Black Friday Protests Against Amazon:
Amazon warehouse workers are set to protest ‘inhuman’ working conditions in planned demonstrations across Europe on Black Friday.
Hundreds of Amazon employees are working with the British trade union GMB and planning to gather outside five of the website’s fulfillment centers on Friday. Meanwhile, in Italy and Spain, a 24-hour strike is planned. […]
GMB spokesman Tim Roache told Business Insider that the workers were not trying to disrupt Black Friday sales, but simply attempting to raise awareness about the “frankly inhuman” working conditions. The goal, he said is to “get Amazon around the table” for workers’ voices to be heard.
People are “breaking bones, being knocked unconscious, and being taken away in ambulances,” he said.
The GMB reported last year that ambulances were called to Amazon warehouses in an incredible 600 times in the last three years for incidents including electric shocks, exhaustion, chest pains, major trauma — and on three occasions even pregnancy-related issues. “At a similar sized supermarket distribution warehouse a few miles away, there were just eight call outs during the same period,” the GMB said at the time.
The GMB gathered disturbing statements from Amazon employees in advance of the protests.
One pregnant woman reported that she is forced to “stand 10 hours without a chair” and told to work hard, despite her superiors knowing she is pregnant. Another described Amazon as “an awful place to work” where people “can’t breath or voice an opinion” and “feel like a trapped animal with lack of support and respect.”
Growing up and reading the MSM, the term "populism" has always been used as a pejorative and quite often is associated with National Socialism and I never understood why...
Case in point:
According to Federico Finchelstein, the election of Brazilian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro is a signal populism is moving "closer to fascism than ever before."
Finchelstein, an Argentine historian, said modern right-wing populism developed out of the ruins of fascism in 1945, after the defeat of leaders like Hitler and Mussolini.
"Especially in Latin America, even former fascists like Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentine leader, realized that in order to do politics in the new world that emerged after 1945, they needed to re-enter the democratic game," he told The Sunday Edition's guest host Peter Armstrong.
Because from my perspective and reading the definitions of populism it isn't a bad thing at all:
Populism is a political doctrine that proposes that the common people are exploited by a privileged elite, and which seeks to resolve this. The underlying ideology of populists can be left, right, or center. Its goal is uniting the uncorrupt and the unsophisticated "little man" against the corrupt dominant elites (usually established politicians) and their camp of followers (usually the rich and influential). It is guided by the belief that political and social goals are best achieved by the direct actions of the masses. Although it chiefly comes into being where mainstream political institutions are perceived to have failed to deliver, there is no identifiable economic or social set of conditions that give rise to it, and it is not confined to any particular social class.
If you read the news, "they" would have you believe that Employees of the richest man in the world are Nazis for protesting better working rights and conditions and nobody is asking, "Huh...600 ambulance calls in just a few years, are we living in China?"
Exactly, why is POPULISM bad?
I asked my High School teacher that one time and he fumbled with the answer before finally replying something the akin of "populism is mob rule" to which I replied, then what is the point of Democracy and having all people vote if their opinions and desires aren't met?
Populism is of course the reason why Trump won and it has nothing to do with Socialism, however it does have everything to do with Nationalism. Nationalism and Populism are by definition the very same things unless you live in a multi-cultural Empire like America (that's a topic for another time) and neither of those definitions are bad.
The Western world is quickly realizing that for decades we have been ruled by a Corporate Industrial Complex that doesn't give a damn about workers or families or even job satisfaction. Corporations now have a computer program that they plug in and figure out exactly how to maximize the profits down to regulating the amount of bathroom breaks you as an employee are allowed to have.
Seriously:
Working at an Amazon warehouse in the U.K., James Bloodworth came across a bottle of straw-colored liquid on a shelf. It looked like pee.
How could he be sure? “I smelt it,” said the 35-year-old British journalist and author, talking about his new book “Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.” It was definitely pee, he said.
As he tells it, urinating into a bottle is the kind of desperation Amazon forces its warehouse workers into as they try to avoid accusations of “idling” and failing to meet impossibly high productivity targets — ones they are continually measured against by Big Brother-ish type surveillance.
It didn’t help that the nearest bathroom to where he worked was four flights of stairs below.
Bloodworth’s grim picture of Amazon’s blue-collar workplaces — he compares the warehouse he worked in, alternately, to a prison and a totalitarian state — is bringing new attention to the company’s treatment of its workers. Out in the U.K. since March, and just appearing in this country, “Hired” sparked a flurry of reviews in the British press and some American coverage as well. [...]
At the warehouse where he worked, Amazon monitored everbody’s rate through a handheld device — tracking “our every move as if we were convicts out on house arrest,” he writes.
And this is in 2018 ladies and gentlemen, how is this NOT serfdom? Hell, it's even worse! Serfs actually had more vacation days. So explain to me again, why "Populism" is bad thing? Why is rebelling against the corporate overlords akin to being Fascists?
Which brings up another point, the amount of internet censorship and banning of people across the web is just another sign that not only is populism correct...it is also inevitable.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.