Easier said than done
You got eleven dollars? It’s as easy as eleven dollars.
If you ain’t got eleven dollars, talk to your local and they should be able to work something out.
You can join the IWW even if you’re unemployed, and even if your labor is exploited in prison. When they say one big union for everyone, they really mean it
Subminimum dues for the Wobs are six bucks
Seriously, join the fucking IWW. Message your local on Facebook if you don’t know who to turn to. They’d love to have you and they’ll meet with you in person to talk about it and sign you up if you want. It can and will only lead to good things for you.
For real guys, I can’t recommend this enough. Join your local union.
I worked at a union job years ago. Best job I ever had. Fair pay–they’d negotiated us danger pay from minimum wage; full benefits (Canadian so we had health care anyways but they covered most of our prescriptions, and glasses, and dental work); got paid holidays starting at two weeks when you started (I think the first year was just the two weeks off, but after that it was paid, and increased regularly with seniority); regular pay bumps to keep up with inflation; sick days; PLUS when management were dicks they’d sort them out.
Like this one time, I had a machine that was cleaning some extremely dirty grain (our wheat was full of peas, which we didn’t handle, so our machines just dumped it as oversized garbage along with pieces of stalks etc), and had this really heavy sack (because it was a regular burlap sack but now it was full of fucking peas) that the peas were going into that usually would be emptied maybe twice a shift or so, and we had so many peas coming out that it was needing to be emptied like every ten minutes. And by the time you lugged this like eighty-pound bag of peas to the other side of the floor to dump, and then cleaned up the mess the machine dumped on the floor while you were doing that, it was damned near time to dump the peas again.
So it’s getting time for my lunch break (mandatory half hour, plus two coffee breaks, also mandatory), and there is no way in hell I can leave it; the peas will pile up high enough that there will be a fire risk from them rubbing against the machine.
So I call my supervisor and tell him my lunch is almost due, and he should either get someone to spell me off or else shut the machine down so I can have my break (which I desperately needed at that point, as you can imagine).
Well, they had a shitload of wheat to clean all the peas out of, and didn’t want to shut the machine down. So first he told me to let the machine just overflow and clean it up after; and when I told him that would likely start a fire with how many peas were coming out, he told me to “just take my break between emptying the sack.” Which, like, does not actually count as taking a fucking break from it.
So I called down to my union rep and told him what was up, he talked to the supervisor, and then him and the supervisor came and had a look at how many peas were coming out (so many that we were joking that the peas were contaminated with wheat), and then grabbed a couple of guys off sweeping to empty the bag while I ate.
And then put a second body on the floor to help handle all those peas because omfg.
Unions are the best. Remember that in the mid-Eighties, almost half of all jobs were unionized. It was Reagan catering to corporations that got all the workers’ rights that people quite literally had fought and died for almost a hundred years previously rolled right back.
Bring back the unions!!
