The Brief Origins of May Day

The simplest answer tends to be the right one, so in the face of the inexplicable, the answer is usually ignorance.

The tech track works great if one falls into line and doesn't rock the boat by questioning authority or trying to see the big picture. If one clings to original teenage fantasies like the idea that intellectual prowess and financial success eventually bring esteem and a social life. If one chooses to avoid becoming mired in dead end physical labor jobs like everyone else, even for a time, in worship of their own cleverness.

But should the unthinkable happen, say, the loss of a loved one due to a hyper focus on work, or witnessing one's work being used to take from others, or waking up one day to find oneself disillusioned with the direction tech is going, then suddenly tech loses its luster. One starts to recognize it for what it is - just another way to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few.

Tech has come to symbolize sheltering from reality, like a state sanctioned drug. It's a way to pat oneself on the back and downplay the wisdom of those outside it. Blindly worshipping it to the exclusion of the other wonders of life is the surest way I know to separate oneself from the soul, other than money perhaps.

In good conscience, I must add that the vast majority of tech today is phantom tech, not real tech. It serves to entertain and distract rather than be a labor-saving device. So in that sense, it's understandable that people invested in solving anything except any real problem have a disdain for the plight of labor.

We tend to think like this, unconsciously if not outright: "I'm smarter than the next guy, so in a dog-eat-dog system I'll come out ahead. Organizing with a bunch of less-smart people would only hold me back."

Plus, at the risk of too much head-shrinking, I've never gotten the impression that tech workers liked each other very much. There's a lot of disdain in the industry, for the guy who uses that language or framework or operating system that I think sucks. You don't see that so much with, say, truckers. There may be some good-natured rivalry based on truck brands or long-haul versus short-haul, but not the real disdain you see in tech.

> Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers?

Because many tech workers don't see themselves as workers, with some justification, many having substantial capital investments alongside labor income, making them, in class terms, petit bourgeois or at least close enough to it to perceive their own interests in more bourgeois than proletarian terms. And even the tech workers that are clearly part of the proletarian intelligentsia tend see themselves (rightly or wrongly) on a path that leads into the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois interests.

What makes solidarity between workers possible is the homogeneity of their labour. This condition is not present for tech workers. Labour market conditions are completely different from those of say, a meat processing plant or a factory assembly line.

Because software developers are some of the most privileged people on earth and need to sooth their guilt by pretending to stand with the working class.

Of course nothing rings as hollow as someone who works from home or a beautiful office, sits in a comfortable chair and works by typing on a keyboard complaining about the struggles of the working class.

The unions I have heard about or seen in action (in Poland or from news) either

(1) demanded flat payment increases for all workers based on seniority etc. Which may make sense for factory workers but I am not enthusiastic about flat rates for programmers not taking into account actual experience/availability/output etc.

Factory workers in many cases do job that can be easily rated and measured and do some specific amount of it.

While measuring output of programmers is notoriously hard.

I expect that union agreement of this kind would in fact benefit only lazy freeloaders not doing any work but having seniority.

(2) are guilds that existed to keep jobs for members and to outlaw or ban hiring outsiders.

I strictly prefer for exclusionary guilds to not exist and one of my big worries is that one would be setup, in area affecting me. One way or another, not necessarily an obvious self-naming itself as a guild.

(3) are gangs existing to steal public money - for example, see coal miners in Poland. Main union achievements was to steal billions of public money to help lazy freeloaders doing work that was not worth doing or outright harmful.

I do not support theft, also in terms of parasiting on public resources. Even if I would get some of proceeds of theft.

(4) intended to achieve more free days, flexibility etc. On my freelancing agreements I sacrificed large part of earning to get about 100+ free days a year, very significant flexibility where and how and on what I work. So this part is achieved for me - and I am not sure how many other tech workers would actually prefer more free time over being paid more.

I am not automatically against unions for tech workers but my first reaction and assumption is not that it will be positive or useful for me.

> Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers?

They do! What doesn't resonate with many tech workers is working together with other people. Tech workers are largely used to working alone, and many even struggle in social situations more-so than in other industries, so when a labor issue arises they believe it is a problem they must solve on their own.

We’re convinced we’re be court wizards, not peasants, in a fantasy setting. Wizards join guilds, not unions.

Mayday is from the french m'aider (a short form of venez m'aider, "come [and] help me")

> Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another.

I do not understand your framing. You don't "have to" do anything. These are people talking about what they wish to do.

> Life is about balance.

Pseudo-Buddhist bullshit.

You are lost in abstraction. These arguments are actually about material conditions, they're not just personality conflicts. Middle-class people lose contact with this fact, because they have no material worries; or rather their material conditions are simply tied to whether their employer believes they are profitable to employ. Of course middle-class people have to "compromise." Or rather they have to paint their total and continuous submission as a compromise, complain about the inflexibility of their bosses, and dream of one day having the leverage to order people around themselves.

Arguing that the best solution is in the middle is just the moderation fallacy. It's not profound, it's the law of averages. It's the kind of thing you can say regardless of subject, an invariant, that will always make people who believe in the law of averages believe you said something profound.

> RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks

It does depend on how you measure it. Given diligent workers you could argue that working from home is better for 'on task' work, than the distractions of the office - however some of those distractions create value for companies that's hard to measure.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had the polite - how are you type conversation - via a chance encounter in the office, that has lead to an idea or new connection that moved something forward, ( have you tried X? Have you talked to Y ).

These don't happen when you are on task working from home.

For companies which are knowledge based - this sort of spontaneous creativity happens more when people are all together and less when people have to intentionally reach out.

Companies aren't just the simple sum of the individuals and a lot of the creativity happens off-task.

Except when a company like Best Buy can fire a bunch of workers and replace them with Accenture who are paying workers $40/hour while holding them hostage with the H1B. At least 20% of workers in US construction (and even higher for residential) are illegal aliens. Then there is the offshoring of manufacturing: your local workers get too uppity? China can supply whatever you need. Don’t like the United Auto Workers? Move your factory to northern Mexico.

What’s interesting is that tariffs helped American workers back in the day — whether or not that happens again remains to be seen.

Unless the entire world gets onboard with worker rights, trade barriers remain one of the only ways to improve the working conditions of local people.

Regarding the French example: they do have the so-called 35 hour week, but compare disposable income for the same job in the U.S. versus France: Americans have much higher disposable income than the French (even after accounting for health care costs.) The US could improve conditions, but pay will drop accordingly. That might be ok or it might not, but there is no free lunch.

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We have been conditioned to fear the idea of demanding a more fair distribution of wealth: My great grandfather for example was shot dead by a cop during a union strike. Nothing happened after that event, just silence, fear and a deeply traumatized family.

It is very important to remember that many of the things we enjoy today as workers only exist because of the enormous courage of workers from the 19th and early 20th century who fought really hard for a better future.

I have a feeling this submission will be [flagged][dead] in the next half hour - that's how soft we are.

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For the union makes us strong

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Unfortunately, I don't think this is a good place for discussion, and it isn't being addressed properly by the moderation team.

There's a lot of regressives here actively abusing the flagging functionality for censorship - ironically the same kind of people that'll tell you how much they care about freedom of speech (the unspoken part: but only if its speech they agree with)

> Tell me which rule I broke.

hard to say without knowing what was there

Social media cracking down on leftist ideology is something that needs to be studied. They are very slick about it, and will usually find some way to make it appear legit (eg: deliberately interpreting obvious sarcasm as literally as possible and then hitting you with the content policy) but at the end of the day anybody can see that reactionaries can get away with calls to violence and war crime apologia while the rest of us have to be on their absolute best behaviour.

It really goes to show you that capital has no ideology and will adopt whatever shape it needs to as the political climate changes. The United States government is now fascist, and therefore the investor class is also fascist.