https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/
Also on the shortlist were:
Sam Altman has also been named CEO of the Year. Meanwhile, Lionel Messi was picked for Athlete of the Year, and Alex Newell has been named Breakthrough of the Year.
WGA just secured a tentative deal, which will set the tone for the SAG-AFTRA negotiations. Meanwhile UAW has the auto industry on the ropes. It's a truism that workers make everything, and when workers exercise their collective power, whole industries grind to a halt.
These are keystone moments for the labour movement at the tail end of a hot labour summer, but they aren't revolutionary victories, they're just sectoral wins. Only 29% of Canadian workers and 10% of American workers are unionized. And these wins are a small percentage of those workers. So what about everybody else?
A general strike only happens when workers across a broad percentage of industries stop work in solidarity with each other—a substantial enough percentage that it can bring a whole country or region to a halt. And that only happens when the general populace feels things have gotten so bad that they need to renegotiate their social contract, broadly speaking.
General strikes are almost always illegal. In fact, in the US, all solidarity strikes are illegal—strike action cannot legally be conducted by workers in other organizations than the target of the strike.
So how does a general strike happen? It requires a leap of faith moment where the rank and file of unions conduct wildcat solidarity strikes, against the orders of union leadership. And it requires non-union workers to walk out en masse. It's a leap of faith because governments and corporations will leverage any amount of pressure and any tactic necessary to ensure it doesn't happen, but if workers call their bluff . . . workers dictate terms.
In the lead-up to the averted US rail strike last year, Biden signed legislation making the strike illegal, imposing stringent fines on workers that walked off, and forcing a deal on the unions. But they could have walked off. The rank and file could have gone ahead with a wildcat strike, and they would have had both the rail bosses and the federal government over a barrel in the space of 24 hours. 80% of freight rail in the US would have been shut down, with no spare workforce qualified to run it, and the economy would grind to a screeching halt. One of two things would have happened in short order—either the feds would force a deal on the rail bosses or it would spark a wave of solidarity strikes, likely culminating in a general strike. But the workers blinked.
The moment you know that strike action could escalate into general strike territory is the moment when workers launch illegal or wildcat actions.
I don't know about you, but I think things have gotten bad enough that a new contract is needed.
Quick note: I am legit looking to read people's thoughts on this, and would appreciate any time someone takes to share despite the length of post
A family member of mine is in the unenviable position of trying to break into the underpaid, oversubscribed, passion-driven world of translation and localisation in East Asian media, and has been worried about the idea that what she's trying to do might be viewed as undermining a strike that is all about writers' agency and ownership of their work.
I am extremely unqualified to help navigate this - I'm not from a union family, area, or industry, and views on such things can be hugely regional. My instinct is that's she's in the clear:
But over time she's come to some honestly very reasonable concerns that I'm just not qualified to confirm/assuage, namely;
Anyway, as I said I'm not qualified for the fine details here - it still seems fine to me, but I know the concept of scabbing can be applied very liberally in some places, so I really can't be confident.
Thoughts/advice from people in the know would be hugely appreciated! She's been struggling to get a foothold in the industry for a while and would really hate to get her start through inadvertantly scabbing (we're all very proud of her).
