hahaalaine:

depsidase:

This is leaving out the most crucial piece of why that was a normal reality: UNIONS.

Union participation percentage is a measly 10% across all industries for the latest statistics in 2025.

Unions are the ones who could fight against the requirement for everyone and their mother to need a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. they could fight for working hours to be properly compensated so that the work week was actually 40 hours or less and everything over was actually paid for.

The reality of the work place and why we work so much more for so much less is because we are not unionized. the reason europeans seem to have it so much better is because of their strong union culture.

there are solutions to these problems and we need to stop obscuring the why.

i wonder how this can ever actually get fixed though, since companies now have so much power against unions even when they shouldn’t be able to (see: a few years ago when Starbucks stores started unionizing and the company just shut down the stores that did that and claimed it was because they were in unsafe neighborhoods)

plus, many of the unions that exist are also… not what they need to be. (see: that one post about how lots of unions now have a scary tendency to do stuff like “eliminate the demeaning jobs by just making them non-union jobs”)

…come to think of it, I wonder if that’s why my workplace has a union for the IV pharmacy, but not for the overnight emergency room pharmacy where I work?

(and why the IV pharmacy’s union forces them to take all their breaks on time, but does nothing about the fact that taking their breaks on time would lead to a buildup of tasks that would be impossible to get through, so they have to do work while on break anyway)

…crap.

…not that I’d have enough money for union fees, or enough time to be an active participant in a union, anyway. But that’s likely because we’ve gone without good unions for so long.