About a month ago, a video went viral of a factory walkout, filmed and narrated by a man who has such intense enthusiasm, it makes me wish he could narrate a documentary series on every instance of working class struggle in history. This video had me beaming with a smile and punching my fist in the air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykb6Nk9_PjI
Unfortunately he frames it as solidarity based on them being Mexican, and saying how black people need to emulate this, rather than making it about something workers need to emulate across racial lines. But still, it's an invigorating, uplifting video.
The video made it to the front page of reddit and was awarded 5 golds (that's a helluva lot). If you look in the comments section, many of the top voted comments are people sharing their own stories of rising up with their coworkers against their bosses. It shows how hungry people are for workers to fight back.
Here's a taste:
yungdroo 13.8k points 1 month ago*
I was an ice cream man at one point, and the company I worked for hired several international students to work for the summer. It was a good gig, but the managers were outright abusive at times. One of the student workers got really sick and had to stay in bed for two days, to which these managers replied by putting him on suspension for the rest of the summer. This meant he would not be able to switch his paperwork to a different job(since his employment isn’t technically terminated) and basically would have to sit unemployed for two months and come home with several thousand dollars of debt.The day after this suspension got announced, all 6 of us ice-cream men packed into my ‘93 accord, but instead of going to work we hit up the liquor store and then bought all-day passes to play laser tag .We told the managers that they’d see us on our friend’s(the guy who was sick) next work day. They kept calling and trying to coerce/bully us to come work, but nobody was having it(and we all really needed our jobs too). The company owner met with us after a few days of this and our man got his job back. Gotta stick up for one another!
And another
BROmanceNZ 17.6k points 1 month ago*x2
This happened to my mum. She works as a coach builder in a large workshop. One of, like, maybe four women out of a total of a few hundred at these workshops, and I think the only one to do actual mechanical work (the others work in admin roles). She's been doing it for longer than I've been alive (30 years) and knows her way around things like a car engine better than I can figure out how to open Chupa Chup wrappers sometimes.She's pretty outspoken, especially when it comes to safety. Around 14 years ago, when I was still in high school, my mum got sent home by the site manager because she pointed out a safety hazard. The problem had just come up, but the national CEO happened to be doing a walk around and it made the site manager look bad. She didn't mean for that to happen but she'd rather the site be safe than someone's feelings be protected.
She gets told to pack up her tools and leave the site immediately with a disciplinary meeting to be called in a few days. She gets home absolutely livid an sets to calling an employment lawyer and checking in with her union. In the meantime, all of her colleagues in her area at the workshop were being treated to a free lunch on account of the CEO being there.
Every single guy loaded up their plate with free food then proceeded to dump the plates into the nearest skip bin in front of the site manager and the CEO. The eldest and most senior of them telling them they owed my mum an apology. Then they all packed their tools up, got in their cars, and drove around to our place to see if my mum was okay. She was in tears because of the support they'd shown her and, to this day, she loves them all like brothers.
Still, that didn't stop them all getting a bollocking from her for wasting good food.
She got an apology and the disciplinary hearing was cancelled. She later became the Site Safety Rep and the local Union delegate. The support those guys she works with gave her left a lasting impression on me how to treat co-workers and our family have been forever grateful to them for standing up for my mum so she didn't have to put up with shit alone.
You can find many more stories like that here: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/93vfy2/entire_factory_walks_off...
Since my recent visit to the Americas I speak in exactly the same vernacular as the splendid fellow on the video. Spiffing stuff, er, I mean dat muthafucka speaking da real shit, bitch!