Bashing people who hold opposing views to yours with harsh phrases driven by pre-existing emotion is not only not curious conversation, it poisons it. Unfortunately, quite a few of you have been doing that in this thread. That's not ok, and no, the topic does not excuse it—on the contrary: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
If you aren't feeling curious, or can't post thoughtfully and substantively, please take a break until you are and can.
I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc).
But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exist to help lazy freeloaders
Now, we need a 4 day week (1 day less work) at the same pay, just as back then they moved from 10-16 hour working days to 8, for the same pay at the end of the week.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/the-histor...
In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of the points made in Conditions of the Working Class), has also seen a recent decline in labour movements - but that's partly because working conditions have improved so massively in recent decades: employment rights, statutory holidays and minimum wage have all improved.
However, in recent years something has changed, and I think a lot of people are now looking at holidays and working conditions in other countries: France (a socialist republic), Germany and Canada all seem to have better work/life balance, strong productivity, remain in the G7 and the roof hasn't fallen in.
I do wonder whether the rise of zero-hour contracts and the gig economy, the debate in the US over tipping as a basis for not paying a higher minimum wage, the lack of holidays and so on, might lead to more interest in either new labour movements or reinvigorating the old.
What's interesting for me is the productivity data shows that many businesses that need knowledge workers to function make more money and grow faster if they allow more work/life balance, but the messaging from the leadership pushes back against it. RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks. AI should, in theory, make that even more possible, but I don't think that's how most in the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 want it to work out.
It's going to be an interesting thing to watch/be part of in years to come, but history tells us transition moments are often violent: can that violence be avoided?
> There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[18] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[19] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day#Labor_Day_versus_May...
Labo(u)r Day of US/CA/JP/AU/NZ:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observance_of_Internation...
Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another. Life is about balance.
Doesn't matter what side of a spectrum you're on. Conservatives, capitalists, evangelicals, anarchists, socialists, leftists. Each group is often dominated by a polarizing, binary force. Some fiery personality is agitating so hard for their point of view that they will only accept total capitulation and domination of their position. But that doesn't leave room for the middle way, compromise, a diversity of states of being. And so it creates conflict, even warfare.
I've worked in both systems (capitalist hierarchy, anarchist non-hierarchy). Both are useful. Both suck. The reason they both suck, is their incapacity to accept that sometimes the "other way" is better to get a specific thing done. But they can't see outside their own limited model. They're 2-dimensional, when they need to be 3-D.
They won't allow the "other way" in, because they're afraid it will taint "their way", and in some way ruin or defeat it. But if they did finally compromise and allow an alien system to co-habitate with their own, they'd see the truth. A composite of glass and plastic is better than either of them alone. Foreign organisms living in your gut make you healthier. It's the sum of the good properties, closely aligned, that contribute to a better whole.
