Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 946-948

According to Stress in America, a study commissioned by the American Psychological Association, Millennials are the most stressed demographic. And it's reasonable to assume that higher levels of stress put the Millennials at higher risk for all sorts of destructive downstream consequences, from diabetes and obesity to anxiety and depression. Not surprisingly, work is one of the biggest causes of stress. The job numbers are grim, and even those lucky Millennials that land a decent job often face a workplace rife with destructive definitions of success. So here's hoping that as they advance through the ranks of the workplace, Millennials will do themselves -- and the generation after them (Generation Z?) -- a favor by redefining success.
Arianna Huffington
Millennials Come of Age as America's Most Stressed Generation
(emphasis JS)

“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked. Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question.

...

...among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education. 

...

An aversion to factory labor is common in China today....

Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobs
By KEITH BRADSHER
New York Times
Published: January 24, 2013

(emphasis JS)

 

 

 

 

…the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up.
...
Of course, nobody is hailing this trend as the sign of civilizational progress. Instead, the decline in blue-collar work is often portrayed in near-apocalyptic terms — on the left as the economy’s failure to supply good-paying jobs, and on the right as a depressing sign that government dependency is killing the American work ethic.

But it’s worth linking today’s trends to the older dream of a post-work utopia, because there are ways in which the decline in work-force participation is actually being made possible by material progress.
...
while pundits who tap on keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of labor, we aren’t the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than our last one did. One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?
A World Without Work
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times
Published: February 23, 2013
(emphasis JS)