lemmy_irl
The last panel is totally unnecessary
Unions decided on four panel structure. What are you, anti-union?
Yes
This could have even been a one-panel comic.
It’s a shame they don’t teach in school just how hard unions and the workers of America had to fight to get the rights we think of as default today.
They went to literal war with their companies and the government multiple times. Look up the Coal Wars, look up the Haymarket affair, look up Matewan, look up Lucy Parsons. We have a long history of worker’s rights, but since WW2 the ruling capitalists learned not to give the working class too many ideas to get too uppity.
We are well overdue for this kind of activity again.
Also how Redneck and Luddite became a slur through propaganda spread by the elites.
There is a reason they don’t teach it.
They don’t want it to happen again.
That is completely by design. If kids were taught what actually drives change then…
No the kids are given distractions and fed propaganda and brain rot.
They taught it in my (public) school. Sometimes I think a lot of people just aren’t paying attention in class.
I was in AP US History so yes we talked about Pinkerton battles and all that, but it really falls on deaf ears for high schoolers. Once you become an adult and participate in the workforce, we should have to learn it again. America needs to celebrate its socialist and worker’s rights cultures, but it doesn’t by design.
Sometimes I think a lot of people just aren’t paying attention in class.
Or…in a country as big as the US there are many differing levels of education depending on where the school is located and how rich the zip code is.
Some people may have been taught this and others weren’t.
Education is a privilege, and if you got a good one, you’re lucky.
I wasn’t taught past WWII in public high school.
This was for an AP US History class, so the teacher was teaching to the test… And of course, whoever controls the test controls what’s taught.
They taught it in mine too, although I feel it should have gotten more coverage instead of learning about WW2 every single year…
I went to public school in Texas. They taught us that both sides had many good points. Seriously.
I find it “funny” that most of the world celebrates labor/workers day on May 1st to commemorate the Chicago protest to fight for 8-hour shifts and workers rights but in the US they don’t even talk about it.
Labor Day in the US was chosen kinda arbitrarily to fall between independence Day and Thanksgiving Day
The history of that is pretty straightforward:
- In 1886, the Chicago labour unions organized for protests on May 1 to demand an 8 hour day
- On May 3rd strikers tried to confront strike breakers, police fired into the crowd of strikers, killing some
- An anti-police, anti-big-business rally was organized for the next day in Haymarket Square
- The May 4th rally was mostly peaceful, but there were police standing by
- At 10:30 the police moved in en masse to break up the rally
- As the police advanced, someone (it was never determined who) threw a homemade bomb into the path of the advancing police, killing 1 and injuring many
- There was a huge gun fight, involving some protesters and a lot of police, many more people were killed, including police, many shot by their own fellow cops
- The bomb throwing was blamed on the anarchists, the anarchist leaders were rounded up, found guilty in quick and massively unfair show-trials, and hanged
- There was massive backlash against the unions and the anarchists, and the cause of the 8 hour work day was massively set back
- Labour unions kept fighting for an 8 hour day, and decided to keep the May 1st date for their actions, with the first being 4 years later on May 1, 1890, but this time it was international, with strikes in Europe, Central and South America
- As a movement representing workers, communist parties around the world adopted May Day as a significant day
- After WWII, the US was in full-on anti-communist mode, and May Day came to be seen as a communist holiday, so they moved it to September 1st and made May 1st “Loyalty Day” instead.
Edited to add: the only really confusing part about the whole thing is the names. One of the main guys involved was named “Spies”, and another peripheral figure was named “Most”. That makes it really confusing when you get phrases like “Most thought hat…” or “Spies believed…”
And that is deliberate
Does China celebrate or even acknowledge the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Same thing
I hear so many excuses from Americans about how they can’t protest their Nazi regime because they have bills to pay and it’s hard and the government has guns and how it won’t change anything anyway.
They have no idea how hard all of these people fought to give them the things they have today. They faced all the same problems and they succeeded.
Yeah I agree mostly, but also it is actually a different time in many ways. The same problem and solution are still there and the American public should do more, but there are some significant differences.
Uh, wait, we didn’t have much of those fights here but have better worker protections than all of America. How did this happen in central europe? Did we just at some point agree, it would be good? Or is it a swap-over from US?
Great question, and I’m also curious. Something worth researching.
My public school taught us this
It was a very rich area though.
I’ve been working weekends for forty years, and I’ve never worked less than six days a week.
Sad. But unfortunately normal in many places around the world. We need more unions.
Sounds like you should organize a union
Hello fellow mexican individual, or is it chinese?
Enjoy the comic in its spirit and work on
That’s US. American exceptionalism!
We got weekends because of collective action, Unions are an example of collective action (when formed and utilized correctly).
damn, truth.
TUIF!
Now kiss
For all the bitching about capitalism, which basically every country on Earth uses for an economic system, we’re missing 3 key things.
- We can have unions under capitalism.
- We can break, or prevent, monopolies under capitalism.
- Our governments can protect us under capitalism.
Everything works fucking great with those 3 ingredients. Imagine that.
These are all laughable but the last one is especially wrong:
Ourgovernmentscanprotectus undercapitalism against us.This is ignorant on so many levels.
Spell it out then. I am willing to listen, willing to be wrong.
In addition to the other thread descendants, staring with u/jjjalljs@ttrpg.network:
For all the bitching about capitalism, which basically every country on Earth uses for an economic system
This is only the case because it was instituted at gunpoint. The exploration, colonization, settlement, expropriation, amassment, warfare, thievery, and conquest of the world’s economy is soaked in blood, laden in exploitation of people, places, and things and destruction of the commons. You’d know that if you were subject to it. Or, if you’d paused to read, ask, or think about it for 5 seconds.
And, I can’t believe I’m saying this in public, “just because everyone is doing it, that doesn’t make it right.”
- We can vilify, undermine, and lead smear campaigns against unions under capitalism.
- We can break, or prevent, unions under capitalism.
- Our governments can attack us using local, state, provincial, and federal police forces whenever there is a perceived threat to capitalism.
Everything works fucking horribly with those 2781 billionaire capitalists robbing the world blind while blaming the victims.
Imagine that.
I think it’s kind of fundamentally unjust that the owner keeps all the profits from what labor produces. That’s capitalism. Unions and government are bandaids on top of that.
The heart of capitalism is definitely theft - theft of labour; theft of time; theft of energy; and theft of value. Intrinsically, it is a system that creates hierarchy and rewards exploitation of fellow human beings. The core tenets of unregulated capitalism are, subjectively in my opinion, a reflection of the evil of the sociopaths and psychopaths who benefit from how the system operates.
While I believe in communism as an ideal and socialism as the next-best-thing (preferably governed anarchically), I don’t see how western societies will be able to immediately get from where we are today to there without terribly bloody war in which countless lives are lost and suffering of the proletariat is rampant.
I think that moves to restrict capitalism (UBI; genuinely enforced workers’ rights; nationalisation of critical industry; stripping corporate personhood to hold individuals liable for the actions of companies; universal high-quality public education from birth to higher adult studies etc.) are the way to edge closer towards a more utopian society.
I don’t know how we make that happen while the billionaires and centimillionaires still have their thumbs on the political scales though. But, a man can dream.
As opposed to…
That’s rather my point! What are we to replace a free market with? Everyone screams SOCIALISM, but no one seems to agree on what that actually means.
Shall we do the literal, textbook definition? State ownership of the means of production? That’s been a complete failure.
What we need is a capitalist economic system, reigned in by:
- Unions, to protect the workers
- Breaking and disallowing monopolies, so they never get so large as to control the government
- Democratic governments who protect us, voted in by an educated electorate
But I repeat myself. I guess the Nordic countries, and most of Europe, who act exactly as I outlined, are failures.
Its the definition according to the people who dont actually want socialism…
Everyone disagrees with what socialism means when you listen to the people who say “Socialism is the Soviets! Socialism is death panels! Socialism is when government bad!”
But if youre listening to those people you dont actually care what Socialism is, you just want an excuse to keep a broken system so you dont have to work at changing it.
Socialism is unions… but from the top down instead of just at the bottom trying to mitigate the problems brought about by capitalism. Socialism is people working together for the greater good instead of the greater profit. Socialism is people matter instead of money.
I suppose if that’s the opposite of what you want, youre right to oppose it.
free market
Imagine believing in this nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
I guess the Nordic countries, and most of Europe, who act exactly as I outlined,
Not even close to exact. You forgot the centuries of violence, colonialism, imperialism, racism, etc.
A free market isn’t really the same as “the owners keep the profits”.
They’re just throwing out ideological phrases from their indoctrination. Nothing coherent.
what an extremely lazy comic, “weekends good, unions good” and reusing the same panel 4 times. Couldn’t even contrive a scenario to share your opinion with a setup and punchline. And if you really want to get nitpicky, it’s not even correct because blue says “thank god it’s the weekend,” not “thank god for weekends.”
We originally got weekends off because Henry ford realized you needed time to go spend the money you were getting from your job and you couldn’t spend money while you were working.
There’s some truth to that. Unions got us the 8 hour work day, after decades of strikes made bloody by companies and cops. Unions were also working on establishing a “weekend”, for decades, and only making slow, incremental progress.
When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, it was able to make cars more efficiently and quickly. But, it was backbreaking work. Many of Ford’s workers quit after only a few months. Because training new workers was inefficient, Ford decided it was in his company’s best interest to offer the workers more pay and more time off. Workers liked that deal, so his turnover rate dropped and his factories ran more efficiently.
Eventually he settled on a 40 hour work week with 2 weekend days. He claimed it was for a more noble purpose, of giving workers more money and time off so they could spend more money on everything, including his cars. Maybe it was just a purely selfish calculation though, that to run his factories as efficiently as possible he needed to make the conditions and compensation such that people would stick around and not force him to train up new workers so often.
What is up with all these complete shit takes in this thread, like the one above?
I’m not glorifying ford and I’m pro union. This is actually pretty much why happened, just the same as ford realizing if he paid his workers enough to afford his products he could sell more of them.
Unions are there to help business owners remember that people need money to buy things and time to relax and enjoy life, and that the alternative to that is violence.
Something that seems to have been forgotten by most business leaders today.
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God could only manage one day a week, unions got two.
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A little unambitious for the omnipotent creator of the universe I would say. I’d have at least gone for a four day week if I were God, maybe even said something against slavery if I was feeling especially benevolent.
they the same dude
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Neither really. It was that guy who wrote the Scriptures, likely based on the cultural values of the time.
I dunno, I wouldn’t put too much value in what a god says who:
Aborted the entirety of humanity so he could start over because he was disappointed in his own handy work. And then needed a rainbow to remind himself not to do it again.
Bets wagers on his own people to test their loyalty, and torture them to unimaginable lengths in the process.
Somehow is always on the side of the tribe that managed to kill the other tribe after the facts.
Creates hell and then somehow manages to forfeit ownership of his own creations based on whimsical matters, sending said creations to an endless loop of peaking torture and agony.
And that’s just the one from the bible…
Unions on the other hand: ” hey let’s make your time on earth a little bit more bearable.”
If you reaaaaally wanna stick to the patriarchy side of old and whatnot… I’d welcome the unions with open arms.
Because if you piss off the people long and hard enough… honhonhon mon ami!
