I know for many people the main condition is that their work wouldn’t be cool with it so would lose income or threaten job. in union strikes, a huge part of our dues goes towards a strike fund to make sure people get income when striking so i think i would like to see some crowd funding general strike fund or some sort of union type thing but anyone in working class can join & point of it is to organize and fund assistance, legal help, anti-retaliation.
I’d be down to general strike though, some massive positive changes in history have been via general striking since wealthy class freaks out.
what do y’all think?
Having a union to begin with.
Folks that stop by this post and don’t have a union, think about this. The reason you have the default concern about your job security, the reason you have inequality in the workplace and the reason “wage-slave” is a term, is because you, your peers, and your predecessors were propagandized away from unions or any form of worker solidarity.
Some of you might say, “but if I even talk about a union with co-workers, I’m fired”, or, “I read about how Walmart would rather stop having a butcher shop than let them unionize”. I say that’s exactly why you need one.
Unions in the US seems to mostly be focused on a single location (yes I know there are large/national as well), we mostly hear about how a single factory/plant/workshop/office is unionized, but others are not.
Here in Sweden, we have sector based unions, I am an IT technician, and a decade long member of the union for skilled service workers, we have unions for hospital staff, restaurant/hotel staff, transportation workers, dockworkers, and basically every other kind of worker has a union that fits them.
Here sympathy strikes/actions are also legal, when Toys 'R Us tried to establish stores without allowing union staff members, other unions started sympathy actions, the transport union would refuse to transport their goods, the graphic designers union would not print their ads or store materials, the financial workers union would not process their invoices, and so on, and despite them coming in hard with their whole “we don’t work with unions” crap, they soon caved in and did a 180, though that didn’t stop them from crashing and burning in a relatively short time after.
Currently we have a similar situation with Tesla, they refuse to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the auto workers union, when the strike started Tesla started bringing in strike breakers from other EU countries, this has been going on for a year now, and there are sympathy actions going on, dockworkers refuse to unload Teslas, so they are being shipped in by road with non union labour, postal workers have refused to send out license plates for new Teslas, this has lead to a weird situation where Tesla is sending the license plate to a separate guy who was recently discovered to be a convicted criminal, I don’t know how this solves the issue for Tesla, and the electrical workers union have refused to install new Tesla chargers.
Sweden has actually very few laws regulating the relationship between employers and workers, that is instead dealt with between the employers and the unions, we have no legal minimum wage, that is instead dealt with through negotiations between employers and unions, there are regular negotiations in every sector, including some strikes here and there to show the power of the union.
The US workers needs something like this, though I doubt it will ever be allowed to exist.
To bring this more in-line with OP’s question:
What if we had a general union that represented all workers generally and could provide support for things like general strikes?
Maybe make it a parent body made up of unionized/federated unions specific to each trade/discipline.
Something like the IWW or the AFL-CIO, but that represents all people by default. I’d argue that such a body could/should replace most of what the government does, and then membership is just citizenship. This could guarantee several worker’s rights within the union and enshrine democratic principles/practices.
In a well functioning society, that would be called the government.
