it's challenging to make principled arguments about what kind of behavior should constitute a fireable offense when you're discussing an industry where gaining five pounds or experiencing the passage of time as a woman constitutes a fireable offense

so much of the discourse around "cancel culture" and censorship in the US right now revolves around employment in certain prestigious sectors, and it's incredibly fraught because employment in the US is incredibly precarious and also one of the only avenues to access healthcare

it's difficult to criticize anyone on this platform without people assuming that you are calling for their firing. and institutions/companies have consistently failed at coming up with any kind of response to criticism besides firing people at the first sign of public pressure

personally i love to criticize shit, and i think there is value in making principled critiques of people with access to power, but i am almost always against *firing* people, and i don't think i have ever called for anyone to be fired

but the unfortunate dynamic between twitter outrage cycles and defensive corporate/institutional ass-covering mean that even participating in public criticism without the intent to take away someone's livelihood or healthcare is basically impossible

meanwhile, we're seeing move by people on the right to co-opt the rhetoric of the labor movement and solidarity in order to defend bigotry in the workplace, a new form of gotcha attack primarily from people who are absolutely anti-union

these are bad faith attacks from people who don't care about solidarity and have no experience with it in practice, but they do speak to a difficult dynamic in unions that is certainly nothing new, but also something that remains a challenge.

to wit: not all abuse comes from management. some of it comes from other workers. and unions have to balance protecting, women workers from sexual harassing workers, or poc workers from racist workers. historically, US unions have not always done the best job of that

doing that will require a much more nuanced understanding of our rights in the workplace, both to be employed and to not be abused, and (seriously, don't we all wish) severing the connection between employment and healthcare