this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
151 points (97.5% liked)

unions

1347 readers
137 users here now

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
151
Before we judge Gen Z harshly for their take on the grind of work, as a Boomer I’m here to remind you that Dolly wrote the same message over 40 years ago (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 10 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

Are we supposed to be judging this? Because like as the youngest of millennials, nah they right.

Like I’m happy to work, and if it gave me a decent standard of living and enough time to live my life I’d be fine with it. But as it is no, if my wife and I work in out decently compensated technical and educated careers we can do pretty well for ourselves. Not amazing but pretty well. And all at the expense of only having a few hours a day to relax and do chores. Which is bullshit. We should be able to each work half time and together afford a good life

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Very few of us are judging them. We all feel the same way. My heart breaks for that girl. I remember when i was that pretty. Now I'm just tired and old. They steal your soul, one stressful day at a time.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm also not judging, I'm more ashamed that I didn't feel the same way at her age.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They have so completely stripped from the system any guise of legitimacy that even their ingenious techniques for deluding the youth are now inept.

Strangely, social media has also helped challenge the delusion. In the early days, everyone used it to foster an illusion of contentedness in life, essentially curating a personal image. Now, it is common to find tearful pleas and angry rants that show each of us that our own resentment is not exceptional.

All that remains is for workers to join in solidarity by a common wish to smash the entire system through our shared struggle.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The youngest age cohort is currently the only with any broad class consciousness.

Older generations, the ones that endured the depression and fought the two wars on either side, were fiercely class conscious, entirely aware that the wealth of society that they were generating was being stolen by the greedy parasitic class of owners.

Ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, it was common, after finishing school, for someone enthusiastically to sell the entirety of one's being, body, mind, and all, to the corporate masters, imagining such enthusiasm as making oneself superior to peers, providing a guarantee to outpace all of them in the promotions and purchases that would mark the milestones of life.

The lies and mythology by now have become too obvious not to notice by anyone not already traumatized by the severest indoctrination and self delusion.

The system is unfair and unstable. Some workers trample other workers, only that we all may be trampled by our rulers, gratefully of course.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, as well as the whole Anti-Vietnam War movement, were both associated with Boomers ('63 would have had some young boomers), and were both heavily class conscious. I think on one hand you had industrialization as well as "strong unions" at this time, which Boomers took for granted as they entered the workforce. Simultaneously the institutions in the US were weeding out and destroying the notion of class in any analysis of public life and political economy. Within this context you get the neoliberal revolution in the 70s-80s, a bipartisan consensus towards the machine of the political economy, and then deindustrialization and the shift to service economy, which hollows out vast holes in the working class. In combination with the Taft-Hartley act the workers have no politics to address changing this political economic arrangement, and politics instead becomes focused on the things that are on the table, like culture war, identity politics, etc. We've been stuck on the train ever since, and even with the crisis of neoliberalism, the parts still function and our politics becomes this increasingly absurd spectacle focusing on cultural signifiers around the rotting corpse of the neoliberal consensus, leading towards doom.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

However, in 1963, the oldest Boomers were still not yet adult.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

9 to 5, for service and devotion. You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion. Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me. I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.

Yeap, best sang by Dolly.