cozy critter 🍂🍁🍄🌧️

cue somebody calling buying a product from a company that sucks "crossing the picket line" when there is no picket line

it's so frustrating because I love their energy, I love the hope and ambition that things could Really Change, but there's such a lack of understanding of even the day-to-day basics of how things work in grownup world

(also there is the problem of demands. I don't know which one you're looking at right now but the ones I've seen either have a big "TBD" for demands, or a massive laundry list of lefty political stances that poll at like 11% among the general public)

as a union bird myself, yeah, a lot of this stuff has the energy of people whove never talked to an organizer and seen what works, and also how to build power among a group of people with disperate interests. personal example here: im relatively covid concious compared to the average person, and as a steward at my shop i organized hard to try to continue the mask mandate when it was up for a vote whether it continues or not. i failed, because people are "done" (including young leftists). in the time since then, about four of those people have started wearing masks again, but that was due to their own judgement of the workers themselves going "hey i dont wanna get sick". covid/infectious disease organizers can do a lot but they work within the limits of the imagination of who they organize. and that, all that, is just one issue, a microcosm of a whole spate of crap thats restricted by taft hartley and other stuff too. as much as i think that reading more would absolutely help these people (and my coworkers more already tuned into leftist literature or near-leftist stuff like naomi klein were never hard to convince) the big thing to me is like...talking to people in the real world lmao. the techno-hermit's perspective is INCREDIBLY limited. "twitter isnt real life" goes way beyond twitter. you cannot do organization entirely from online, i think, without some way of making you talk to people you wouldnt ordinarily (and i dont mean debate, i mean long form narrative conversation)

This is part of why I think the call by the UAW for unions to align their contract end dates to April 30th is wonderful long-term strategy. There's clearly existing desire for large, cross-industry strikes but little actual organization as yet. However, if enough of the union contracts expire together anyway leading to a strike on the day that's explicitly for that sort of action...

Yeah, it would be a lot more worthwhile to get more people invested in long-term boycotts like BDS instead of just tweeting out impromptu general strikes that are either vague as fuck or ask way too much without any support form orgs.