Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 449-450

Now to the Canadian economy and a breath of fresh air today from Statistics Canada. The latest employment numbers are encouraging…
A pleasant surprise on the job front… 79,000 jobs were created in November… October was a bad month… this is very good news… good news for a lot of people…
CBC Radio 1 News, December 4, 2009
(emphasis JS)
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The classic bully—mean, overbearing, belittling, sadistic… and when that kind of thing happens in the workplace, it can be absolutely shattering… way more common than imagined…37% of the workforce, that’s 54 million Americans… witnesses to this type of psychological violence also can be traumatized…. 5 million people in this country [Canada] are or have been bullied in the workplace?… Yeah.
CBC Radio’s The Current, November 30, 2009

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 445-448

Dr. Diane Fassel and I wrote The Addictive Organization. Since the publication of that book, thousands of people have spoken or written to us about their recovery and what has happened to them in their addictive organizations as a result of their personal recovery. Their words differ, and the stories are essentially the same. They go like this: I’m an addict, alcoholic, workaholic, whatever kind of addict, it doesn’t matter. I‘m in recovery, and feel good about my recovery, it’s going well—my life has really I improved, and I basically feel happy. Because of my recovery, and I believe, the changes in me, my family is changing. We are all actually getting better.

But I am not sure that I can maintain my sobriety and continue to work in my addictive workplace. If I really put my sobriety first, I cannot continue to work where I do.

Often I suggest to these people that they attend Al-Anon, with the workplace as the addict in their lives. As I talked with people about their sobriety and what they needed to do to stay healthy, I found some interesting phenomena emerging. As people get healthier, they are no longer able to support the level of pathology that is present in their workplace. One of two things usually happens—as the individuals get healthier than the system in which they work, they either leave and start their own entrepreneurial efforts, or they get fired. They cannot stay and remain sober; and the workplace cannot tolerate persons who no longer support the pathology of the organization.
Anne Wilson Shaef
Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science


When we sell our time at the job, someone else then "owns" our time; within certain limits, it is the bosses' to do with as they want. But we are not disconnected from our time. We either have to pretend we are, and so drift through the working day by imagining we are somewhere else, daydreaming, or we have to admit that the central and governing hours of our daily life are not our own.
Tom Wayman





Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holyday-rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business in the green fields, and the town-
To plough, loom, anvil, spade - and oh! most sad
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
Charles Lamb

Dead Workers Update

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 441-444

Joe is an insurance analyst. He gets up very early and drives to work, further congesting the already overcrowded morning rush. During the drive, his car pumps poison into the air. At work, he alternates between slacking off and doing insurance analysis, with an emphasis on the former but always with great care to look busy. What little analysis he performs is used by the company to maximize profits through tiny tweaks to peoples’ insurance rates. Finally he goes home, his car pumping more toxin into the world. Exhausted, he watches some TV and hits the sack.
Societal contribution: FAIL.
AAA
That same day, Joe’s neighbor Bob calls in pretending to be sick. Instead of working, he throws a potluck and invites lots of friends who live nearby. At the get-together, new friendships are formed, connections are made. People laugh and talk about everything under the sun. Guests are introduced to new types of food and music. Both of them a little buzzed, Bob ends up hooking up with that nice girl down the street after the party. In short, everyone has a really cool time.
Societal contribution: KACHING!
How To Contribute To Society
Sam Alexander


I did what I thought I was supposed to do. A bachelors degree, part of a masters degree. Then a series of ladder climbing, mind-numbing, thankless corporate jobs in my field. Then layoffs...then corporate burn-out.
Lickme
Comments section
Unemployed? More like funemployed
Globe And Mail


Jason Rodriguez, an unemployed man in Florida, entered the engineering firm where he used to work and shot six people, killing one, then drove to his mother's house, where he was arrested. "I'm just going through a tough time right now,"
he told a police officer. "I'm sorry."
Harper’s Weekly
November 10, 2009

Steel Collar Workers Update

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 438-440

That all social violence--whether by war, revolution or economic exploitation--is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not surprise us. The propensity to reinflict childhood traumas upon others in socially-approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues. Clear evidence has been published in The Journal of Psychohistory that the more traumatic one's childhood, the more one is likely to be in favor of military solutions to social problems.
The History of Child Abuse
by Lloyd deMause

The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998

My friend, John Farina, who is Deputy Director of the University of Toronto's School of Social Work, suggested in his master's thesis that leisure was a synonym for freedom. Leisure, in Aristotle's phrase, is "the state of being free from the necessity of labour" (the italics are mine). But Farina also pointed out that true leisure, as opposed to "free time," presupposed two things: the freedom to choose what one does and the capacity to choose what one does. Without these two prerequisites, true leisure and true freedom are not possible.
Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority, p. 43

From the beginning, civilization--as well as people's daily lives--has been structured in large part around the concept of work. But now, for the first time in history, human labor is being systematically eliminated from the economic process. In the coming century, employment, as we have come to know it, is likely to be phased out in most of the industrial nations of the world. A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies is being introduced into a wide variety of work situations. These machines, together with new forms of business reorganization and management, are forcing millions of blue- and white-collar workers into temporary jobs and unemployment lines-- or worse, breadlines.
Jeremy Rifkin,

Utne Reader,

May-June 1995

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 435-437

A man working 8 hours a day, 250 days a year, generated 37½ million foot-pounds of energy. Each day, at that rate, he produces 0.13 kilowatt-hours. As an energy source, he is worth far less than coolie's wages. In 1940, it was calculated that in energy prices then current, a $50,000 a year executive was being paid as though he developed 16,500,000 kilowatt-hours per annum. Neither he, nor the worker, is "earning” his pay-- they are both drawing dividends at a fantastic rate.
Hugh Kenner,
Bucky



Oh, the Marxists talked a good game - working in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, lounging around to watch the sunset; 20-hour workweeks; month-long vacations; etc. But when you get down to it, they are still drawing from the same poisoned well that has parched Western civilization for the last 500 years: the Protestant Ethic, which freed Europe from Catholic voodoo only to feed its heads with doodoo, such as "work is the outward sign of moral perfection." While Luther was telling people that what counted was faith and the Holy Spirit, not work and deeds, Calvin helped spread silly ideas, like the one that people had to be at constant physical labor or idleness would tempt them to sin. Deep down, this is the root of the Puritan Ethic: why even today the neo-Puritans hate Hollywood with such passion: they feel that if we are not kept busy with mindless, rote work, then we will be seized by the carnal passions and led to sin.
Steve Mizrach


Were mechanisation an end in itself, it would be an unmitigated calamity, robbing life of half its fulness and variety by stunting men and women into sub-human, robot-like automatons. But in the last resort, mechanisation can have only one object: to abolish the individual's physical toil of providing himself [sic] with the necessities of existence in order that hand and brain may be set free for some higher order of activity.
Professor Walter Gropius

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 432-434

The General Confederation of Workers (CGT), France's largest union, says about 400 people commit suicide in France every year due to job-related difficulties.
…
"Suicide because of precarious, stressful working conditions is not an exclusively French phenomenon," Laurent Vogel, who tracks labor health at the Brussels-based European Trade Union Institute told IPS. "At least 27 percent of workers in the E.U. consider that their health and safety are at risk because of their work.
"All over Europe, there are suicides at the workplace, but they do not appear in the statistics of labor. (Admitting) suicide at the job is a taboo, because it would question the steady search for higher productivity and efficiency.
This Job Is Killing Me:
Authoritarian Corporate Model Spurring Suicides in Europe
By Julio Godoy, IPS News. Posted October 21, 2009.




What's Better PRISON or your JOB?

IN PRISON: You spend the majority of your time in an 8X10 cell.

AT WORK: You spend the majority of your time in a 6X8 cubicle.

IN PRISON: You get three meals a day.

AT WORK: You only get a break for one meal and you have to pay for it.

IN PRISON: You get time off for good behavior.

AT WORK: You get more work for good behavior.

IN PRISON: The guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you.

AT WORK: You must carry around a security card and open all the doors for yourself.

IN PRISON: You can watch TV and play games.

AT WORK: You get fired for watching TV and playing games.

IN PRISON: They allow your family and friends to visit.

AT WORK: You can't even speak to your family.

IN PRISON: All expenses are paid by the taxpayers with no work required.

AT WORK: You get to pay all the expenses to go to work and then they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners.

IN PRISON: You spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out.

AT WORK: You spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside bars.

IN PRISON: You must deal with sadistic wardens.

AT WORK: They are called managers.


So would you like to go to your Prison again?
Popeyee



Last Sunday, CBC radio's Sunday Edition host Michael Enright interviewed two people about an experiment carried out in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s, in which all households whose income fell below a level determined to be necessary for basic well-being received a single top-up to bring them to that level. For various reasons, the data gathered from the experiment has just recently been analyzed.

What they found was that the people who were most likely to work less under the system were adolescents and women. The youth stayed in school longer rather than leave to help support the household. Women tended to stay home longer after giving birth to take care of their children.

Researchers also found an overall improvement in community health and education indicators, and therefore a reduction in the cost of social programs. In short, the system provided income support for better education, maternity leaves and at-home child care, while delivering benefits to the entire community.

A guaranteed annual income, sometimes called a negative income tax, replaces all the piecemeal, ineffective measures now administered by provincial agencies including welfare payments, various supplements, prescription drug coverage and many others. It treats people with dignity and provides a basic level of well-being across the community without discrimination.
Janice Harvey,
Cut the roots of poverty with a living wage
Published Wednesday October 21st, 2009

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 429-431

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
The New Untouchables
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New YorkTimes
Published: October 20, 2009



Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans.

We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.

That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale.
Safety Nets for the Rich
By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
Published: October 19, 2009


The measure of a society's industrial advancement is not dollars, but its use (consumption) of energy. In 1939, the United States consumed enough energy (from mineral fuels and water power) to produce 746 quadrillion footpounds of work.

It is estimated that one man, besides carrying his own weight, can do 150,000 foot-pounds of work in an eight-hour day, a total of 37,500,000 foot-pounds per year.

Reduced to human terms, the U. S. consumption of energy, therefore, would provide the equivalent of the work of 20,000,000,000 human slaves.
R. Buckminster Fuller,
Untitled Epic Poem On The History Of Industrialization

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 426-428

Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers. Beyond government and politics, it’s not only "socialists" who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad--all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
The Attack on "Redistribution"
Ed Kilgore
The Plank
The New Republic


…unemployment among men and women is proving relentless. Of the 15.1 million people who are now officially counted as unemployed, over a third have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, the highest percentage of long-term unemployment on record.
Editorial
Wanted: Leadership on Jobs
New York Times
Published: October 3, 2009



…we spend eight to 10 to 12 hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say.
I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now -- if we make it that far -- they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent 10 hours of every day in a totalitarian situation, and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."
Naomi Klein Interviews Michael Moore on the Perils of Capitalism
By Naomi Klein,
The Nation.
Posted September 25, 2009.