Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 406-408

One of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that we have to have work as a centerpiece of any social policy.
Barack Obama, 2008

An important new study has cast an appalling light on a place where workplace laws fail to protect workers, where wages and tips are routinely stolen, where having to work sick, injured or off the clock is the price of having a job.

The place is the United States, all across the lower strata of the urban economy.…Its researchers sought out people often missed by standard surveys and found abuses everywhere: in factories, grocery stores, retail shops, construction sites, offices, warehouses and private homes. The word sweatshop clearly is not big enough anymore to capture the extent and severity of the rot in the low-wage workplace.
Workers in America, Cheated
Editorial
New York Times
Published: September 2, 2009
AAAAA

I actually believe that many more Americans than let on secretly share my distaste for work. They can sense that the American Dream of getting so rich they no longer have to work is a hallucination. It is almost impossible to achieve it through hard work alone. They believe instead in a version of the Dream that requires outsmarting work by going for the big kill. You can see that Dream being chased in casinos, in the slush piles of publishing houses, in the overflowing file cabinets of the patent office, and in classifieds sections thickened by omnipresent ads for multilevel marketing schemes and make-millions-working-at-home-in-your-spare-time scams. We are as much a nation of disappointed dreamers as of optimistic laborers. You can't really blame people for dreaming big. The problem with big dreams, of course, is that when you eventually wake up, you're still in the same grubby little bed you fell asleep in; the bigger the dream, the littler and grubbier the bed seems in the morning.
The Loafer's Manifesto
By Bob Jacobson, Isthmus.