When there was no more bread, the workers flooded out of their factories and into the streets of Petrograd, staring down the czar and braving the guns of his army.
When there was a right to work provision included in their contracts, writers at the liberal leaning Slate turned off their messaging app. For an hour.
That’s right, those workers of an increasingly insulated world united by going out of pocket for a whole sixty minutes.
THREAD: 1/ Today, Slate’s union is conducting an hour-long Slack strike to express our unity and commitment to what we’re asking for at the table. We feel these asks are essential to the wellbeing of our workplace.
— Slate Union (@SlateUnion) November 16, 2018
The new democratic socialists could use some heroic realism. The millennial revolutionaries who pay their dues to the Slate Union just don’t have the same fire in the belly as their labor forebears. But they have managed to heighten the contradictions.
The whole thing was completely uninspiring. Even a picket line would have been more interesting and hardly much of a sacrifice on a sunny, almost-balmy 50-degree afternoon in Washington, D.C. Instead, the Slate Union decided to knock off work for about as long as it takes to watch an episode of “Game of Thrones.” What’s more, they did it on a Friday when the news is slow and editors are heading out early anyway.
Way to go comrades, that’ll show ‘em!
But the whole thing was not a complete waste. The time-theft stunt reveals how poorly this sense of labor entitlement works in journalism. The news needs to be covered, and no one who would skip a story to go on strike really belongs in the business. Which is exactly what this ridiculous not-really-a-strike demonstrates.
