prisonhannibal:
prisonhannibal:
prisonhannibal:
people are so annoying about strikes like they’ll say they support the workers and then complain about how it’s inconveniencing them. please explain to me, in your own words, what you think a strike is and how it’s effective, I’d love to know
also if it really is that inconvenient for you, that just proves that they’re important workers and that you should be supporting the strike and respecting the people whose hard work makes your life easier
Okay, so I agree with everything above, but also here’s why you should complain anyway.
In 2019 and 2020, university lecturers across the UK went on strike. (Yeah… what with that and COVID you can imagine how my first year went.)
Not all of mine did— not all of them were even in the union— but enough that I personally lost something like 75% of my contact hours per week. Obviously students were very inconvenienced… and obviously the university management weren’t inconvenienced in the slightest because we were still paying them.
Like, as students, we’re not actually involved in the fee paying process. That money goes straight from the loan company to the management, and the universities refused to refund it. By the second strike, I was openly wondering why the lecturers even expected to achieve anything, because getting to have people pay you for goods and services that you then don’t actually have to deliver sounds like every capitalist’s wet dream.
(Plus multiple lecturers were trying to encourage students who still had contact hours to go on strike with them, which is basically the equivalent of walking into a shop, handing the shop-keeper all your money and then refusing to take the goods they owe you because “fuck you mr shopkeeper, that’s why!” Like I still genuinely have no idea what the thinking behind that was.)
But anyway, I happen to know somebody with that kind of job, and I asked her about it. And she told me that the problem was… the students.
Because obviously the only way strikes can achieve anything is if they start costing management money, and the only way the university workers strikes were going to cost management money would be if students kicked up a fuss and demanded their money back.
But students had been told to support the strikers, and so for the most part we were all bending over backwards to not make a fuss or do anything like asking for our money back, and many people were skipping the lectures they did have in ‘sympathy strikes’, thus jeopardising their chances of getting their money back for the ones they were forced to miss.
In fact during the first strike (less so the second) there was a definite attitude among students that refusing to keep giving money to the university while the lecturers were on strikes would in some way be siding with the establishment.
So yeah, while it’s true that strikes are all about inconveniencing the consumer, that is precisely why you should make a fuss if it’s inconveniencing you!
If you can’t buy a certain product because the manufacturers are on strike, ring up the management and complain! Let them know they just lost a sale, and now they’re losing even more money dealing with your call! Make a fuss about service being slow because so many workers are on strike! Say you’ll never shop there again unless they improve things! (The fastest way to improve things will be to give into the workers demands.)
A strike is essentially the workers’ way of weaponising you, the consumer, against the management. Be an effective weapon.
Remember too that the wealthy will do everything in their power to keep the blame narrative focused on any demographic or group within the working class. Intra-class conflict is how they survive and thrive.
“You can’t get your goods and services because the workers are lazy, not because we understaff and underpay”
“You’re being laid off because brown people are taking your jobs, not because we employers are illegally giving your jobs to them for less than the legal wage”
Don’t fall for that propaganda, it’s been around long enough.
