I live in the USA, and our future seems more bleak than it ever has. Is not about politics, although politicians do have an impact on it. It’s really about our quality of life, and cost of living, which has not changed for the better, it seems, in a really long time. The cost of living keeps going up higher and higher, and much of our country still believes that even with increased cost of living, there is never any reason whatsoever to pay people more. So for instance, a job that paid 10 bucks an hour in the year 2002, that same job might still pay $10 an hour now. But I think we all know that the cost of living has dramatically gone up from 2002 to now.
Even White collar jobs though seem to be threatened to now, which is not something I’ve ever seen before. Positions like analyst, engineer, business intelligence, revenue management, whatever you want to think of. Any corporate office job, people are suffering. The cost of living is absurd, buying a house is simply out of reach unless you have dual income and it better be nearly six figure dual income…
I just don’t see how Americans at large are going to survive the next 30 years?
It is about politics. You need to organise yourselves better into unions. Then, you strike until you get what you deserve.
Why does Denmark and the rest of the Nordic countries have so high quality of living and happy people? Cause the people realized that you need to work together to get what you want. You need to have solidarity with your other workers to push for better compensation and work environments.
Do this, or you’re doomed.
Absolutely 100% this.
To be totally blunt, this doesn’t need political backing. This requires people collectively coming together, forming unions with single-focus, and pushing for an increase in pay to align with the cost of living. Hell, if anything it’s better if Trump and his lackies oppose this, because you ultimately have the power to cripple these businesses via strikes, forming your own cooperatives off the back of your soon-to-be previous employers, or simply signalling to businesses that if they cannot afford to pay people enough money they shouldn’t be in business.
Push for gradual increase year-on-year until pay is aligned. If this is missed, everyone walks. Push for the removal of limited sick pay, and for 25+ days minimum vacation time a year. Leave it at that, and you’ve got terms that 90% of workers will agree to. Can’t get a single company to agree? Create a professional body for your line of work and promote it as the place to be for those in your field. Push for accreditation for roles, and shun those that avoid it.
I’ve anecdotally heard that the reason Nordic countries rank high on happiness is because they have a relatively high level of cultural homogeneity, or similar ideals circulating around with most people. This is in contrast to a place like the US that has a relatively high variety of ideologies and cultures. In other words it’s easier to get along if we all generally agree. What are your thoughts on this?
True, but misleading.
Yes, if you got rid of all the Nazis in America, then Americans would be happier. On the other hand, if everyone in a country, say, Germany, agreed on establishing a fascist dictatorship, then Germans would be unhappy.
Norwegians aren’t just happy because they all agree. They’re happy because they agree, and they’re left wing. Agreement is important, but only if it’s agreement on people’s rights and decency.
Every other time I’ve encountered this argument, it’s been an argument in favor of racism and xenophobia, often a Nazbol argument like “socialism only works if no diversity.” It’s my instinct to refuse it.
But I couldn’t deny that, American conservatives and liberals + leftists, on the mental level, live in different realities, with not only different core values and worries, but different ideas of what is actually happening (and no, I actively believe American leftists do not live in a fundamentally different reality from American liberals the way conservatives do from liberals + leftists.)
Yea definitely don’t disagree with that. I think that is a factor too. But I think it also kind of goes hand in hand. Do you have similar ideas because you organized and kind of aligned your ideas, or did you organize because your ideas are similar and you easily agreed to organize? It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing.
I’ve also often thought that countries like the US are just too big. There’s too many people to take into consideration. A country like Denmark with ~6 million people is much easier to keep track of and the governance and politics is closer to reality.
It’s a system of bargaining. But if you have nothing that they don’t already have, you can’t bargain. How can you unionize, when they have so many applicants they can just fire you or outsource you to India and your government will never stand up for you? It’s not possible. COLLECTIVE bargaining. It doesn’t work if a few people do it, and I can’t control others.
Of course it’s collective bargaining, that’s what I mean with “organize”. I don’t mean just organize within your workplace, I mean organize within entire fields and industries.
This sounds kind of condescending and mean. In Denmark we have large unions that cover whole industries and fields and they work very well for collective bargaining and securing good levels of compensation, vacation and good work environments. I am myself a member of such a union. So please don’t assume that I don’t know how unions work.
Sorry, didn’t intend for it to sound man and realized afterwards. I edited that part out. Read my other response. I don’t believe it’s as easy to unionize here in the USA as it is in Denmark. Denmark is extremely restrictive with immigration and is such a tiny country. If they started losing workers in a large number it would be very difficult for them to replace them. In the USA, we have 50 states, and incredible amount of land mass. People move around quite a bit for jobs, and when people start unionizing, they just fire everyone or make everyone terrified to lose their job. Just look at what happened with The Home Depot, largest hardware store in the USA. Basically, Home Depot lobbies strongly against it and provides severe amounts of misinformation to mislead people into thinking that they’re going to be a lot worse off, that they’ll get rewarded for voting against unions. These people are basically fighting against themselves and trying as hard as they can to screw each other over in hopes of a reward that never comes. And it’s totally perfectly legal, companies can basically paint unions as a nightmare that you will never recover from
Yea this needs to be made illegal obviously. But that’s hard. And that’s where it becomes political. You can’t get around the fact that it is political unfortunately.
This is why it’s important to work for class consciousness and worker solidarity. Look for ways that management and capital tries to divide us and point them out to your peers!
Sure, but what’s your idea for fixing that? It works in Germany where it’s extremely difficult to gain citizenship and immigration is extremely tight but in the USA when there are countless millions of people ready to fill in your job, and constant turnover due to the amount of people that live in the USA and the expensiveness of the country, what is your solution?