Stronger Than You

I don't see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to "eliminate the risk of theft" (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women and girls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.

The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.

The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.

This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation-- every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about--every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.

111th anniversary

@pluckyredhead:

#also please note that the owners got off with a slap on the wrist and opened new factories #WHERE THEY LOCKED THE DOORS AGAIN #anyway fuck capitalism

112th

113rd

I think it's important to also mention that this stuff hasn't stopped globally, it's just stopped in America. Think of the collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013, or the Dhaka garment factory fire a year before in 2012; women and girls are still being forced to work for obscenely small wages to make the clothes we wear everyday in incredibly dangerous conditions, it's just been outsourced to the global south.

Well said.

One hundred and thirteen years as of yesterday

every single villain with minions would be utterly fucked if the heroes just introduced them to the concept of workers’ unions

While that Shrek scene is one of the best, I do feel some villains would survive the unionizing. Gru, for one, would have been fine even as a bad guy since he was still a good boss. Megamind would absolutely let Minion unionize, even if the union was just Minion.

Roxanne: A union?

Megamind: Yes, we’re very forward-thinking in this organization - very cognizant of workers’ rights.

Roxanne: But the point of a union is collective bargaining, and Minion is-

Megamind: Look, I weighed the costs and benefits, and if you want to have a three-hour debate about this, you do it.

Heinz Doofenshmirtz’s backup dancers are canonically unionized iirc

Well this is absolutely hellish

Mickey Mouse when I ask him why he's increasing my house rent by $100 dollars every month (he's my landlord)

The underpaid disney employees on their way to evict me and my family

disney literally tried to do this ages ago. please watch defunctland explain it. im losing my mind. why

I would like to let people know that is a reality for many of the underpaid Disney employees as they can’t afford housing on their salaries

So Disney has apartment buildings it buys to rent cheaply to their employees

And I’m sure you can imagine the level of control Disney has over you when they control your employment and your housing

Originally it was just for the college program employees (like me) but got expanded to being available to all employees

Now I don’t know how it is with the full time employees, but if you were a college employee and you got “termed?” (Disney loves alternative language to control their employees, see being a ‘cast member on stage’ vs an employee at work). After being termed you had 24 hours to move out

Now, guess how well that worked for 19 year olds from Ohio who have nowhere to sleep and no way to get home

I knew a guy who had two “strikes” against him (calling out of work gets points against you, 3 points get you a strike) that had been waved as he had good reasons to miss those days. He then made a comment his supervisor didn’t like so she reversed the strikes being waved and gave him the third one for his comment. He then had to call his parents at 2 am to tell them he was now homeless in Orlando. Imagine if your boss could evict you for talking back

Now imagine you’re one of the many semi retired employees trying to stay afloat through their 70s, or the many employees who are recent immigrants, or who are parents of kids, or anyone else without a lot of work or housing options

Think of the shit they’d be able to do to you if losing your job meant immediately losing housing because your boss owns your home

Think of how much leverage that gives against the unions when your workers aren’t even secure from their employer in their home, where union dues paying for you to not work can’t save you from eviction because your boss decides if you get to live there

Any fucked up thing Disney does is almost always worse for their employees, and likely tested on them first

I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world. 

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you. 

Man, this post makes me feel conflicted, because on the one hand, of the things listed, next-day delivery is the only one that DOES actually exist in the world today. The others are exaggerations, and while I understand the point being made, they do detract from it.

I understand—and agree with—that sentiment of, “I want slower deliveries by drivers who are paid better,” as one recent tumblr post put it. I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to produce and consume less as a culture, and that an actual substantive conversation about politics should involve willingness to relinquish the many modern luxuries that are built on exploitation.

I don’t think these are good examples of those luxuries, though.

Large budget movies are possible because consumers (and investors) are willing to pay for them. A large budget is actually a necessary component in making sure workers are being adequately compensated; the fact that they currently are often exploited by studios is a result of deliberate misallocation of resources, not anything intrinsic to the size of the production. Same thing goes with high-quality video games. As for releasing a new film/game every month/year, that’s only unsustainable because there’s only a handful of monopolistic studios doing it. In a well-regulated industry that encourages growth and competition, we could see tens, if not hundreds of studios producing big-budget films and games. And, with a well-compensated and socially-supported citizenry, consumers would have enough disposable income to support it.

Similarly, the problem with soda isn’t that we have 80 brands; it’s that we have two. And those two brands each own 800 different labels. In a healthy economy, these monopolies would be dissolved, and we could support well over 80 moderately-sized independent beverage companies producing their own sodas.

Same-day delivery, again, could be easily supported with proper allocation of resources. Currently, we have huge centralized distributors like Amazon exploiting gig-workers with slave-wages to ferry cheap mass-produced crap to people, and that’s what makes it bad, not the speed at which they do it. If instead, we had something like a super-robust USPS, with well-compensated deliverypeople working reasonable hours within a decentralized network of independent-but-cooperative suppliers, there would be absolutely no reason why you couldn’t get something delivered to you from the distro ten miles down the road within a day.

When we critique capitalism, and they respond, “Yeah, well capitalism made the cell phone you’re using!” our response shouldn’t be, “Oh shit u right,” it should be, “No, capitalism made the cell phone I’m using break after a year so I’ll buy a new one, and they use slave labor to do it while they pocket the rest.”

There are luxuries, and there are artificially-valued, mass-produced, built-to-break trash that are marketed as luxuries. But we don’t solve the problems of fast-fashion by saying, “Welp I guess I shouldn’t wear clothes.”

I mean, there are things that I think people are going to have to give up to get the world they want, as much as I get the point made in the last two paragraphs I do think that’s ultimately unavoidable. You can’t be a socialist and be as attached to consumerism as a lot of people on this website are. But yeah the first post doesn’t pick the greatest examples, I appreciate that you made the same point that was going through my head about how movies are only that expensive because of the abundance of unions in the movie industry that ensure that their workers are fairly compensated – a good thing that more industries (especially in entertainment and most especially the video game industry) should have!