Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
So many people have converted the rail strike into something they think serves their cramped, socialist agenda that it's hard to say anything on this topic without be flash-mobbed but I'll try anyway.
This discussion started on Twitter ONLY because an anonymous and unaccountable agitator -- a dishonest fuckwit using terrible methods or a Kremlin troll, and you can't know the difference -- WORD-SEARCHED and found a comment about rail workers and strikes and pasted SCAB and CLOWN and every other derogatory term he could into the Twit box. It's a technique, and when you see these mobs forming you could just block them all -- or you could be like Mastodon and block the very ability to search on words at all (!) in order to prevent people from being mean using this method. I'm a grown-up, I can handle Internet fuckwits word-searching and flash-mobbing me. I either ignore and block them or I go a few rounds if the topic is worth discussing with friends and followers.
I then risk things like Vick Forcella telling me haughtily that some European countries have workers' rights and unions written into their Constitution, and then I have to laborously tell him that we have workers' rights in our New York State Constitution, etc. -- but unions have declined for all kinds of reasons (Google them) and life is different now. (A reason that DSA and other socialists don't focus so much on workers' rights any more, and have substituted them with identity politics, is because there are fewer and fewer unions, far less venues for them to agitate workers and PS they don't really care about them as you can see by this images from the comrades to the left of AOC:
Normally people like @altshlar aren't worth bothering with and often I find that if they followed me, on "Who Unfollowed Me" they are among the "deleted or banned" accounts because they are merely provocateurs. This is an anonymous provocateur who is busy harassing people he views as "scabs" or anti-union, who word-searched or saw an answer I made to his or the OP's post, and can tweet falsely about my views, claiming falsely that I "oppose the concept of unionization" which of course is sheer nonsense. I support unions, unionizing, and workers' rights. But this is Twitter; Elon's Twitter; and it's like it always was, only worse, I suppose.
Pro-Union
I'm totally fine with unions and blue-collar workers in the private sector need to join them and collectively bargain. White-collar workers in the private sector and municipal workers could arguably benefit from joining unions, too, but we do get to ask of society as a whole benefits. I do have some concerns about the amount of democracy in some unions; whether they are effective (especially teachers' unions); whether they are coercive; and whether they can solve by strikes what cannot be solved by policy or law. And I'm not alone in this. I would bet that most members of the Democratic Party today have this attitude, and even Working Families would have people with this attitude even if supportive of the unions they are in as nurses or truck drivers.
In either the NYT white-collar strike or the Amtrak blue-collar strike, I'm NOT hearing angry -- and COVID-sick -- essential workers striking because no one gives them time off when they are sick with COVID. That's because that's not what they are doing, and that is not their message. If that WERE their message, this might all be easier to understand -- and the Twitter-sized claims about workers being denied sick days -- period -- or denied the right to strike -- period -- would like you to think this is the correct understanding and frame of the facts and the news -- and it is not.
And yet, they are both striking because we've been in a pandemic for two years, and they're tired like all of us.
Still, it's not actually about COVID and they are asking about something different; they are trying to grab more; they are doing what everyone does and grab more when the time presents itself to grab most effectively. Who can blame them?
I'm with Neal Cassidy on this one -- "It's all a big grab from Moscow to Washington." Usually, we're to suppose this "grab" concerns Big Corporation or Big Government but it can also concern any organized force like a union, or Hollywood stars, or swarms on Twitter. The rail workers already have a benefits package superior to many workers so let's get a grip here.
So...I'm just not as jazzed about the particular issues these workers have chosen to strike about AND re: the NYT unions, I am lacking in enthusiasm in general about white-collar unionized workers with little interest in civil rights/human rights in general, much less any culture of tolerance, now trying to get us to support their list of demands -- which includes some typical worker demands and some demands for social change which can't be accomplished by unions, workers, or strikes. (The liberal NYT author Peter Baker has essentially said the same thing, that he thinks the union has packed too many social issues into a "rights" demand, which is why he is a scab breaking the strike.) I'm not particularly jazzed about rail workers obtaining MORE paid sick leave than THEY ALREADY HAVE by ruining everyone's Christmas and harming the economy. I don't have to be a rich bourgeois corporate exploiter for that; I'm a single mom in HUD housing.
That's why I ask, cogently, in my view, the following:
My question to those of you who might be on the picket line striking at The New York Times. Have you ever, or did you now, become involved, in the Slack channel or in any other venue, in any effort to get any of your fellow workers at any level fired over their speech or writing on the nytimes.com servers or any other venue, yes or no.
I'd like a full account of this with a spreadsheet, please.
I have no doubt that some of these people were busy getting Bari Weiss or James Bennet or others more or less important than they fired in the known controversies of the NYT and unknown, and the nature of those writers isn't the issue.
Most of the people likety-liking this nutter's rants on @altshlar -- he'll have some other alt if this one is banned -- are as bad as he is, but since others watch these things and form opinions based on ranters, I sometimes bother with explanations of my views such as in this post.
We live in a world where 151 -- and counting -- people can "like" a tweet claiming to "dox" me as a "human rights researcher" and "name and shame me" as speaking "contradictory to my public role on an alt" without checking a single fact anywhere -- and even claiming I don't link my accounts, although you have only to click on the book title to see my real name, which is not hidden. I keep separate accounts not because I'm "afraid" of something being heard in one world or another, but so that I can read discussions and topics separately, and that's my right. If I were someone who wanted to hide behind anonymous personas to comment and follow topics -- I am not -- that would be my right, too.
Alex D. Rocca and the Potted Plants
I have no idea who Alex D. Rocca is; he seems to be some kind of "talent manager" -- which are legion in the US -- online harassment reduced him into making his Insta private and his Twitter comments only for a circle and now I can't even see his account at all because he likely just blocked anyone answering his original tweet. Isn't he somebody who works at home in a living room with WFH privileges amid the potted plants, too? I have no idea but his snipe at the type of person who does -- the New York Times worker -- is one that has a lot of resonance.
This fellow who is very likely self-employed and living from gig to gig and looking at a slew of 1099s in his mailbox in January, has no use for the NYT, unions, workers' rights, train trips or anything remotely related because he lives and works on the Internet -- and BTW, so do you, so do shut up.
Whatever your beliefs or mine, I simply don't think any debate is served by using Leninist methods on Twitter of "freezing the target," "doxxing," heckling, harassing, deliberately missing the wider context, and in short behaving like the Kremlin troll you likely are, or the tankie you likely are if not a Kremlin troll -- say, you love worker's rights? I do, too. How's your position on the invasion of Ukraine?
Union Family and Union Bug
I come from a union family, with family members in unions, and was taught never to cross a picket line, and so when I see one of those big old inflated rats by a store like The Gap or whatever in NYC, I don't shop at that store, even though I think the "rat" trope isn't useful in making the case. These unions range from teacher's unions to hospital unions to even the Teamsters, imagine that. Unions are not an unalloyed good, given the methods of coercion and violence they have sometimes used, and the ineffectiveness they have for solving complex social problems.
Likely that is among the reasons that there are far, far less unions now than when I was a child or even a young adult. I'd invite you to contemplate how your Internet caused that problem.
Throughout my life, I always supported union printers and made sure the "union bug" was on every printed matter for which I was responsible in any NGO job. I think few people even know what a "union bug" is nowadays, even if they have grasped the concept of "union label" which I do, still, try to buy on those rare occasions when I buy clothing.
But yeah, now a lot of this is gone and doesn't matter because of the Internet, which was designed by people who had no interest in workers' rights or unions or anything but their own technocommunist or technolibertarian agenda.
Whenever I got to DC and see "We are the 99 percent" shouted from banners on the SEIU building, remembering the circus of Occupy, which I covered, I can only say, no, you aren't, you fraudulent hucksters.
Not a Union Member Because Too Low Paid and Unimportant
I've never been a member of a union because non-governmental organizations simply don't have unions, for the most part. They are low-paid jobs; if you don't like the conditions -- and many don't -- you don't work in those jobs -- and many don't. Even adjusting for inflation or changing cultural norms, my children and young relatives earn more than I've ever earned in my lifetime at any job because they aren't in non-profit groups but in corporations or government or self-employment. I've been involved at times by attempts by NGO workers to try to unionize; to try to get themselves accepted by sometimes seemingly exotic but technically related like the Seafarers' Union.
I have been in big non-profits where famous civil libertarians said if the workers unionized they would stand by the door and clock them in with a time stamper -- and thereby ending their enjoyment of 10:00 am arrivals and casual long lunches that sometimes were accompanied by working late hours but in general weren't always favourable to the employer. I've been in small non-profits that tried to unionize as a way to get rid of a horrible boss when hilarious methods failed, like sending his resume to other employers with fake letters about how he was "seeking other opportunities" to get him an invitation the hell out of there.
New York Times Latte Drinkers
If the people who don't care a good goddamn about life below W. 43rd Street, who are indeed among the fica ferns and posed at the aerobic and ergonomic stand-up blonde wood desks, have a union, in which they seek even more affluence than they already have, compared to most city workers or people I know among friends, families, and colleagues -- I shrug. I'm not overly sympathetic to their "union struggle" because, while I'm happy to concede they deserve rights like any workers in New York State -- and they have them! -- I find it hard to believe that the people who constantly sabotage journalists on Slack and force them into unemployment and Substack subsistence -- and that's what a lot of the millenials and Gen Xer programmers, copy-editors, photographers and other media workers really do at the Times -- have worksite issues that I really need to cry about.
That's why I say this:
Except, that's what NYT employees *are*. They're not in the same union as the *drivers and deliverers* of the papers (like my relatives & friends) who have to lift heavy bundles and move them around. This - and municipal employees - are why unions have come to be hated. Deal.
— mastodon.social/@prokofy 🌻 (@Prokofy) December 8, 2022
And I stand by it and you can convince me differently possibly, but honestly, it's never going to move me. I see it's been converted into a race issue, as most things are these days, and maybe there's something to that, but some of these people are the same people who hound others out of their jobs over speech, so I can't get overly excited about their problems now. I think likely, the ability to shed identity politics and go back to classic workers' rights struggles is now atrophied forever in America and it will have to be fought out this way, I don't know. It can be fought without me.
But I feel this is class warfare. Unions did not get rid of class warfare in our supposedly classless society. I'm happy to fight it, virtually, without Marxism, even by my caustic remarks. I have zero respect for people who report on the dithering of yuppies over which million dollar co-op to buy, and occasionally on dying Ukrainians, or put up "neediest cases" every year -- but can't report on life as a subway worker, newsstand seller, hospital worker (except as a target of clapping people on the Upper West Side), etc. most days of the week -- much less the army of part-timers and 1099ers and gig workers who make it possible for their affluent life to be viable -- until it isn't because of a pandemic.
The New York Times isn't my local newspaper; nor is the NY Post. I don't have a local newspaper. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't.
Do these people deserve one 30-minute break and two 15-minute break under New York State labour law (or whatever the standards are these days). Sure. Are they workers like most workers in NYC in unions? No. Are they workers like me? No.
But...I know who got to wear the scarce masks during the early days of the pandemic -- and who didn't. Don't talk to me about unions and workers rights when you never cared about them for years -- decades -- and substituted your Marxist categories with identity politics -- and only care about them now as a way to bully the Democrats -- who barely got a majority in the Senate -- to the left. Hey, not only Uncle Joe but AOC is a scab now! Whee! Great opportunity to flog your socialist worldview that no one subscribes to because you're an asshole.
Unions Have Changed and There's Less of Them
Why do you Bernie Bros and Gamergaters and incels and anonymous trolls willing to go vote for Trump and golf-clap school-shooters on 8chan want socialism? Let me suggest it's only because of the glee you get from culture jamming, not any actual concern for people.
White-collar or "intellectual" workers often don't have unions, except when they do, in some wealthy corporations where they are highly paid, unlike me, in the lowly jobs I've had through my entire life, whether babysitter, berry picker, casual clerk carrier (the "casual" is the workaround for hiring us outside of a union at USPS), clerk, typist, waitress, researcher, translator, news editor, etc. These are all low-paid jobs; they might pay more or less and even put me into the lower middle class at times but they can't build equity. Usually, as a 1099 employee, I get no benefits and no nothing because that's the nature of gig work. That's a separate discussion, really, so let's focus on "unions".
"Unions" and their dispute are not what they were when I was a child or even a young adult. They are no longer mainly for only people who perform manual or low-paid work for corporations, large and small, in the private sector. More and more, unions -- especially when they are in the news with disputes -- are for municipal workers of blue, pink, and white collar nature and white collar workers, as well as for well-paid manual laborers with real political and PR clout.
Is an expensive union, where you have to pay a huge price-tag for membership (like SAG); is a union like SEIU where you can't vote on every issue, and really have no democracy at all, as you might have had once in the old-time unions, a good thing? Is a union that picks its presidential candidate without your input really a viable, democratic form of protection of workers? Of course not. And that's how the right-to-work movement -- which is really a right-wing, conservative Republicab sleight-of-hand for corporativist types - could get legs. And you are responsible. Yes, you, with your sectarian socialist clap-trap.
We Take the Bus
Quite some years ago, I, like other people with low pay began taking the bus, because it's cheaper, and actually crashes less and gets you to your destinations often faster. Where once, I would routinely take the 3-hour Amtrak to Washington for my various jobs, as it was affordable for non-profit workers or the expense account of a non-profit could at least afford it; in the last decade or more -- really, since the Recession -- it got too expensive. It began to get as expensive as a shuttle flight -- until those got more expensive, too. I, like many others began taking the bus to Washington as it is 5 hours, but cheaper, and more reliable. The end, that's all she wrote. We take the bus, which hey, doesn't have striking workers, but you take the train and you are therefore pro- or con- on this issue.
Do Rail Workers Get Sick Leave?
So let's come to the rail workers. Amtrak is universally poor in its performance; it has a lot of crashes; it has added to its many discomforts over the years; paying more for "business class" is no guarantee of anything.
Should rail workers, who are unionized, and paid more than non-union and other low-paid workers, have paid sick days? Of course they should. Do they not have paid sick days now? Of course they do. That's not the issue at all. No, my understanding is that they wanted MORE KINDS of paid sick days than they had, with COVID rampant still, and didn't get them.
Should they get paid medical leave merely to go to a doctor's appointment? I've never had that in any job I've ever had, even in the wealthiest non-profit or foundation. You fit a doctor's appointment in, or you go after work or on a weekend. That's what most people do. That's why we can't really get overly irate over striking rail workers if only "appointments" is their issue because it's not realistic.
So no, guys, I don't think, that for the sake of MORE paid sick days, and the right to have paid time for medical appointments, you should get to hold up traffic on Christmas during the holidays and harm millions of workers and their families, not to mention halt the nation's industry, which might be in the hands of capitalists you hate, but which also provide enough benefits for the public at large that they don't opt for socialism in elections, as they might in the UK or Russia.
So wait, all these ranters on Twitter, could I be wrong?
Did the rail workers have no paid sick days at all?
And all employees have a long-term sickness benefit that can pay a portion of the worker's income for up to 26 weeks, the rail association said. But time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act is unpaid, according to the Department of Labor.
So they can HAVE family and medical leave -- which would cause most people -- including me in most of my jobs -- TO LOSE THEIR JOBS IF THEY TOOK THEM. It's just that they can't be PAID.
Further -- you know, read different newspapers with different perspectives and try to uncover the facts:
Why do railroad workers not get sick days?
The railroads refused to add sick time during these negotiations because they said the unions had agreed over the decades to forgo paid sick leave in favor of higher wages and strong short-term disability benefits that start to kick in after four or seven days and replace part of a worker's wages for up to a year.
So workers have paid sick leave, something that the legions of non-Americans ranting and raving about this and thinking we "don't get socialism" and we "need socialism" can't be arsed to find out. They even have 26 weeks of it. To be sure, it looks like Workmen's Compensation for disability incurred on the job (let's see the fine print). But they don't want to use up their sick leave on pregnancy or child bearing or parenting or care of ill family members.
They have higher wages, and if they are disabled on the job, they are taken care of, for up to a year. They can take sick days off without losing their job; they just aren't paid because they took a deal where they got higher wages instead of sick leave.
Is this formula, they once fought for, and got, and were happy with, no longer valid and viable in a pandemic, with Long COVID especially? Quite probably, but striking and paralyzing traffic during Christmas won't achieve the ends needed so the president intervened, because that's what you elect presidents to do and that's how our system works. Would you rather Trump intervene?
Who Are Rail Workers?
Let's review what we mean by "rail workers". There are people who drive the trains; there are people who load trains and maintain them; there are people who take tickets, work the concession stand, and clean trains. Many of these people are Black; the job of the ticket-taker or conductor on trains was one of the first job that the Black men in this country could get to better their lives as the mass crime of slavery waned. Among these workers today are whites who didn't go to college or who managed to get a high-paying union job through connections while they work and save to do something else.
Do I realize these people have a hard life? Of course I do, because of COVID and also because their customers are assholes who mistreat them often and make their lives miserable. I don't see reporting on the issue of COVID per say, and whether that is accepted as a job hazard. But hey, we're all worse off than we were, and rail workers have jobs with pay and paid leave -- they just want more to cope mainly with COVID, apparently, especially LONG COVID. They have more than most folks because they have a hard customer-facing or heavy-labour job. But they are justly compensated as far as the eye can tell.
Do they get to have unions and strike and collective bargain? Of course they do, these are basic rights that I uphold. Do they get to disrupt everyone else's right to freedom of movement (travel) and the decent standard of living that comes with freedom of commerce (and often isn't available in the countries of "real socialism."). No, I don't believe they do.
The Nature of Amtrak
Can Amtrak accommodate these demands? Aren't they a rich capitalist exploiting horror, you know, a leech on the neck of humanity like Taibbi say investment firms are?
No. They can't. Understood. It's expensive to provide even more leave with these terms; Amtrak has long lost money; Amtrak is a kind of semi-state but private organization, etc. Amtrak loses a billion a year - hey, too bad Elon didn't buy Amtrak, you know? And turn it into his profit-making fast train thing, right? Not!
Does this Guardian story featuring people demonstrating with signs saying "People Over Profits" make ANY sense? No it doesn't, because Amtrak loses a billion a year. Is your point that an Amtrak executive makes "too much" and workers make "too little"? Well, we don't have socialism and there aren't laws that can deliver that to you, so back to work making a socialist party people can believe in -- see who shows up. It's not a matter solved by a contract, collective bargaining, and a strike.
How to Debate
If you can't read basic news on this story from different perspectives and come to a reasonable conclusion, and need to rant that "rail workers don't get sick leave" -- which is fact-free, there is no point in talking to you. Bye, many Europeans I know. If you have read the papers, know the realities, and have a different opinion on this because: socialist worldview, great, you can deliver it in nuanced form or by sloganeering on Twitter and pasting linky-links or calling me names, but you aren't persuasive and I'm done with this issue now.
If you need to unfollow me, unfriend me, block me on social media or virtual worlds as a capitalist fascist warmonger because I don't share the exact same set of rigidly uninformed and cramped socialist views that you do, eh, go ahead.
Washington State Teachers
It's like those striking teachers in Washington, DC, remember them? People you saw who made $50,000 a year or more, with the entire summer off, with paid vacations and health care in addition. They wanted more than that. They were municipal workers, as I recall it. Most of us watching the antics of all this with the Republican governor Scott Walker refusing to accommodate them really couldn't take the teachers' side, even if we were Democrats.
If socialists, Sandernistas, DSA types, Working Families, or anyone on the left tried to convert this into "workers' rights" or "unions" or "basic human decency," we could only laugh, because we never had a job that paid us $50,000 a year and a lifelong pension, health care, and summers off.
The nature of the job "teacher" needs to change; the concept of school as something with summers off needs to change; the nature of teachers' unions needs to change, because all these things, in their current configuration do not help children learn or prevent them from becoming liabilities to themselves and society.
Does that mean that there isn't a union, a job with a living wage, decent conditions, and civil rights in the picture? Or course not. There has to be. But we can't get behind this system as it is, and no, most of us -- look at the elections -- do not think the path out of this is socialism and socialist parties and enabling people to take a teachers' dispute and call it "about workers' rights and unions" because they don't like the GOP's policies on their real issues, which are abortion or free health care.
And no, it's not because we have a poor grasp of socialism, don't know how it is "really" defined, or think it's some old classic definition of "ownership of the means of production."
Often it's a cultural matter, and it boils down to how the proponents of socialist views seize on issues like this and try to name and shame and harass and heckle people into silence -- of accepting their limited and infantile views by force.
Like these anonymous fucktards in this discussion on Twitter.
I'm not anonymous; my accounts are linked; nobody needs to do more than click on a link to find me. I don't get "scared" or "intimidated" or "worried" that my "views on my alt" differ from "my views on my account for Russia work" because they don't differ.
What is the answer? Well, Uncle Joe made a deal that most of the unions were happy with; I don't think nationalizing Amtrak would fix this problem, but maybe it would, let's hear the proposals for it. I don't think railroad workers should be able to strike during Christmas when many people have time off and visit families -- one set of workers should not get to harm another set of workers.
Nor do I think they should get to halt commerce over the fact that they can't get IN ADDITION to their paid sick leave, which is intended for illness, PAID leave for pregnancy/child bearing/parenting which isn't a sickness or more time to cope with COVID.
Finally, I'll ask. Who pays your bills? Mom? Dad? Drug sales? Your girlfriend, while you loaf around the house? Welfare (that's awfully hard to get on in this country, in fact, so congratulations). I've worked my whole life and paid my bills. I'm now on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid due to my illness. I only work part-time. I have no property, equity, alimony, royalties, inheritances or lottery winnings. I don't like Ayn Rand or Peter Thiel for all kinds of reasons and I was banned on Twitter like you.
One of the chief reasons I've advocated for a liberal democratic system under the rule of law with a free economy where business is regulated but not seized or suppressed by the state and not for socialism or democracy with "social" adjectives, is because I've never heard the people arguing for these systems use as terrible arguments as you do, or behave as badly as you do in real life and on social media.
Oh, you want to argue about the UK rail strike? That's about pay and not about leave. I'm not informed enough to argue about that, sorry. Let's not confuse the two, they are different, in different contexts.
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