09-08-2018, 07:41 PM
(09-08-2018, 04:12 PM)TheNomad Wrote: I was working as a teen at the tail end of unions in America. At that time, I was making hourly what would take the rest of the nation until the mid 00s to catch up with in terms of MINIMUM WAGE.
So, for the older people here, what is the future of unions?
Are they going to return with a vengeance? It seems maybe. Since we know these cycles run on reaction to previous circumstances. And people now are tired of the CEO making millions while they do all the heavy lifting for corn and wheat.
If the Hard Right gets its way, the only permitted unions will be company unions -- the sorts of unions that fleece workers and urge them to work harder and make great sacrifices for ownership and management so that they can deserve more and be able to plead for charitable people by people who have no charity.
The ruling elite of the USA wants the sort of inequality associated with high productivity -- people working to exhaustion for starvation wages, just as in a fascist regime. Basically the Gilded Age plutocracy has met the heritage of the planter class and the pair movers in political lockstep now. This is a nightmare.
I wish that I could expect better, but these people will arrange an economic crash the next time that we have a liberal government so that they can come back even more firmly, kill democracy, and make America the sort of country that people want to leave.
I hope for better, but that is the sort of hope that one makes when buying a lottery ticket. Maybe I am in a blue mood, as I have lost all faith in anything ever going well for me again. I am in a community that I despise and willl probably be stuck in for the rest of my life. I have outgrown in every aspect except finances -- and money is everything and people are nothing in Trump's America.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.