I don’t believe in coincidence. In particular, I don’t believe it was happenstance that a growing anti- %1 movement emerged in the same year that the NFL and the NBA experienced extended lockouts and sometimes fierce negotiations between the players unions and ‘owners’. Nor do I find it coincidental that the entirely loaded term ‘owners’ is used to describe the ultra-wealthy in the NFL and NBA negotiations.
Nor do I find it merely coincidental that, in that same year, non-unionized retail workers were told to suck up a 12AM “black” Friday opening, only to be faced with pepper spray and tasers in some stores.
Nor do I think it coincidentel that the OWS movement, however diffuse it has become, seems to me to have been trailing close behind Gov Walkers’ (of Wisconsin) clear anti-union efforts. Interestingly enough, cops and firefighters were exempted from Walkers’ efforts to curb collective bargaining… Apparently, the Green Bay Packers were exempted from this also (Yes, I know, the GBPs aren’t public sector employees but I hope you get my point.)
So, is OWS, at core, just a frustrated effort at collective bargaining writ very very large? Or is it a recognition of a complete breakdown in the social contract underpinning capitalism? Is it an attempt to re-negotiate that contract? And what do we make of the fact that the first responders in the crackdown of the Occupy Movement, the police, are unionized? Is that merely irony or allied sentiments at odds, making it the fatal flaw in the movement?
Why is it that players and ‘owners’ can publicly battle, even rancorously at times, over billions in revenue, using clearly defined arbitration rules defined by law but WalMart employees cannot? Is that just another iteration of Panem et Circenses?? If so, they are sorely lacking in the ‘panem’ part. What wedges divide the unionized cops, basketball and football players from WalMart employees? David Brooks opines about morals and values and austerity with the casual cruelty only the very very comfortable can muster… why can’t he point out the dichotomy in unionized America: cops, firefighters and athletes can be unionized, but teachers shouldn’t and retail workers can’t…
What is clear… That is, if I am correct and there are no coincidences here: if the NFL, the NBA, “owners”, WalMart, “black” Friday, Scott Walker, cops and OWS are all of one piece… What is clear, therefore, is that the problem is larger and is cutting to the bone in a way that is far far deeper than we have heretofore guessed.
If the corporations were hiring kids out of college like they were before 2008, would OWS protesters accept those jobs?
Have you not been paying any attention at all? The people participating in and supporting the Occupy movement are not all recent college graduates.
Just tell me what the problem is.
It’s that I was right – you haven’t been paying attention.
Just because someone may work for a corporation, doesn’t mean they have to accept the fundamental flaws undermining this country. We are citizens first, after all, not just consumers.
OWS offers people — including those who work for corporations — an opportunity to change this country. If someone is upset with something at work and speaks out about it, chances are strong they’ll be punished for it, up to and including firing them. Wal-Mart closes entire stores rather than allowing them unionize, for heaven’s sake. When people working for these sorts of entities go out to OWS and help protest, they’re trying to improve their own lives, too, in a way in which won’t lead them to being fired and will help EVERYONE, not just themselves.
is a successful attorney whose office is just around the corner from the OWS site. The day after the eviction, she put on her pearls and joined the march to Foley Square, carrying a sign that read, “Employed professional and doing fine – I stand with the 99!”
In the context of a post about the strange, not to say fractured, state of collective bargaining in the US, your reply possesses a subtext that ignores, wholesale, terms of employment. I suppose that there are those, OWS and otherwise, who would accept a large salary without thinking twice… but that just begs the question about why, during highly profitable years for banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies, they don’t just go on a hiring binge and ‘buy off’ the OWS movement? Or, put another way, perhaps the problem isn’t merely a lack of corporate hiring… ?
If Kobe Bryant has the protection of a strong union to ensure his livelihood, why can’t the greeters at WalMart have the same protections? If Scott Walker is going after some public sector employee unions, why doesn’t he go after all of them? Why stop at the public sector? Why doesn’t Scott Walker of Wisconsin insist that the Green Bay Packers give up their collective bargaining rights?
Perhaps OWS should just incorporate themselves, solicit donations and hire people to occupy public spaces… ?
Conservatives it seems ask, “What’s in it for ME?” As such, Seascraper assumes that if each of these individuals is personally in good financial shape, then there’s nothing for them to complain about. Liberals it seems ask, “What’s in it for US?” As such, they look out at what is happening in the country and sense that something has gone horribly wrong, and that whatever their personal situation might be, there are still a lot of people being left behind.
n/t
Mitt Romney and Scott Brown and the Tea Party could just as easily claim to be satisfying those goals.
Scott and Mitt? Good joke.
Their “us” is not our “us.”