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The Brief Origins of May Day

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Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#31

Badass read. Geez we are soft today…

We have been conditioned to fear the idea of demanding a more fair distribution of wealth: My great grandfather for example was shot dead by a cop during a union strike. Nothing happened after that event, just silence, fear and a deeply traumatized family.

It is very important to remember that many of the things we enjoy today as workers only exist because of the enormous courage of workers from the 19th and early 20th century who fought really hard for a better future.

Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#34

The US does have a rich history of labor movements and it's sad that they've been diminished - arguably because of perceived and actual corruption in living memory - while working conditions for many haven't really improved. In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of…

> RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks It does depend on how you measure it. Given diligent workers you could argue that working from home is better for 'on task' work, than the distractions of the office - however some of those distractions create value for companies that's hard to measure. I've lost count of the number of times I've had t…

If you look at layouts of buildings for organisations lauded for unusually high output - I'm thinking Bell Labs, Xerox, MIT Media Lab, and others - historically there has been mixed mode: the ability to do focus work, and also the ability to step away from focus and bump into people on the way to get a coffee or lunch.

Today's working environment is 40+ hours in open plan offices with too few social spaces or meeting rooms for meaningful collaboration, so both focus work and casual collaboration have to be fought for.

Regardless, what's interesting to me at least is that even while we can see productivity rose for many decades even as people moved to the 5 day, 8-hour week (which must was counter-intuitive - there was an expectation of a drop in outputs), we're seeing potentially more gains from moving to a 4 day week.

RTO - for my type of work, and most work that needs "flow" for 2-3 hours a day, minimum - doesn't work for most people in 2025. Leaders are holding onto it in an irrational way, and that is leading to growing resentment. That, coupled with trying to pay people who have to show up (service workers, gig economy workers), with ever fewer working rights and poorer conditions, means something's going to give at some point.

If all the menial work was done by robots, and we were all going to Bell Labs-style environments for 3-4 days a week, I think we'd all prefer that and actually, society might be a lot more productive as a result. But it's never going to happen. Not in our lifetimes, any way.

Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#35

Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers? I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc). But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exis…

Because tech jobs are one of the few career lines that create a realistic path to passive income => becoming an "evil of capitalism". In fact, life outcomes that fall between "failure and poverty in old age" and "generational passive income from capital", are infrequent in the tech industry, at least from the people i know.

Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#36

Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers? I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc). But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exis…

Because tech jobs are one of the few career lines that create a realistic path to passive income => becoming an "evil of capitalism". In fact, life outcomes that fall between "failure and poverty in old age" and "generational passive income from capital", are infrequent in the tech industry, at least from the people i know.

Those who fall between the two are usually those who didn’t have a family nest egg to start with (ie, their parents were factory workers rather than accountants).

Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#39

The US does have a rich history of labor movements and it's sad that they've been diminished - arguably because of perceived and actual corruption in living memory - while working conditions for many haven't really improved. In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of…

Except when a company like Best Buy can fire a bunch of workers and replace them with Accenture who are paying workers $40/hour while holding them hostage with the H1B. At least 20% of workers in US construction (and even higher for residential) are illegal aliens. Then there is the offshoring of manufacturing: your local workers get too uppity? China can supply whatever you need. Don’t like the United Auto Workers?…

While trade barriers might improve working conditions, as you hint, it's going to come at a cost of disposable income.

Those barriers work by raising the minimum price of a product, making it profitable to produce it in a more expensive labor market. When you make products more expensive though, it comes out the other side as people have to pay more to get the things they want, and you get inflation.

If that is what people want, OK, fine. I don't think it's what has been sold to most Americans though - not only is the narrative that inflation going to be avoided, but income tax is going to be scrapped too. It's hard to find credible economists from any part of the political spectrum who agree.

I hope it does work, because if it doesn't, what will follow will be horrible to watch from afar, even if as a result we end up with prices for most things coming down (if Chinese companies can't sell to the US, they'll just dump to the rest of the World).

Re: The Brief Origins of May Day

#40

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