BONUS: Will Talks To Rail Workers

Great interview.

David Andrews

Retitle the episode "Will Gets Railed"

Casey Kiesling

This speaks to your obsession with AOC more than it does anything else.

bruce moment

Thank you for this episode. My union is headed into a strike and I’m really seeing the need for internal organization. It’s great to hear from Jonah and actual current members of the rail unions. Solidarity forever

Matthew Dickinson

This wards me away from getting surgery. I think people do not realize the connection between understaffing and rampant MRSA. They just assume it is an inevitable product of our sciences.

K H

if there was any justice in the world Mick Lynch would be PM right now, absolute unit of a man

drewb

I mean, those are probably the two worst things to break but I get your point. Everything is degrading everywhere. There is increasing wealth capture at the top and no resources for even the basics of a functioning society.

John Williams

Please, please please interview some local strike captains from the UC system strikes going on right now. Exactly the same shit is happening: the bargaining team is playing politics and settling every step of the way and the rank and file are getting screwed and being cut out of negotiations. It needs more visibility! Great interview, thanks as always.

Jacob

The guy said .. fuck Joe Biden. Great

Fernando

A lot of the institutional failures and purposeful labor shortages described in this interview match the hospital systems i've worked for. We're talking surgery, not enough techs for sterile processing and abysmal pay, same for the scrub techs. We're talking about people who make sure when you get an operation the hundreds to thousands of instruments are decontaminated, sterilized and assembled correctly. We're talking about people in surgery making sure the surgeon has what he needs and assists in the operation. We're talking MRSA and nosocomial infections. To a greater degree every facet of most (if not all) hospital systems are degraded while the hospital administration is incredibly bloated and top heavy. And this is true at "nonprofit" hospitals especially. That is all to say if our supply chains and hospitals are shells of what they should be, what else is breaking?

Poppy Chulo

Can someone give me the run down on the tension between WSWS &labor notes?

LizardQueen666

Are you taking about that letter the CPC hilariously buckled on? I don't remember what was said on Chapo exactly, I don't think it spoke very much to "squad's critics are right to complain" or not so much as it was very funny how thoroughly they bitched out on that one. I'll review the point if you have a timestamp.

Christopher E Musgrave

Matt has brought up that it is pointless to view politicians(specifically referencing AOC) as good or bad, because they are tools. What matters is the capacity to which they can actually be used. Apparently that capacity for AOC is effectively 0. She should be protested and removed along with any other weakly entrenched progressives as a message and warning. They did also call out AOC for falling into the anti semitism narrative around Israel. I've honestly found that any politician that can't articulate that Israel is basically evil, can just be discounted. They are willfully blind to too much. I use to consider it a niche issue, but find it is actually a consistent and easy gut check. As soon as they run apologetics for Israel you know they've had the talk and gotten their mind right.

K H

Mick Lynch, RMT union boss in the UK perfectly explains the private lease ownership setup of all the rolling stock in the UK by a few banks/financial institutions. Extracting all profits of any operators, crushing workers and destroying quality of service for users, whilst constantly racking up higher ticket prices. Brutal.

Alex Gullen

That's literally the opposite of the stance they last took in a situation like this, re. war.

Riley Bloomer-Ludwig

I'll bite. My Dad has BMW ED

Jonathan G

Thank you!

Hector Jaime

I went into listening to this thinking last time there was a left backlash against the squad Chapo took a conspicuous indifferent stance to it, I wonder what we'll see this time. And there we go, another deflection for AOC et al. I'm not a dissatisfied hog or anything, sometimes your slop has an editorial slant. The discerning hog adjusts and moves on.

Christopher E Musgrave

That is the wrong way to view it. The rail companies would have granted sick leave if a strike was allowed to take place. Workers have direct power outside of the political system. Joe Biden signaled multiple times he wouldn't let them strike. Joe Biden and Democrats only needed to stay out of the way. Any executive order will be challenged in the Supreme Court and since Hobby Lobby and others don't have to give birth control access because of...religous reasons(?)it is safe to assume rail companies would get some kind of protection where they can't be compelled to give sick leave. Honesty, this is workers taking action outside of the completely corrupt and mutant formal political system and having it shut down. This sets a precedent that your option aside from voting for people that don't care is NOTHING. Worse it was enabled by """""progressives.""" Railway, aviation, and other workers are bound by the railway labor act and as workers "critical" to infrastructure can not strike without being released by a government mediator to do so and as you've seen now, can be blocked from striking by Congress. Exactly what they would do about it if they did it anyway, I don't know. The problem is if you take an "illegal" work action, not only can you be severely fined, you can simply lose your job and many of the specialized skills are not easily transferable to another field of work. So most will be too scared to call the bluff of an insipid government. So we fall a little further down. This could be solved by prepping a general strike ahead of time, but something like paid sick leave is too small a demand to rally around. It's give me freedom or give me death, not give me a tiny amount of dignity or give me death.

K H

These are my favorite types of episodes, but I also wish they were the ones that didn’t have to happen. Help me understand as a dumb person. Can Joe Brandon do an executive order mandating sick leave?

Hector Jaime

Listening from EU, this is just mind blowing to me...