Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
We are all busy. Life is stressful. But we can resist in so many small ways. Don't use self checkout, you can't be in that much of a hurry. And talk to other folks in line.
Remind them that you don't work here. Remind them that the jobs here are union jobs with benefits, important in the US with no health care and poor public services. Tell them that if we all do this there will be no jobs left for our children and grandchildren.
And most of us are just working folk, we won't be pop stars, (most musicians won't be either, they'll make good music) basketball stars, or move about in the company of the Bill Gates, Onan Musk's and Mark Zuckerberg's of this world. We should carry our identity as workers proudly as society functions because of us.
Fight back against their war in the workplace and their ideological war aiming to convince us, against our best instincts, that the free market is efficient and works for all of us. Fight back any way you can.
When we take these small steps, in other words, not passively go about our daily lives as if we have no power, it changes our immediate environment. It creates discussion. Even if we accomplish very little in the short term, in the long term we make headway. We talk to one another, we question technology, the technology that in the long run makes us redundant and those that it does not make redundant it increases their pace of work and the rate of exploitation.
We inevitably think about the real problem and that it is not technology but the class that owns it.
Most of us are not happy with the way things are. But we are isolated, distracted by the mass media, the obsession with sports, sex, religion and so on. I should add, I like the first two, but obsession with anything is not healthy.
The media is owned by the same group of people that own the supermarkets and big stores, the airlines, the building of homes that, in essence is human shelter. They own the means of producing our food and they own the water needed to produce it. Yet they are not in the business of food production. Marx explained it so well:
“A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”
This class of people spends billions of dollars trying to convince us that our basic instincts about the world are wrong. It is this that makes us sick, depressed. Fighting back changes this as confronting the school bully does, even if he wins on that day he will find a different victim. Rejecting the narrative has the same effect.
I'll share these statistics below once more. They are from rom a year or two ago. We are not what the billionaire's media says we are. We know what we want but do not know how we can get it or that we can get it at all. That is a huge dam that will be breached at some point, the idea that we can't change things. We will see some huge battles ahead I am convinced of it.
Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.” Gallup
According to a Gallup survey…… 62 percent of Americans now say that the federal government should ensure that all Americans have health coverage, Dec 2024
Nearly four times as many voters
support increasing public transportation funding as support reducing it.
70 percent of respondents agree that “providing people with more transportation options is better for our health, safety, and economy than building more highways.”
We know what we need.
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