There are usually 2 kinds of paid leave (Paid Time Off) in the US: sick and vacation. Sick leave is an allotment of days where you can call in sick and still get paid. Vacation leave is the same but for vacations.
Until recently, there was an expectation that when you leave a job, your unused PTO would get lumped into your last paycheck.
As you can imagine, corpos have started clawing back that money. This is also egregious since corpos do everything they can to deny that leave in the first place ("You're not sick, you can still work." "Someone already is taking off that week so you can't. No I don't care that you already paid for it.")
I am so shocked how the people in the freaking richest country of the world ended up letting corps stew them so hard. In Europe streets would be burning - literally...
Because America is large and decentralized. Want to protest the Capitol in a European country? Take the day off and drive a couple hours to the Capitol and block the limited pathways and roads.
Want to do that in America? Take at least two weeks off, drive for at least a day and at most a week or so, then go block streets that are easy to get around and don't really have any strategic advantage.
There isn't a person or building we can take out, as again, power is decentralized. Taking out one person or group, there's hundreds more spread throughout the country that are constantly changing locations. Think taking over the Capitol Building and holding it will do, ask January 6thers how that went for them.
Americans are constantly having protest. Our protest are often bigger than even Europe's largest ever protest. But to actually change things, you'd need to get at least 30% of the population to all work in unity, at the same time, and have a workers strike. Which would end up in a lot of bloodshed as that's what the powers that be do when we start being effective. We're not quite ready to pull that lever yet. We're trying this voting thing one more time. If it doesn't work, we all agree the system is fucked and start taking more drastic measures.
Why would you need to drive a week? Labor law relating to PTO is state level, which arguably makes things easier if less even. Like look at how much Mamdani has been doing at just the city level. Never underestimate local politics.
So your solution to deal with federal persecution is to throw out the advantages that decentralization give you and gather everyone in perhaps the most heavily protected city on the continent to be scooped up by the feds, all for policies that are handled at the state level anyway? I don't follow the logic here.
No, I understand perfectly. I am objecting to this:
Want to do that in America? Take at least two weeks off, drive for at least a day and at most a week or so, then go block streets that are easy to get around and don't really have any strategic advantage.
That's just a huge misrepresentation of what actually needs to go down for protests in America. And clearly you know that, because you go on to point out that we are capable of having massive protests like No Kings and the George Floyd protests, both of which happened in largely decentralized manners across the country rather than carting everyone to DC.
Also, most strikes aren't just workers sitting at home. There are generally demonstrations by the workers that serve to remind the capitalist class that there are more of us than there are of them and to discourage scabbing. And if you want a revolutionary or near-revolutionary strike (which is what it seems you want), you want striking workers demonstrating. I could probably go on, since I am politically adjacent to anarcho-syndicalism and have therefore given the idea of the general strike a bit of though, but I think that's enough of that for now.
we are capable of having massive protests like No Kings and the George Floyd protests
Neither of which were effective...
Nor was Occcupy Wallstreet, the Women's March on Wallstreet, BLM protest, March for Our Lives, or one of the other hundred or so protests we've had in the last 30 years.
That's the point. Americans protest. The problem is most of us miss what actually made movements like the Civil Rights Movement and Workers Rights Movement effective. And that was large scale economic activity/boycotting/strikes. Schools in America love to go on and on about the marches, which was part of it, but often downplay the part where they stopped working for corrupt companies, made their own goods, didn't use services that treated them as less than human, and sometimes did resort to either display of force (see when farmers prevented bankers from buying farms with large, intimidating gatherings of farmers at auctions with the implied threat of violence to said bankers if they bid or Black Panthers standing at street corners, with guns so their kids wouldn't get harassed going to school) and occasionally violence when protecting their communities.
A simple march isn't enough. It takes large scale, coordinated efforts to actually make the government bend a knee.
And now you're missing my point while explaining things that I agree with at me.
My point is that:
You misrepresented the problems caused by the size and decentralization of the US for protest movements. They exist, certainly, but nobody needs to drive a week to get to a protest. That's just not a thing that happens unless someone really wants to go to a DC protest rather than a more local demonstration. J6 is the odd one out, largely because that was more of an attempted coup of the federal government.
You're glossing over the advantages that a decentralized system gives to reformers and radicals. You don't need to organize the entire country and march to DC to push for better labor law in Oklahoma. You can even get quite a lot done at the county or municipal level, be it from within the system or from the outside.
So leading with "The country is big, so people need to drive a whole week to get to a protest, but that doesn't even matter because the country is decentralized" isn't especially helpful to people trying to understand why America is the way it is and distracts from the more solid point of Americans broadly being unwilling or unable to break out more sustained strategies and direct action for the past several decades.
That was brought up because other countries just go down to the Capitol and start burning shit/blocking it. To fo the same her, which is go to the Capitol, the Capitol being Washington DC in this case, yes it could take a week of travel. This was said because people compared America yo other countries and I went into what differs between America and them. I do see your confusion now though about what was said.
You don't need to organize the entire country and march to DC to push for better labor law in Oklahoma
It does nothing if the government doesn't enforce it, which is the problem we're having at the moment. We can get better labor laws locally. I do agree there. But the government institutions haven't been enforcing the laws we have now and that's a much, much larger problem.
I can assure you that our international friends are familiar with the concept of protests and uprisings in cities besides the national capital.
And you’re not really addressing my point about the federal model. You don’t necessarily need to twist the federal government’s arm for a lot of this stuff. A lot of it is kicked down to the states, and it is a lot easier to twist your state government’s arm until they submit. That’s not going to immediately cause huge national reforms, but it gets the ball rolling and shows people that we do have real power should we choose to use it.
3.7k
u/Luutamo 1d ago
I think this comic might be too American for me to understand