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Essential Workers Honk Back
One of the posts I wrote that got the widest circulation was on what actually matters in a crisis. Instapundit and even Ace of Spades picked it up. Back then, people were really worried about the pandemic, other issues tended to fade into the background. All that mattered was surviving the virus, and our response to the virus.
Pretty rapidly, we were introduced to the concept of the “Essential Worker.” The Essential Worker had to be at work, no matter what. Critical infrastructure workers, health care workers, food supply chain including grocery stores, delivery drivers, and first responders. I was a second-tier essential worker, as I was around to support people researching the virus. There was a lot of gratitude for essential workers back then, when you could say “We’re all in this together” and get determined nods rather than eyerolls.
One of the main groups of essential workers was truck drivers. Quite simply, without truckers our supply chain is dead. Amazon is nothing without a freight fleet, and our economy and civilization would fall into disrepair as items pile up at railyards, docks, and factories. Right now, part of the supply chain nightmare is that truckers are in short supply. Around when I wrote the article above, truckers were finally getting some thanks. Even Justin Trudeau tweeted about thanking truckers for their hard work during the early pandemic.
A funny thing happened to the Non-Essential workers during the pandemic — they got to feel virtuous by staying home. This included a lot of government workers and even politicians. The lockdown was not so bad for them, and for many the promise of social control was too much to resist. Meanwhile, the essential workers were taking all the risks and working extra hours. Gratitude faded into entitlement, experts torched their credibility, and the lockdown dragged on.
Vaccine mandates combined with a lackluster vaccine took this standoff to a new level. The elite political class, which is about as far from essential as you can imagine, decided to crack down as opposed to actually persuading. Essential workers began to push back, and suddenly the contrast became clear. Essential workers realized they held the power in society. All they had to do was organize.
The Convoy is a cousin of the Tea Party in the US, a demonstration by civic-minded citizens mostly drawn from the middle class. It has the benefit of being backed by labor union tactics without the bureaucracy. Perhaps now that they hear the blaring of horns from miles of trucks, the non-essential workers will get off the road and out of the way of the essential workers that keep our economy moving.
Honk Honk!
Published in Domestic Policy
Your post was pitch perfect, an accurate assessment.
Unfortunately the quoted sentence is naive. The nonessential bureaucracy and tinpot dictators will double down on their tyranny. Notice the 10 year olds suspended from school for not wearing masks in school, even though courts ruled they could not be mandated. Watch government officials and MSM slander protesters as racists, fringe, terrorists, insurrectionists!
We have a long hard road ahead.
This essential worker has Gone Galt.
I fear it’s going to get worse – government-sanctioned violence against the truckers . . .
Age and gender are big factors in the Covid mania.
Yes, but as the back and forth goes, its nice to see our side putting some points on the board.
There is a big category missing here: not-entirely-essential small business owners. We never had a sense of being “all in this together,” either. At the close of the infamous “two weeks,” if not before, we knew that we were being screwed, and being set against each other is one of the worst results. Pretty sure most of us are cheering on the truckers, who, as you point out, have the means and have shown the ability to organize in an impressive way. I’m praying that the American truckers are able to manage a peaceful convoy. It will be an enormous undertaking.
Only two years ago:
Off topic but related to it:
We all wonder if the little protest steps we take will ever be joined by others and amount to anything, and we wonder if the people we are protesting will interpret our little protest steps correctly. We do them anyway in some kind of insane faith in how the world of people works.
I was really glad to see this story on my LinkedIn news page just now:
I’m sorry for the small investors who lost money, and I know that Facebook executives are turning themselves inside out to spin these numbers in a positive light.
But as one of the subscribers who quit a year or so ago over their shameful treatment of President Trump, I am glad to see that decline of half a million users (mere dust particles to Facebook, I know) registered somehow. :-)
Another point to consider: The truckers in the convoy must be mainly owner operators, which means that they are in a position to take independent action, although it must be costly to them privately (hence, I assume, the need for raising funds). They have are other important advantages, as well, such as the mobility and impressive size of their “workplaces” and probably the history in Europe of trucker and farmer strikes. Something about taking over our roads makes an impression. So in a way they are in a unique position. We have heard from other business owners—gym owners, salon owners, etc.—and have heard from doctors and nurses, who have also organized—but nothing on this scale. The rest of us are surely obligated to support their efforts in any way we can.
The Canadian conservative Tory party is taking notice and action. Perhaps the RINO squishes in America could learn a similar lesson…
They sacked their own moderate squish, O’Toole and replaced him with “firebrand Candice Bergen.”
Reactions!
I’m still coming to terms with Canada having their own Candice Bergen.
there is a resemblance
Caucus deliberations are strictly confidential, and I have no special insight into what went in to their decision to oust O’Toole, but if I was a betting man I would wager that the last straw might have been just before Christmas when the Leader’s Office whipped a vote on a bill banning “conversion therapy”.
It is a founding principle of the Conservative Party of Canada that we do not whip votes on “issues of moral conscience”. In fact, it’s item #10 (out of 172) of the Conservative Party’s Policy Declaration (the party’s permanent statement-of-principles that can only be amended by the party’s members at the National Convention, and which is different from campaign platforms that are ephemeral and are written by the election campaign team, and also different from the party’s constitution which is legally binding while the Policy Declaration technically isn’t).
We are the only party in the House of Commons that even tries to limit the Leader’s authority to whip votes. It’s pretty much the one thing that holds conservatives of different ideological stripes together in this very fractious coalition of ours.
Firstly, I dunno if I’d characterize her as a “firebrand”.
Secondly, she’s only the Interim Leader. The party’s membership will now have to elect a new Leader, and the Interim Leader isn’t eligible.
We were never all in this together. My eyes were rolling on day one because I knew this slogan was just cynical propaganda from the political class. The proof is that, the moment some essential workers decided they might not want to participate in Covid theater anymore, these once-celebrated heroes became racists, misogynists, and a threat to our democracy.
The political/managerial class just couldn’t wait to stab them in the back. Our rulers have no idea how the supply chain works and look down on all the ‘essential workers’ as the help. If there is any hope this foundering ship can be righted, it’ll be because everyone can now see this. The mask has slipped, and I don’t mean those dumb paper masks that were supposed to ward off the plague.
Honk, honk indeed.
On Wednesday evening, the CPC voted for firebrand Candice Bergen, former Deputy Leader of the party, to be the new interim leader of the CPC before members vote on a new permanent leader.
Chris Tomlinson, the author of the article named her that. She certainly seems more willing to confront Shedeau and support the Freedom Truckers.
What does it mean to whip votes? You’ve given us some hints, but could you provide more details?
One of the worst things we did in the early days of the pandemic was to buy into this idea of “essential” and “non-essential” workers. We should have rejected it immediately the moment it escaped some non-essential politician’s lips. Everyone’s work is essential, especially to the worker himself. But our elite class decided that since some were more equal than others, they could put large portions of people out of work or close down their businesses and we’d be okay with it.
That evil notion should never have been allowed out of the brain pan of the deluded elitist scum who came up with it.
But almost two years later I’m still hearing phrases like “essential worker” tossed about.
Reject it every time you hear it. I don’t care whose tender sensibilities you offend. Whoever dares use that phrase tell ’em to eff right off.
When the Leader tells you how to vote and you have to do it, otherwise you can be kicked out of caucus and you have to either sit as an independent or else cross the floor and join one of the other parties (if they’ll have you). Sitting as an independent almost always means that you don’t have a chance in heck of being re-elected.
I could agree if we limited it to private sector workers.
Correctamundo.
One of our local county sheriffs agrees with you in this video from about a year ago, in which he excoriates our hypocritical governor.
That helps. But does the Leader get to decide that all by his lonesome self?
They did up until the Reform Act of 2015. Now it requires a vote by caucus to expel a member. However, a strong Leader still has a lot of ways to retaliate against an MP that violates the will of the Leader’s Office. The Leader can refuse to sign the MP’s candidate nomination for the next election meaning they’d have to run as an independent, the Leader can take away the MP’s critic position (when the party is in opposition) or refuse to appoint the MP to a cabinet position (if the party becomes government), the Leader could threaten to leak damaging information about the member, etc. etc. etc.
Note that none of the Conservative MPs openly defied the Whip back in December, suggesting that O’Toole still wielded sufficient power at that time. (However, some of the MPs were conveniently away from the Chamber at the time of the vote, which is fine because it wasn’t a recorded vote so in the official record it’s still recorded as having been passed unanimously.)
Very interesting. Thank you.
Chicago teachers see themselves as essential workers who should not have to report in.
I can think of one famously snooty FB investor whose potential losses won’t exactly break my heart. I’m sure there were no losses though — some people are just too smart for that.
Haven’t you watched House of Cards? (British version — I’ve never watched the US version).
“No, no, no! I’m just a back-bencher!”
We have whips in the Senate and House as well, IIRC. Same idea. When the boss says JUMP, you jump.
Sigh.
Here’s the tl;dr version.
We don’t have fancy push-button voting in the House of Commons, so recorded votes are very time consuming.
The bill in question had already been passed in the previous parliament, but then Trudeau called an election and it died. After the election the government tabled a “new” bill that was identical, and asked for consent to treat it as having been passed since it was identical to the previous bill. A motion of this sort requires unanimous consent, so the Speaker asks if there’s unanimous consent and if nobody says “nay” then the Speaker declares the motion carried. No need for a time-consuming recorded vote, and no need for everybody to be in the Chamber for the vote.
If even one MP had yelled “nay” then the bill would have had to go through the whole process of being read three times, debated, examined in committee, voted on, sent to the Senate, read three times, examined in committee, voted on, sent back to the House, voted on, and finally sent to the Governor-General for Royal Assent.
It does mean that some day a “unanimous” vote will receive the consent of a member who dropped dead in his office while eating lunch.