I'm kinda curious what is going to happen. Nobody is paying attention to the primaries here yet. Old people also make up a huge chunk of the electorate. That 65+ demographic is disproportionately large and young people don't vote so it'll be interesting to see who wins that race.
Fortunately we've got someone running for governor who is genuinely pretty cool that is likely to get a bump from Platner so at least something good might come from his campaign.
Not to say school teachers are adequately compensated for their labor, but these two occupations operate on wildly different pay and benefit structures which makes it kind of inaccurate to only compare take home pay.
As a bartender she was probably making $15k a year (or less) in wages and $40k or more in tips. She probably wasn't paying FICA taxes on a portion of those tips which will hurt her retirement, disability, and unemployment benefits. She probably also wasn't paying income taxes on some of those tips which is illegal and carries a huge risk of the IRS fining her. She almost certainly didn't have employer paid health insurance, sick time, retirement benefits, or any other fringe benefits. Her labor hours and working conditions were entirely up to her employer. Her tips were based on customer goodwill and being scheduled to work during busy hours. The restaurant industry is notoriously unsafe, retaliatory, unstable, and offers very little wage growth, especially for women as they age.
A teacher is usually salaried and guaranteed pay. They probably have a union and a CBA with fantastic healthcare and retirement benefits, time off, guaranteed wage increases, and just cause protections. They have access to loan forgiveness. They have limited work obligations for a quarter of the year, on weekends, and public holidays. There is career mobility in education. Even just having a daytime work schedule is a huge benefit if she wants to have a family or even just an evening to herself. Of course teaching comes with its own problems but it's a much steadier career than bartending and higher take home pay is one of the tradeoffs for that security.
I don't even think any of that was intended. It was just a massive handout to Apple, Google, and other tech companies and a diversion of resources from teaching/education to hardware and apps. Coincidently it also made us all dumber which was a nice bonus for the capitalists.
American social democrats are amazing creatures. A little over a century ago the Zimmerwald left ruptured with social democracy and the social democrats proceeded with a simple message: rights for workers and nationalism-lite. This message was wildly popular with the working class throughout almost all of Europe and many of these parties remain powerful even to this day.
In America however, we had Samuel Gompers. He and his cronies decided the unions wouldn't have a political party. This meant that social democrats had basically no constituents here and they never emerged. To this day they still don't really exist in any meaningful sense. Yet some people still pretend they are social democrats for whatever reason as if that means anything in the US context. They pretend they have independent political views when in reality they just toe the Democratic party line. Nobody knows why they do this. They don't get any clout or power from it and they never seriously act in a way that would build power to implement their ideas. They get spit on by every side of the political debate and for what? To post tweets like this? Incredible.
One person under 30
I've been wanting to write something about how we live in a cannibal country that eats it's young because they can barely hide the contempt they have for the youth. This is another good example here.
Also none of these people have real jobs.
There's a lawyer who's been using an LLM to parse US labor law (which is almost exclusively case law) and make it much more accessible to regular people. It seems to be pretty good at that.
Not really more aggressive but the leash is definitely getting shorter. Labor's slashed, rules are getting enforced, problematic people are being fired. Welcome to the recession.
I mean, he has a Political Science degree
Political Science is a terrible reactionary discipline that inflicts brainworms on all of its students. Much in the same way modern academic economics comes from the reaction to Marx, so to did political science emerge. The impact Marx and Lenin left on the rest of the social sciences and philosophy left them far too radical for the academics that wanted to use Hobbes and Hamilton to give a facade of liberalism to their Nazism. The only good political scientist was Parenti and he wasn't allowed to work in the discipline for the last half-century of his life because he was immune to the fascist brainworms.
In terms of structure, that mass base cannot be held together by a thin layer of NGOs or by labor unions (representing only 10% of US workers), but must instead be united by a committed layer of organic leaders across every sector of our society.
This is how you know they're full of shit. Just spontaneously follow the leaders - because that strategy has just been killing it for the last century.
No actually to resist fascism you need durable institutions of the proletariat class, primarily a vanguard party and a strong labor movement. It's incredible that anyone thinks we can organize some sort of vague group of "organic leaders" to resist fascism but we can't organize workers into existing or new unions. This isn't to say our existing labor unions aren't dogshit but that's a separate critique. We need a vibrant worker's movement if we want anything good to happen.
It's actually something that railway workers sort of "won" way back in the 1920s almost a decade before the passage of the NLRA. Basically railway workers were so powerful that strikes and lockouts became too detrimental to commerce so Congress stepped in and decided that they would regulate labor relations in the industry. I think airlines were interpreted to fall under or encoded in the law a few decades later.
It was always unlawful for federal workers to strike. Reagan was just the first one to actually enforce the law on the matter and permanently replace striking workers, something that was uncommon in both the private and public sector at the time.
The unions totally folded after this rather than doing anything to fight back which is really why they've withered and died.
I left a few years ago. I'm considering rejoining. Not really because of anything they did but because I think it'll be useful to what I'm trying to do in labor organizing and maybe I can rejuvenate the chapter's political education program.
Red Star, a faction of the organization, has good politics if you're looking for comrades. Not sure how friendly they are but check them out.