(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Railway Strike is Coming. Charles Stallworth Thinks the "Laptop Class" is to Blame [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-11-29
Railway strike in 2022 threatens to damage the economy
It may be too late to respond properly to Charles Stallworth. Disgruntled union railway worker and class traitor.
He wrote an opinion piece in Newsweek on 11/18 about how entitled the Twitter employees were and introduced my to the condescending but clever phrase “the laptop class”.
www.newsweek.com/...
The gist of his beef if you don’t have time to read it - and I don’t suggest you do - is that liberals are elitists who have contempt for “real workers” ie people who work with their hands, have skilled trades and no college degrees, and that railroad workers are gearing up for a strike that will likely paralyze the US economy.
This second part is true. Even the real threat of a strike is going to cause panic buying and result in real and severe shortages that cause suffering for real people in a widespread and devastating way. It is hard to imagine that this will end well in any case. The railroad workers have been screwed by rail companies since time immemorial - between 1980, when about 500,000 workers were employed by the railroads and 2019 when automation and “increased productivity” (another way of saying “squeezing more work from fewer people”), about 160,000 workers remained. COVID forced some additional layoffs, but the supply chain became more critical. Each of these very essential people are contributing more, seeing their families less, and facing loneliness, illness, and maltreatment by employers so that the rest of society might function.
I am VERY sympathetic to the plight of the railroad worker.
The railroad companies are in a position where they are “too big to fail”. They are more important to American society today than the banks we bailed out in 2008. They know this. They know they don’t have to make any concessions to the workers, because the Federal Government is going to be FORCED to bail them out. This is a brinksmanship version of the oldest games-theory problem: The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The idea is that cooperation should bring all self-interested agents and society at large the greatest reward and least sanction, but cooperation is almost never played because each side has too much to gain from defecting.
That is going to happen here. And the Biden Administration will have to act. And the railroad workers will suffer even more (remember when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers - that was almost trivial compared to this). And the railroad companies will lose too. Everyone loses. Especially the unprepared public - but let’s come back to that in a bit.
Right now, let’s talk about the article written by Charles Stallworth. The (understandably disgruntled) union railroad worker. Now that I think I have shown union workers the solidarity and brotherly love they richly deserve, let me tell you why Stallworth is wrong. He is wrong and he is destructive and his grievances start with some very petty and ignorant premises.
Back in May of this year, Stallworth wrote a similar opinion piece in Newsweek entitled “The Divide Isn't Right v. Left. It's Us Blue Collar Workers Fighting Elite Contempt”. Despite the attempt to leave ‘left v right’ out of it, this article could have been written by Tucker Carlson and cribbed over to Stallworth to try to pass off as his own. There was whining that the “Blue Collar Class” had to work during COVID and the office jobs got to stay home. The rest of the article is a long complaint about how trade school training is undervalued and too much emphasis is placed on a college education. Stallworth offers (without evidence) that “disrespect showed to the [skilled trades] is getting worse and worse”, but the importance of these jobs should be clear to everyone. Especially now.
www.newsweek.com/...
While I am in total and complete agreement that skilled trades (and even so-called ‘unskilled trades’ - put a pin in that, I want to come back to this) are valuable and should be respected, even cherished by society, I fail to see where the big stigma is.
YES. Parents and schools and programs push college-bound children into community college prep programs and push them into associates and bachelor's degrees and even graduate school has become more and more common. There has been sort of an ‘arms race’ in the workforce. Whatever skills you have - computer skills, art skills, marketing, business, design, building, etc etc etc - all of these things become more marketable and command a higher salary with more education. So many studies are available showing that, over the lifetime of one’s career, a college degree can be worth many multiples in terms of its admittedly high cost. So perhaps, parents and teachers who want their kids to go to college aren’t disrespecting trades as much as they are looking for the road to financial success for their loved ones. That makes sense right?
I myself find it hard to classify my own job in terms of white collar vs blue collar. I have a bachelor’s degree and most people filling my billet have at least a master’s. I wear a lab coat and get to present myself as an expert. So right off the bat, without doing anything to earn it, the public sees me as a professional - these are things that accompany “the laptop class” that Mr Stallworth derides. But I also wear scrubs to work - anyone who wears a jumpsuit essentially is almost always considered “blue collar” (my collar is literally blue). I use a time clock to track my whereabouts. I work twelve-hour shifts and bathroom breaks are not guaranteed. Not only did I work during COVID, but on the frontest of the front lines, where I saw healthy young people, my age and younger, intubated and expire in front of my eyes. I had COVID patients who refused to wear a mask cough in my face. I have had things thrown at me by patients: telephones, food trays, and full urinals. The “laptop class” you imagine working from home in their cushie marketing, strategic business planning jobs - do they have work hazards like these?
I do think that ALL WAGE EARNERS should stick together. This includes railroad workers - union or not - nurses, doctors, technicians of all kinds, people who work registers, people who clean things, people who serve other people (in restaurants, in hospitality industries, in their homes). Even better than universal unions, or META UNIONS, would be a honeycomb network of worker-owned co-ops. If the doctors, nurses, techs, janitors, clerks and laboratory operators all owned the hospitals and ambulatory clinics, they would have more say in the HR policies and other service policies that made these places run. But I don’t spend a whole lot of time concerning myself with whether or not the public is condescending towards me because I work hard for a living.
And neither should Mr. Stallworth.
In fact, when he talks about Uber Eats Drivers - he acknowledges that they faced the same hazards that other essential workers faced during the pandemic. That they were also forgotten and scorned and mistreated, underpaid, and underappreciated. But they are ‘unskilled’ in his parlance. They didn’t go to trade school. You may need trigonometry to read welding and electrical diagrams, but it is unnecessary when it comes to delivering food. Is Mr. Stallworth guilty here of the same level of condescension that he accuses everyone else of when they are considering the tradesmen vs the college-educated?
Let’s agree that workers are essential and should stick together. I don’t care if you work at a desk doing spreadsheets. That can be as demeaning and soul-sucking as any encounter I ever had in the ER where some drunk guy threw up on my shoes and then yelled at me because no one brought him a turkey sandwich when he asked for one an hour ago.
Stallworth complains that Twitter employees who were fired were overpaid and did little work anyway. I see occasional memes that Twitter lost 90% of its workforce and is still functioning so why did they need those employees anyway?
There is a well-known hospital system whose business model is to acquire smaller hospital systems and lay off a huge percentage of the workforce and cease unprofitable services. Some of those “unprofitable services” may be a drain on the bottom line, but if your grandma is the patient currently benefitting from her stay on the med-surg floor, they are as essential as dear life itself. My point is: it doesn’t take a genius to cut expenses to the bone for short-term, unsustainable profitability that compromises service in the long run. It just takes greed.
“You must show up to work this Friday or be fired”. This policy change received mockery and ridicule far and wide throughout the interwebs thanks to friends like Mr. Stallworth. People who should know better. People who should be champions of other working-class folks and not simps for the billionaire class that wants to treat them like property.
Imagine you had made a life decision back when Twitter was under more competent, more stable management that you would relocate your family to an inexpensive location with good schools, good internet access, and a short distance from your elderly parents so you could help care for them. Win-win for you and the company. You get the lifestyle you need to contribute to your family and community and Twitter gets the benefit of your expertise. All the data shows that these arrangements were MORE PROFITABLE for the company - not less. They could get the same productivity with less overhead out of the same number of people.
But then suddenly, the new guy wants you to show up to work. He gives you two weeks' worth of notice, thinking he’s being generous. You have childcare to arrange. Your spouse needs to alter their work schedule. Someone else needs to pick up the extra care you’ve been giving your parents. Maybe the office is SO far away, you need to rent a place closer to the office so that when you DO go in, the drive isn’t killing you.
These are not trivial concerns. But they aren’t just treated trivially by Stallworth. They are treated with disdain.
He is giving the same holier-than-thou treatment he imagines that he is getting from college-educated liberals. And I’m afraid that despite my constant cheerleading of the working class, every single chance I get, I am not going to change his mind.
More college is good. More college for more people. Electricians and welders will certainly benefit from geography and civics and history and liberal arts. You don’t need to be able to analyze poetry in order to analyze circuit diagrams, but it will sharpen your critical thinking skills, and your powers of persuasion will increase, which might come in handy when you are communicating with job supervisors or homeowners or vendors.
Finally, the imaginary divide between blue and white-collar workers is only encouraged by the capitalist class who would enjoy the fruits of our labor without having to pay the societal costs necessary for us all to enjoy the dividends that our collective labor brings. The American Workers - collectively together - should have a say in how business is conducted and resources are allocated. That includes college-educated and trade-school finished and even the people who deliver things and keep our workspaces and our homes clean.
Mr. Stallworth, PLEASE reconsider your position on the divide in our workforce. We need the support of each other now, perhaps more than at any other time in American History.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/29/2139045/-The-Railway-Strike-is-Coming-Charles-Stallworth-Thinks-the-Laptop-Class-is-to-Blame
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
