Ned Yeung (@ned@beige.party)
beige.party
Attached: 1 image This boils my blood. I don't know the US labour history, but I do know how hard public sector workers in Canada and Alberta had to fight to gain collective bargaining rights, which they were not allowed because they were "civil servants". All public worker strikes were wildcat strikes and illegal until 1967 when Federal workers gained the right to collective bargaining through the Public Service Staff Relations Act which took 2 years to pass through Parliament after the wildcat Postal Workers Strike of 1965. Federal government employees responded by joining unions in record numbers. Public sector workers in Alberta did not gain these rights until 2016, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that ALL Canadian workers have the fundamental right to strike, essential to even the playing field between workers and employers. That hasn't even been 10 years ago, that our Provincial healthcare workers, education workers, social workers, wildlife workers, custodial workers, and many more have had access to such basic fundamental rights to legal collective job action! You may not have realized that all these strikes you are seeing now are history in the making! We are living out a struggle for the right of the working-class to SURVIVE. It breaks my heart to see our fallen comrades losing this fight with such desperation to the south, and makes me fearful of the coming storm we will have to face in Canada as our populist shadow government pushes to put us down in Canada. #union #unionstrong #cdnpoli #abpoli #uspol #strike
    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      Unions are helpful in teaching people how they can have power collectively, and how to wield it and organize.

      Admittedly many unions now are corporate captured (teamsters as an example), but more revolutionary unions like the IWW are much more useful in regards to actually getting people to become class conscious, and more apt to prefiguraton.

      An example in practice is how the FNT and CAI unions in Spain were able to organize their communities when the government institutions crumbled during the Spanish civil war, resulting in a well functioning anarchist society in Catalonia.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      You had company towns, where everyone was in debt to the company store and so your neighbors shared the same gripe against the boss. And the boss didn’t live too far away, since jets didnt exist.

      Now your neighbor works for a different company, and your boss is 1000 miles away.