#wage demands

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"12,500 STEEL WORKERS OUT AT THREE PLANTS; WAR OUTPUT SUFFERS," Toronto Star. January 14, 1943. Page 1. ---- Loss Set at 170,200 Tons Monthly, Two-Thirds of Nation's Production ---- ASK WAGE BOOST ---- Three of Canada's basic steel producing plants today are tied up by strikes. A total of 12,500 men have quit work at Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.; Sydney and Trenton, N.S., to enforce demands for wage increases.

Five thousand workers at Sydney, N.S. - on strike for the third day - were joined early today by 4,000 at Sault Ste. Marie and 3,500 at Trenton.

Strikes at Sydney and Sault Ste. Marie tied up two of the dominion's three basic steel producing plants. It was estimated by government figures the loss in production at the two plants would amount to; 170,212 tons a month, or two-thirds of the country's basic steel output.

Workers at the Steel Company of Canada at Hamilton have decided to defer strike action until the company management has been approached regarding negotiations with the United Steelworkers of America (C.I.O.).

Picket Lines Set Up The strike at the Sault began officially at 7 a.m. when members of the day shift didn't report. Picket lines were set up.

The strikers were not joined by 500 transportation department employees and machinists, members of American Federation of Labor unions. These entered the plant to work today and were not interfered with by pickets. An additional 500 men engaged on construction work were not direly affected by the strike, it was reported.

It was announced that 300 men had been left in the plant to do maintenance work. No effort was made to stop those who wished to continue their regular work in the plant, but as buses neared the picket lines, a union representative boarded each and read the following statement: "This bus after its next stop will go through a picket line - any working man going through that line to work is undermining the fight of his fellow-workers for decent living standards. Let your conscience be your guide."

#sault ste. marie #sydney nova scotia #trenton #strike #picket line #picketing #steel workers #steel plant #steel industry #algoma steel #dominion steel #united steel workers of america #central industrial organization #hamilton #wage demands #wage increase #wage freeze #price controls #canada during world war 2 #working class struggle

[blakbonnet]

he's so pretty 😌 [x]

#ofmd #our flag means death #ofmd s2 #ofmd spoilers #rhys darby #ofmd s2 spoilers #stede bonnet #breaks my heart that the studios won't pay fair wage and meet the bare minimum demands of writers and artists #cause otherwise these guys would be celebrating so big with us 😔 #they deserve to celebrate after all the hard work they've put it

[ahaura]

from @/JoshuaPHilll, via More Perfect Union

#hvaña #labor #uaw strike #wishing all striking workers across sectors a successful strike and more importantly a fair contract!!!!!! #remember to be on the lookout for anti union proaganda such as 1) unions being at fault for negotiations falling through #2) pitting one group of workers against another #3) workers being greedy and unreasonable #and many more. remember that the power to call off the strike ALWAYS lies with the company if only they meet the workers demands. #not even gross revenue but profits is 20 BILLION usd they can afford to pay their workers a fucking living wage and pension. #ANYWAYS!!!!.

[rabbiteclair]

a while back my mom discovered that the owner of the company was stealing basically all of the money that he was supposed to submit for things like 'taxes' and 'health insurance' and 'court-mandated payments' for the employees, listing them on the pay stubs but then pocketing the money to help keep the company afloat

she then made sure that everybody in the company knew, submitted her resignation effective immediately, and spent about the next week calling government offices to report every crime, regulatory violation, and breach of employment contract that she could think of. and now it looks like the series of investigations that she kicked off might be the thing that finally destroys this man's company.

sometimes I'm proud of her

#and if you want a succinct summary of the American labor situation #after she told her coworkers about all of this #including things like 'turns out we all lost our health insurance a month ago because he stopped paying for it' #nobody else quit. everybody else decided that it was worth putting up with very direct wage theft and tax fraud to avoid unemployment #even the people in very in-demand positions who could trivially find work elsewhere #also i used to work for the guy too because he owned a good chunk of the businesses around my home area when i was a teenager #i met him once and it was when he walked into the store unannounced and then grabbed some stuff and tried walking right out #and got all 'do you even KNOW who I am' pissy when I informed him that this isn't how stores work and you pay for things here #being rich rots your fucking brain i swear to god

[leolingo]

they should invent a college major that doesnt involve doing things

#my uni is supposed to go on strike soon anyway can it just happen FASTER damn get on with it i dont wanna go to class anymore #for context public universities in brazil go on strike often to demand better wages and other stuff from the government #it can take from a week up to several months so fingers crossed! #during that time we dont have classes until everything is settled #kit.p

[athetos]

I know there’s at least 2 other ppl interviewing for this position so I’m not getting my hopes up however I’m still going to give my best tomorrow 😤

#I’m just thankful I’m in a position rn where I can make demands about my pay #if you can’t match my current wage and offer me better insurance like why am I bothering

[californiasplit]

fuck me im so bored. just finished 5 hours of work. Two and a half hours left of work. and then i will go home and do more work. then i will sleep. then tomorrow I will do more work from 8 am to 8pm. potentially more work on friday evening depending on how productive i can be this evening. saturday will probably be fine ^_^ going to hang out with my friends. Sunday I will do tutoring (barely work) and then preparation for the upcoming week of classes which is definitely work. then another really fun 12 hour workday on monday and tuesday and wensday andummmmmmmmmmmmmmm what if we all stood in a circle and got willingly but non-fatally run over by a volkswagen beetle

#its not hard. i get paid essentially a solid 1.5x the minimum wage. its not physically demanding or even emotionally demanding. but can i be #honest with you guys whats killing me is that im really . really bored

[angryisokay]

maybe you're in an industry with a group of "old school" workers who love to talk shit about how they suffered without whining about it and never had anything handed to them. they're super tough guys, don't fuck with me types, i know more than you ever will and i'm going to treat you like shit then act like i'm just screwing around types. you know them, i know them, we've all encountered them.

if you're still intimidated by these types, pay a *little* more attention to them.

because odds are they are the whiniest, cry about everything, category 5 tantrum throwing motherfucker you will ever encounter. and they'll spend a week out of work after throwing their back out with a fart.

#just observing the legacy auto workers who 'never whined or demanded anything we just keep getting screwed' #and yet every contract year it's wall to wall sob fest about legacy workers getting nothing cry-wail-poor me #the truth is they're mad because math is hard and they don't understand how percentages work #why yes you're only get a 10% raise and i will get a 19.5% raise but get this: we will be making the same exact wage afterwards #if you keep insisting on having a higher wage than everyone else then lower wage workers will always get the bigger pay raise

[archaeologysucks]

New coworker told me yesterday that one of the CRM companies they are currently working for is only paying them $14/hr. This, for a job that requires a 4-year degree + field school, in an area that has a fairly high cost of living. Told them to quit that shit right away, and demand what they’re worth. Even a newbie archaeologist shouldn’t be making less than $20/hr, though $25/hr is closer to ideal. Don’t be afraid to discuss your wages with your coworkers. A low wage is an employer’s shame, not yours.

#fair wages #la vie de la archaeologist #demand your worth #archaeologists

[stellamancer]

I wouldn't call myself a workaholic because I do not like work, and yet sometimes I have to be kicked out by my coworkers in order to leave.......

#wage cage confessions #i just don't want my coworkers to suffer..... #our job is not only highly demanding it's super unpredictable..... #i don't mind staying [redacted] hours to help......

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"LINEMEN STILL OUT," Hamilton Spectator. April 23, 1913. Page 10. ---- Refused to Accept Cataract's Offer of 32 1-2 Cents ---- The linemen of the Dominion Power and Transmission company who went out on strike Monday had another meeting with Manager Coleman yesterday afternoon, when the original offer of 32 1/2 cents an hour was again presented to the men. They refused to accept it. The strikers said they would accept 34 cents, an hour, the same as is, being paid Hydro linemen, with the understanding that this be increased whenever the Hydro men were granted an increase. They were urged by Mr. Coleman to accept the offer of 32½ cents, with the verbal understanding that they would be increased to the 34 cent rate in the near future. This offer the company would not put in writing, and the men refused to return to work.

"We have nothing further to say to the company, the matter is now entirely in their hands and we will not return to work until the 34 cent schedule has been granted with an additional signed agreement that this will be increased from time to time as the Hydro advances its scale," said a member of the strikers' committee this morning.

#hamilton #linemen #strike #hydro line #dominion power and transmission company #wage demands #strike demands #working class struggle

[madtomedgar]

Another peeve of mine when reading sociological books: when it is abundantly clear that the author does not understand the particular character of working class Appalachian drug addiction

#like yes its about deapair and poverty but also #its about industries that break your body #poor medical access and an insane work ethic #and wildly low wages #so much of it starts because people are working 80 hour weeks #in physically demanding jobs #and need to stay awake and or energized and not in pain #the industries mostly encourage it

[fuck-the-conquistadores]

The expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again.

—Godspeed You! Black Emperor

On March 29, 2023, graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants with GEO3550 (AFT) at the University of Michigan began an illegal strike for a living wage, increased healthcare coverage, workplace protections from ICE, the funding of a municipal non-police, unarmed emergency response, and an end to restrictions around the childcare subsidy. After months of bargaining with HR, grad workers seemingly had enough, and walked out of their classes and departments to march through the university campus.

Since September 2022, GEO members had adopted a “bargaining narrative” that would guide the rhetoric and basic principles behind their bargaining platform, both in their presentations to academic HR and to the public. The narrative was centered on issues of affordability: grad workers can’t afford rent, the university can afford to pay them money, grad workers should be able to afford to live in the city that their institution is in, the university can’t afford to go any amount of time without grad labor. For a labor union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers with more than fifty years on the books, this narrative seems to work. It seems reasonable, approachable, important. Yet the narrative created a very narrow scope of political possibility for the union—a union that had previously adopted abolitionist, anti-policing demands, and had taken the radical leap of striking against COVID-19 policies and campus policing. The affordability narrative constrained the framing of our demands—what can we demand, and what kinds of actions and risks can we take when we are politically constrained by a single issue (the wage)?

This group of rabble-rousers celebrates the strike, not just because we want a living wage (and lord knows we’d breathe more easily every month if we did), but because we want everything. For us the strike is just the beginning of our struggle: we want a life free of exploitation and work, and we want it for everyone. We want time for our families, lovers, friends, and comrades. We want to dream, conspire together, play and party together. We want a blunt in every hand and every cop run out of town. We want the end of the university as we know it, and we want to dedicate ourselves to whatever the fuck we think would be cool (for the night, for the week, for the year, for our lifetimes). We want so much more than the union contract lets us bargain for, and we want it now, not just when this strike eventually ends and we accept a contract for the next 3 years. We want everything. Everything we want is “permissive,” and we are the only ones who can give ourselves permission to take those things.

And so we strike—striking not only for wages, but for life. The picket lines breathe life back into us, after all of the breaths we’ve expended for an institution that could never love us back (and to pretend that it will is a fool’s errand). We strike against business as usual, and we strike to take back our lives:

1) We began bargaining with the “reasonable” request that the university only be allowed to steal $170 million worth of our labor from us every year ($200 million in profits – $30 million to cover our demands). What if, instead, we had asked for everything?

2) In the MIT calculator for a living wage, we live alone (one adult, no kids) and we spend less than $11 a day on food or drink ($4,010/365 days = $10.99 per day). Is that living? (and also, what does it mean to count such a value. We are not asking for all the money they can give us—although that wouldn’t be bad, but it isn’t really like a UBI demand).

3) It seems often that people want to be told they are being reasonable. This is a fear, the fear of being unreasonable. It is an old fear, a modernist fear, a fear of being labeled one of the “crazies” like the mad, like the colonized, like women, like queer folks. Often, we feel compelled to prove that we’re “not like them,” we present elegant arguments, we read books, we’re getting our PhD—we’re reasonable. But maybe we shouldn’t be. Maybe being reasonable, having reasonable demands, only means being like the University. And the University is our enemy.

4) How did they convince us that we were supposed to suffer? Was it the promise of some pretty bourgeois future in the capital? We beg those of you who believe in that future to look at academic job reports. Maybe you believe there’s some salvation in industry. We beg those of you who believe in that future to look at climate change reports.

5) We could say that there is no future. In some sense this is true. For some people, the future is bright, it’s shiny, it has flying cars, and we’re living in some miraculous post-scarcity world. But we know that future isn’t coming. The minerals required alone would destroy half the globe, and Elon Musk would need to destroy the atmosphere, cooking us with solar radiation, in his cockamamie schemes to get off the rock. But there are other futures. There are futures together. There are futures spent growing food, cooking, and building homes with people we love, like people used to. There are futures where we wake up and work together to make clothes, sing silly songs with each other’s kids, take care of each other while we grow old. There are futures where everything we make is ours. There are futures where we demanded, and took, everything.

6) What is everything? Everything is not some abstract totality, the dream of state-makers and capital. It’s always having a cool place to sleep and hang out with your friends; it’s having fresh vegetables from the community gardens and farms, good cuts of meat from the chickens, goats, and whatever else we want, and homemade wine and beer made by and for those you love; it’s clean, fresh water; it’s never being forced to do work that doesn’t directly make your or your community’s life better; it’s communities of care where no one ever gets to tell you what sort of healthcare you need; it’s summer nights with a blunt in hand, tripping on mushrooms, and watching a meteor shower with your friends; it’s working with your friends to deck out one of those beautiful lowriders and going cruising down the open road; it’s no more cops on campus, in our cities, in the world; it’s more than you can imagine. Communism is just this: skipping class to go swimming, but for a million years.

7) Demanding everything also means the abolition of the wage. It is the ending of a way of life that decides if we live or die based on how much value we generate for someone else. It is the end of a world where bargaining over wages is not necessary for our day-to-day survival. Our dignity and our lives shouldn’t be rhetorically or politically reduced to a question of affordability, nor can it be reduced to a debate on if we are deserving of anything.

8) Neither the university, nor their lawyers, nor the labor contract process, nor the specifics between permissive and mandatory subjects of bargaining, nor the distinctions between hard and soft pickets, nor the courts and their injunctions can contain or repress this demand for everything. The demand for everything exceeds the existing processes and beckons us out of these containers of repression, respectability, and rules. We can choose to heed the siren song of a life where we have everything, or we can limit our imaginations and our actions to cut ourselves off from possibility.

9) University politics cannot be understood if the university as a site of desire for common life is ignored. Herein lies its contradictory character. Especially in the humanities, the secular collapse of the capitalist economy drives anyone who minimally hates work to the university, seeking in study a respite from the malaise that infects every other job option. At the same time, here we are more overworked than most people doing what David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs.” Yet the bullshit cannot hide that in between class, teaching and research, there is sometimes a brief moment of actual thinking. It is in the strike that we seek to expand these moments—small prologues of a life worth living. Both macho chatter about weak grad students as opposed to brutish workers outside the campus, and cosmopolitan Jacobin-esque punditry about the enlightened student organizer both ignore this crucial fact.

10) “We need your ideas, we need your insights, and most of all, we need your dreams.” This is it: in the highest stage of capitalist nihilism, the biggest lies are always shouted out as they were everybody’s aspiration. This sordid little incantation is what drives the contemporary university’s factory of unwept tears. The fact that this industry works on an image of a continually extended sameness into the linear future should foment distrust—distrust felt deep in the pits of our stomachs. The appropriation of every struggle, every radical negation, every true dream to break free from this hell-world, speaks to how pernicious liberalism’s adage can be. First, it demands that every collective aspiration be reduced to whatever makes one a “decent living”. Second, it ensconces it in the puerile and sanitized language game of ambitions, dreams, in sum, change. Everything is to be made a little bit better; nothing is to be destroyed. These cowards hate above all our hatred, our anger, our force. And the wish to dismantle this war-affect will come not only from outside, but also from within our movement.

To be clear, this critique comes from within GEO, from within the university—in but not of it, if you’ll forgive the cliché. We have no quarrel with the friends we make on the picket line, nor do we have beef with the rank-and-file folks we haven’t met yet (we don’t like the reactionaries in and around the union, but who does?). We echo the calls of the disaffected communists and disillusioned anarchists in so-called California against the UC, and we salute the brave folks who ran up on and attacked rapist frat houses in Nebraska, Kansas, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. We celebrate and honor the dropouts, the proles, the fellow travelers trapped behind bars and murdered by the state. We’re hungry for more than what union politics can give us, we’re sick of the university containing our rage. Let’s take action that pushes our demand for everything to its fullest extent: let’s feed each other, whether in expropriated dining hall food or in our strike kitchen. Let’s take campus back from administrators and security. Let’s make the football field a fuck forest. Let’s have dance parties in North Quad and print zines together in Mason. Let’s take naps in lecture halls on purpose. Let’s cut class. Let’s enjoy spring. Let’s demand everything.

#The only living wage is everything #demand everything #anarchism #communism #abolition #Marxism #unionism #GEO #University of Michigan #zine

[howlingdemon13]

How in the fffffffffuck do I not meet the minimum requirements to work in a college library when I ALREADY WORK IN A LIBRARY!?!?!?!?

#raaaahhhhhhhhh #foaming #I hate this capitalistic hellscape that can’t pay me a living wage #but then demands I somehow pull 1000 years of experience out of my ass #hate it here!!!!!!!!!

[theburialofstrawberries]

Watching jimmy mcgill find one (1) moment of peace every few episodes by doodling or painting or shooting a short film and generally using his imagination and creativity....babygirl just GO and get your M.F.A. !!!!!

#its a metaphor about the artisitic soul warped by the wage labour demands of capitalism.. #better call saul

[uzuuzuking]

love being horizontal love to be in bed 10/10 god bless

#summer.txt #my whole body hurts #my job is so physically demanding for minimum wage