Not dealing as needed with crops and livestock for ten days would cause massive problems for one hell of a lot longer than ten days.
Not to mention all the people dead or permanently damaged from lack of care.
You’d have to have a lot of exceptions.
Even aside from that issue: I don’t think you’d get ten days. Getting one day, in limited fields, would be hard enough. People are afraid of losing their jobs and winding up out on the streets. Yes, this is a symptom of the problem you’re trying to fix.
Not really. Dictatorships typically have elections, they just rig the elections. I find it very unlikely elections will be cancelled no matter how dictatorial the US becomes. So if that’s the needed trigger it won’t happen.
Also, strikes don’t work in dictatorships; they just roll out the tanks and the troops and crush the strikers. Picket lines won’t hold against people willing to just drive a tank over the protestors.
A lot of people, including me, would not join a general strike. I have been treated well, so I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me because other people in totally different jobs feel they are not being properly rewarded. As another poster pointed out, the blow back would give impetus to the AI movement.
Back when I was healthy I would have had no issue heading somewhere to be one of 100k protesters. However.
Now I ride a wheelchair, I wear an ostomy bag, I take maintenance medication to keep my lame ass alive. Cancer survivor. I am really sure their concentration camps will make sure I have the correct diet and medications to keep me alive, ostomy supplies so I am not streaming poop out my abdomen all over my clothing and the floor … and regular bloodwork and imaging to make sure that the cancer is staying away and my other issues are controlled. /s
But you can donate money to the organization that will handle the food logistics. Spending weeks or months in Washington is out of the question for me as well, but you can bet your ass I’ll be cutting a big check.
Sounds like what would happen if the SDMB were in charge of the general strike:
“We are calling for a general strike. We are going to walk off our jobs and refuse to return until wages and prices are such that normal folks can buy homes, eat, and have affordable healthcare…
…and also that only transgendered people can be elected as president, senator, or representative.”
That first set of demands sounds like something people would say. The second set is nonsense.
That said, this is one of the things that’s frustrated me about organizing. In the world of NC education, there are constant calls on Facebook for a strike. They’re almost always from anonymous posters, ostensibly brave enough to engage in a protracted illegal strike but not brave enough to sign their name. And they’re never clear on what the demands would be. It’s not “an across-the-board raise of 10%, the resumption of pay for Master’s degree, and a living wage for classified staff tied to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.” It’s always, “Then the legislature will take us seriously!”
Yes, it’s nonsense. It was a tongue-in-cheek example of the “pet issues” and “subgroups” that @Babale mentioned. All in good fun but I do believe Babale was correct in identifying that pet issues would end up squashing any attempt at a general strike.
It’s the same phenomenon that dooms the Democrats from making real progress.
Work slowdowns would be easier to do, everyone shows up at work and gets paid, but nothing gets done in a hurry… and everyone works to the rules… no hustle culture, no coming in early or staying late to make sure the deliverables are done before the meeting tomorrow. We act like the French, and take long lunch breaks and stop working on things that can wait until tomorrow around 3:30 in the afternoon, because we’re planning that evening’s apéro
The problem as I see it is that the primary weapon of a general strikes is economic pressure. And the workers are a lot more vulnerable than the billionaires. If everyone stays home from work for two weeks the workers will have children with no food and the billionaires will have to postpone buying their next yacht for a month.
The secondary purpose of a general strike is publicity. It’s showing everybody the problem in a way they can’t look away from. And showing which side has the numerical superiority. But none of that solves the problem by itself. This only works if you then channel these results into votes and winning elections.
So I guess I disagree with the quote in the OP. True power is in the voting booth.
Huh, and here I thought that conservatives were supposedly against “cancel culture” negatively impacting people’s employment situations as a consequence of their opinions on political or social issues expressed outside the workplace.
Understood, but at my workplace there are maybe two people (myself and one other guy) who are willing to stake our jobs on it. Probably a small handful of MAGAts, the rest not invested one way or the other.
And we’ve had the predicted problems with the air traffic control system since. It is only the care and professionalism of the people involved that have kept crashes rare. Failures are catastrophic. Like the one that killed two of my colleagues and 65 other people January of last year.
Since money talks, perhaps a nation-wide refusal to pay taxes would get someone’s attention? The problem would be organizing it, of course. It would have to be big enough to where the IRS would find it nearly impossible to freeze that many bank accounts or prosecute that many people. There is, of course, a big downside to that sort of action, as taxes pay for a lot of things that people need.
You might get more traction with a 10-day strike on income taxes. “Everyone send your taxes in on April-25.” Less personal risk if it doesn’t get critical mass.
Yes, we have. The people making the decision don’t care; they broke the union and punished the people who dared defy them; a lot of innocent people dying is if anything just another bonus for them.
