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The General Strike is Happening Now! (Script & Sources)

Added 2021-10-14 20:08:56 +0000 UTC

Good morning, good news! We are in the middle of a nationwide general strike, and you didn’t even know about it. A few months ago we talked about a General Strike scheduled for October 15th, in which workers from every industry would simultaneously stop working until their needs were met - which included higher wages and better working conditions.

But over the last three months, we’ve watched the entire American workforce develop a totally new type of general strike. Instead of choosing a day to stop working until their employers concede to their demands, millions upon millions of workers have just outright quit their jobs, and they’re refusing to get new ones. There’s no threat of being fired, no scabs to temporarily replace them, there isn’t even a negotiation process. It’s the ultimate ultimatum.

To some economists it might sound strange to call The Great Resignation a general strike, but that’s exactly what it is. In fact, former secretary of labor, economist Robert Reich who we just had on the show a few weeks ago, was one of the first to identify the current anti-work movement as an organic general strike, in the face of political and economic inaction and exploitation. It has been over a decade since the federal minimum wage was raised, among major economies, the US ranks dead last in workers rights. And all of that is solely the result of corporations siphoning trillions of dollars from their workers through blatant exploitation, and handing Congress a few billion of it to make sure that this exploitation continues, and that pro-worker legislation is never passed.

Workers are quitting their jobs at a record-breaking rate that we’ve literally never seen before in US history. Nearly 4.3 million workers voluntarily quit their jobs in August ALONE, and that was on top of 4 million quitting just the month before. Here’s how serious it is: 2/3rd of US workers, or approximately 130 million Americans are currently looking to leave their job, and that number has doubled just since May.

Meanwhile, the number of available jobs has also been at a record high with over 10 million open positions. There are WAY more jobs than there are people without them. But there isn’t a labor shortage or a jobs shortage, there is a WAGE shortage. This is happening voluntarily, and for what looks like the first time in US history - we’re experiencing a totally organic General Strike, which is frankly more effective and much more threatening to employers, than a traditional strike.

They did this to themselves, and as a result of their short-sightedness and reliance on extreme exploitation, thousands of companies are failing without a steady diet of exploited workers to keep them afloat. And there’s something very funny about the fact that hyper-capitalists are going crazy blaming workers for killing their companies. When the basic truth is, in the words of Robert Reich, if you can’t afford to pay your employees a living wage, then you don’t have a viable business model.