At present, there are a lot of workers on strike or workers threatening strikes for better pay, better conditions, better hours and so on. This has somewhat been dubbed Striketober, though that appears to be mostly applied to strikes ongoing in the USA (the big ones right now are John Deere workers, Kellogg's, some health care workers and there was a narrowly-avoided strike by the iatse (though it's not clear if that deal is going through, it's currently tentative as far as I can tell).
Outside the USA, there was a general strike in South Korea involving half a million people with further action planned into the new year, port workers and school teachers in Congo are on strike, Scotrail workers and Glasgow's bin workers are going on strike during the COP26 summit to be held in Glasgow and I suspect there are a lot of strikes I'm missing out on.
Personally, I think this is all great. Workers everywhere and in every industry have been underpaid, overworked and not given sufficient respect or support for a long time. Worker safety has been an issue in many industries and the conditions do not seem to have been improving. All this even though worker productivity is always increasing, it's just been decoupled from wages and economic inequality has been increasing, including during the pandemic.
All workers deserve a fair wage, reasonable hours and working conditions that are both safe and not causing undue stress. If their employers won't give these things to them, then they should deprive their employers of their labour (imo).
But what do you all think?
