I was unaware that pilots are underpaid, skip meals to make rent, and could get fired for refusing to fly. If that’s not true, then being a pilot isn’t congruent with my metaphor.
My point is that our hypercapitalist society forces people into poverty then compels them to act dangerously in order to secure the basic necessities of life. In such a system, claiming the individual has sole responsibility is a perversion of responsibility.
I never have to worry if the subway will be running when it’s snowing.
Nice. Over here the bus shows up when it wants to and can’t be relied upon. It only comes by five times a day, and it can be up to half an hour late. I’ve had multiple interviewers tell me that relying on the bus made me ineligible for hire because I’m responsible for transportation.
The fact that society views owning a car as a symbol of responsibility is part of the perversion of responsibility I’m talking about. It’s the same perversion that requires you to go into debt, so you can prove that you’re “responsible” with managing your money. Like, I paid off my student loan debt, so my credit score is now null. If I had to move and find a place to rent, not having a credit score will affect the prices I’m offered. By not maintaining a debt load, I am making my life more difficult, and that is fucked up.
orgrinrt@lemmy.world 6 days ago
If everyone dared to challenge the shitty practices and expectations of their superiors (while actively following through with the reasonable ones), then they’d have no other choice but to accept that the can’t just order whatever, contexts matter and life fluctuates, same as the world, locally and at large.
Unions are the tool towards this. It’s the convenient hammer a worker can wield to dare build a more sensible environment for work.
Anyone going against these superiors alone can rightly expect to get sacked or something to that effect. It’s not okay and shouldn’t be like that, but that’s the unfortunate reality.
Do the same together, and unless they are confident in their capability of replacing everyone efficiently and quickly, somehow eating the time and cost of re-establishing the workflow and the silent knowledge previously shared between the senior workers and the new, etc, they have to bend and listen to reason. And I am pretty confident in saying that there isn’t a workplace that can ever be confident in all that, unless they only ever had a maximum of two workers and a very generic, easily learnt job.
Lesson here is the old and tired union, nobody likes to hear it for whatever reason, but there exists an effective way to fight precisely this. Adapt and wield it. Make things more safe and sane for everyone.
MangoCats@feddit.it 6 days ago
Agreed, unions level the playing field between large businesses and individual workers. If you’re a single employee in a small business (say, less than 10 employees) you have a reasonable chance to negotiate with your employer. As a single employee in a business with hundreds, it’s basically impossible - you have almost no leverage and the employer has too many incentives to not acknowledge your needs.
Unfortunately, union organizations are themselves “big business” and ripe for corruption.
Transparency is the real answer. We should all know and share what our working conditions, benefits, salaries, etc. are. Companies should be up front about what they are offering and how their employees are treated. If you’re applying for work at a place that does 10% layoffs every 3 years, you should be able to easily see that from a reliable source, not just random scattered news stories and ex-employee anecdotes. If your prospective employer has been giving upper management 15% annual raises in total compensation for the past 20 years, while rank and file have been getting 1.5-2%, that should be readily available information.