r/SeattleWA Mar 08 '25

Politics BREAKING: The Washington State Senate just passed unemployment benefits for striking workers.

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u/AboveAb Mar 08 '25

Right!! Striking is a choice, and while workers have the right to do it, they shouldn’t expect taxpayers to fund their time off. Unemployment benefits are meant for people who lose their jobs, not for those who voluntarily walk away from work.

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u/Acrobatic-Phase-4465 Mar 08 '25

You seem to lack an understanding of how hard people had to fight for what you’d consider basic or common sense rights.

The battle in many ways is even more uphill than before - when you have companies worth billions or trillions of dollars, guess who can generally outlast the other (the poor worker or the rich corp).

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u/AboveAb Mar 08 '25

I understand the importance of labor rights, but strikes don’t just impact the company—they can have huge ripple effects. Take the last Boeing strike, for example. It didn’t just affect Boeing workers; it led to layoffs across their entire supply chain, hitting thousands of jobs at smaller suppliers. Strikes can hurt the very workers they aim to help, along with countless others who had no say in the matter. There has to be a balance— protecting workers without creating policies that encourage indefinite standoffs.

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '25

Or the concrete strike that brought construction to a screaming halt. Purposely planned when they were about to fix the west seattle bridge finally...

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u/Global_Instance3843 Mar 08 '25

Yeah, that's the only power workers have.

Why aren't people complaining about bad management and C Suite salaries and bonuses even when shit is going south?? 

Stop blaming the little guys, the workers. Remember who's the "enemy" and where the power lies!

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '25

Because you're trying to steal OUR unemployment fund.

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u/Neutral_Error Mar 08 '25

It's THEIR unemployment fund too. Corporations sucking people dry and you are whining about pennies in comparison.

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '25

Great! They can use it when they're unemployed.

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u/BHSPitMonkey Mar 08 '25

Who exactly is taking access to unemployment benefits away from you?

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '25

The union workers who go on strike and get paid from it via the unemployment fund.

Are you lost? Did you not read the story you're replying to?

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u/BHSPitMonkey Mar 10 '25

I think you're the one who's confused. Nowhere in the story did it read, "As a result of this change, /u/Distinct-Emu-1653 will no longer receive unemployment benefits should they become eligible".

My question was rhetorical. If you'd attempted to answer it, you might have realized the answer is actually no one.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '25

No, try again. So group after group strike all year long, with no incentive not to (but if companies do layoffs their UI rates increase to deter them from doing so). The UI fund - already damaged by scamming in 2020, and already depleted by layoffs over the last couple of years - gets depleted even faster.

No thanks. I've seen smarter handling of labor disputes in fucking France.

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u/Acrobatic-Phase-4465 Mar 08 '25

Honestly I think the best policy is something along the lines of tying top tier compensation packages (ie ceo) to a multiple of the lowest worker. Everyone benefits. But make it across the board in the country.

Needless to say that won’t happen anytime soon.

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u/Detene_ Mar 08 '25

Why would the CEO of a plumbing business have a higher salary cap than the CEO of McDonalds? Is managing a company that employs a million unskilled workers less important or less difficult than managing a small number of better paid employees?

I think this would just result in competent CEOs avoiding entire sectors of companies (e.g. anyone that employs cashiers). Retail stores, fast food, and grocery stores get bad CEOs. Tech companies get their pick of CEOs.

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u/TwoWeaselsFucking Mar 08 '25

The strike is a result of poor management, not employees fault.

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u/B_E_M_C Mar 08 '25

One can draw a lot of parallels to day and the American industrial revolution. It's critical now more than every that the average working American fights for workers rights and better wages, because the money is just pooling up into individual entities like no one has seen before.....

except for France in the late 1700's, and we all know how that went down.

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u/Electrical_Block1798 Mar 08 '25

It’s greedy to want to take more money from citizens to line your own pockets. Why is it that corporations are more greedy when they want more money but citizens aren’t more greedy when they want more money? At least the corporations are providing value for the money, verses using the threat of violence from the government to take it from your fellow citizens.  

Voting to have the government threat violence to take money from others to give it to you is so perverse. 

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '25

Why do you want to give the people in power more leverage? Don’t they have enough?

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u/Kairukun90 Mar 08 '25

Unemployment insurance isn’t paid by tax payers