I'm consistently impressed by French solidarity to just go on a strike until they get their government (or a company in this case) to start treating them fairly. I wish that could work in the UK, but alas, we don't do that here.
it could work in the UK, the union you want is this one: https://utaw.tech/about/ UTAW United Tech & Allied Workers although others are options too (UTAW is part of the CWU Communications Workers Union).
want better rights and working conditions: join a union, get everyone that you can to join the union, strikes do work.
want better salaries: decline jobs solely and purely on the basis of the salary not meeting expectations, the signal that they cannot hire because no-one accepts the salary forces an employer to pay more. leave jobs that are not paying well, and give that single reason in the exit interview.
both require the same thing... solidarity amongst the workers.
it doesn't work in the UK because of a lack of that, everyone is very much in it for themselves, and so there is no solidarity. but better salaries and conditions are achievable everywhere that there is solidarity. the starting point can be to join a union, but needs to include everyone talking about their rights and conditions and discussing unions.
Signal is a great tool btw... DO NOT discuss unions on work owned channels, take the conversation elsewhere. where I work embraces a healthy relationship between the employer and employee, but I've been at places before where merely talking about a union would get you fired some entirely unrelated thing.
oh, and be very prepared to fight for people in a weaker position than you. the basis of a union is that when you act in solidarity to protect the weakest, you protect everyone else too. the poem First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller, this works in the context of workers rights too... protect your trans, black, women, disabled colleagues, and if they have equality and fair treatment, then you almost certainly all do.
Solidarity? You must live far from actual France and have some romantic young rosy view on events far away. Almost everybody who isn't protesting is pissed off at folks protesting, since they block you from doing basic things in life like going to work, shopping groceries, driving anywhere or flying, taking train, going to gas station, going to hospital (I kid you not, you can be unlucky and literally die to negligence when health care sector goes on strike and nobody would bat an eye too much, and french public health care sector is not in good state currently). Cca half of my colleagues commute daily to work from France, so I have some group of quite opinionated citizens that express their honest opinions loudly outside of French borders.
There are often good causes behind strikes. What they actually do though every single time, is take rest of civilian population as hostages, make their life as miserable as possible for as long as possible, to create pressure on politicians.
See a little flaw in the logic above? You consistently end up in the crowd of hostages that take various pressures from side to side, often in matters unrelated to yours (say massive subsidies to diary farmers should be even more massive, nobody got time to improve efficiency or processes so market gets distorted more and more and local farmers are brutally incompetitive on their own), and you and your family suffers.
US population would not handle such massive things nicely I believe, not with so many guns and gun/freedom culture in general population.
Yeah you shouldnt strike because you could disturb those who like how the system works!! (because it works for them)
Solidarity doesnt mean being nice to others. Its awarnes of shared interests and acepting/enduring some pains for others. This includes understanding that you might not be striking today but you might in future.
No, you should be smart. Instead of taking whole country and its population (and everybody else anyhow connected to it) hostage, strike politicians you want to affect where its most inconvenient and 'hurtful' for them, strike the state that you want the change from.
Don't go through making life miserable all the time for 65 millions of folks who didn't cause your woes in any way. I understand its far easier and 'cheaper' to target literally everybody out there, but that's lazy and makes tons of enemies of causes that you should be gathering support for.
Again solidarity… If the strikers were listened to by the politicians they need to target then there wouldnt be a strike in a first place. People dont strike for fun. They try a lot of things before striking. Including communication with HR, bosses, politicians. All of it is easier than orginising a strike.
Instead you assume they didnt try other ways. They are “not smart”, they take others “as hostage” and their methods are “lazy”.
If they did strike in convinient ways nobody would care/listen. Making people upset exactly the point. You wouldnt be upset about it on US tech forum most likely you wouldnt hear about nor care about some lazy farmers.
You mean enforced solidarity without any chance to vote out of it, not very democratic if you ask me. More like gentle modern terrorism, we strike you where it annoys you the most to manipulate you to change your opinions en masse as we need.
Not actually what the word solidarity originally means.
Also, more broadly to the topic a lot of french strikes by state sector were purely money driven, asking each year for substantial raises on top of already-agreed rises even when economy wasn't performing well, asking for 12+ salaries when leaving, of course 10+ weeks of paid vacations, ridiculously high pensions at early age and similar stuff. I don't mean folks like police or firefighters but lifelong paper pushers. That wouldn't fare well in US, would it. As I said, on the ground in France most folks don't approve most of the strikes, but they don't have any choice or effective voice unlike very vocal minority who often has strikes as a (part time) job.
One example I saw unfolding closely even if not living there - during 'gillet jaune' there was a long period in neighboring region where cars would get sometimes attacked by throwing rocks on random roundabouts and places if not showing yellow vest for support behind windscreen or elsewhere visible. This included foreign cars in France. Instead of maybe half of cars driving around with it initially, eventually everybody got scared into driving/parking with it 100% of the time. This lasted few months. This was most publicly supported strike I recall from past few years. Like most of them it eventually leads to another round of bitter political arguments since these are always also political moves.
You dont have to have solidarity towards them. You obviously dont have and thats fine.
This is society everyone affects everyone. Same way you are inconvenienced by some workers striking. The workers are exploited by things that are out of there hands. So many people would like to quit capitalism but its impossible it will be enforced on everyone.
Be glad that it now works in your favor and you dont have to be one striking.
In this case that "state" seems to be Ubisoft. I don't know who's being hostage outside of assassin creed players having a delayed release. But that sounds like a trivial sacrifice compared to a political strike.
You must watch a lot of french propaganda to have some romantic young rosy view on "hostage taking". Except for those who profit from the system's abuses (such as your colleagues) most people very much support the strikes. It's only the TV stations claiming otherwise, but look at the actual polls for example against the pension reform last year...
Can you name a single person that died due to health care strikes? No, because even when on strike health care workers perform their duties. They simply wear a badge or demonstrate outside of job hours. You're just spitting outright lies. However, we can name the many people (the number keeps rising every year) dying from job "accidents", which is one of the reasons unions and strikes exist.
Solidarity is precisely supporting others in their struggles. And yes, there is a lot of that. If you actually went on a strike's picket line, you would see a lot of different people from different jobs, including unemployed or retired people. Some people bring coffee or food, others materials to build barricades or wood to burn to keep warm in winter... Not everyone is as selfish as your colleagues who only care about missing a train and not why people are actually on strike.
All power to the Ubisoft workers, and to all other workers on strike.
> Good old right-wing talking point, uh? Try being hostage of the Hamas, then consider the difference with having to ride a crowded train.
This is a very unhelpful framing because by that logic you cannot complain about anything. By that logic most of your worries are trivial. At some point if every vacation I have to live through the stress of train strikes, is it not legitimate to feel aggrieved? Especially because if it only was overcrowded trains, people would say well at least I can get to my destination. But no they can also just outright cancel the train if they do not have enough personnel. Then you have to find a last minute alternative if you can even find one with so many people doing the same thing.
> Good old right-wing talking point, uh? Try being hostage of the Hamas, then consider the difference with having to ride a crowded train.
>Frankly the kind of people spouting this stupid propaganda deserve to be enslaved by their capitalist overlords.
To complete Godwin's law you only need to add some Hitler reference and win gold medal for smart discussion. Really good effort on your side.
See folks, and this is why it doesn't work. One side literally wants to suffer horribly and ideally die to move out of their shiny true way, they are so above everybody else. Reminds me 100% of those truly-to-the-core communists from back home from behind iron curtain that my parents suffered so much from, the same material, zeal, same methods, at the end same results.
In France striking is a fundamental right just like marching (assuming you make the demand to the authorities and it gets accepted). However what I dislike about the situation is that everybody strikes and manifests for his own core interest separately. I think we should really get into a more coordinated effort. Most of those strikes have failed.
You're not asking for the authority to accept you to march, you simply announce that you'll march, which, as a fundamental right, can't be rejected by the authorities beforehand unless there are serious reasons to believe that major trouble will occur. Though in the recent years several protests were forbidden by the authorities, it still is completely exceptional, and the marches happened anyway (and of course, major fights with the police ensued).
I agree with what you and your brother comment say, however you are both missing my 2 main points :) Which are that being a fundamental right it is easier to do and also the right is misused in my opinion, we should consolidate forces instead of striking in turn each year.
This is not entirely wrong, but is misleading. Yes, striking is supposed to be a protected worker right, but there are entire regulations to follow for that ("préavis" / "droit de retrait" etc). However, it was not always the case and for most of french history striking was illegal and heavily repressed. It's important to note, because in the past decade or so there's been massive retaliation against some organized workers in certain corporations and even in public services like La Poste. Striking is only protected as long as the balance of power shifts in our direction, and it's fair to say that the bourgeoisie has been gaining momentum while we have lost significant rights since Sarkozy, and our protests have been heavily repressed including maiming and murders by cops.
As for demonstrations, what you said is incorrect. There is no obligation for the prefecture to approve your request before you go on a demo. There is indeed an obligation to declare it but unless it's explicitly forbidden you are go. It used to be, not so long ago that undeclared demos were legal and i believe it was only under nazi occupation that they weren't. Sarkozy changed that to repress young people hanging out in public spaces by making 3 people or more hanging out together illegal.
It's important to understand that outlawing demonstrations in France (along with other obvious signs of growing fascism) are a rather recent phenomenon. Except for workers/ecologist or pro-Gaza demonstrations repressed in the past decade, the last forbidden demonstrations in France date from the 60s (in support of Algerian independence).
> It WOULD work, but alas, you don't do it. This is also why the USA has all those anti-strike laws.
My mom did it reasonably often as a teacher. The state made it illegal for her to ever strike again. Maybe not being willing to go to jail for refusing to work is why she doesn't do it? It's crazy to me that the law is basically "show up to work for whatever we decide to pay you, or go to jail" (via contempt of court, usually, if they continue to strike after a judge orders teachers to go back to work and fines them for each day of missed work).
So the other option is to "strike" by quitting and starting over in a completely new career. Enough people have done that that some schools are having trouble opening[0]. Somehow even that doesn't seem to raise wages. So -- for teachers at least, striking literally doesn't work. Enough teachers quit that schools can't stay open, and yet the wages don't rise to hire enough teachers. It's insane.
I don't want to be dramatic here so don't read too deeply into the comparison: I'm sure black people weren't willing to go to jail either some 60 years ago. Or worse. Most of the biggest change was achieved with the biggest sacrifice.
If they throw teachers in jail over not doing their job, the state loses in the long term. If enough refuse to do it they have to bargain, illegal or not. And it wouldn't take long since it'd imoh be a few days (if that) before the parents join in, with kids either not learning or not going to school over the lack of supervision.
The big issue here is the collective isn't big enough in some areas. Or there's enough supply coming in when the old batch walk out (which is partially why the teachers quitting aren't getting the effect. Teaching is partially a passion job and thst keeps supply high).
> If they throw teachers in jail over not doing their job, the state loses in the long term.
British health workers (nurses, ambulance workers) went on strike during 2022 and 2023. Their union eventually accepted a 5% pay increase - down from their initial 19% demand - which doesn't even begin to cover inflation. Most demands fizzle out into nearly nothing and most unions are by now massive bureaucratic machines, staffed with people more focused on their own interests and careers than on those of their members.
The same pattern can be seen with nurses in Sweden. Salaries aren't high enough, funds aren't allocated, nurses quit their jobs. To find new hires, standards must be lowered.
"The state" no longer cares. That's what decline looks like.
Yeah, not all unions are created equal. We saw some of thst with the Hollywood strikes last year. That's sadly a part of why some anti-union sentiment spreads organically; if the people who are supposed to be looking out for your interest end up being another corporation to fight, what's the point?
That doesn't mean collective bargaining can't work. Especially for critical jobs like medicine and teaching. But it falls back to the issues of sole people not being at wits end and needing to be at wits end before going nuclear, instead of seeing the long term and being able to withstand short term sacrifice.
"vote", sure. Many countries vote for their leaders too. I think small groups like a single company have it worse because at least in some ways a nation wide election will somewhat represent the state of the country. The turnout for a union rep must be awful
Sometimes intentionally. I remember the SAG talks last year "voting" on a compromise and so many people not even realizing there was a meeting.
Indeed. The house holds most of the cards. But it's not risk-free per se. It's just a prisoners dilemma that hasn't had a chance to shift to the worst case scenario of "literally everyone leaves". Probably still a safe bet, but it's only as safe as the people they are gambling with.
Sad part is that it's bad but not necessarily "life or death" for many teachers as of now. But it may be that way if we keep going.
Jail is always an option when someone is subject to contempt of court. In other states it's the individual teachers who get automatically fined, not the union. Contempt of court could also apply to the individuals if the judge wanted to make it so.
To many Danes (everyone I’ve ever discussed it with) Americans are simply “ridiculous” in the way you keep electing people who hurt you. It’s like you’re in a continuous abusive relationship with your own democracy.
My wife and I just had twins, and while it went fine they needed CPAP to help their lungs develop fully because they were born with a c-section. Which put them in the children’s intensive care unit for around 12 hours and afterward we lived for 7 days in the specialised ward for children with troubled births. And it cost us around $100 because the lodging for spouses isn’t free for the first 3 days(3 meals a day + fruits and cake and all sorts of drinkable stuff that I don’t know the English names for… mostly concentrated fruit you mix with water).
Now, I do pay around 57% in taxes on everything I earn above $90k and 39% before that (my wife pays 37% since she doesn’t earn above $90k). But I do sort of “cheat” the system by investing 14% of my pay before taxes into methods that will let me pay 25% in taxes on another $10k a year, and some that goes directly into my children’s investments. Anyway, that is what we pay for everyone to have this opportunity in our country.
I’m not going to pretend our system is perfect. Like, I have a private health insurance through my job which led me skip a two year wait time when I was diagnosed with bipolar type2 after having some issues with stress. And that’s obviously not available to everyone, and a two year wait period is obviously terrible for people who can’t turn to the private sector. So everything isn’t perfect.
But when you then read about how US citizens pay ridiculous amount of money to have children… when they live in a nation which is significantly richer than ours… it just baffles the mind.
Similarly we have about 9 months of maternity leave. 2 months of which are with full pay for my wife, and 14 weeks are with full pay for me (I have really terms through my work often it’s only 2-4 weeks for spouses). But even when you aren’t on full pay, you’re still getting around $5k a month from the government. You’re also paid around $1k per child every 3 months for the first couple of years of their lives (something which should probably be limited by income if we’re honest since people like us need it a lot less than most Danes). My wife transferred some of her maternity leave and was decades sick for the first two months, so I’m getting around 30 weeks of paternity leave which does mean a significant decrease in income this year, but then you look at how US citizens basically have no paid leave and again… it’s just so weird.
And you’ve chosen this yourselves. I know it’s not as easy as that, but you are a democracy and you do elect your leaders and a huge part of you are basically wage slaves. I know a lot of HN’ers are likely to also have good terms, it comes with our line or work, but as a whole… I mean, just why?
I'm American and I don't disagree that America has serious problems, but you should be leery of trying to compare your country with another country, especially if you haven't lived there and have only read about it.
I was a military wife for about two decades and had two children during that time and it cost next to nothing to spend two or three nights in the hospital to give birth and then all outpatient visits for me and my kids were completely free. I was friends for a time with a Canadian woman who used to openly hate on America and one of her criticisms was we have apparently a weirdly high percentage of citizens who have served in the military.
So I sometimes wonder how many American children get born while one of their parents is in service. And I spent years trying to figure out how to explain to other Americans what military life and military compensation is like and I eventually gave up. Civilian jobs have relatively high pay and few benefits. Military jobs have relatively low pay but high benefits and it's an apples to oranges comparison and I know when I was a military wife, anyone who wasn't making a career of it seemed to be trying to have all the kids they planned to ever have before leaving service because it's so cheap to have a kid while in service.
I desperately wish America would fix some of its problems. But I genuinely wonder just how bad it really is when I never see mention of details like that and when I have looked for data on just how many Americans get some portion of their medical care covered as military dependents for some portion of their life, I have been unable to turn up stats. So I don't know what to conclude, honestly.
But if I cannot figure it out as an American, my guess is your opinions amount to prejudice, not informed analysis. And although I know why so many people in the world have opinions about the US -- because the US is very influential, so it impacts them -- I don't run around telling other countries how to fix their social problems and it bugs me that so many foreigners feel they know what is best for us, often without ever having lived here.
As a first approximation from a quick google search, approximately 2.75% of US children are born to one or more parents who are in the military. This was not hard information to find, but I can't vouch for its veracity; the language used is sloppy and without sources.
A bunch of pages all say the same line that 100,000 children are born each year to "military families", or about 1.5 million between 2003 and 2016. Google also says that about 3.65 million children are born in the US each year. I used division to reach the percentage. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it gives us some idea.
As to your wider point, the idea that you as an American have been unable to find this information and therefore anyone who is not American cannot have a valid observation of the issue because they are missing this critical info is less than useful.
The part where I said I was unable to turn up stats was not the part you rebutted with stats. It's the part I quoted. It's a disingenuous argument to smear me like I am stupid and can't find birth stats when I didn't say that's what I looked for and failed to find.
This is a surprisingly harsh take on what appears (from the caveats included) to be a well intentioned attempt to add some statistics to the conversation.
> disingenuous argument to smear me like I am stupid
I don't know what this is about. My post has nothing like that.
The thing I disagree with is that you think being an American gives you the unique privilege to weigh in on the matters of America, and that people in other countries should just keep their nose out of it. And that not knowing one single detail about something fairly inconsequential disqualifies people from having an opinion.
Attack their argument. You don't get to disqualify them from having one because of where they live.
A quick search shows that TRICARE has 9.5 million beneficiaries, so ~2.8% of population based on 2020 census. I imagine the number you're looking for isn't far off from that.
Okay, I know HN is full of pedants who think a quick google can readily prove I'm stupid, but that's not what I was asking.
My sons are not currently TRICARE beneficiaries but were for much of their lives.
I have a serious medical condition. One of my sons has a serious medical condition. We got many thousands of dollars in value out of being military dependents for a lot of years. But, no, they are not currently beneficiaries.
I wouldn't begin to know how to figure out an answer to a question like "Of all Americans currently alive, what percentage of them has spent some portion of their life in military service or as a military dependent?" much less a question like "If you could place a civilian medical cost equivalent on the medical care they received, often for flashing their ID with zero bill, what would the total be or what percentage of their lifetime medical costs does that represent?"
And that doesn't begin to get into questions like "And can you even begin to measure the impact on health of having secure housing, of one parent participating routinely in exercise as part of the job, etc?"
I don't know how to answer such a complex question at all. You can google all the live long day and you won't be able to tell me the answer. Sorry.
Americans as a whole have a very high quality of life. If you consider the entire life time of our country, the US has accepted substantially many more poor immigrants than EU per cap - and then brought the median of those people to a quality of life comparable or higher than the EU countries.
If you consider just the descendents of the original population in the US in, say, 1900 - they are doing vastly better than equivalent in Europe. It is only because we let in so many more poor people that the median stays deflated, but people move up.
After eliminating differences due to obesity, the US also has better healthcare outcomes than the EU. Every time I go back to Europe it feels like the society is getting comparatively poorer.
In Poland you pay ~30% of your salary as income and social taxes.
If employed, woman has free access to public health system, with huge waiting lists, as you mentioned in your case.
When getting pregnant, woman can go into full paid sick leave untill the delivery day. And then there is a maternity leave paid in 80% for a year. And there there is possibility to get unpaid leave for up to 3 more years, while woman keep her employment and access to healthcare as working person.
And then you hear about wealthy western countries when at 4 months woman should either leave the job or the baby. Not surprising such wealthy countries getting old fast.
> And then you hear about wealthy western countries when at 4 months woman should either leave the job or the baby. Not surprising such wealthy countries getting old fast.
poland tfr is significantly, significantly below that of the US
>Like, I have a private health insurance through my job which led me skip a two year wait time when I was diagnosed with bipolar type2 after having some issues with stress.
If I had to wait 2 years for treatment, after paing so much taxes, I'd be livid and assume the public system is providing terrible value for what I'm paying.
I was so impressed that I left France forever and Im never coming back. Couch activists like you have no idea the misery those constant distracting productivity-killing micro-movements do to the country in aggregate.
I wish you could enjoy them in your country and we wouldnt have to. But well, as long as we can leave France when we dont like it I guess it's fine.
Who is "the population"? Here in France there's a major difference between people who watch the news and those who live in the real world. On the news we get fed propaganda by the business owners and fascist apparatus about all the privileged rail workers and nurses and how their striking is pure nonsense.
I mean, I have multiple examples of recent and semi-recent government policies that I'm certain would lead to Paris being on actual fire if they were proposed in France, but in the UK they are met with apathy at best. Strikes of rail workers and doctors are of course strikes, but they are mostly limited to just not working, and the impact is mostly pissing off the population rather than the government. It's out of their view, it doesn't impact their lives in any way other than journalists asking annoying questions about it.
> Strike action, also called labor strike, labour strike and industrial action in British English, or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work.
Rioting and damaging property is not part of a strike. That is somewhere on the road to a war, or some other word for conflict resolution resulting involving violence.
Elections are the opposite of a strike. Elections were designed to prevent the people from exerting power, by dividing them along arbitrary lines (party lines) and then concentrating power in the hands of the few.
Strikes are designed to redistribute power in the hands of those at the bottom, if only until certain demands are met.
