Happy May Day/International Workers Day, comrades! If you have an 8 hour workday and a weekend, you can thank a union.
Why not read some of Hamilton Nolan’s essays about unions today? Why not look into forming your own union at your workplace? From Your Money Is On the Table:
If there is one single fact that I could magically make every working person in America understand, it is this: Without a union, without the ability to negotiate with your employer collectively, you are always leaving money on the table. Always. If you and your coworkers are not united into a single group you cannot negotiate as a single group and you cannot go on strike as a single group and therefore you lack the leverage to force your employer to pay you what you are worth and you enable them to instead pay you a lower amount, which you are forced to accept because you cannot impose a meaningful penalty on them for doing so.
And, from Every Pay Raise Is An Admission of Guilt:
When you read that the UAW’s recent strike will raise base wages by 25%, ask yourself: Where did that 25% come from? When the online media industry was unionizing several years back, it was common to hear about workers making rock bottom salaries who got $10,000 raises the moment that the union contract was signed. Where did that $10,000 come from? How is it that the act of collectively demanding something with the explicit threat of withholding our labor power can, with no other changes in the business, produce such huge new piles of money for workers?
The answer, of course, is that the money was already there. Your boss was just taking it instead of giving it to you. This is the simple but critical point that we all should chew on. Because when you chew on it, the flavor of revolution leaks out into your gums, real sweet.
