Fast food strikes to massively expand: “They’re thinking much bigger”

[Hekate]

34. Please read my long post above and see what you think.

All wages need to go up -- wages have not only not kept pace, they have shrunk over the past 30 + years. The more inequity has grown, the worse it has gotten for all wage-earners at all skill-levels. When the lowest wage-earners see an increase, not only will they spend more into the economy, but wages all along the ladder will be bumped up as people seek parity.

The destruction of the unions has been the destruction of the notion that anyone should demand more than they are getting. If all they are getting is crumbs -- well, then that must be what they deserve. That's a tautology, not a prescription for a functioning democracy. It's a way to keep people down by making them feel they deserve to be kept down.

The other way of keeping all people down is to make them believe that wages/ health-care/ or whatever good there is is a zero-sum game: If Jose gets more, that means Bill will get less, and we can't have that. Make people resentful of other people for getting ahead; but also make Bill and Jose believe that anyone (including themselves) can become a millionaire -- the Catch 22 being that if Bill fails to get ahead it is his fault, and if Jose gets ahead it must be because he took something away from Bill. Resentment is a great way of keeping crabs in the bucket.

Don't fall for this crap. It's only a zero-sum game if you believe it is. If you are truly a union man, it behooves you to remember who is management and who is labor. You can be proud of your skills, but if your job is outsourced and all there is for you is changing diapers in a nursing home or flipping burgers at McDonald's, you STILL deserve a wage that doesn't leave you begging for small change to get home at the end of the day. Because the nursing home is charging on average $50,000 per year per patient (more in my area) and the burger chains are not hurting either -- and the workers who make it possible deserve their fair share of the take.

I recommend "Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America". When wages drop below subsistence, there are no bootstraps left to pull yourself up by; there is just a dehumanizing scramble from day to day.