Trolls R Us Resurrections

[wolfpup]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

his work with the Memphis Sanitation Strike was part of his Poor People’s Campaign.

Do you feel that either the profound racial injustices or the related deep economic injustices MLK was protesting in Memphis (the example you specifically brought up) were in any way equivalent to the Toronto garbage workers’ demands related to seniority and the cross-year banking of sick days? Would you like to back up your claim that “Martin Luther King would agree with [me] about the garbageworker strikers being thugs”, or can we just conclude that you engage in dishonest hyperbole?

Also this:

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

his bizarre self-identification as a union supporter

Please tell us how to reconcile your skepticism with this, a direct response to you:

@wolfpup

I’m totally with you here, my friend. You’re trying to do a good job in a state with shitty politics and a shitty government, and all the power to you for what you do. You need unions. That doesn’t change my other arguments in other contexts, though.

Or this:

@wolfpup

@BrickBat

@Miller

What do you think is gained, on a societal level, by taking a bunch of jobs that support people in a middle-class lifestyle, and changing them so that they’re minimum wage jobs? What benefit do you think derives from making those people poorer?

Bumped for visibility, because IMO this is indeed the salient question of the thread, and I’d be very interested in hearing those questions answered as well.

Happy to give my take on the answer to that. What would happen is that the rich would get very slightly richer, in most cases negligibly so. The less privileged classes would suffer existential crises affecting their health, their families, and their entire lives. In the US plutocracy in particular, where the gap between rich and poor is one of the biggest in the civilized world and growing ever larger, the widening gap would create suffering and social instability, driving up crime of all kinds, both violent and non-violent. Racists would come out of the woodwork and blame the social unrest on immigration and brown people.

So, much as I’ve been pointing out many of the issues with unions, on balance they’re a good thing and generally essential. But like government itself, which is essential and generally beneficial, unions are problematic when they get out of control and become unchecked self-serving powers.

Gap between rich and poor, and recent trends (the higher the Gini coefficient, the greater the inequality gap):

https://geo-mexico.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/gini-coefficient-change-oecd.jpg