Boss-napping

[Provost Harrison]

Would you have prefered the phrase "held hostage"? Does that make it more palatable?

So if it wasn't a kidnapping, how about an unlawful arrest? That's still a crime in most places.

Depriving your fellow citizen of their liberty and personal security (in this case, barricading them in an office) is not the behavior of a decent person. Trying to justify it by splitting hairs just makes you look like a jerk.

I'm not opposed to unions that serve a valid purpose. Workers that are mistreated have a right to organize and freely associate with one another. But organizing into a criminal conspiracy, in order to coerce management into giving you money is not a valid purpose. It's racketeering.

My main point with this was meant to be that the press was certainly sensationalising by using the term kidnapping. Granted, the method of barricading is a little dubious. I think the good old fashioned withdrawal of labour in the form of a strike is by far the best approach if the circumstances come down to it.

Sometimes I don't understand Europeans. I guess the fact that their continent has been ravaged with wars for so long that they just wanna live their life in content laziness.

Maybe that's why idiots like Provost come here advocating a welfare state and class warfare. They like to point fingers, like blaming this economic crisis on the rich people. Oh wait, don't they blame everything on the "rich" people?

You see, in America, we don't have class warfare. Everyone just minds their own business, most of the time, and lives their life. We don't need European intellectuals coming here to remind us to unionize and destroy our business.

But go ahead, enjoy your welfare state, sit in your appartment and suck on society's teet until you're old enough to retire. Rant and rave about the evils of capitalism, of wealthy people, of conservatives.. tell people to unionize, riot, murder.

Hey, it worked for you guys in the 1930s, right?

Eurotrash scum.

Perhaps before I report you for racism (who are you troll? Which one of our prolific DLers is behind you this time) perhaps we should go through what you have said. This very crisis is a result of the actions of the bubble caused by the gambles taken by the financial institutions of this planet (not country but internationally, and I think my own (UK) government has as big a part in that as the US before we start pointing fingers).

So what do you propose? Full control by industry and the corporation where no one has any choice but to acquiesce to their every whim? You see I am not taking the irrational position, I am saying that there needs to be a counter to the corporate powers. How on earth is allowing one group to have all the power unchecked going to lead to a balanced society? I state to you again, why does your beloved country have the ****tiest worker rights, shortest holidays and longest working hours in the Western world? And don't start going all "American dream" on me, that bullsh*t rhetoric doesn't work on us "Eurocommies". We don't think you are the be-all-and-end-all, contrary to what you lot like to think of yourselves.

Also I think you fail to understand my position too. I've worked for large corporations, one of them very large in fact. An utterly soul-destroying situation and somewhere I have no intention to go again. Constantly **** on, taken for a f**king mug and basically shafted because of the lack of collective bargaining which had been successfully eroded by the company. Because I work for a much smaller organisation, and thus I am actually an asset rather than another worker drone, I am actually valued. Alas not everyone has that privilege.

Now I have also reported your post to the administrators of this board because of the racism within it, and the fact I suspect you are a DL.

[Dauphin]

European isn't a race.

[Provost Harrison]

It is. It's a race between Germany, UK and France

[Az]

It seems rtwinger lost the debate for the capitalists.

[Asher]

There was no debate, actually.

There was che saying capitalists are "dispensable" and that to work is to be oppressed. There's no debate there, it's clear lunacy.

Regarding rtwinger, I wasn't aware anyone was reading his posts. I know I didn't.

[Az]

Didn't miss much.

[Arrian]

A gilded cage is still a cage.

Oy. Wage slave and all that eh? Please. ****ing self indulgent bull****.

You have rendered the word "slavery" meaningless with this ****. Well done!

The funny thing is I don't think any poster in this thread (discounting the obvious DL troll) is actually against the idea of workers organizing and negotiating a better deal (they may, in any given example, think unionization will fail to provide the desired effect in the long term, but that's another argument).

Finally, turning to the question of "the masters," seriously: any human society will develop an elite. Many members of that elite will be a-holes. The key is designing a society that gets as much from the *******s as possible, whilst limiting their shot at causing systemic failure and, at the same time, not trampling their human rights. I think it's obvious we haven't struck that perfect balance (and maybe we never will since that's a rather ideal situation). Communists have taken several shots at it and haven't done it either, for various reasons. I know the excuses, so save your keystrokes.

My main point is that if you are going to propose an alternative society, you've got to have a plan for dealing with society's ambitious types. Shooting them all doesn't solve anything, because a new generation will be born, and amongst them will be ambitious people. What are you going to do? Psych screen them and kill the "bad apples?" Create a new underclass of dangerous type As?

-Arrian

[Krill]

Do I have the right to not be oppressed by stupidity?

[The Mad Monk]

Che's easy acceptance of "oppressors" having no rights at all gave me a thought: It seems that all the "successful" communist revolutions all occured in cultures that never really had a tradition of individual rights to begin with.

Maybe that's why Agathon was so eager to put down the Founding Fathers' ideas as being 250 years old and outdated. Communism can't get a foothold where the concept of individual rights are still accepted.

[Asher]

That should be intuitive. It takes a special kind of idiot to give up the rights we are used to.

Why should I let someone else decide how I am to live my life?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle5974895.ece



The French.....

and how is it for the boss while being kidnapped by the workforce



please arrest me!

if they did this in UK we'd get fish and chips

[chequita guevara]

More Boss-napping

Caterpillar bosses held hostage

* Lizzy Davies in Paris
* April 2, 2009

FRENCH bosses were given a fresh reminder of the dangers facing them during the economic downturn this week as angry factory workers in Grenoble barricaded their offices and took four managers hostage.

Protesting against job losses and meagre redundancy payouts, local employees of the US firm Caterpillar decided to take matters into their own hands and locked their superiors inside the plant's management headquarters.

The latest in a surge of "bossnappings" across the country, the incident aimed to bring a more satisfactory conclusion to the recently announced round of blood-letting in which more than 700 workers are to be laid off.

"We are holding them in the director's office," Benoit Nicolas, a union official, said during the stunt, or sequestration, as it is known in France. The hostages included Nicolas Polutnick, the factory director, the head of human resources, and the head of personnel. "They are a little shocked," Mr Nicolas said.

The bossnapping was a clear sign of France's reawakening industrial restlessness amid the financial crisis.

Far from a one-off, the Caterpillar crisis was the third since last month. Last week the head of a factory run by the US chemicals giant 3M was held for 24 hours in a meeting room.

The chief executive of Sony France, Serge Foucher, had to spend the night in a conference room as workers blocked exits with tree trunks, demanding improved redundancy packages.

Bossnapping is regarded as the ace card played by a workforce at the end of its tether.

I'm sure more house-slaves will run to protest for their masters.

[Arrian]

[Velociryx]

Che's essays in this thread kinda remind me of lurking on peakoil.com

Every week, the world is ending and there's plenty of fresh evidence to prove it. The final collapse is right around the corner.

So it is with "The Revolution..."

-=Vel=-

[chequita guevara]

I'm too much of a pessimist to believe the revolution is right around the corner. Honestly, I think we're going to piss away our chance to have an advanced technological democratic socialist society, and that capitalism will pretty much destroy civilization. But there's always a chance.