So, I know I'm kind of late on this issue as it's been going on for a while and is just getting "resolved" around now, but I do want to express my thoughts on this issue from my "indepentarian" perspective.
To summarize the issue, basically, railroad workers had a strike. They were working 14 hour days, they had mandatory overtime. They had no work life balance at all, and they couldn't even take sick days off adequately when sick with a disease like Covid. It was messed up. As someone who has this mentality that work without a way to say no is de facto slavery and that as it stands we Americans work too much under adverse conditions as it is, I view this whole mess as a failure of the American work system.
While workers in most unionized industries can adequately strike, due to the importance of the rail industry to national logistics, there are all kinds of rules prohibiting striking under various conditions, and Biden himself interjected his way into the discourse, negotiating with the unions directly. The result was an increase in pay, but no other real conditions changing. And a lot of people feel outraged and betrayed. I don't blame them. You know, it isn't uncommon for democratic presidents to betray railroad workers. Truman had a lot of issues with strikers post WWII as unions promised to hold off strikes until after the war. But when the post war period came, strikes happened and Truman was kind of infamous for crushing them. He even threatened to draft them into the military. The fact is, presidents are more interested in keeping the country running smoothly than giving into strikers. To go back to the whole idea of state run socialism I discussed the other day, this is why you do NOT want the government to be the sole employer in a nation. Push comes to shove, they will force you back to work, and you will have little to no say in it.
I really want to emphasize the fact that this strike isn't about money. The railroad workers make good money. I think with the new contract they would make like $160,000 a year? That's INSANE money. But given the working conditions, I honestly don't think ANY amount of money is worth selling your soul and having no life to yourself. I feel like this is the big problem with this economy in which people are coerced to work. As long as this is a thing, the actual working conditions will not change. Because people can't say no. The only difference between one employer and another is pay. And often times employers will throw more money at people to put up with increasingly abusive working conditions, than to actually have work life balance. As such, the entire economy remains over worked. You can quit one job and find another, but any and all jobs with an actual living wage will be at minimum 40 hours a week, with people often working much more. We value money over time. Time IS money after all, and the expectation is you're going to give your time, we just tend to frame the issue as the price of your time. This is what's so oppressive about employment for me. ALL conditions of employment should be subject to debate. Not just pay, but the hours, the benefits, the vacation and sick time, breaks, etc. Nope. The mentality is you accepted the job at that pay, so therefore you have to do the job, period.
Sure, there are ways to improve working conditions, such as regulations, but those regulations were created almost 100 years ago in the 1930s and are very antiquated and full of holes. And what is often the way to get around them? Why? by offering more pay. If you work over time, you may be entitled to time and a half or double time. You aren't really given the ability to work less, the system incentivizes you'll work 40+ hours no matter what for the most part (part time service workers notwithstanding and subjected to an entirely different set of incentives). And that seems to be what is going on with the rail workers, they're just throwing more money at the problem ignoring the quality of life issues.
Unions are supposed to be another solution to the wage slavery issue. But in this case, the unions are hampered by the fact that this industry is important, has a history of strikes screwing up the nation's logistical issues, and and is subjected to regulations that limit striking. So workers are forced to accept Biden's deal, whether they want to or not. They asked for sick days, they get ignored and instead they get more money. Put up with the abuse, here's some money to shut you up, blah blah blah. And of course Biden is spinning this into a "victory for the workers". Yeah, bullcrap. They didn't get what they wanted. They asked for sick days, they got more pay. To be fair, congress is the real obstacle here as any agreement had to pass congress and congress is subjected to all kinds of obstruction greatly limiting their actual ability to act on ANYTHING despite still holding a house and senate majority for another month. But yeah, it's a joke.
This is why I really don't trust things like unions or the government to do the bargaining for me in a job. Yes, collectivism is good. Apes together strong. BUT, as long as these solutions focus on simply improving working conditions without empowering each and every worker to say no to their jobs and to quit as they see fit on their own terms, then collectivism is going to have limits. Unions fail. Governments fail. Workers can either abide by whatever agreement is reached or just outright quit, and if they quit, they lose all of their pay and benefits. With a UBI, people could live at the margins more comfortably than they can now and say no to these oppressive jobs, and if workers want better hours or sick days, the government has to give them to them to attract labor. None of this crap of just incentivizing people to put up with abuse and then throwing money at the problem to keep them around.
I mean, just imagine you're a railway worker. You're making $160k doing harm physical labor 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. Your life sucks, you hate it. You cant even take off sick. But...are you going to quit? Okay, what are you going to do now? ANd that's the question, isn't it? You try to find another job. Your prospective employers grill you about why you left the railway job. If you're honest, they might not want to hire you. They are likely to call them and ask for a reference any way, and if the boss doesn't have good things to say about you, they might not recommend you. if you don't get a recommendation, you might get blackballed from getting another job, being cited as "not a team player" or "not a good worker."
Say you do manage to get a job, say you end up working a factory job instead. This time non unionized. You take a pay cut, end up working for around $50k a year, working at 1/3 of your previous salary. You STILL work long hours. While the job is 40 hours on paper, you do find they throw all kinds of mandatory overtime on you, and you have to take it. You DON'T have a union, you DON'T have recourse. You're just told to put up with it or else. So you do.
What is that railway worker going to do? Stay exactly where they're at. It doesn't get any easier going anywhere else, they just get paid less. That's the point in paying these guys so much. To keep them from looking elsewhere. They might be making good money, but they will work like this every day from their teens and 20s until their mid 60s, or given how the right wants to keep raising the retirement age, possibly their 70s by the time younger people today retire. Their bodies will be giving out. They will deal with crippling arthritis and other injuries from a lifetime of hard labor. They are STUCK. Doing the grind, day in and day out, being incentivized to stay by a pension promised that might never be paid out in full and the promise of social security. And then they get carted off to an old folks home where they sit waiting to die. Some life, huh?
And again, let's not kid ourselves. Socialism isn't the answer. With socialism, the state just becomes the new bourgeoisie, they declare all deals good deals, and aren't interested in hearing dissenters. How do we know this? Look at any communist country ever and their working conditions.
The only answer to any of this is a UBI. We need people to be free to live without being forced to work in the first place. As long as we insist on financially coercing people into the labor market more than absolutely necessary, then we will continue to treat the symptoms of the disease that ails us, not the disease itself. We need to stop glorifying the disease itself, and acting like it has "dignity" or some crap, because it doesn't. Like really. I never even came across these "work has dignity" types of statements until well into my adulthood. As a religious conservative I grew up accepting that work sucks. I mean, even in the Bible, work is proscribed as a PUNISHMENT from God for original sin. I just saw work as a necessary reality of the system. But as an adult I know differently, and for some reason a lot of people act like this work stuff is GOOD for you, we just need to ensure that the working conditions are good and just and blah blah blah. Well how is that working our for you? These guys are UNIONIZED. They should have it better than most of us. hell, by their pay they're WAY better off at least FINANCIALLY than most of us. They would be effectively paying into my UBI plan unless they have a stay at home wife and/or lots of kids. But...they're unhappy, and overworked, and oppressed just like everyone else. Because work itself is what sucks, and there is no salvaging the concept or bringing dignity to it. You might fix the disease, but you'll never solve the problem.
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