. they target activists and union leaders. chiquita has been fined before (yes, only fined) by the US government for these types of crimes.

how supervisors look at you when you remind them labor laws exist

mutuals do this

I am dead serious: If you are a Walmart employee, at any level and in any store — like if you are a high school kid with a part time job stocking shelves — message me any question you have about unions. Like ask me “What’s a union” if you want. I will explain it to you. I am a grievance chair for a white collar union whose workplace only unionized within the last five years and whose management fought as every step of the way, but in the end we fucking won. It can be done, and I can tell you how.

Rb to kill wal mart

Unionizing is our wet dream I promise you.

I like how it’s described as a union could “cripple American Capitalism” when more precisely it’s just that a union would be so powerful as to force WalMart (or any other company) to pay their workers like human beings. That’s not going to break Walmart. They’ll barely notice.

They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”. 

But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.

Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.

Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.

But thousands of people, millions of people? Better chances.

To anyone that wants to claim it wouldn’t work:

Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.

Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.

So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.

Cause if you, an individual, complain, they just fire you and laugh about it. A union is a collection of hundreds up to MILLIONS of people, supported by lawyers, going against employers for you.

In Denmark, due to union negotiations & refusal to work for slave wages, the McDonald’s basic pay comes out to about $20 US / Hour. The big mac there costs about 60 cents more.

How does the quote go?

Don’t thank god for Friday’s; thank unions.

Reblog if you think janitors should be paid $3million a year or want to burn down a Walmart

iww.org/membership

(via)

Yeah, they’re gonna lift the working class right into a company town.

Only rich people would think this was a good idea.

Learn your history, people!

We DID this shit- for DECADES. It was fucking awful. Companies paid people in “scrip” which was only good for use at the Company Store. So effectively, the company got your money coming and going, and they didn’t pay you at all. And the longer it went on, the less likely you were to have savings that could have helped you move away or get a different job.

I’ve already seen one ad trying very sneakily to promote the idea of “AmazonBucks”, including giving them to workers as rewards, or instead of things like healthcare, sick days, and PTO.

Here’s your reminder that scrip is fucking illegal, that company towns are always a shit idea that should stay dead and buried, and that if unions didn’t work? Every big company out there wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to destroy them.

#UnionStrong #SolidarityForever

We even have old songs about how this is a bad idea

You know how shitty it is that your health care insurance is directly tied to your job? Imagine if your housing worked the same way. Your husband or wife dies in a warehouse accident and you have 30 days to find a new place to live.

I live in the North of England, which, because Londoners are inherently bigots, is the middle of England. We had Mill towns: Some mill owner with Notions would build a Model town or a set of terraces and lure people in from the smallholdings to work in the mill.

And then they'd own you: You'd buy your bread at the company store at their price, you'd pay them rent, be fined for being late, for dropping your work, for missing quota... If you were super unlucky you'd have to use the company coin, which couldn't be spent anywhere else. Very EA. You'd get a half day off on Sunday to got to church but you'd work 7 days a week. Your kids would get a few hours school, because some interfering politician had made a law saying children had to have an education, then they'd be expected to show for work.

They'd have to crawl under the looms, while they were in operation and scavenge thread and chaff. Meaning the foreman would occasionally haul you off the machine you were working on and tell you your kid just got scalped because the machine caught her hair and ate the top of her head. So sad, back to work, PS you're being fined a penny for not being at your station.

The soot would get everywhere: We were still power washing it off inb teh 90s. Stuff that didn't get it is still stained black. The dust from the fabric would give you Black Lung, and you'd retire at 50, having been deaf for 30 years, hacking up chunks of lung, and be dead by 55. Then the company would charge your family to bury you. And yes: they'd throw them out of the tiny house that shared a toilet with 20 other families.

Oh yes: The shop floor was so loud it'd deafen the workers, and they'd all be lip reading and using ad-hoc local sign language to talk. You know that running joke about OSHA being written in blood? Yeah. It was.

So here's the interesting part. You know who dug us out of this corporate hell?

Quakers.

They took offense at all of this and started showing up, running Co-Op shops. They did the same as the Corporations: Everyting you had to buy, or wanted, was at the Co-Op. Houses (One of the biggest mortgage lenders was a Co-operative bank until Capitalism happened to it), food, clothes, funerals, furniture and banking. You put your wages in to the Co-Op and they'd let you buy everything on lay-away.

And that helped break the Mill's monopoly.

And they also made... chocolate.

The Quakers came to the conclusion that Chocolate was morally correct: It cheered you up, was nourishing, and had no real drawbacks (Hey! Look, white people thinking - They never looked too hard into where cocao was coming from or what the conditions were like. If you're feeling too happy and cheerful go look up the Belgian Congo some time.)

Anyway, you still find these weird little Yorkshire towns with these huge Mill factory buildings, sitting right next to a chocolate factory: Rowntrees (Bought by Nestlé), Mackintoshs, and Cadburys were all Quaker owned co-operative factories with on-site showers, and profit sharing.

Then Capitalism noticed and ate them, yum yum.

Anyway, point being is that there's a working model for how to wreck a Corporation Town: You clone thier operation with a non-profit or Co-Op. They provide the same products and services that Corporations provide, but they put the money back into the pockets of the people, they circulate money instead of accumulating it.

I'm salty about this topic because I live here. I've worked in the Industrial Museum, met the survivors of the Mills (Old age takes no prisoners) and watched the literal colour of my home change from soot black to creamy brown stone, lived in the Mill terraces, watched Nestlé wipe out an entire company and squat in it's corpse while slowly degrading the products to pump up the profits at the consumer's expense and of course run slavery plantations.

Anyway: TL:DR Company towns are slavery and always have been.

HR rule

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 know so many people have said it but

UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONSUNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS

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.

as we are living through a new resurgence in unions, after they were systematically decimated for decades, people might ask ‘how do i join a union?’ or ‘how do i unionize my workplace?’. the IWW isn’t a union union in the sense that it will automatically give you benefits like the above. BUT it is the single best place to start if you want to begin unionizing your workplace, connecting with other workers (including prisoners), and generally learn about unions and the international labor struggle.

https://www.iww.org

If you make $15 an hour, don't be mad that fast food workers are making the same as you. Be mad that a parking space is making almost double.

Want to support TAG artists and production workers in negotiations with Nick Animation?

Now you can!

You don't even have to be a member of the guild! ANYONE can sign!