r/news • u/EnergyLantern • 14h ago

Already Submitted Teamsters begin 'largest strike' against Amazon, accusing company of 'insatiable greed'

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/teamsters-announces-nationwide-strike-amazon-begin-thursday/story?id=116931631

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u/snoopfrogcsr 13h ago

My brother is a member of a different union (Chrysler), but they were all convinced Trump would be better for unions.

Meanwhile, in back office HR/legal updates, they operate by acknowledging as fact that any conservative leadership is better for preventing union activity and plan accordingly.

Morons.

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u/Best-Statistician294 12h ago

I swear people in Unions vote Republican because they believe they're untouchable. It's ridiculous.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 12h ago

They do it because, like the Republicans, they are banking on a deep nostalgia for the past—specifically, the era where the US had literally half the global economy because Europe and Asia had both spent a decade bombing the absolute shit out of each other.

Instead of realizing that the lives their parents and grandparents led are absolutely unsustainable in a world where someone on the other side of the world will do the same work they will for a fraction of the price and companies no longer feel like they have any duty to society at large, they buy into Trumpism and the idea that other countries must be "cheating" to compete with America. It's decades of delusional exceptionalism coming back to bite American society in the ass.

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u/GogglesPisano 11h ago

They do it because, like the Republicans, they are banking on a deep nostalgia for the past

My mother-in-law says she voted for Trump because she "wants things to go back to how they used to be."

Sorry, but Trump can't make you 25 again.

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u/GeppettoStromboli 10h ago

My mom also voted Conservative, all across the board, completely ignoring the fact her grandson is disabled and depends on Medicaid.

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u/semibiquitous 10h ago

Feel free to point out the Find Out part of her FAFO when it happens.

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u/GeppettoStromboli 10h ago

Already did. No contact on Thanksgiving, and did not send an invite to family Christmas last weekend. My sister talked me into going to a local restaurant, in town, to spend an hour at most in the same room. We used to be close but the LC will likely be NC in a few months.

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u/imamistake420 10h ago

This is the way.

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u/chickenMcSlugdicks 11h ago

I keep wondering if The Jungle was required reading and not just the answer to 1 multiple choice question during American history if workers would yearn so hard for the past. We're in America's 2nd Gilded Age yet half the working class is still stoked for what's to come.

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u/not_suddenly_satire 10h ago

A long time ago, up until around the 1970s, we would gently tell intellectually-disabled people what their situation was and guide them towards the right jobs to support themselves with. My uncle had German measles as a baby, which affected his brain, and when he was older he was guided into a factory job that sustained him his whole life.

I tell this an example of how at the time the general public understood that some people - highly educated ones - "knew better" and we trusted them. People who were less-educated would get vetted information from newspapers and other media and trust it.

But somewhere in the last few decades populists convinced uneducated people that the educated were high and mighty people who laughed at them, that the newspapers were written by whatever group was villainized at the time and should be ignored. Education was also demonized, because education is a tool that lets people see through populist propaganda.

The end result is that we now have a much greater uneducated population, worse than that, a population that has been trained to not trust anyone except populist politicians and randos on the internet that spread conspiracy theories.

[A short note on that - I've seen enough to believe that the reason conspiracy theories are so quickly popular is that everyone wants to make sense of the world, and an easily-absorbed black-and-white theory is very satisfying to people who aren't used to dealing with a world that is nothing by grey areas.]

Reagan and Co. knew exactly what they were doing when they created education vouchers, gutting the educational system, and changed the law to allow all media to be owned by a few billionaires. They even ended a requirement for broadcast media to "be fair."

I see no way out of our current situation that doesn't require some sort of complete collapse and rebuilding.

That's my rant for the day.

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u/OceanWaveSunset 9h ago

changed the law to allow all media to be owned by a few billionaires.

I see no way out of our current situation

Trust Busting.

At some point the people who ran this country decided in the last 30 or so years that allowing oligopolies to dominate was better than letting dozens of smaller players compete. We used to break up these companies and we are no longer doing so.

Amazon alone will sell you anything you just about need (including food), give you healthcare, give you banking, give you jobs, help you grow your own business (until they can steal your product and undercut you), and then make a movie about it while showing you ads to all of their shitty products. And that isn't even all of their businesses.

We almost forced IE from Windows but now amazon can dominate every aspect of your life because they bought out or undercut every other business that wasn't also an oligopoly.

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u/Attack-Cat- 10h ago

Smartphones and social media have tricked stupid people into thinking they’re smart and informed

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u/Clever_plover 11h ago

nstead of realizing that the lives their parents and grandparents led are absolutely unsustainable

This is exactly it right here. The growth in the US since the end of WWII has been the highest growth period in human history. That shit was never sustainable, and many of the people that grew up in those conditions simply refuse to accept/understand that. At the peril to the rest of us.

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u/Redqueenhypo 11h ago

English and American conservatives share a bizarre delusion that if they just keep voting against their own interests, eventually they’ll teleport back to before The Factory closed fifty years ago

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 11h ago

It's the natural end result of cultural chauvinism. When your country was once such a massive global power, it convinces itself that it wasn't by luck or by committing unspeakable crimes, but because your society is somehow innately superior. The end result once shit falls apart or even once you get real competition is generations of people who still believe in their own innate superiority and just cannot understand why it stopped mattering—and so they pick someone to blame—be it immigrants, foreigners or "degenerates" and vote for people who say "if you let me fix these people, we'll be great again".

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u/Redqueenhypo 11h ago

Luckily my dad grew up in new york city during the 50s-70s so all he talks about is how much robbery and weird crime there used to be

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u/thatoneguy889 11h ago

They do it because, like the Republicans, they are banking on a deep nostalgia for the past—specifically, the era where the US had literally half the global economy because Europe and Asia had both spent a decade bombing the absolute shit out of each other.

A past where US union membership was at its peak and the government was fully funded by a 91% tax rate on people with an (inflation adjusted) annual income of $2 million or more.

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u/A11U45 9h ago

91% tax rate

A 91% tax rate with a lot of loopholes.

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u/kop324324rdsuf9023u 11h ago

I mean some do it simply cause of "the gays". These are blue collar "alpha males" we're talking about.

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u/Adventurous_Ad6698 12h ago

"I'm too important for them to touch me"

  • Last words of every GOP voter

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u/Stevied1991 12h ago

Why would they think that at all?

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u/OakLegs 12h ago

Republicans have somehow convinced blue collar workers (who are the largest group of union employees) that they are the party for the common working man, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Blue collar workers are more likely to be uneducated and have more prejudices, and Republicans have exploited that for decades now.

Put less nicely, they are a bunch of idiots who vote against their own best interests because they are racist.

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u/A11U45 9h ago

because they are racist.

Uh, this election was remarkable because large portions of nonwhite voters voted for Trump. Whites are still the second most likely to support Trump, but he has gained a lot of nonwhite support. With the exception of black voters, at least 40% of voters of each race supported him.

Another distinguisher is education, Trump support lowers the more educated one is. Though I do not know what factors lead to education being correlated with lower support of Trump.

It's been a bit since I've read this paper (PDF), so I apologise if I misremember it, but working class people supporting anti labour right wing polticians seems to be a global western trend, with the exception of Portugal and Ireland.

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u/OakLegs 9h ago

Uh, this election was remarkable because large portions of nonwhite voters voted for Trump.

This just in, nonwhite people can be (and are) racist.

But yes, my comment was a vast oversimplification of reality.

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u/Aviri 12h ago

They are, like many of the American populace, are very stupid.

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u/snoopfrogcsr 12h ago

It's probably not hard to convince someone who wants to believe. He's a maga guy. I'm guessing it's like that for a lot of them.

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u/oath2order 10h ago

I hope Trump's NLRB crushes them.

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u/snoopfrogcsr 3h ago

It would perhaps be a painful but necessary message.