If a 2M employee return to work order is declared soon, I could see us in the US finding ourselves with tent cities full of white collar workers.
Possibly with tents numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands. And that became such a halting thought that I forgot to rinse the shampoo out of my hair.
Good. But not for the reason you think.
White collar workers are workers. They just don't realize it. Yet.
American Federation of Government Employees membership has increased dramatically. Fucking with every federal employee makes for a stronger union.
Unions fight back.
AFGE does not fight back unless there is a political statement to be made. I was hired as a federal employee in 2023 and endured 6 months of rights violations, gaslighting from management, and incompetence from HR. When I made complaints, I was shitcanned. When I went to the union, I was told that they had no representation since the last president of the local resigned in 2022. I was told "arbitrations are expensive" when I filed grievances that the union refused to back. I was told "probationary employees have no rights" despite my union contract very much specifying otherwise. The ONLY reason AFGE is getting off its ass now is because AFGE as an organization is being threatened. They don't care about their union members. They only care about their own fucking paycheck.
Take a minute to look through all the photos of hoovervilles. Tens of thousands of people in tents, often with the apartments they were evicted from and the factories closed or running at a fraction of capacity within a few hundred yards in the background.
How would you explain to aliens why tens of thousands of people in every city were driven from their homes, which were left empty, to live in squalor while being prevented from doing anything productive?
The thing about history is if you don't want your name associated with homeless Trump Towns in every city in America, maybe don't take a healthy economy and run it into the ground. Maybe don't let a PE hack who has never built anything like Tom Krause near the institutions the American people rely on.
https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/hoovervilles
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/
Ah yes, 2025: the year that the shantytown returned to the US
In the UK they sometimes just confiscate their tents to make the problem go away
Confiscate? They are getting it back at some point? Because in Montreal and North America in general, the police just treat homeless people's stuff like radioactive trash. They just clear the place with machinery and put all the stuff in a trash container.
Some homeless people here have lost ID cards and important documents because once the police decides the camp is gone, the homeless can't go back to get their stuff. It's just all going to the dump, with everything inside.
They definitely do this in the US as well… problem solved! 🙃
This is my tent
and this is my investment tent
I also have a vacation tent down by the (polluted) river.
I better invest in Coleman and the North face, I hear they are due for a boon soon
I don't think North face tents are in the price bracket for homeless folks...
i don’t understand. why?
Isnt the point of these things to get people to quit?
