Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/10/sleeping-giants-r-us.html
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Here’s hoping the giant doesn’t hit the snooze button.
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I wish the ‘sleeping giant’ would stop being positive about turn out, it makes for lazy voters who think why bother voting if this giant is going to take care of it. Remember all the voters who didn’t’ vote in 2016 because there was no way Hilary wasn’t going to win?
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I don’t think the giant was ever sleeping. It was just ignored by the media. It would be interesting to investigate just why they bought the anti-union narrative in the 90s, but they sure did.
I think after decades of shrinking wages, the working class has begin to wake up to the fact that they’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires, that the deck is more and more stacked against them. If the ruling class was smart, they would get out the bread and circuses post haste. Give the workers maybe $12 an hour and mildly reformed Obamacare, and hope they go back to sleep.
But here, the 1% doesn’t really play the long game.
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Nice work, Missouri! This provides a blue-print for other states to push back on unwanted legislation in otherwise gerrymandered states.
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I wish the ‘sleeping giant’ would stop being negative about turn out, it makes for lazy voters who think why bother voting if there’s no chance of changing the status quo. Remember all the voters who literally never voted once because it’s meaningless and the outcome is predetermined?
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I’d love this and the teachers’ strikes to be the start of the rehabilitation of labour unions after 35 years of conservatives vilifying them as all being variations on the thuggish Hoffa-era Teamsters. Workers need to understand that strong and clean unions can preserve “the right to work” and then some.
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I hope it encourages more aggressive unions.
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I assume “they” means the media. It would be interesting to investigate, but I’d put early money on “because, owners”.
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Yes, that’s how pronouns work. And your answer is the usual one, and it’s probably mostly right, but I’ll bet the whole story is more complex and really interesting. But I Am Not A Labor Historian.
There was also a strong narrative about how abusive unions were of their employers. Basically, the story they spun was that unions leveraged their power to put 10 people on every single-person job, demanded excessive coffee breaks and bullied new employees into joining. This is why they call it “right to work” legislation. Obviously unions benefit employees, but as the disingenuous narrative goes, maybe not every employee wants to join the union. Because they trust the invisible hand to guide the employer’s decisions.
Like everything else coming out of the anti-human right wing of politics, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, is not based on precedent or credible research, and negatively impacts those who they duped into supporting it the most.
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You are probably perfectly correct and - even if that was the answer - the how and why of it, in a proper detailed account would likely be compelling. But I think the ‘answer’ will always be subjective. The investigator could not avoid bringing interpretative bias with them however hard they tried.
(Yeah, I was just checking re the pronoun operation as my knee-jerk, rut-deep thinking could not countenance why any investigation would come up with any other answer - from the bottom of my subjective rut’s perspective, that is - even though I recognised you would be unlikely to misuse a pronoun there.) 
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LOLwut…?
Yes. Actually, now I stop to think, and @Boundegar, one only needs to look at Murdoch with his UK papers and the Wapping saga to get a pretty good view of the how and why.
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Which bit?
Remember that election in 2016 that was in NO WAY influenced by deep pockets and foreign governments manipulating the Big Two social media platforms? Yeah, I don’t either, because it was. Why are people so insistent on turning a blind eye to that bit of social engineering? Are US voters more complacent than in other countries? Probably. But we are all being manipulated 24/7 by unheard of amounts of money, and weapons grade social/psychological manipulation. Let’s not forget all that gerrymandering combined with states that have in-person voting (an abomination at this point) and electronic voting (a double abomination). A lazy voter is a privileged voter.
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Thank you! I personally voted against this.
The Republicans tried to sabotage this initiative several times. That’s actually why it was on the primary election ballot and not the general election in November. They were hoping a lower voter turnout would allow Right to Work to pass. Luckily, their efforts failed. For some reason, the pro Right to Work forces didn’t try very hard to get people to vote for it. I saw “Vote No on Prop A” ads on tv all day, every day. I think I saw one ad for it. Perhaps they knew it would fail and decided to save their money for unseating Claire McCaskill. I am seeing a lot of anti McCaskill ads.
