As part of his Labor Day message to workers in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday re-upped his call for the establishment of a 20% cut to the workweek with no loss in pay—an idea he said is “not radical” given the enormous productivity gains over recent decades that have resulted in massive profits for corporations but scraps for employees and the working class.
“It’s time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay,” Sanders wrote in a Guardian op-ed as he cited a 480% increase in worker productivity since the 40-hour workweek was first established in 1940.
“It’s time,” he continued, “that working families were able to take advantage of the increased productivity that new technologies provide so that they can enjoy more leisure time, family time, educational and cultural opportunities—and less stress.”
Working within the system will never give us what we need. The system is made for them. All we get are concessions that then get taken away when we’re no longer a threat. No company, no matter how much popular support, is ever going to allow this. You’d have far bigger chances of making far bigger changes if you joined an org. Any org.
Louis Rossman on YouTube hired a lobbying firm to help farmers to be able to repair their own tractors and won, so there’s proof right there it can be done.
If there’s grassroots lobbying of politicians by regular people, change can happen.
That’s what corpos are really afraid of, being out lobbied.
As I said, the things you don’t get by fighting are purely concessions so you shut up. When you do shut up, they get taken away. Every single fundamental working right we have was fought for with blood, not votes.
What corpos are really afraid of is us organizing. They have always been. That’s all we have to do. Advocating for people to send emails (since none of them are going to have the money to hire lobbying firms) will just feed them back into the system, the same way voting does. Makes you feel realized when it never fundamentally changes anything for good.
Why would you ‘shut up’?
That seems like a nonsensical sentence / opinion.
Passed laws just don’t evaporate into thin air after they’re done being passed, they continue to exist.
That’s not true, at all. Not everything was about slavery. I’m sure you can find some that were, and some that were not.
Our society wouldn’t exist if everything was anarchy 24/7.
Concessions are given, the radicalization stops as the standards of living improve. People are satisfied and don’t pursue the deeper systemic issues. Once the radicalism has died down, efforts are made to remove those concessions. Sometimes it does not work, a lot of the times it does. The rise of neoliberalism was one of these efforts, the most succesful so far.
They don’t evaporate, they get repealed. Tons of things do. Roe v Wade, police defunding, literal underage labour laws got repealed this year. The Paris Agreement almost worked, but thankfully protesting brought it back.
I’m not talking about slavery. Every fundamental working right we have comes from fighting. The 40-hour work week and 8-hour work day, the abolition of child labour, the minimum wage, pensions, sick leave, paid overtime, the right to strike… even weekends are thanks to fighting. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
You may notice some of these things have been dissapearing recently, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. They were concessions given to us so we stopped being a threat. They don’t perceive us as one anymore, and so they’re trying to gain more power for themselves by stripping us of the things we earned. And part of this threat reduction is precisely the insisting on working within this “democratic” system, which will never meaningfully challenge them, because it is for them, by them, and controlled by them.
Will change is a constant, and there’s always going to be some people who want to gain power for themselves for their own sakes to the detriment of others, and you have to fight back against that.
It sounds like you’re so cynical about things that you’re saying it’s not even trying, not worth fighting for. Sincerely if you’re not just someone trying to reshape the narrative away from activism, I would suggest, as the Internet likes to say, to go outside and ‘touch grass’.
For the record I’m not saying you get to utopia and then you stop, the job is done. You got to fight for what you have to keep it.
But to not fight that’s just defeatist, and not something I’ll never do, and no one else should either.
I’m not being defeatist at all. Quite on the contrary, I’m telling you to fight.
My point is that fighting within the system never works. Everything we achieve that way eventually gets taken away from us. As long as the ruling class is still in power, they simply benefit the most from granting us as little as possible, and so they will always search for ways to do just that, and to take away things they previously granted us if they think we wont be threatening enough to take them back.
That’s why I am saying, do not hire lobbyists or email politicians or something. Or if you do, make sure it’s not the only thing you do. Join an org. Join an union, a party, a syndicate, organize. That is what has brought, brings and will bring real change. Fight against the system.
You know, there is a range of options available, between doing nothing, and full out anarchy/war.
And I’ve given you a real example of when it has worked. You’ve just ignored it, twice.
Louis Rossman on YouTube, go look him up, and watch his videos about helping farmers with the right to repair by hiring a lobbyist.
I didn’t ignore it. I said what we achieve working within the system is a temporal concession and thus it’s not actually a reliable and deep change. It’s good, but it shouldn’t be the only thing we do.
But for the love of god, don’t not vote. Us not voting is a major part of that system that’s made for them.