How To Support a Labor Strike with 3 Simple Steps

Today is a momentous day, dear readers! For today I’m using ~*current events*~ to teach you a relevant thing about the world. Instead of pulling it straight out of the depths of my own ass, like usual. You’re welcome!

The employees of King Soopers—one of the largest grocery store chains in Colorado, and my personal neighborhood grocery store—just went on strike and won. And while the actual labor strike itself only lasted a total of ten days, it was a textbook example of the genre. From the workers’ motivations, to the company’s reaction, to the negotiations, to the community support, we hit every step in the classic life cycle of a strike.

And much like the Krebs Cycle, it was orderly, justified, and important to all life on earth. I’m proud that I could contribute to the labor strike in a tiny way, as a supportive consumer. Let me show you just how so you too can enjoy the smugness of supporting a labor strike!

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Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less

Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less

There’s a short story by Ursula K. LeGuin called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. With apologies to the late, great author, I want to summarize it here:

In the city of Omelas, everyone is deliriously happy. The people eat well, drink well, and party all the time. There’s no sickness, no pain, and the weather’s always perfect. It’s a utopia. Everyone has everything they could possibly want or need.

Well, almost everyone. For deep in the heart of Omelas is a dark, damp, cold room. And in this room is a child: unwashed, starved, uneducated, and treated cruelly. They don’t have a name, a family, clothes, or a clue as to why they’re kept in horrible conditions.

Everyone in Omelas is taken to see the child once in their lifetimes. They’re made to understand that, somehow, all the glorious happiness of Omelas relies on this one person’s suffering. As long as this child suffers, everyone else in Omelas will thrive.

And it’s then that the individuals of Omelas make a choice: to stay in Omelas, content in the knowledge that their comfort and happiness relies on the misery of another; or to leave, to opt out, to go somewhere that might not be as perfect as Omelas, but where they can live without exploiting another for their own gain.

The ethical choice is, of course, to walk away from Omelas. It’s a fable for modern times.

We live in a world where so much of our lifestyles, our wealth, relies on exploitation. Animals live short, brutish lives on factory farms so we can eat meat from the supermarket. Carbon emissions slowly damage the climate to devastating effect so we can drive cars and ride airplanes. Children work twelve-hour work days in sweatshops so we can browse a closet full of fashionable clothes and still say “I have nothing to wear.”

The way we consume—food, clothing, electronics, everything—is, all too often, pretty fucking unethical.

Now here’s a gif of a doggo hanging out with some baby chicks because that shit just got real fucking dark!

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