“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...
>One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale:
* Real-time location from your cell provider
* Real-time AirBnB booking
* Real-time purchases from credit card companies
* Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks
* Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy
"Pinkerton men"
-Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.
It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
By that strategy, we could have a 10-hour work week if we wanted it.
The 30 hour mandate is from the federal government as part of the Affordable Care Act. If someone was moved from 40 hours to 29 hours because of this, that's bad, but they were likely not a union member, right? Unions would have a negotiated contract for however many hours they wanted (either more or less than the norm), and would have also already negotiated benefits on the side so the incentive for the employer to cut to 30 hours would be gone.
Regarding the fewer hours points - I wasn't advocating that shorter weeks are always better, but rather that unions are responsible for, or at least contributed to, many of the gains that workers got over the last 150 years, and that IMO have been eroding.
Pretending we lived in the early 20th century, isn't the benefit of 40 hours a week in a factory over >60 hours a week in a factory clear? In terms of health and safety, unions have also made sure that e.g. you were less likely to become trapped and burn alive during the workday [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d814caae4b0ddcef50a1460
So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.
You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.
As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.
Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.
However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!
The solutions, not so much.
But they're definitely worth reading.
I haven't read through it yet, but it's relatively short, and it was recommended to me as a good starter.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wag...
It's not in the interest of virtuous people to have Marxism. It's in their interest to have freedom, which implies capitalism.
Any transfer of wealth towards weaker member of society is forbidden? Should we let babies starve, after all they don't literally pull their own weigth? What about disabled people?
Rentseekers in the literal sense (landlords) are not that big of a function of the economy. Rentseekers in the figurative sense (companies that use regulatory capture to extract wealth from others) are not a feature of capitalism, they are a feature of a mixed economy.
I.e. that Marxist scholarship / thought does not have a one to one correspondence with Marxist-inspired social or political movements, of which there are many different kinds.
But the real question is why am I wasting my time on the internet writing this when the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low?
Which isn’t so much a statement about you, dear debate-opponent, as it is about the internet itself.
Getting people to waste time online - the capitalists greatest tool in the repression of the masses! LOL ;)
Maybe we’ll get immortalized in the Internet Archive ;););)
I'm still kind of talking past the other person, and vice versa, but it's hard to have a good conversation about this, and I think it's important to say something to express my opposition to Marxism (though that's debatable---if nothing good/useful can be said, it's very debatable).
I would not have said anything on most discussion forums, but if there ever was a place where it's appropriate to speak up against Marxism when it rears its head, YC News is it. I think I can voice my pro-capitalist position politely and it's OK here, even if there is no traction in the conversation. I wouldn't do that on, say, reddit; I think it would be rude in that context, unless I can actually foster a meaningful conversation.
> the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low
Valid statement about the Internet in general, but culture can change, and we should strive to be better than that. In my own commenting history there are certainly bright and dark spots. I try to do the best I can.
I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(
Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably.
All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.
At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.)
I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.
Were subjected to police brutality while largely peacefully picketing. Meanwhile the army was called in to do their jobs...
Apparently there was evidence of "excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers."
According to the independent police complaints commission, anyway.
Note the similarities to current protests in the US and similar attempts to depict police as simply reacting to "violent blacks".
If you want to see the full gamut of vicious state inflicted violence you can either be the wrong race, or you can form a powerful enough union and go on strike.
As a taxi driver he was also not a police officer or an agent of the state. He was not armed or causing violence to anyone.
He was just driving someone who didn't agree with the union to work.
So they killed him.
Normally, a union is formed to balance the power of capitalists with the laborers they employ. In the case of law enforcement, there is no capital, nor is their labor being used to produce something of value. If anything, law enforcement defends the interests of capitalists, rather than being subject to abuse by capitalists.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/news-des...
So, yes, they killed him and were rightly imprisoned for manslaughter.
Murder does require intent, but it does not necessarily require an intent to kill that person; if you intend to "just" assault a person but they die, that's murder; if you intend to kill someone but kill someone else whom you did not intend to kill, that's murder.
"extreme indifference to human life" (again, intentional) is generally considered murder - e.g. if you'd intentionally burn down your neighbour's house without knowing or caring if anyone's inside, then if someone dies, it's considered murder. And UK, where the incident happened, has the concept of felony-murder where any death (even if accidental) that happens in the process of felony can be considered murder, because the felony that endangered people's lives was intentional.
> Subject to three exceptions (see Voluntary Manslaughter below) the crime of murder is committed, where a person:
> Of sound mind and discretion (i.e. sane);
> unlawfully kills (i.e. not self-defence or other justified killing);
> any reasonable creature (human being);
> in being (born alive and breathing through its own lungs - Rance v Mid-Downs Health Authority (1991) 1 All ER 801 and AG Ref No 3 of 1994 (1997) 3 All ER 936;
> under the Queen's Peace (not in war-time);
> with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm (GBH).
It was manslaughter though
I wouldn't have any trouble believing there were more attempted murders on the part of the anti-union side, or that this example happened differently than described, but what was described was clearly a (successful) attempt to kill someone.
Is that the same as shooting a gun? ; )
“Shooting a gun”, or “shooting guns or beanbag rounds, etc”, or whatever is specific and relevant to the topic clarifies thought and improves our thought. The opposite approach occluded and damages our thought.
And since language is how we discuss politics, we need clear language in order to truthfully and honestly discuss politics.
:-)
To quote Orwell from Politics and the English Language:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
“ Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
“ Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining).”
I'd gently suggest it was quite the opposite; used to call attention.
"Understatement often leads to ... rhetorical constructs in which understatement is used to emphasize a point. It is a staple of humour in English-speaking cultures."
What’s the “expression of lesser strength” in this case? Confused.
Also, the bit you quoted continues with this as an example of the sort of rhetorical construct used in understatement:
“ For example, in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, an Army officer has just lost his leg. When asked how he feels, he looks down at his bloody stump and responds, "Stings a bit."”
That’s a quite different style from the “discharged a kinetic energy weapon” phrase which we are analyzing.
If the Army officer in the Monty Python skit had said, “hmm, there seems to have been an incision made through my epidermis, muscle, and bone, resulting in a reduction of my ambulatory capacity”, that might have been funny in other ways but I don’t think it would have been understatement.
Similarly, while I have no idea of the intent of the author of “kinetic energy weapon” phrase, I argue the language in question is not understatement.
Well, that particular Wikipedia article is not a complete guide to the English language or the topic of understatement. Taken in isolation, it doesn't prove the existence of the sort of phrase in question.
I guess if this were in court, I'd lose my case because I didn't spend enough time researching.
And I was pointing that dropping a large rock on someone is a attempt to kill them. I don't particularly care about it happening to be politically motivated.
[EDIT: All this because I lost the thread that we were talking about when striking miners in the UK dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto David Wilkies taxi whilst he was driving a strike-breaking miner to work, killing David. Hopefully future HN readers will find some value and pleasure in this thread, however.]
Ah. I didn’t realize a naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals was involved.
:):):)
And with regards to politics, part of Orwell’s point was that our language - how we choose to express things - is political, too. Regardless of our intent.
I wasn’t saying anything about the politics of anyone throwing a rock. And I’m not saying anything about your political beliefs.
I’m saying there’s a political power in how language is used, even if the subject under discussion isn’t expressly “political”.
Finally, to be a complete pedant, although “discharge” is often used as a synonym for “shoot”, I’ve never heard it used as a synonym for “throw” before.
So the correct way to use overly complex language to say “throwing a rock” would be “launching a kinetic energy weapon”. Or “releasing”.
Because unlike a gun, or bow, or whatever, in this case the “weapons system”, if it wouldn’t be a dehumanizing offense to call it such, is a persons arm.
Not a gun or bow or phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range or whatever.
And when we throw things we don’t “discharge” them.
Which is actually a perfect example of Orwell’s point.
To try to call someone throwing something a “discharge” is to dehumanize them, because humans do not discharge things from their arms when they throw them.
We do, however, discharge snot from our noses when we sneeze ;)
We are talking about throwing a rock at a truck, right?
[EDIT EDIT: We are not. We are talking about pushing a concrete block off a bridge onto a car below. Which I suppose, pedantically, is to “discharge” since the stored potential kinetic energy of the block is what makes it a weapon, although “pushing” is still a human thing, but it doesn’t feel as dehumanizing as the “throwing” case for some reason. You were, technically, correct, which is the best kind of correct. Ah well, at least we got a lesson in the relationship between language and politics out of the whole thing.]
I didn’t just write a pedantic magnum opus on the wrong subject because I didn’t realize the other person was still discussing hypothetical asteroids being de-orbited to destroy planets, or hypothetical kinetical bombardment weapons aka “rods from god”, did I?
;)
[EDIT EDIT EDIT: You did not, but what you did is almost as embarrassing.]
Lord, I hope I’m not arguing with a 16-year old on the Internet. It’d be like arguing with my younger self :/
[EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT: If so, I think you lost.]
Yeah, no. We must be living in different countries. There are lots of large, powerful, popular British unions in a wide variety of industries.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/287232/trade-union-densi...
The Labour party have been ineffective for a decade and haven't been less popular since 1935. They're at their least popular when their leadership is more aligned to the unions. They were at the most recent popularity when they were furthest from the unions. They have just one representative now in Scotland, once a key area for unions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/election-2019-50768605
If you're a fan of unionisation in the UK then I'd say you have cause for concern.
I'm mostly centrist/moderate left. None of this rings true.
Typing on phone so excuse the brevity.
In my experience people have a fairly balanced view of unions. There's pretty broad membership. In most places I've worked people join the union if there is one. Some unions where regarded negatively at some points in time but there's also general sympathy for some industrial action. It varies - blue collar workers tend to be more positive and white collar workers (especially in non-unionized fields) tend to be less.
But this guy seems to be implying that that's wide-ranging hostility to unions in the UK - which I've never been aware of. There's a plurality of views as you would expect. I've known plenty of tory-voting union members so it's not even a strict right/left split.
In the US, for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
I mean it was actually part of a war (at least it’s called such) between companies / government and organized labor!
I think you meant to say Margaret Thatcher's war on labor? Her boyfriend in America was doing the same thing at the same time.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reagan-fires-113...
If you’re a righteous person, then by extension everything you do is by definition clothed in righteousness.
As for the union "goons" well it's safe to assume that the people doorknocking are going to be the ones who haven't been driven away by random verbal and physical attacks.
It's hard to overstate the extreme militancy of trade union leadership in the UK during the late 1970s. While Thatcher gets the blame for the disintegration of the labor movement, just as big an issue was that the union leadership no longer represented the opinions of its rank-and-file members.
The 1984 miners strike largely failed, because most of the local unions decided not to join. Scargill never put the strike to a membership wide ballot, because he knew it probably wouldn't have passed. Union leadership became more focused on pushing communist ideology than it was on representing its members.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labo...
this is part of history and one of the many reasons unions have failed in the UK. and they're still failing having lower number of members every single year.
The Pinkertons have been busting unions for over a century - they have pretty much explored the full range of options for worker suppression available to capital.
False flags can be a powerful tool (but becoming less so, as surveillance makes deniability harder).
No way a union could ever use dirty tricks too. But of course they might because they were forced to by their employers?
History is full of private interests using the full might of the state and any trick they can think of to prevent unions.
So yeah, one is more likely than the other.
> Each location should have its own union
You might as well go all the way, and condemn any union with more than one member.
The whole point of a union is to have an organization representing the workers that has enough power to negotiate with the employer as a relative equal. Your "single site" unions would be pointless in many cases. They'd have no power, because the employer's power to close and transfer work between sites would completely undermine the union with little disruption to the employer. Just look at how Walmart handled it's only successful unionization effort:
https://apnews.com/3d709955866a71cc82d641b848714fd0
> The United Food and Commercial Workers is seeking an injunction against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to prevent the giant retailer from eliminating meat cutting departments at 180 stores with prepackaged meat....
> The decision to eliminate the meat cutters came just weeks after the butchers at the Jacksonville, Texas, Wal-Mart voted 7-3 to join the UFCW, the first successful union vote in the country at a Wal-Mart, a company well known for its opposition to organized labor.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...:
> The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Walmart's (WMT) recent closing of five stores was done in retaliation for a history of labor activism at one of the locations, rather than because of the plumbing problems the retailer cited, The New York Times reports. The union is asking the government agency for an injunction that would require Walmart to rehire the 2,200 workers who were temporarily laid off or affected by the closings.
Your "single site" unions would be anything less than a sham to neuter unions was that if businesses were also forbidden from expanding beyond a single site, so each location would have to be a totally independent business. So instead of the Walmart corporation, you'd have 11,496 independent retail businesses with no common ownership or management structure.
I don't understand your point. Do you believe that this so called risk of an elected representative getting more power than the people that elected him is overall worse than the people having absolutely no power or representation?
I mean, can you explain why in your view leaving an employee SOL is more desirable than ensuring he has some say?
The primary positive effect of a union is its appeals process that keep employers from firing you on a whim.
Nothing about that positive effect requires the union be forced upon you, and if unions had to earn their dues they wouldn't act in bad faith as often.
Who said anything about forced unions? We're talking about allowing unions to exist so that workers are free to join them if that happens to be their wish.
I mean, we're having a discussion on how corporations use their coercive power and influence over workers lives to degrade their lives to serve the interests of a few, and somehow you're expecting to shift the conversation to how bad unions are if we don't get a say whether we join one or not?
Another possible part of such collective agreements is that the employer will withhold union dues and hand them to the union no matter if the employee wants to join or not; to prevent the 'free rider' effect where some employees get the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for the representation (the appropriateness of this argument can be debated, but that's at least the stated intent).
In about half of USA ("right to work" states) such agreements are illegal, and in about half of USA unions can have such practices.
The effect is every grocery chain in the area has the same price-fixed wage they offer, price-fixed benefits, and etcra.
Don't like your wage at Fred Meyers? too bad, the safeway down the road is in the same union contract and thus the same wage.
Get kicked out because an unexpected financial/medical expense killed your ability to pay dues? too bad, none of the other chains in the area can hire you until you pay off the back dues, that you can't pay because you can't get a job.
Union is holding a vote to strike and pushing out misleading information when really the only provision the employer is objecting too is a new one that requires the employer pay the union dues for any unfilled position because the union just wants to make more money so they can vote themselves into a raise? too bad, you can only communicate with people on your shift at your location in your section of the store, the union however has mandated access to break rooms, as well a mailing and email broadcasts.
What people don't seem to get, is that sometimes, the power unions get from getting so large, can be used against the employees, not just the employer.
But you can't even bring that up without getting strawmanned as a republican union hater.
I haven't even gotten into programmer unions, with high dues and 9k initiation fees that get voted for because nobody who votes it will have to pay it as they are already in.
A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
> Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.
Seriously though, that man's sense of ethics were... well, when he first found out about the GDPR, his first and only question was "how do we circumvent this?" There's a bunch of reasons why he's a FORMER boss.
Edit: Turns out it was IATSE