In a general sense, the difference between a regular workplace with a union and a worker co-op is that the company is, in part, managed and/or owned by the workers themselves. There’s varying degrees of this, but the best (and unfortunately least common) co-ops elect their managers. It’s my opinion that electing managers is a crucial part of a worker owned economy, but a union is still needed to represent the workers.
The hair gremlins wake us up if they try to pluck our facial hair
Damn sounds like the rebuild will be a nail biter! Hope it goes well, good luck and god speed. Toss in a couple hail Satan’s too, you’ll need all the help you can get
Hope you kept a good backup
There wasn’t enough notice for you to still figure something out, but they explained enough for why they couldn’t cover. Don’t be too mad at them, they clearly also have a need for that time off. This one is a dish best served cold. I’d respond with something like
Damn, that’s too bad. Thanks for considering it!
When they ask you to cover for their shift next, tell them you’re busy
I had a coworker randomly suggest that we needed a union one night while we were shit talking the CEO. It intrigued me, but I didn’t actually think much about it. 3 years later I helped form the largest union in our industry.
If it was less “come on dude you’ve worked here for x years this isn’t hard” and more “you’re a stupid piece of shit that frankly should quit now”, you have a lot of power. Bully managers are real, and always need to be pushed out of their position of power. It’s always hard speaking out in the moment, but you tried and that’s what you should remember. You can’t go back now to reassert yourself, but you could still take action by reporting it to the company, or asking how your coworker felt about the interaction.
My ex fiancee broke up with me and then asked if she could invite a coworker over for a date 2 weeks later. Does that count?
Aside from solar panels, as others have mentioned, I have a few other suggestions for things to get/do:
As others have said, there isn’t much that a single individual can do against climate change, but let me explain my suggestions. Some of the most carbon intensive activities include the transportation of items like food, clothes, and other goods. To reduce your impact, you need to reduce your reliance on this carbon intensive logistics network. By growing your own food, learning to repair what you own, and learning to sew, you’re making a large impact on your personal contribution to climate change. By supporting the library, you’re encouraging the use of a shared pool of communal resources, which also reduces your community’s climate impact.
The other items are what you can do to improve the efficiency of your house, if you own it. Induction stoves are incredibly safe and a highly efficient cooking surface. Heat pumps are crazy efficient at both heating and cooling, so slowly replacing old appliances with high efficiency options as they fail will maximize the use of what you own before it gets replaced. Compost bins and insulation certainly aren’t glamorous like the other tech options, but they’ll also go a long way: Landfills create an anaerobic environment, meaning food that gets thrown end up producing methane, and single family homes consume a lot of energy because heat escapes from every wall open to the air.
I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant
It makes me feel much better knowing you’re (probably) familiar with my type of questioning, it’s become too ingrained to stop.
Now that I understand how this would differentiate itself from actual orgs, I’m definitely on board. I have some good things worth sharing already for tenant organizing
What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion? To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems. One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time. Like for example I created a shortened organizing training for my campaign, we were able to turn a 4 hour, 2 class course into a single 1.5 hour session because we tailored the info specifically to the ongoing campaign. It could be useful for some very limited purposes, but by and large it’s just a relic of my campaign history.
Unions can be slow, but they also move incredibly fast. CWA still has work to be done, but members won’t allow it to be anything other than democratically controlled. The labor activist world is small and full of plagiarism, the conversation is never held to just one group with unique ideas. Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di to 1970s teachers to modern examples that were just implemented.
I love giving advice on organizing, but I tend to agree with the other person that social media is a poor format for building long term collective action. The best place to share this stuff is with a union. I learned everything I know about organizing from my union CWA, including the classes needed to learn how to organize (they’re free and offered every weekend).
I’m fighting an unjust firing, and went to my union. When we had a violation of status quo, we turned to our union. When we’re unsure how to organize, our union forms a committee to figure it out. When we need more people, we recruit among coworkers. When we have an idea for political action, we talk to our local president to get it proposed during membership meetings. When we have questions we can’t answer, we talk to our executive board.
There is space for a community like what you’re proposing and I’d participate in it, but I don’t know how much active interest there would be.
The way I look at it, things have to get better. Because if they don’t then we will destroy ourselves. Barbarism until socialism.
It would violate my NDA to say anything more than: yes, all of the software I’ve helped develop use the name of mythical creatures during development
I use the app opentask. Based on your criteria, it’s exactly what you’re looking for. It’s all stored locally on your phone, it has the ability to set recurring tasks, and you can create categories of preset and custom tasks. Deadlines can be set as far into the future as you need, down to the minute. It’s available on F-Droid.
Content moderators are superexploited. These employees primarily work from African countries like Kenya, so there’s a whole second layer of neo-imperialism that I won’t get into right now. They’re given poverty wages, sometimes as low as $1.30/hr. Because they’re content moderators, they have to look at images and read descriptions of traumatic events without respect for mental health. OpenAI, Amazon, and Facebook have engaged in aggressive union busting tactics for these workers as well, though workers were still successful in organizing one of the largest labor unions in Africa.
You’re probably out of luck trying to convince this person of your opinion. However if it comes up again and you want this person to walk away, I’d recommend mentioning the horrible working conditions that content moderators have to go through. Contrarians don’t like unassailable facts.
It’s a great balance between new and hot! You mostly see posts that picked up some interest within the first couple minutes of being posted
Kinda, it was only added a couple months ago
60 psi is definitely in the “rip your dick off” range