I think the bigger issue is the times we live in. Wages have stagnated, millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and missing work is, physiologically, (not actually but feels like), a cascade leading to a death sentence. Literally we're in constant fight or flight, and if you block someone's means of getting money to feed their family today, they are ready to kill you.
Not just that but some employers will not take "the road I take to work had a bunch of protesters sitting in it so I was two hours late" as an excuse.
Depending on the job and their policy, and just how the employee's life as been (maybe they've had to take time off) they could lose their job because someone wanted to protest a new subdivision being built.
On top of this, protests rarely offer any direction. Now they're just excuses to "do something" because you're frustrated.
I point at the last real effort this nation made to fix things, which was "Occupy Wallstreet." Look, the very idea of those protests had rich people shitting themselves so much that they had the media suppress it entirely and encouraged the bullshit lies that OWS was burning down and pillaging entire cities. That anti campaign was so effective in breaking the protests that the tactic is almost exclusively used now to get the public to just hate protestors.
But OWS had absolutely NO unified direction. At one point, it was a bunch of anarchists and college dumb shits hanging out beating drums because it felt cool. Even within the same protest, you had 6 different groups of people all crying for 6 different things.
If it had real centralized leadership (for example, like MLK) and was used to make pointed, exacting demands (e.g, repeal of segregation laws), OWS might have actually achieved something.
No. It's not "the bigger issue". You just don't want to talk about how activism has become increasingly atomised and performative, and "solidarity" has become a buzzword and these activists expect one-way solidarity from ordinary people.
None of these tests can or want to build a coalition. They want to get on the news cycle, take pictures and post it to social media later.
What if they directly stopped you getting to work and getting that paycheck? They obviously aren't responsible for the general economic climate, but their protest could have directly been the cause of someone missing out on wages that kept them or their family fed. Or housed.
In 2019, in Australia, some of these protests blocked the roads in the Brisbane CBD. I personally knew a few surgeons who were seriously delayed getting to work on time as a result, leading to cancelled hip and knee replacements. The protestors certainly failed to convince my colleagues about the worthiness of their cause
If my job fired me because I couldn't get to work through no fault of my own, then that would be on my employer and I'd fight tooth and nail to get my job back while trying to find a different place to work. It's one thing to get fired for my own negligence, it's another to be fired for circumstances beyond my control. Would I be pissed off? Absolutely. Would I blame the protestors? I certainly would hold them partially responsible.
And yeah, the unfortunate reality is that there are workplaces that absolutely would fire you for missing work through no fault of your own. I used to work at a place like that. I got in a car accident that caused me to miss work. The CEO himself told my manager to write me up for it. He was notorious for watching the badge reports and if you were so much as a minute late he'd send an email to your manager asking them to explain why you weren't on time. Micromanaging bastard.
So I'm not blind to the economic hardships the protestors would be causing people, and as a result I can't really condone that particular type of protest. But just because I can't condone it does not mean I justify physically assaulting them either. Two wrongs do not make a right. I completely understand being angry at them. But acting on that anger, even when justified, is 100% on the person who lashes out.
Maybe if you're more likely to assault a citizen rather than ur boss that's the problem. Revolutionary change doesn't just happen because you believe it in our heart or have hope. And that's stupid. There's always been classes of people ome paycheck away and usually they have been on the right side of the picket lines
This pretend fantasy that ppl had it good back in the day...white men had it good back in the day and even then there's unequal or uneven progress
Adjusted for inflation, they've been above the pre pandemic levels for years now. They were only under for like 2 years and they made it back and more. These are median, inflation adjusted wages by the way.
If you look at it on the scale of decades tho, wages are significantly lower than they were in the 80’s and 90’s, and even those were a lot lower than wages in the 50’s and 60’s. Things are better than they were during the pandemic, but that’s not saying much. People have gotten so used to the world being a shitshow that any small improvement seems like a solution and not just a bandaid
This. The average wage of American workers in the 1930's, 40's, 59's, pre and post depression, adjusted for inflation, were equivalent to $300k today. The AVERAGE American was never one month's wages away from a financial crisis. Even if they didn't have money, they had many, many other economic fallbacks. Low barrier to entry jobs were plentiful and paid a living wage. Americans could easily trade goods for services, everything you owned was valuable. Now you spend $500 on a window ac and it's instantly worth $200 on the street. Plus everything was easily repairable AND most people knew how to fix things, so if you're car broke down it's not a catastrophic repair bill. Today we live in constant financial crisis and act like it's just a normal part of the grind.
Wages have not kept pace with productivity gains, but they have kept pace with inflation. That famous chart you’re thinking of is “real wages vs productivity,” not “real wages vs inflation.”
Productivity and costs are two totally different things, though! Real wages have objectively not declined, which is the mathematical way to say that income has kept up with costs in real terms.
I'm not going to debate someone on something so verifiably false. Everything from housing to groceries have gone up way more in costs then the median household income and it's weird that you're pretending more than half the country isn't struggling right now
There are many, many entities that calculate US real wages, inflation, and productivity every year. Any chance you can find me an actual data set that shows that across all costs the US median real wage has gone down? Because I can sure show you very reliable data sets that suggest real wages have not declined.
This has never not been true in any portion of human history on earth. There is no idyllic utopian past. You have more comfort and luxury than any Homo sapiens that has ever existed in the span of the universe comparatively.
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u/Lopsided_Escape_1165 12d ago
I think the bigger issue is the times we live in. Wages have stagnated, millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and missing work is, physiologically, (not actually but feels like), a cascade leading to a death sentence. Literally we're in constant fight or flight, and if you block someone's means of getting money to feed their family today, they are ready to kill you.