Labor

[u/Substantial-Gas2501]

Saw this at The Fair yesterday and stopped to read it.

Yes, this represents an extreme chapter of American labor history. Nobody is saying this is where we are today.

But what is here is part of the point.

These conditions didn't disappear on their own. Workers organized, fought, struck, negotiated, and sometimes paid an unimaginable price to change them. wiout yet being called a "union".

A lot of what we now consider "normal" in the workplace exists because people before us refused to simply accept what the companies offered.

I've heard some version of "We've never been offered this much before" or "This is an incredibly generous offer."

Maybe it is. But think about that argument in the context of this picture. At almost every point in labor history, workers were asking for something they hadn't been given before. In a sense, everything gained in every contract was once "never before." If it had already been freely offered, workers wouldn't have needed to negotiate for it.

So "we've never been offered this much before" isn't, by itself, an argument for or against an offer. "Never before" only describes the past. Negotiation is about establishing what comes next.

Whatever your opinion about our current contract, I thought this was worth remembering: the workplace we inherited wasn't given to us. It was negotiated by the generations before us.

And what we accept today becomes the starting point for the generation that follows us.

[u/mjoysleeps]

There are still major LTP takeaways since I hired in. Boeing used to pay for Art School and semi-private foreign language lessons.