For the past few months strikes have wrought havoc with the UK’s national infrastructure, and will likely continue to do so well into 2023. The run-up to Christmas saw postal strikes for the UK’s Royal Mail service.
Throughout the second half of 2022, transport strikes were routine. There’s one happening today that has effectively shut down all train journeys.
There’s a possibility of a teachers’ strike later this month, that would see kids sent home from school. Nurses went on strike in December, and will likely do so again this month
It’s not just the UK either. Strikes in several sectors took place all across Western Europe in December and into early January so far. New York’s nurses are ready to go on strike next week, and Minnesota nurses only narrowly avoided a strike last month. It was only Joe Biden’s presidential overreach that prevented a nation-wide rail workers’ strike just before Christmas.
A google trends search for the terms “strike” or “industrial action” have seen surging interest worldwide in the last few months. An admittedly crude measure, but certainly not meaningless.
Strikes are suddenly becoming a high profile global phenomenon. Given the economic hardships currently being imposed this is not surprising of course.
Corporations price fix and cut costs at every turn, and wages have stagnated for decades while profits soar. No wonder workers and their representatives are trying to redress this balance in any way they can. But in the New Normal world, what does that mean? And is it possible this perfectly just cause is being manipulated into furthering the great reset agenda?
After all the Union model has a clear disadvantage in the current situation: It is built on the underlying assumption that bosses want their workers to work. But post-scamdemic is this any longer reliably the case? For almost three years we have seen the vast majority of the corporate-political structure dedicated to stopping workers from working.
Covid and “lockdowns” have demonstrated that the establishment wants to:
- Stop people travelling
- Stop people working
- Breakdown healthcare and medical services
- Cripple supply chains
- Increase the cost of living
- Generally ruin the economy
Governments around the world have shown us they want stagnation, disruption and misery. However just the cause, it’s also true that strikes further almost all of these goals. And of course they can easily be created by leveraging workers through inflation & price hikes into taking industrial action just to preserve a living wage.
There’s also the handy bonus of shifting the blame at the same time. Just as the appalling state of the economy was blamed on the war in Ukraine in 2022, it will be blamed on striking unions in 2023.
Another reason for repeating the mantra: “the system is broken, we need a new way of doing things.”
…and then, of course, comes another step toward the Great Reset.
What that specifically means in this instance is not yet clear, although some kind of Universal Basic Income system seems likely (it’s in the zeitgeist right now, as we predicted in our This Year in the New Normal post).
Maybe more “public” ownership of utilities, or perhaps new legislation for a state-backed employment mandate where the unemployed are given digital busywork to do from home, like a cyber work camp.
In the UK at least we won’t know for sure until we have a Labour government installed to “save the day”. Other “resets” could include higher “benefits” that accompany some kind of agreement to not unionise and never go on strike. A proto-social credit system.
It might be sold as “the end of the need to strike”, and everyone will celebrate the new law that makes striking illegal, while anyone who points out the further reduction of our rights will be called old-fashioned and, of course, a “conspiracy theorist”.
“We don’t need strikes with the new way of doing things, and people that want to go on strike will ruin it for everyone else,” could so easily be the line touted by all the usual suspects.
That’s just speculation, of course. One possible future. Other knock-on effects could play a role in the GR as well. For example, if corporations are “forced” to increase their pay rates, they will naturally increase their prices to preserve profit margins – meaning strikes can be directly parlayed into exacerbating the cost of living crisis, even as they are called a “victory” for working people.
Or maybe nursing strikes will mean we “lose control of the Covid situation”, and have to endure a new wave of masks and lockdowns.
We can’t be sure what the exact next steps will be, but we can be aware of the high likelihood this current wave of “worker unrest” is being manipulated to further the aims of the globalist narrative-makers, that the government-corporate-union trifecta will guarantee strikes continue, and that it’s playing an important part in shaping our new normal future.
Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.
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