Massive solidarity with all the strikes going on for all the workers everywhere. Unions negotiate with the power structure, but boycotts can help us dismantle it.
And while we need to support the fights for workers and worker rights, we must keep expanding that conversation. We need to keep expanding the conversation to become free or get what’s needed and matters long term.
Separate from striking, what will help going forward is massive boycotts—something like a consumer union. No matter what we vote on, we can’t vote on the prices. We can’t vote on price freezes. We can’t vote on whether people’s rents must be reduced. The things that materially affect our lives, we have no say in. And that’s just a fact.
Massive Communication
In these times, when we can communicate with each other on a more massive scale than humans have ever experienced, we need to harness the power of the consumer and the worker. These two things should be viewed as the left and the right hand of everything we need to do moving forward.
If every existing union wins the most massive gains for their industry, and I hope they do, that still isn’t going to change the baseline conditions under which we are living for the average person.
And let’s also keep in mind that inclusion in labor unions, that participation in labor unions has been dismantled because they dismantled it when they saw how much power unions can have. So in supporting unions and workers, we also have to think not about what we can watch and support but what we can do personally.
We Are The Consumer
Consumers are the other engine that makes this society run. It seems that people are afraid to or because there’s no precedent for it happening on a wide scale that people don’t want to try it or think it won’t work for some reason, even though it obviously would.
We have many smaller-scale examples of boycotts working, so why not make it huge? Make it nationwide. Make it so people are not watching from the sidelines while unions win gains. People want and need to get involved. People want and need to do what they can do.
In terms of difficulty, not buying something isn’t that hard.