Video game companies. I don’t feel like I need to explain this one, but some extra shittyness to digest: less than a year after forming, the Activision QA union has filed at least 1 ULP for illegal termination

Most cities are trying to improve it. My city has invested $1B into a light rail expansion, and $500M into BRT

If you don’t think about it very hard, solidarity is basically macro ionization

Intellectual property is a resource. Corporations are in the business of hoarding resources to extort ration at a price. Microsoft doesn’t care about the studios. They care about owning ip.

In a general sense, the difference between a regular workplace with a union and a worker co-op is that the company is, in part, managed and/or owned by the workers themselves. There’s varying degrees of this, but the best (and unfortunately least common) co-ops elect their managers. It’s my opinion that electing managers is a crucial part of a worker owned economy, but a union is still needed to represent the workers.

The hair gremlins wake us up if they try to pluck our facial hair

Thankfully a lot of workers have it in their union contract, so it’s not going away entirely

I prefer the sample platter and have a taste for the week

Shoddy is a hell of an understatement

Lol i didn’t notice that at first. I’m heavily involved with community/union organizing, so I find myself using it for both at the same time

Por que no los dos?

Totally fair. The trick is to meet them where they’re at, and then work from there. The folks you’re thinking about will take a lot of effort, but if union organizers can do it then so can you

I had a coworker randomly suggest that we needed a union one night while we were shit talking the CEO. It intrigued me, but I didn’t actually think much about it. 3 years later I helped form the largest union in our industry.

If it was less “come on dude you’ve worked here for x years this isn’t hard” and more “you’re a stupid piece of shit that frankly should quit now”, you have a lot of power. Bully managers are real, and always need to be pushed out of their position of power. It’s always hard speaking out in the moment, but you tried and that’s what you should remember. You can’t go back now to reassert yourself, but you could still take action by reporting it to the company, or asking how your coworker felt about the interaction.

Socialism is the people. If you are afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.

• Fred Hampton

My ex fiancee broke up with me and then asked if she could invite a coworker over for a date 2 weeks later. Does that count?

The Prime Minister is selected by the majority party within the House of Commons, kinda like an “elect the party” type deal. The election cycle is roughly every 4 years, the last election was in 2021 and next election has to occur before Oct 20th

I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant

It makes me feel much better knowing you’re (probably) familiar with my type of questioning, it’s become too ingrained to stop.

Now that I understand how this would differentiate itself from actual orgs, I’m definitely on board. I have some good things worth sharing already for tenant organizing

What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion? To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems. One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time. Like for example I created a shortened organizing training for my campaign, we were able to turn a 4 hour, 2 class course into a single 1.5 hour session because we tailored the info specifically to the ongoing campaign. It could be useful for some very limited purposes, but by and large it’s just a relic of my campaign history.

Unions can be slow, but they also move incredibly fast. CWA still has work to be done, but members won’t allow it to be anything other than democratically controlled. The labor activist world is small and full of plagiarism, the conversation is never held to just one group with unique ideas. Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di to 1970s teachers to modern examples that were just implemented.

I love giving advice on organizing, but I tend to agree with the other person that social media is a poor format for building long term collective action. The best place to share this stuff is with a union. I learned everything I know about organizing from my union CWA, including the classes needed to learn how to organize (they’re free and offered every weekend).

I’m fighting an unjust firing, and went to my union. When we had a violation of status quo, we turned to our union. When we’re unsure how to organize, our union forms a committee to figure it out. When we need more people, we recruit among coworkers. When we have an idea for political action, we talk to our local president to get it proposed during membership meetings. When we have questions we can’t answer, we talk to our executive board.

There is space for a community like what you’re proposing and I’d participate in it, but I don’t know how much active interest there would be.