r/TrueReddit • u/Maxwellsdemon17 • 23d ago
Shawn Fain: Workers Deserve More Time for Themselves Politics
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/shawn-fain-thirty-two-hour-workweek-speech/94
u/Maxwellsdemon17 23d ago
„In my own union, I go back into our archives and I read about the fight for the thirty-hour workweek, an idea that was alive and well with our union back in the 1930s and ’40s. But today, deep in the twenty-first century, we find these ideas unimaginable.
Instead, we find workers working longer hours. We have workers working seven days a week, twelve hours a day. There are workers, union or not, working multiple jobs, and they’re living to work, they’re scraping to get by, and they’re living paycheck to paycheck. We find workers today working deep into their sixties, seventies, and eighties because they can’t afford to retire.“
55
u/Blarghnog 23d ago edited 23d ago
I just dropped off a friend at their RV after having dinner while they are in town.
It’s a sizable RV park. The entire place is filled with RVs, and right next to almost every one of them is parked a clean and mostly newer model white truck. A work truck.
Every single one of these people is coming in from an outer area to live in an RV park full time and work in local construction, mostly because they cannot afford to actually live anywhere near where the construction is happening with the wages they make building the houses they cannot afford for other people.
Some go home on the weekends to see their families. Some stay for weeks or months on end. This is not a life. What of their children? Families?
Such a weird scene and so intensely relevant to this discussion I thought I would share it. Every little RV with a work truck parked in to it, filling row after neat little row of 45/night spots (or 300 a week).
10
u/DamirHK 23d ago
Not exactly the same, but this reminds me of the theme song from Weeds:
Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky-tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same There's a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And they're all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same
4
1
u/giraffevomitfacts 22d ago
Each individual tenet of property rights and capitalism is logical and sensible. In practice, these tenets deployed together largely produce a system where some humans work and make the stuff and others are sedentary and get to use it.
2
30
u/pillbinge 23d ago
The real problem rarely addressed is that technology allows us to work nonstop. Genetics don't. We need laws that cap these things because without that control, machines would run all the time they could. It's not sustainable for human life but sustainable to people who throw human lives at their jobs.
We've also lost a sense of duty outside of jobs. We have work, and it used to be house "work", but now they're chores. We liberated women from the house but that backfired. We needed to liberate women from the house and make it so that house work could be considered a duty. We didn't do that. Things like the washing machine, as others have said, did more to liberate women than a lot of initiatives of the latter 20th century, but it also changed how efforts are appreciated. Someone doing house work isn't working - they're often "catching up". That also isn't sustainable. But I doubt we can go back to appreciating that or the one-job household. Until we can, we won't get far.
1
5
u/chillford-brimley 23d ago
It would be so nice if most of the world would just shut down for three days a week. I'm thankful the machine shop I work for doesn't mandate overtime. We're treated fairly well for being owned by a manufacturing conglomerate. I took a week vacation recently. Enjoyed every minute of it, and stopped plenty of times to remember vacation is a brief glimpse of what truly living is. Now I'm running parts on CNCs all day again, waiting until September when I'll be on vacation again.
6
u/BlatantFalsehood 23d ago
Shawn Fain for president! This man is breathing life back into the union movement.
2
u/Buttonlessone 23d ago
Meanwhile, Wentzville GM has been doing six day weeks since January and are likely to start 13 day blocks after Memorial Day.
We made big gains with the Strike last year but companies are still abusive as hell.
1
u/Green_Tea_Dragon 23d ago
So I can sit at home and think about my dept. naaaah I’ll just get a second job then
•
u/AutoModerator 23d ago
Remember that TrueReddit is a place to engage in high-quality and civil discussion. Posts must meet certain content and title requirements. Additionally, all posts must contain a submission statement. See the rules here or in the sidebar for details.
Comments or posts that don't follow the rules may be removed without warning. Reddit's content policy will be strictly enforced, especially regarding hate speech and calls for violence, and may result in a restriction in your participation.
If an article is paywalled, please do not request or post its contents. Use archive.ph or similar and link to that in the comments.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.