Campaign to unionize automakers in America picks up pace rapidly; Honda starts anti-union campaign
Just a few days ago, the UAW announced a campaign to unionize over a dozen non-union automakers in America. Now it's reporting rapid progress, citing the example of 30% of workers at Volkswagen's only U.S. plant having signed up in less than a week.
As fears spread among the companies that the effort to go union may quickly succeed, they have taken steps in response. Honda has set up its own anti-union campaign, distributing propaganda among the workers that encourages rejection of the union.
The unionization campaign was announced just a few days after the UAW's strike victory against the "Big Three" auto companies amply demonstrated the benefits of unions, with raises expected to range from +33% to over +160% (after including forecasted COLA and CWIs) among other gains.
The UAW has set up websites where employees of every targeted company can easily join the union online. If you're one, check them out below. And anyone can send them to friends, family and others.
After clicking the link, click the big "Sign your Union Card" button (scroll up if you don't see it), fill in your details and check your email.
A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
Why would you seek to end work if you're not working?
Why would you have work related struggles without a job?
How are workers irrelevant to discussions about jobs?
But you did. You said that the community's description indicates it isn't about work or work reform. I pointed out three points made in the description that are specifically about work.
Why are you so reluctant to pin your point down and discuss?
I pointed out three points made in the description that are specifically about work.
Two of the points are not about work per se but specifically about ending work. Labour organising is not ending work. In fact labour organising is specifically for the purpose of continuing to work.
The third point is about personal work-related struggles. This post is not a community member seeking personal help with work-related struggles.
It doesn't matter. What matters is what this community is about. This community is about being idle, not labour organising. Look at the community's icon. Note the presence of In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell on the community's reading list.
Because it isn't everyone stopping labouring.
You've introduced a new term here, "everyone". You're clearly thinking in terms of social movements like socialism or communism. This community isn't about a social movement.
You are extremely misinformed. Antiwork is a movement aligned with socialism. The "work" that antiwork wants to end is capitalist employment, specifically. I have always thought, even back on Reddit, that the name "antiwork" is misleading, since ending work does not mean ending labour, though to most people it is practically synonymous, leading to confusions like yours.
You’ve introduced a new term here, “everyone”.
Again, what do you think "ending work" means? A single person leaving a job and remaining unemployed?
You’re clearly thinking in terms of social movements like socialism or communism. This community isn’t about a social movement.
A community with a goal at the societal level is indeed a social movement. You can't get any clearer than that. Ever hear about "the great resignation"? Yeah, that was part of the antiwork movement.
Also, if you're gonna reference the links on the sidebar, read them. This is from In Praise of Idleness:
Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
Also, I really like this part from The Abolition of Work:
When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or “communist,” work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually—and this is even more true in “communist” than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee—work is employment, i.e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In Cuba or China or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions—Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey—temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who—by any rational-technical criteria—should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.