Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1219-1221

And suppose, to elaborate the nightmare, that we had decided even as late as 1950 to grant a proper stewardship and husbandry to the natural world. Suppose we had refused to countenance the industrialization of everything from agriculture to medicine to education to religion. Suppose we had not tolerated the transformation, in the official and then the public mind, of vocation to "a job," which is to say the transformation of the farmer, the tradesman, even the sharecropper (all subsistence-based) to an "employee" helplessly dependent on an employer and "the economy"  and interchangeable with any other employee. Suppose we had not stood for the displacement of people who once functioned as parts of the creaturely world, working members of their places - the quality of their work always, of course, in question - to the "labor pool" and the placelessness of modern life.
Nothing living lives alone
Wendell Berry
from the Threepenny Review
Pushcart Prize XXXVII
Best Of The Small Presses

Whoever gives his [sic] labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.
Cicero

...The only thing "free" about so-called "free time" is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and laptops don't do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward. G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"

          Bob Black
The Abolition Of Work