Luke. February 2038. Seattle, Cascadia Megacity, Cascadia Free State.
The general strike of 2038 can be seen, in hindsight, as the last true battle between organized labor and the government of the former states of Washington and Oregon, now known as the Cascadia Free State. At the time, the strike was seen as a way to pressure the government into reversing the de-organization of the Ports of Seattle and Portland and the replacement of most clerks and all delivery workers employed by delivery services within the Free State with artificial intelligence-driven machines.
The reaction of the government to the strike was decisive and swift. Spearheaded by the corporate Progress and Liberty, or more accurately, the Profit and Loss Party supermajority in the national parliament in the then-downtown of Olympia, the Party used their dominance of all media channels within the fledgling nation to cast striking workers as terrorists, even going so far as to plan and execute false flag operations to discredit the organized labor movement. Workers who demonstrated found themselves banned from the national citizenship rolls and from all legitimate housing and employment sources, and the remaining politicians in the old Democratic Party were exiled from government under sedition charges for providing tepid moral support to the effort, while the remaining Republicans from the rural Eastern sections of the country either quickly retired or joined P&L in exchange for non-voting stock in one or more of the major corporations which sponsor the Party.
While the Cascadia Free State hasn’t repealed laws allowing for union formation in the years since, no major corporation or any of their subsidiaries are unionized, and this author believes that union drives among smaller businesses have historically been orchestrated and used by the corporate oligopoly which rules from Heaven One Tower to destabilize those businesses and prepare them for acquisition via hostile takeover.
* The Fall of Organized Labor, from the Free History of Cascadia. Author unknown, sourced from the Dark Web. Warning: possession of this material without corporate clearance is a capital crime against the Free State. Penalties for possession include null-status revocation of citizenship and deportation.
Lucas - Luke to his friends - was tired. Yesterday was a grueling 14-hour delivery shift in downtown Seattle, when he had finished his postal route and picked up a pivot route for a worker who had called in sick. After all that, he got back to the office and saw a notice posted on the wall advising employees of the former United States Postal Service that the assets of the holding company which controlled those operations had been purchased by United Delivery Solutions. All employees, except for a few junior clerks without seniority, were to be replaced within two months by UDS-operated courier machines. Overtime was cancelled retroactively, and any protests would be met with immediate termination.
His union steward - a clerk named Samantha, who had been working at the same office for thirty five years - was sitting on the steps outside the office and had met him with a grim, angry expression on her face. She explained to him that the CPWU, a union formed from the merger of the Cascadian branches of the old APWU, NALC, and NRLCA postal worker unions, was going to take a stand, and to meet her on the steps of City Hall at 8 AM.
Luke didn’t have anything better to do, so he had agreed. He threw on his vintage letter carrier jacket, cleaned out his locker, and headed home to the apartment he’d rented in the megabuilding near his work.
Sarah had met him at the door. His girlfriend had a bottle of whiskey in hand, tears running down her face, and a scared look in her eyes. The television behind her showed a scene of protesting at the Capitol Building, with the script scrolling at the bottom mentioning a “Terrorist Threat from Union Workers” and a police car on fire.
They talked all night. Yes, he’d arrived back home after 8 PM, and he’d been at work at 6 AM. But there was so much to plan. Sarah had lost her job at one of the last small grocery stores near downtown when the land had been purchased by a megacity developer, and they’d relied solely on his union income for their bills.
She didn’t want him to go to City Hall. But Lucas had always been stubborn, and told her that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, knowing that he’d just let UDS destroy everything they were trying to build together. They’d only been living together for six months, but had known each other for five years, and he’d been trying to work up the courage to ask her to marry him. Luke was damned if he would ask that without an income to support the family he wanted to build.
So, at 7:35 AM, with two days of stubble on his face and red-rimmed eyes which looked like he had been staring into the abyss for a year, he got into a robotaxi for the trip to City Hall. He had a sign, but it didn’t really matter to him what was on that sign. Something about fair pay for fair work. A CPWU courier had left it outside his door. He’d wave it, because he didn’t have anything else he could do, and he had to do something.
When the rickety, 20 year old retrofitted Chevrolet had rolled up to the police barricades, he knew something was wrong. Luke knew some of the cops on the beat in the area, and none of them were around. They’d all been replaced by large, hard-eyed people who looked like they’d seen recent military service and were fully outfitted in riot control gear, with batons at their belts and rifles on their backs.
But the police barricades were open, at least for now, and Lucas walked past those hard-eyed officers towards his steward. He’d texted Samantha that he was on his way.
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“Luke! You showed!” Samantha exclaimed, jogging over with a big smile on her face and bags under her eyes.
“Yeah, Sam. I saw what they were saying about us on the news. But I’m too stupid to stay away. So, I’m here, at least until we can’t be.” Luke replied in a weary voice.
Samantha clapped him on the shoulder. “Luke, it’s not as bad as you think. The Longshoremen are here with us from the Port, and even some police who were ‘sick’ today have decided to show up. We have the numbers. There’s nothing they can do to shut us up this time.”
Samantha was often like this. A well-built woman in her late fifties, she'd persisted as a union steward and clerk through several Presidential administrations, financial instability in the Post Office, political tumult in Washington State, and even the recent collapse of the United States government. She was one of the only people he knew in the former USPS who had maintained her optimism for all that time, and he knew she could have retired with a full government pension at any time.
Luke, of course, wasn’t so sure that everything would be okay. “Sam, I’m here because of everything the Union has done for me in the last fifteen years. I’ll do my bit. Just don’t blow smoke up my ass. You’re older than I am, and I’ve got no damn idea where you get the energy for optimism with everything Profit and Loss has done to this fucking country. It’s all going to shit, and some days, I think of just walking into the rainforest and living like a hermit until I’m eaten by those damn aliens.”
Samantha’s grin slipped, a bit of her inner fear squeaking through. “I know what you mean, brother, but we can only do what we can do. I think it’ll be enough. God knows, I hope it’s enough.”
“Sam, you keep praying, and maybe I’ll believe in what you’re selling if a Samurai joins the picket line with us” he replied, in a voice which sounded like it came from the bottom of a pit of despair. His friend and steward squeezed his shoulder with a firm hand, nodded, and jogged off to meet another new arrival.
Luke looked around him. The strikers were congregated in the street outside of Seattle’s modern city hall, a building of glass and steel which had been built in 2005. They were marching up the external stairs to the second floor, yelling slogans and curses at a line of riot police - or mercenaries? - who blocked the exit from the stairway. He saw, with pride, that organized labor packed the street for two blocks in all directions and formed lines opposing the cops at the barricades.
“Well, nothing for it” Luke said, grabbing his sign and heading towards a group of burly longshoremen. He hoped that if those goons dressed as cops were taken off the leash, he’d at least be able to hide behind men who spent all day unloading container ships.
Luke knew that there were other demonstrations peppering the entire megacity. Hell, the city had ground to a stop, with all the people marching and disrupting traffic. P&L and the Corporate Council had gone too far, finally nationalizing the Ports of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and Aberdeen on the same day that they’d approved UDS’s long-awaited takeover of the old post office system. Millions across the state, all good union workers promised pensions and fair pay for fair work, were going to be out of their jobs soon. He knew that there was no place for them in the new office economy their corporate overlords were building.
Sam was right, in a way, even if Luke knew it was all going to go to shit. The Western urban areas of the fledgling nation had been flooded by massive groups of people fleeing the effects of rampant climate change in the drier, now completely dry, Eastern half beyond the Cascade Mountains. The fighting in Idaho and Montana didn't help, as ad-hoc militias flying the old US flag battled corporate mercenaries for control of the natural resources over there. Everything had gone to hell, and this was their best chance to fight for a future which wasn’t just sitting in an office all day and managing company business with makework jobs. Either enough people were pissed off and willing to do something about it, or they were all screwed, and there wasn’t much of an in between.
Lost in his thoughts, Luke put his brain on autopilot, marching and chanting slogans with workers from a half dozen different unions in front of the cops. He didn’t even know if they were listening. The damn cops had hard helmets covering their ears, so for all he knew, their fancy corporate augs were filtering out the protestors.
And so it went. Luke marched. He chanted until his raw throat felt like it was going to bleed, and then kept going. Rain started drizzling down, a common sight in wet Seattle, and he saw umbrellas replace some of the signs. But most of them stayed up. If you worked outside during a Seattle winter, you either realized that you didn’t melt, or you took a job inside.
Luke’s thoughts about the weather and the futility of it all were interrupted by a blast from behind him, followed by screams. Frantic, he glanced backwards at City Hall, only to see what looked to him like black-masked people with a fist emblazoned on their shirts toss small objects towards the building, which already had smoke billowing out of the ground floor. More blasts rocked the square, and pro-union protesters started rushing off the bridge and away from the building.
But they weren’t fast enough. Horrified, Luke dropped his sign and sat down on the wet asphalt, hugging his knees to his chest, as his shocked eyes saw one of the attackers in black being tripped by a large man in a 1980’s vintage letter carrier jacket. She had a bomb in her hand, larger than the others, and she screamed in genuine fear as she fell towards the ground.
The package in her hand dropped. It was about the size of a basketball. Luke thought that it was so odd, how much fuss could come in such small packages. She'd been standing at the base of the stairs near an unremarkable box truck manned by other black-clad people, who Luke assumed were also agent provocateurs.
The stairs vanished behind a concussive wave he felt in his chest from a block away, and Luke fell onto his back, staring at the sky. He couldn’t hear anything but ringing in his ears or feel much at all, other than a sharp pain and a trickle coming from both of them.
Luke brought his right hand up to cup his ear, trying to block out the ringing, and felt something warm and wet which didn’t feel like rain. Bringing his hand in front of his face, he saw blood covering his hand, just as the form of one of the corporate goons in riot gear he’d been demonstrating in front of moved into his vision, police baton in hand.
“That’s not good,” Luke thought, as the baton descended towards his head. “I’m leaking.”
And then the world went black.