From Infidel753:
Congress is near-paralyzed due to the filibuster and tiny Democratic majorities, but that doesn't mean the people are. They are taking action on their own while the government stumbles.
As the pandemic winds down and bosses try to drag home workers back to the office and re-assert the old model of shitty pay and shitty working conditions, workers are quitting in unprecedented numbers. It's becoming a cliché that service-sector businesses can't get people to come and work for them — unless they offer decent wages for a change. Republican state governments have been cutting unemployment benefits in an effort to force their serfs to give in and submit to the re-shittyization of the economy, but it isn't working.
As for those white-collar workers who have been working from home for a year, I've been saying all along that companies which try to drag them back to offices will wind up at a huge competitive disadvantage — they'll lose their best workers to other companies which continue to allow work from home. Now that some workers are indeed being dragged back, they're coming to realize just how awful the misery of commuting and spending all day in an office really was. They know they can do their jobs from home as well or better. They know there's no valid reason for forcing them back to the office. They know the supposed justifications are just squid-ink for the bosses' desperate control-freakery. They're going to start looking for something better. People are already quitting rather than give in.
When NPR did a story about "the great office return", they managed to find someone to quote who said that "businesses have a civic duty to bring workers back". He's an executive of a company that leases out office space to other companies.
Since our country has no major political party which is explicitly committed to the class struggle, and the structure of our government allows the Republicans to block the Democrats from doing even as much as they wish to do, that struggle must be waged by the workers themselves. If Congress won't bring our minimum wage into line with that of other developed nations, the workers themselves will do it by refusing to work for shitty pay any more. If the government won't defend our right to keep working from home instead of commuting (a zero-cost contribution to the fight against global warming, on top of everything else), then we ourselves will defend that right, by refusing to settle for anything less. And given time, who knows what else working people will be able to achieve once these changes help them realize their power? I've said before that this pandemic may ultimately be remembered as a catalyst for social progress.
Oh, and over time our people are developing a more favorable view of socialism and a less favorable view of capitalism—and this is especially true among younger people.
Be afraid, fuckers, be very afraid. We're on to you, and things are going to change around here, big time.
I know that I am not happy about being called back into the office every other day.
"There's something obscenely American about refusing a vaccine that millions around the world are desperate to get." ~ George Takei
