(Photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
Over the past 40 years, there has been a deliberate and systematic crackdown on unions by the 1% and the establishment class to crush and disempower American workers. Profits and productivity have increased but nothing has trickled down to the rest of us. Instead, Americans work longer hours than Europeans, leave vacation days on the table, and are expected to be content with crumbs and a stagnant wage.
Income inequality has increased and a young generation of Americans have less freedom and wealth than previous generations. Meanwhile, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk hoard an obscene amount of wealth they use to build penis-shaped space rockets and influence policy, politics, and the media.
With the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House - thanks to nearly a quarter of a billion dollars spent by Elon Musk - the broligarchy is coming to take all the crumbs. They don’t even have the generosity to give us cake. The new broligarchy is going to cut regulations, slash government spending on our porous social safety net, and use the funds for their tax cuts.
It all seems bleak and hopeless. However, amidst the greed and corruption, significant victories throughout the country are being engineered and led by young people who don’t own newspapers or get government subsidies. They have paved a pathway towards worker empowerment by organizing against Amazon and Starbucks. And they’ve been winning.
Eric Blanc, editor of the Labor Politics Substack, outlines the strategies and tactics of these workers in his forthcoming book We Are The Union and assures us there is a replicable model that can be followed and multiplied which will force billionaires and politicians to bend the knee to the 99%.
In this Chai Talk, he breaks down how the rest of us can do our part to ensure that Americans without trust funds and millionaire daddies can get our fair share of the pie.
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