Remember when the railroad threatened to strike and nacy pelosi said they would throw them in jail if they didn’t go to work…fucking unreal.
There’s a great WTYP on this, detailing how the inability/refusal to strike has resulted in an exodus/early retirement of train engineers sufficient to knee-cap the industry already. Increased incidence of train derailments, higher rates of rail jams and mechanical failures, and generally slower delivery times are all the result of the decline in experienced and knowledgeable industry workers.
None of this matters to the train management, which has reaped an enormous windfall in profits at the steady marginal decline in network efficiency. Monopoly means you either pay the cartel for degraded service or you ship using a more expensive method.
Solidarity will be hard to achieve because those threats will be too much for people on the ropes in their day to day life to endure.
Its important to recognize modern capitalist control as a form of hostage taking. “Pay us the ransom or your critical infrastructure get its”, even as we’re receiving fingers and earlobes in the mail with every passing year.
Solidarity is about liberating these critical components of infrastructure and operating them for the benefit of the public. The goal isn’t to shut down these institutions, but to run them without profiteers leeching the excess revenue. That’s why some of the most effective popular economic protests don’t involve suspending services, but operating them while refusing to collect fees for service.
Remember when the railroad threatened to strike and nacy pelosi said they would throw them in jail if they didn’t go to work…fucking unreal.
A few take aways:
They need us so fucking bad
They will do anything to maintain control
No one at that level is fighting for you
Solidarity will be hard to achieve because those threats will be too much for people on the ropes in their day to day life to endure.
There’s a great WTYP on this, detailing how the inability/refusal to strike has resulted in an exodus/early retirement of train engineers sufficient to knee-cap the industry already. Increased incidence of train derailments, higher rates of rail jams and mechanical failures, and generally slower delivery times are all the result of the decline in experienced and knowledgeable industry workers.
None of this matters to the train management, which has reaped an enormous windfall in profits at the steady marginal decline in network efficiency. Monopoly means you either pay the cartel for degraded service or you ship using a more expensive method.
Its important to recognize modern capitalist control as a form of hostage taking. “Pay us the ransom or your critical infrastructure get its”, even as we’re receiving fingers and earlobes in the mail with every passing year.
Solidarity is about liberating these critical components of infrastructure and operating them for the benefit of the public. The goal isn’t to shut down these institutions, but to run them without profiteers leeching the excess revenue. That’s why some of the most effective popular economic protests don’t involve suspending services, but operating them while refusing to collect fees for service.