UAW strikes created the middle class, this one can bring it back
ALT
Big strikes like this one are about more than the striking workers. When the UAW struck GM in 1945/46, they transformed the American labor bargain. That strike gave birth to the defined-benefits pension, employer-provided healthcare, the cost-of-living allowance, and worker pay raises linked to employer profits. The UAW strike of ’45 created the American middle class.
Today, that middle class is an endangered species. American oligarchs have spent decades siphoning away the wealth of workers and gathering it into fewer and fewer hands. Today, “autocrats of trade” have replaced the aristocrats that American revolutionaries overthrew at the nation’s birth.
These new aristocrats are powerful and ruthless, but they’re also vulnerable. They lack the executive function and the solidarity to stop draining the American economy as it grows increasingly brittle. The plute’s “efficiency” comes from long, fragile supply chains, skeleton crews working punishing overtime, and regular federal bailouts for companies that are designed to be both too big to fail and too big to jail.
But the UAW doesn’t need to send all of its workers to the picket line to shut down production. Their bosses have made themselves terribly vulnerable, by eliminating backup suppliers and by relying on workers accepting “voluntary” overtime to meet production quotas. Simply by shutting down just a few facilities and refusing overtime at a few more, UAW members can immobilize US car production while barely touching the strike fund.
In the web of technology, humanity is lost, trapped between threads of code and shimmering lights. We are fascinated spectators, but prisoners of innovation without mastery. In the cybernetic labyrinth, the secret is to dance between progress and understanding, to transform digital incantations into a rebellious symphony of autonomy, hoping not to lose ourselves.
ALT
