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#also strong unions
thatrandomblogsays · 6 months
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I’m so happy for them
[Image Description: Castiel from Supernatural is saying I love you, underneath is an image of Dean Winchester with the caption: “After four months of striking the WGA has a reached a tentative agreement & finalizing the contract. If all goes well writers will get to return to work with better pay and protections. They did it. Go unions”]
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cardassiangoodreads · 9 months
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Seeing some nerdrage about the fact that if SAG-AFTRA strikes, actors won't be able to do promotional stuff for their projects including at SDCC and, anyway I am once again asking online fandom to recognize that there are real human beings behind your entertainment products. Their welfare and their ability to just like, have a career at all doing the things they and you love (because most people who act for a living are not celebrity superstar multi-millionaires) are in fact more important than whether you get to stand in line for hours just to pay too much money for a handshake and a scribble on a photo. And I say this as someone who has paid too much money for those scribbles myself. Also the future that studios want to create where acting and writing is replaced by AI is bad for consumers, too, bad for anyone who cares about art! And also just, more basically: artistic labor is labor and if you enjoy the products of that labor, you should want the people who make that for you to be fairly compensated and treated well.
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cyanide-sippy-cup · 8 months
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All I have to say about SAG-AFTRA
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Fuck yes
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theabstruseone · 1 year
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'TIL a papyrus scroll indicates that, during the building of the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses III, the workers were upset about their treatment and, rather than discussing it with them, management served them a large meal.
'The workers didn't think that was enough so occupied the Valley of the Kings refusing entry to anyone until they were given a raise and "cosmetics" (research shows it was a form of sunscreen).
'So not only does workers organizing a strike and forming a picket line for better wages and workplace safety conditions date back TO THE FRIGGIN' BRONZE AGE, but also management has been trying to placate discontented workers with a pizza party.'
And then that went viral on Twitter and I got hammered with people trying to "Well ackshually" about my three-tweet-long thread on a thing I'd learned just that morning I turned into a joke about corporate pizza parties. So I decided to research and here's the entire story.
TL;DR: I was pretty much right except it'd be closer to say "donuts/cupcakes in the breakroom" rather than "pizza party".
The events took place sometime around 1157 BCE (specifically the 29th year of Ramses III’s reign) in the village of Deir el-Medina, a worker village for the people who worked on the built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
BTW, the site itself is fascinating as it was first excavated in 1922 and ended up being one of the most thoroughly documented accounts of community life in the ancient world and proved the builders of the Pyramids were middle-class skilled artisans and craftspeople, not slaves.
You also have to know that this era of history is around the start of what’s known as the Bronze Age Collapse. Some sort of environmental catastrophe happened that caused widespread crop failures across the ancient world.
Now what precisely happened is strongly debated, but generally several groups from elsewhere in Europe and Africa known as the “Sea People” attacked the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean, which caused most of those cultures to collapse.
Also, commerce was a bit different as they were (oversimplified explanation) on the bread standard. Salaries were measured in values of beer and bread as the recipes for those were standardized and made up the basics of the diet.
So while common laborers would be paid in literal beer and bread, more highly-valued workers would be paid in an equivalent of a larger allotment of beer and bread. So they’d get paid “100 loaves a day” worth of oil or metal or coin representing the value.
Now, for our tale. This comes from the contemporary account of the scribe Amennakhte. If anyone wants to read along, a photo of the scroll along with a translation is available to read for free at https://libcom.org/article/records-strike-egypt-under-ramses-iii-c1157bce
On Year 29, Second Month of Winter, Day 10, a group of workers walked past the guards and sat at the Temple of Menkheperre stating it had been 18 days since they’d last been paid, staying the night in the tomb saying “We have matters of Pharaoh”.
The following day, a scribe brought the workers 55 “s'b-cakes”. So yes, a “pizza party”. I can’t find any reference to what this is precisely other than “fine bread” that was worth more than a large loaf of standard bread.
Seriously, I wasted an hour of my life trying to figure out what “s'b-cakes” are exactly so if anyone knows please tell me.
Anyway, it didn’t work and there was “quarrelling” at the temple of Ramses II. The translations says “chief of police” which doesn’t seem quite right but I’ll go with it, but anyway he said he’d fetch the mayor of Thebes.
The mayor claimed they didn’t have enough to pay. The workers responded by saying “The prospect of hunger and thirst has driven us to this. There is no clothing, there is no ointment*, there is no fish, there are no vegetables.”
They then said to go tell it to the Pharoah directly. On Day 12 (the day following the “quarrelling”), they were given their ration they were due during the previous month (basically, they got their back pay). It was 21 days late.
Side note: I got some pushback by an “Egyptologist” for calling the “ointment” a type of sunscreen and…yes, it was. Some translations mark this as “cosmetics” but it was a medicinal balm used to prevent and treat sunburn. What the hell else would you call it?
So Day 13 (the fourth day of the strikes) and Mentmose, the “chief of police”, apparently took a side. He told the workers to lock down the work site and continue their protests, and that he’d lead them to the temple to continue the sit in.
His words (recorded by Amennakhte): “I’ll tell you my opinion. Go up, gather your tools, close your doors, fetch your families, and I’ll lead you to the temple of Seti I and let you settle down there.”
At this point, the tax master Ptahemheb came out to talk to them making a list of all the things they demanded. On Day 15 (sixth day of the strike), they tried another “pizza party” with half a sack of barley and a jar of beer for each worker.
Amennakhte doesn’t say what their response was exactly, but does say that the workers brought torches so they could continue the protest in the dark. So I take it the response wasn’t good.
Day 17 (eighth day of the strike), the head of the temple came out and asked what demands to bring to the Pharoah for them. And they gave a detailed list of what precise wages they wanted for each of the workers.
On that day, they were given what they asked for in rations for the second month of winter. They may have also been paid early as they should have been paid on the 21st or 28th day depending on the source.
So we’re now in the third month of winter (no exact date written) and they’re still striking. Worker Mose said basically “As Amun as my witness if you drag me away I will come back and start robbing the tombs.” I couldn’t fit the whole thing in one tweet.
Reshpetref, the proctor, said “We will not come back, you can tell your superiors that. For sure, it is not because of hunger that we strike, but we have a serious charge to make. Something bad has been done in this place of the Pharoah”.
We’re on the fourth month of winter now, Day 28 (so over three months of striking now) before the Vizier shows up. This is the government official that handles day-to-day business and is second only to the Pharoah.
He says he just got promoted so isn’t authorized to give them their wages (at least partially true, he’d just been promoted five days prior) and even if he could, there was nothing in the granaries to pay them with.
The granaries may have been empty because of the other issues going on with the Bronze Age Collapse or it may have just been the rampant corruption speculated of the government of the era, or he may have been lying.
On the first month of summer Day 2, the crew got two sacks of grain as their ration (they’d demanded 5 ½ sacks each). The foreman Khonsu told them accept it, then go down to the market and tell the Vizier’s children about it.
Amennakhte (who again, is writing this scroll) stopped them and said NOT to go to the market since they’d been paid and if they did, he’d have to have them arrested. He doesn’t mention they were only paid a third of what they were owed.
First month of summer, Day 13, passes the guard post saying “We are hungry” and continued their sit in. They shouted at the mayor of Thebes as he passed, who then got them 50 sacks of grain to tide them over until Pharoah paid them.
That’s the end of this particular scroll, but there’s evidence that strikes continued throughout the reign of Ramses III as there are records of more workers being hired to transport food and supplies to the workers.
The scroll also leaves out some of what happened in between dates. For example, it wasn’t one single long strike, but a series of them. After they were paid their wages the first time, the workers went back to work.
However, they were told that was their pay for the third month of winter and not the second so they wouldn’t be getting paid again, sparking the second strike that lasted into summer.
There’s also a big deal in Egyptian culture at the time called “Ma’at” or basically “The Order of Things”. Nobody had any idea what to do with the striking workers because workers weren’t supposed to strike. They were supposed to work.
Sure, they were treated well and the village of Deir el-Medina lived at what could be called middle-class standards for the time period, but they weren’t supposed to rebel against their betters in this way. It was unthinkable.
There was also a big festival coming up to celebrate the 30th year of the reign of Ramses III and a lot of the government officials were focused on that, more concerned with maintaining order than actually managing the country.
I should also note I paint Amennakhte as on the side of the government rather than the workers when the opposite was likely the case. The strike wasn’t recorded in the official government records as Egypt tended to cover up their losses.
That said, we do have some records like those of Amennakhte showing that, once the workers realized they had the power to organize, they used it all the way through the New Kingdom.
The last entry on the scroll doesn’t directly involve the strike, but is related. On the first month of summer, Day 16, one of the workmen provided evidence that government officials were stealing from the tombs.
One of them, Weserhat, was one of the ministers who shorted the workers payment previously. The other, Pentaweret, may be the son of Ramses III at the center of the “Harem Conspiracy”, an assassination plot that took place between 1 to 3 years later.
In summary, the workers were unpaid due to corruption and management enriching themselves, they went on strike, management threw them a pizza party, that didn’t work, and they eventually got their demands.
Though I guess if you want to be completely accurate, it was more “donuts/cupcakes in the breakroom”…
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57sfinest · 1 year
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What do you think about Evrart Claire? You mentioned you think about him in one of your tags I think.
okay i will first direct to you to trusted mutual @sydmarch for the most in-depth evrart thoughts with the appropriate warning for nsfw lmfaoo
but like. evrart is one of those characters where you have an initial knee-jerk reaction to them and then you kinda have to reevaluate after all is said and done because you get a LOT more context on them as you go.
most shallowly, you're meant to see evrart as the slimy "fantastically corrupt" union (mob) boss who sits in his office embezzling and making others do his dirty work (the hardies as his enforcement, you as his little errand dog, you get the point). however, a first point i want to make is that comparing a justified labor or civil rights advocate group to a "mob" is such a ubiquitous piece of capitalist/bigot rhetoric that it should automatically clue you in to the fact that something else is going on here. also taken in context with the fact that kortenaer poses as a scab to break the strike, further framing the union as a lazy, entitled, unreasonable splinter faction of stupid socialists-- obviously we know that the people who made this game are leftists, so it's not just Ough Unions Bad. there is Something Else Going On! because we are seeing this union strike filtered primarily through the lens of someone who is, consciously or not, a moralintern lackey! even at his most self-aware, calling himself the moralintern's bitch, harry does not have enough awareness of the world and his role in it to recognize how he is being manipulated by the various agendas at play here, and that affects our perception of it.
i think evrart presents as corrupt and weaselly on purpose! again syd has said a lot of this already & i've added some stuff in their tags, but i'll reiterate here for convenience. he is aware of the rhetoric people can use against him and he uses that to his advantage. he's using his personal reputation as misdirection. we see in dialogue that even joyce, an ultraliberal diehard capitalist who obviously dislikes the union, concedes that it was respectable in and of itself before the claires came in:
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and we can infer that a lot of that might be because the union was *less effective before the claires took charge*. of course a capitalist will respect an ineffective labor union! but on top of this, the claires' open "corruption" give anti-union people an easy target for criticisms that serve to legitimize the union itself. oh, they say, well, the union is alright, it's just the claires that are ruining it. it's misdirection and it's genius. evrart's reputation isn't a concern if the union is doing its job, right? and here's another thing: i think people will trust open corruption more than they'll trust altruism that seems to good to be true. especially in a world with something like moralism, where this organization has killed millions and will kill *millions more* for a "greater good" that is literally just the status quo. if evrart's corruption is an open secret, as joyce puts it, people feel they can trust him *because* he's transparent about the bad things he supposedly does or supports or whatever. at least he's honest, right?
this makes the juxtaposition of evrart with joyce SUPER interesting, too. i think they both have that 'honest about their bad traits' way of going at people- joyce with her self-aware but relentless ultraliberalism, evrart with his intentionally misrepresented agendas. of the two, i think people tend to like joyce a lot more, despite her and evrart using pretty much the *same exact tactics*, and i think that tendency is largely explained by the intersection of gender and fatphobia and ingrained capitalist rhetoric, but i digress.
yes, the way evrart's little tasks are presented makes them *feel* slimy- you're evrart's peone, you're a little bitch dog running his errands to get a gun you never should have lost to begin with, he knows how to help and he's toying with you- but it's on purpose!! you can be joyce's little bitch dog too and it's not framed anywhere near as scummy. It Is On Purpose. because if evrart pretends to be the "socialist" mob boss, maybe it really does get martinaise the youth center, or enough money to, you know, fix the crumbling buildings that could kill the tenants at any moment. there are genuinely good things he is sincerely trying to accomplish. he is curating his image exactly as he needs it to be to get things done and that's partly why joyce hates him *so much*.
and of course this isn't to say that the claires never do anything wrong. contracting dros to kill the previous union head, for example. if i had to pin evrart's major sin, i think he's an "end justifies the means" type of guy. the other union head candidate needed to die for progress to be made. the fishing village will have to go so we can build martinaise up properly. some people, if not willingly cooperative- like harry- need to be used for their status regardless. we see the union at the opposite end of "for the greater good" as moralism: where moralism wants to stall the world, the union represents ruthless progression. why else the red-vs-blue juxtaposition of the union vs the moralintern and its financial interests? the red banners draped over shipping containers?
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neverwhere · 9 months
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MY COWORKER IS AT THE WHITE HOUSE TO DISCUSS WORKERS' RIGHTS TODAY 🙌💪🎉✨
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I'm so proud of our union and all the people in it! 💙
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mrsbeef · 6 months
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Canadian union actors have been locked out of commercial work by union-busting agencies for over 500 days.
Because a lot of people don't really understand what is happening here, I'm going to take a moment to talk about what a lockout is.
A lockout is like the opposite of a strike: in a strike, workers withhold their labour until employers agree to their demands for improved conditions, while in a lockout employers essentially starve workers of work-- and by extension, crucially, wages-- to force them into accepting unacceptable conditions.
In the context of a factory, it might look like literally shutting down the factory because the owner can afford to simply eat the short-term loss while they sit and wait for the workers to grow desperate. Or they may bring in what are euphemistically referred to as "replacement workers". You may know them by the more familiar term: scabs. Those who are willing to put up with more for less, and in so doing worsen labour conditions across the whole industry. This is economically advantageous to the employers, and they can just sit there in comfort while they wait for the union and its members to break.
A lockout is a cruel power play in what is already an unequal relationship. It is intentional infliction of desperation and psychological distress.
The Institute of Canadian Agencies' lockout of ACTRA members has been going on for more than 500 days. It has intentionally inflicted more than 500 days of psychological distress and existential threat on thousands of people. And in the midst of this the ICA has done little but employ DARVO strategies (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender), when it has initiated this essentially in protest of not being given the freedom to slash union commercial actors' compensation by 80%. ACTRA has been ready and willing to bargain this whole time, but the ICA insists it's ACTRA holding its own members down.
The ICA's client companies are hugely recognised brands whose CEOs take home untold millions every year in salaries while the average ACTRA commercial actor makes well under 10k a year. Professional actors' work is important and needed-- if it wasn't the agencies wouldn't be bringing in scabs-- and yet they are forced into conditions where they literally cannot live. They cannot afford to put a roof over their heads and food on the table in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
PLEASE share this and let union actors know you stand with them. Boycott these companies who hire union-busting agencies. Write to them and let them know why. This fight has been long and demoralising, and folks are exhausted and sad, and given all the attention that has rightly been on the striking WGA and SAG-AFTRA members (with whom ACTRA has been rallying together in solidarity), their Canadian sibling union needs your solidarity and support too.
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gingerswagfreckles · 6 months
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What the WGA was offered on May 1st vs what they achieved through 5 months of striking, if anyone is interested. AI issues are at the very bottom of the document, starting on the bottom of page 6.
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pointsfortrying · 6 months
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Yeah you like kpop but also are you normal ab asian people and aware of the state of the entertainment industry in korea—
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arsonistbunny · 13 days
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Things happening on qsmp and fans reminds me of that time dream had another brilliant idea of asking for speculative work for his icon and I said that it wasn't normal or okay and I had this discussion with an American person and at some point, they went "well when we want to enter a school we have to pay for the test to enter. are you saying this isn't normal" like a gotcha but like? yeah?? that's not ok?
In France, having to pay to pass a test to enter a school isn't illegal but your teachers will warn you: this is a sign of a scam. the scam being that the school actually sucks and is just trying to get as much money as fast as possible before eventually closing down due to being bad.
And I'm saying that because qsmp fans on twitter are doing their best to defend doing nothing to fix the situation. (The situation being free work by the way. And unsigned contracts. And abusive clauses.) And invoking things such as "oh the union that wants to take this to court are illegal" and things that appear to be normal in USA. And like, ok, listen I don't know a lot about how your country works but please question it!
You may not realize it but your worker's rights suck so much that you think a union fighting for worker's rights to be respected has to be illegal or nefarious??
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dizaryswrites · 7 months
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Saw Blue Beetle and damn it was a lot better than the trailers made it look.
Also when Jenny Kord was introduced, someone loudly said "Ted had sex?" and I absolutely lost it
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sayheykid · 6 months
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need ted lasso but rugby
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montanabohemian · 5 months
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OH MY GODDDDDDD!??!??!?!!!!!!!!!!!!
SAG-AFTRA GOT A (tentative) DEAL
SAG-AFTRA GOT A FUCKING (tentative) DEAL
SAG-AFTRA GOT THEIR FUCKING (tentative) DEAL
LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
edit: HERE'S THE OFFICIALOn a black background. A white figure with its right arm upraised. Next to it. In white tex: SAG-AFTRA. Below. In yellow text: STRIKE IS. Below. In white text: OVER. Below. In small, yellow text: Strike is suspended as of 12:01 AM (PT) November 9.
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wyrddogs · 2 years
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I think that if a trainer only owns herding dogs from particularly biddable breeds, and I tell them that my dachshund has a specific hierarchy of rewards that he is willing to work for-- and he works very well for them-- they don’t get to berate me for having a dog that “doesn’t play the game for the sake of playing the game”.
My dachshund has plenty of games (ratting, tracking, hunting, earthdog) that he is happy to play for the sake of playing the game. Nosework is not one of those games. He really enjoys nosework, but he does need to be paid for that one.
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ladyotakukiut · 29 days
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Ughhh got to deal with the worst customer ever named PG HJ SAIFUL ** bin Pehin PG HJ **
The reason? that title PG = Pengiran meaning *Prince* & Pehin meaning *Lord* Well he's not a real prince but kinda descendent of the older Sultans. Having his dad receive the lord title just makes him "high royalty"
& omg the entitlement that they thought they got even threatening me with the CEO name as in I know your ceo so don't you dare go against me! Then going to say the Sultan will not allow me to work at the company cause I refuse his DEMAND!!
Like sir if this is 100 years ago your threat might get me to prostrate in fear but even you can't go against capitalism nowadays so go complain to your CEO FRIEND!! & The fuck do you mean you know the Sultan?? This company is also under the gaddamn government which is under the gaddamn Sultan!!
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theswizzle16 · 2 months
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like not to be mean but why are so many swifties pretending to care about football girliepops I know that you don’t care who are you trying to convince 😭
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