Would you let your friends be cashiers?
Would you try to organize cashiers? Would you try to organize other retail workers?
Would you work together with groups that try to unionize cashiers? Would you work together with groups that argue cashiers are cops and thus shouldn't be part of the socialist movement? If not what is the correct political response (engage with the group online/ engage in physical space in discussions with the group/continue organizing cashiers or retail workers).
Are cashiers part of the working class?
If cashiers are fine, who and what is the problem here?
Does your answers change depending on whether the cashiers are working a register tallying up food prices, cinema tickets, swimming pool tickets or park/museum entries?
Please be nice and remember the no sectarian rule. This post is mostly to highlight some contradictions and tensions in real existing capitalism and your social and friend sphere. It might also highlight classism that unhoused or neurodivergent or poc comrades might be able to highlight.
Link not related.
Why can't people ever ask better are X cops questions like:
Are park rangers cops?
Are animal control officers cops?
Are HR workers cops?
Are soldiers cops?
Are construction workers who bulldoze homeless tents cops?
Are mall security cops?
Are people who work for child services cops?
Are workers who work in prison-industrial complex-adjacent industries cops?
Are IT techs who work for the police department cops?
Are secretaries who handle the press on behalf of DAs cops?
Good question. If we look for example in Johannesburg in the late 80s and early 90s and the park rangers who were tasked with patrolling the public parks the answer is: for some parks mostly yes. The task of keeping the park up was done by - often black - labourers, with white over seers and the black public was excluded from some "public" parks.
The job was then in part furthering the Apartheid regime. Of course you could argue that executing a function that cops also execute doesn't mean being a cop, but it does highlight the tension of how racist structures exist in capitalist societies and how structural discrimination (paradoxically) can be channeled and executed by individuals as part of their regular job, even if their focus is on something different.
Having to work to subsist in principle is true for park rangers, though, but it is the same for cops, so what is the difference and what is the similarity? How did Marx use dialectics to analyze cops as class?
This is something you ought to as our :vegan: and animal liberation friends.
However lets take a look at 1933-1945 Germany. The Nazis did introduce under the guise of "animal rights" laws with the expressed aim to discriminate against Jews (and others). The animal control officers did focus not just structural but encompassing so called enemies of the regime. So in what way do your animal control officers differ?
Also: Ask an unhoused comrade whose dog was taken away from animal control how they see those "officers".
That is a good question. Looking especially at "labour relations" HR experts you might get an interesting answer.
However the point for the post was that people interact with cashiers and they are a good, example as the answer is more or less clear, but the criteria can be used on the jobs you mention, too.
Someone I know was hired in doing IT for the control facilities of a prison, so ensuring that the cameras work, the doors lock, the computer screens work, the network is set up, the users got the "correct rights" etc. Is he a cop or just "doing his job"?