Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 786-788

But even when I quit
the numbers of the minutes and hours from this shift
stick with me: I can look at a clock some morning
months afterwards, and see it is 20 minutes to 9
—that is, if I'm ever out of bed that early--
and the automatic computer in my head
starts to type out: 20 minutes to 9, that means
30 minutes to work after 9: you are
50 minutes from the break; 50 minutes
of work, and it is only morning, and it is only
Monday, you poor dumb bastard....

Tom Wayman
Factory Time

More Americans said they struggled to buy food in 2011 than in any year since the financial crisis, according to a recent report from the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit research group. About 18.6 percent of people -- almost one out of every five -- told Gallup pollsters that they couldn't always afford to feed everyone in their family in 2011.

One might assume that number got smaller wrapped up with the national unemployment rate falling for several consecutive months. In actuality, the reverse proved true: the number of people who said they couldn't afford food just kept rising and rising.
Growing Number Of Americans Can't Afford Food, Study Finds
Alexander Eichler

Huffpost Business Canada

We prefer to stay good, obedient children of the Kindergarten who rather do dare to cry without end, than to become adults who can feel the endless injustice they had to endure in their childhood and rebel against it. In my opinion, the adult must dare exactly that.
Alice Miller

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 783-785

Alarm clocks that jab into the head
each morning, like so many insane brain surgeons,
the hours that one by one transform themselves
into dollars
while they discreetly, inexorably wear us away,
the emptiness of being controlled by
landlords, mortgage companies,
supervisors,
the insolence of bureaucracies
who are paid to help us,
the abrupt horrifying moment
when after much figuring
it is evident if everything keeps on as it has
there will not be enough money.
Tom Wayman

One of the more startling statistics in the report, which analyzed prescription claims data from 2.5 million insured Americans from 2001 to 2010, is that one in four women is dispensed medication for a mental health condition, compared to just 15 percent of men.
…
…when someone has life stressors and is having difficulty coping. An example would be a marital discord, going through a separation or a divorce. A job would be a big one, particularly in the current economy.
Women And Prescription Drugs: One In Four Takes Mental Health Meds
Huffpost
Katherine Bindley
(emphasis JS)

About 13 to 14 percent of Americans work under an abusive supervisor, Yagil said. Her study on Israeli workers found that abused employees tend to cope by avoiding their bosses, seeking support from co-workers and trying to reassure themselves. As useful as those strategies might sound, however, they actually made employees feel worse.

Your bullying boss may be slowly killing you

SlingShot Water Purification

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom, Quotations Of The Week 780-782

The established rationality becomes irrational when in the course of its internal development the potentialities of the system have outgrown its institutions.
Herbert Marcuse

I was thinking about these things on Sunday, as I participated in a conference on basic income. Basic income is income decoupled from work or wealth: everybody has a right to it, just for existing. I am no expert, but I understood it is framed as a measure targeted at establishing the dignity of the individuals, making them more safe and harder to intimidate. All of this makes a lot of sense; still, I can’t help thinking that basic income could also be seen as an instrument of innovation policy: free from immediate need, (mostly young) citizens would be enabled to take some extra risks and try out more new ideas. Most would fail, as is always the case, but failures would be effectively too cheap to even meter, while successes could have large impacts, easily able to pay off the whole operation. I suspect the social cost of basic income would be near zero: people are surviving anyway, so the whole thing amounts to a reallocation of purchasing power from the wealthy and employed to the poor and unemployed.
Beyond the “three Fs”: basic income as innovation policy

Contributed by: Alberto Cottica on February 16, 2012.

From this point of view — that of drift and dream; of looking out for interest; of following this or that because it seems alive — Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed, so they won’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good. There is more to this than keeping out the interesting: there is the fantasy and terror that someone here will become pleasure’s victim, disappearing into a spiral of enjoyment from which he or she will not return.

The Art of Distraction
By HANIF KUREISHI    

New York Times

Published: February 18, 2012

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 777-779

A new study warns that when Americans eat out, they feed into an industry fueled by exploitation and rampant discrimination against women.
Study: Restaurants Feed on Exploited Women’s Labor
February 13, 2012 by Michelle Chen
Ms.blog Magazine

Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.”

Average Is Over
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times
Published: January 24, 2012

Banks are another large recipient of our collective largesse. I’m not talking about bail-out funds; I’m talking about the hugely valuable right we give banks to create money out of nothing. Banks do this (with our generous permission) by lending roughly seven times the money customers deposit (this is called ‘fractional reserve banking’); they then charge interest on these magically minted dollars. This gift to banks is justified on the grounds that it injects needed cash into the economy, but a comparable boost could be achieved by giving people new government-issued dollars — for example, by wiring money to their bank accounts — and limiting bank lending to money actually on deposit. Fresh money would then trickle up through households rather than down through banks.
…
All we’d have to do is charge for private use of common wealth and feed the resulting revenue into an electronic distribution system.
It's Time We Get to Cash in as Equity Owners of Our Common Wealth
Peter Barnes
AlterNet

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 774-776

Worldwide, we are seeing the end of manufacturing labor as well as the labor need in much of the service sector. The world is running out of much of the current need for labor. China and India didn't steal our middle class jobs, so much as provide a death row holding cell for jobs that one way or another are going to be automated out of existence. When was the last time you talked with your travel agent, insurance agent, telephone operator, etc., etc. ? Finally, as an example, China produces much of the world's clothing. They now produce over twice as much clothing as they did just 10 years ago. BUT, here is the real story - the Chinese clothing industry employs two million fewer workers today than they did 10 years ago, and they expect that clothing manufacturing jobs will continue to decline as output continue to go up. Why? Automation Technology. The Chinese manufacturing sector as a whole as it pertains to employment is expected to go into decline within the next few years, and dramatically so.

shend
NJ
New York Times
comment on T. Friedman's
Average Is Over
Published: January 24, 2012

…in the 1920s and 1930s, when a US economy that was built on farm output became the victim of its own success. Advances in farming led to a food glut. As food prices plummeted, farmers had less money to spend. This, in turn, depressed manufacturing and led to job losses in the cities, too. Land values in both places declined, impoverishing families and trapping them in place.

We remember this as the Great Depression

Why Going 'Back To Normal' Is No Longer An Option for the American Economy -- And Where We're Headed Now
Sara Robinson
AlterNet

(emphasis JS)

We expect that economic factors—like continued fiscal deficits, ever-rising provincial health care costs and tightening labour markets—would be the political drivers for GAI [Guaranteed Annual Income] reform, more than social concerns. But there are solid economic, fiscal and social reasons to give a GAI serious consideration. If properly designed and implemented, the introduction of a GAI could be one of those rare moments in public policy when a win-win-win outcome is achieved, for society and for the individuals and families affected.

Guaranteed annual income – a Big Idea
whose time has yet to arrive
Posted on Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 1:21 pm by Glen Hodgson

(emphasis JS)

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 770-773

College graduates and advanced degree holders, once they are unemployed, are as vulnerable as high school dropouts to long-term joblessness, a new study has found.
Unemployed College Graduates As Vulnerable As High School Dropouts ToLong-Term Unemployment: Report

As one of the 95.9% of bachelors degree or higher that are employed...it doesn't mean I'm making a living wage (I work 2 jobs, one full time, the other 20* hours a week). But even more than the money...I'm not coming near to what I *could* do, and I see that all around me. People counted as employed but not working anything like their potential, nor anything like they hoped when they invested in their education.
nlwincaro
North Carolina
NYT
comment on T. Friedman's
Average Is Over
Published: January 24, 2012

Unemployment in the eurozone hit a record high at the end of last year, the Eurostat agency has said.
...
Unemployment is at the highest rate since the euro was launched in 1999.
Eurozone unemployment hits new record
BBC31 January 2012

Suicides among active-duty soldiers hit another record high in 2011… The Army also reported a sharp increase, nearly 30 percent, in violent sex crimes last year by active-duty troops. More than half of the victims were active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21.
New York Times

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 767-769

Someone is stealing our time, our time alive,

and all our lives are marked by that theft.
They have told us that time is money
 and since money can be owned you can possess a man or a woman's time
and spend the human beings who live in that time
like a coin or a dollar. In some trucks
we are ordered to install
a recording tachometer, so that the owners
can constantly check
on the driver: the device tells how the driver shifts,
when he stops the vehicle, how fast he was driving
at any time. So even the man alone on the highway
has the foreman watching - he remains in the factory,
like the man or woman in the bar after supper
with one eye on the clock because even off work
somebody owns your time.
Tom Wayman

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. … But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Average Is Over
 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
 Published: January 24, 2012

Men [sic] are as mature

As the forces of production
Of their times allow them to be.
T.W. Adorno

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 764-766

Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans report rudeness and incivility at work, Herschcovis told LiveScience. Fewer are systematically bullied, she said, but the best estimate puts the number at about 41 percent of American workers having been psychologically harassed at work at some point.
Your bullying boss may be slowly killing you

Resignation

by Catherine Shaw

This, superiors,

is to offer you

my resignation.

Too many years have passed

without recompense

and without sentience

too many days,

each one vacant

as the bare vestibule

I pass through

day after hollow day

from or to

the circle of sorry labor

I inhabit,

my subordination.

Automaton, I

go about my work

in mindless quietude,

totting up numbers,

filling out forms,

stacking and stapling-

so efficient!-

but watching every minute

on your grey clock

loiter and drag

on its tired trail

to the tired end of day.

And what of

those dear others

who share my circle

and whose faces match

my own encrypted face?

They are not dear.

Away from here,

they live lives

I can't imagine

in small and singular worlds

that have no use for me.

if there's friendship here,

it's made of shallow stuff,

of pleasantries,

enforced equivalence:

the accident of company!

I soon learned

to be on guard against

such amity,

to cultivate

the ingrown point-of-view,

pruning away

those shoots of anger

and intelligence

that would expose to me

the baseness

of your hierarchy.

It's just as well.

I may be dwarfed

but how much worse

to flare up in my insignificance

and be unheard

and change nothing

and destroy only me.

"I will seek work elsewhere!"

That has been my quest:

a foolish enterprise,

a grail of styrofoam at best.

Wherever I go,

I find your duplicate:

vestibule, paperwork,

watched clocks

and grey-eyed vacancy

What's the good of going?

I'm too weary now

to take my future in my hands

and forge another way.

This, superiors,

is to offer you my resignation.

I'll stay.

The main problem: There just aren’t enough jobs to go around.

Lose a job, prepare for a really long job search
LIFEINC.

You Are a Socialist

Roy Zimmerman