A lot of people I know exist outside of the world of unionization. Though there is a massive freelancer union, few people I know are members. Virtually none of my friends who work in tech are unionized. And academics, well, ironically enough? Eh.

But then my family, who are not well-off, work in retail and healthcare service industries where unionization has struggled to get a foothold for years. Companies like Walmart and Target employ notorious anti-labor practices to suppress worker organization, effectively firing anyone who even says the word union on store property. They lobby the government in a constant effort to sabotage labor law. They force all new hires to watch an anti-union propaganda video before they are allowed to interact with other employees. Just last month, Walmart admitted to hiring Lockheed Fucking Martin to spy on its employees’ social media so they would know who to fire:

Lockheed, a major defense contractor, provided the retailer intelligence gathering for surveillance of employees to stay on top of any efforts to organize workers or disrupt business in 2012, just before planned Black Friday protests by a group called OUR Walmart, the report claims. OUR Walmart advocates for higher wages for Walmart employees, among other demands…Lockheed’s team…monitored employees’ social media feeds to keep an eye on planned protests. Bloomberg reviewed hundreds of pages worth of pages of emails, transcripts, and other documents ahead of a National Labor Relations Board hearing into allegations that Walmart retaliated against employees who protested against the retailer in June 2013. (source)

Yeah because we live in a nation where this kind of antidemocratic bullshit is tolerated.

And part of the reason it is tolerated is because the American people aren’t saying it’s bullshit loud enough.

There is no good reason employees should have to live in the terror of getting fired because they engage in public discourse about labor protections.

Do you hear how maddening that sounds?

Can you imagine living under such fear? To not be able to fucking tweet the goddamn hashtag #fightfor15 without fear that Lockheed Martin is going to report you to your boss so your kids can go hungry?

What kind of fucking Orwellian hellscape are we living in?

Maybe you have a nice job and labor protections aren’t the first thing on your mind when you go to work in the morning, but we live in a country where most people’s jobs are garbage, where you can be fired for practically any bullshit reason, like tweeting #fightfor15.

While it’s (probably) not your fault that American jobs are awful, the fact that you never think about bullshit jobs to begin with is part of the problem.

(But honestly, even if you’re a complete asshole and don’t care about poor people at all, I think it’s pretty important for me here to underline this related point: it should make you fucking uncomfortable as an American citizen when Walmart contracts a military subcontractor to spy on domestic civilians. I mean just chew on those implications for five minutes before you go back to being an asshole who doesn’t care about poor people.)

I know there are no Walmarts in San Francisco. There are no Walmarts in Boston, New York, or Seattle. Most of my friends have not been in Walmarts for years. We hate Walmart, right? Team Fuck Walmart 100%. But when we stop thinking about Walmart because we never shop there, it’s not in our daily tasklist to think about how America’s #1 largest employer is abetted by military-grade expertise in legally stifling the political discourse of American citizens.

This should absolutely be on our minds, every day as we ourselves go to our jobs. This is what we, as citizens, no matter what industry we are employed in, need to be talking about when we think about what kind of America we want to live in. We need to be thinking about the most vulnerable in our labor force and the conditions with which they are being treated if we want to fight inequality. We can’t put it off for later or — fuck — leave it to Hillary Clinton to think about a solution for us. (I mean for fuck’s sake, Hillary Clinton sat on Walmart’s god damned board of directors at the exact time they first started dreaming up all these bullshit anti-union tactics.)

We need to cultivate some civic empathy really fast, America.

It costs you nothing to start thinking more about how the vast majority of Americans are getting through their days. My heart breaks when I watch shitheads like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio talk about the poor and working-class like they aren’t listening, because they aren’t worth thinking about in their garbage vision of a greater America except as a public resource they can sell off to the Koch Brothers.

It sickens me that we have not, in an age of such epic inequality, centered our collective attention to our most vulnerable children.

I want a better future and we’re not getting there fast enough, America.

If you’re with me here, you know that a major reason why Walmart gets away with the shit it does is because the most powerful workers in America aren’t thinking about Walmart. It’s not on our minds. It’s not in our discourse. And as such, we are complicit.

So are you ready for my one weird trick?

Start talking about Walmart.

Please start talking about the labor movement again. People need to speak to make a discourse.

Make it a point tomorrow to start reading about #fightfor15 and labor movements like the IWW.

Start thinking about how you can help your friends think about unionization, because even if you yourself don’t feel like you need a union, you probably know people who do. America is a big country with a lot of fucking bad jobs. (If you don’t have any friends with shit jobs, then you’re probably a classist asshole. Good job.)

People think talk is cheap, I know. That talk doesn’t do anything. But I know this one weird trick about history: talk has started every Revolution there’s ever been.