Look, I completely agree with the general sentiment, but if you conflate the current illegal theft of agreed-upon and earned wages with what workers deserve to be paid, it doesn’t help the latter argument, it just confuses the former.
This type of thing is “defund the police” all over again, where the intention is to transfer funds from the police to social services specialized in situations the police shouldn’t be handling in the first place, and then got conflated with the idea of abolishing police. And while the former would have, it seemed, broad support (even among a lot of police who felt ill-equipped and trained to deal with every kind of emergency), the latter immediately turned off a significant portion of people, and conflating the two hurt the entire movement.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a serious focus on wages increasing with profitability, I’m saying don’t use the terminology of a separate problem that needs to be fixed and could have broad support right now.
The conspiracy theorist in me sometimes wonders if this type of thing is deliberately done by bad actors to sabotage these movements with poor messaging.
I’m not from America, but I thought I had a pretty good understanding on some of these issues. Turns out I only got the memo for “defund the police” meaning “abolish the police”.
It did/does. It was used by activists because the message could not be co-opted by corporate marketing, like Black Lives Matter did. Defund and Abolish have very explicit meanings. It never began watered down like this revisionist person is saying.
Look, I completely agree with the general sentiment, but if you conflate the current illegal theft of agreed-upon and earned wages with what workers deserve to be paid, it doesn’t help the latter argument, it just confuses the former.
This type of thing is “defund the police” all over again, where the intention is to transfer funds from the police to social services specialized in situations the police shouldn’t be handling in the first place, and then got conflated with the idea of abolishing police. And while the former would have, it seemed, broad support (even among a lot of police who felt ill-equipped and trained to deal with every kind of emergency), the latter immediately turned off a significant portion of people, and conflating the two hurt the entire movement.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a serious focus on wages increasing with profitability, I’m saying don’t use the terminology of a separate problem that needs to be fixed and could have broad support right now.
The conspiracy theorist in me sometimes wonders if this type of thing is deliberately done by bad actors to sabotage these movements with poor messaging.
I’m not from America, but I thought I had a pretty good understanding on some of these issues. Turns out I only got the memo for “defund the police” meaning “abolish the police”.
It did/does. It was used by activists because the message could not be co-opted by corporate marketing, like Black Lives Matter did. Defund and Abolish have very explicit meanings. It never began watered down like this revisionist person is saying.
It’s true that this comic is not actually about wage theft. But then you lost me.