going on strike is petulant

When I posted yesterday about being a slave to the customer, I didn't realize that workers at Walmart and Amazon and Target and FedEx (and I think another Bigboy or two) are going on strike.

As though, suddenly, at the same exact time, all these companies just start treating their workers poorly? 😆

Indeed, they could all just be doing a poor job adapting to covid. Also, a lot of people want everything for nothing and don't like to work and are always the victim. So it's hard to say.

And covid is inherently a difficult thing to work around, where it seems kind of impossible to make jobs 100% safe with 0 room for complaint.

So this seems kind of obviously just 🙄🙄🙄 standard politicking around the current situation.

Professional union lobbyists are good at what they do and wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't milk a crisis for whatever bargaining leverage they might be able to get out of it. In the amoral "game" of trying to get more money, it all makes perfect sense.

But if we take it on face value and pretend there's actually a reason to strike, I don't get what it accomplishes or why you wouldn't quit instead.

"because they need money to survive!!"

Well then not showing up when they're scheduled to show up probably isn't a good maneuver.

If I ever owned a business and somebody "went on strike" as their way of telling me they aren't happy about something, I'd basically take it as a quit.

(At least, if they didn't come to their senses and admit it was wrong or something.)

I'd be extremely curious what their complaints were and what we could do differently. I'd feel really bad that it ended up like that. But if either they didn't tell me what their issues were or we had gone over them and there was no way to change it, then "hey I'm not gonna show up!!" is just pointless and unnecessary.

If that's how you feel, you quit.

A lot of it, I guess, has to do with these companies being so large where there's really no practical way for anything to change around anyone's specific issues.

So it isn't like there's some righteous dude like me who you can actually talk to and request things from. But I feel like when you accept a job like that, you have to just accept that you're working for a program or an algorithm type of thing.

And I'm sure the algorithm would like to fire people who strike, lol. Except that there are laws in place that make it illegal for companies to fire people who go on strike, I'd imagine.

So in other words, the government uses coercion against employers so that you can be petulant without consequence.

Interesting country.

It's a very childish behavior that we take for granted because of the laws as they currently exist. But it doesn't actually make sense to negotiate via not showing up.

And if you think you care about the common man or whatever....

The more you enable workers to be chaotic without consequence, it just leads to higher prices for the consumer. And a lot of those consumers these days don't even have the luxury of having a job to complain about. They need the low prices and don't really benefit from professional union bosses being greedy.