Jack Saturday

Monday, March 30, 2015

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1277-1279

Roughly one in 20 UK students has worked in the sex industry to earn money while at university, a new study has found. 
...

In a climate of high tuition fees and increasing living costs, more than half of student sex workers are motivated by the need to pay for basic living costs, while 45 percent wish to avoid debt, the research revealed.
Thousands embrace sex work to fund university costs, study finds
March 27, 2015
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Last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 46 percent of recent college graduates were in jobs that don’t even require a college degree.
Robert Reich
Why College Isn’t (and Shouldn’t Have to be) for Everyone
SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 2015






Meanwhile, the jobs of many teachers and university professors will disappear, replaced by online courses and interactive online textbooks.

Where will this end?
Robert Reich,
MONDAY, MARCH 16, 2015








Monday, March 23, 2015

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1274-1276

All taxi drivers, not just the owner-drivers of London's famous black cabs, are under threat of extinction from automation - and they are not alone. A recent study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University suggests that 47% of all categories of jobs providing employment today could be automated within 20 years.

This research has been widely misreported. Osborne and Frey did not say that 47% of all jobs will be automated but rather that 47% of all categories of jobs may disappear. If you look at the list of categories included at the end of their report it is clear that the total number of jobs under threat is far greater than 47%, simply because many of the categories are large cohorts.

Sweep away the rocket scientists of the world and we would hardly notice the blip. Make all the world's taxi drivers, delivery and distribution drivers, bus drivers, tram drivers, train drivers, street cleaner drivers and garbage truck drivers redundant and you get an unemployment problem that will destroy economies and cause serious, global social problems. There are more than four million people driving trucks, taxis, limos and buses in the USA alone.

Forget the economy: the "future of work" is the key issue in this election
By: The Leader @theleaderspeaks
Published: Monday, March 9, 2015



1800-2000, global population increased 6 times. Over the same period, the total amount of wealth produced increased 49 times…most of this wealth went to a few at the expense of the many.
Power and Powerlessness




Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold. 
Joseph Chilton Pearce








Monday, March 16, 2015

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1271-1273

The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs.
Vaneigem




Rescuing political action from its current paralysis is no different from developing the publicness of the Intellect outside the realm of wage Labor, in opposition to it.
Paolo Virno,
A Grammar of the Multitude




I'm a free soul who hates paying attention to things I am not interested in. Consequently, I have rarely been comfortable in the role of 'employee.'
Steve Solomon

Monday, March 09, 2015

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1268-1270

There’s something dangerous happening to millions of Americans nationwide. It is happening in places where many people spend at least 40 hours a week. It is causing severe physical and mental illness. It runs off fear and manipulation. But its victims are not talking it about.

So what is it?

Work abuse.

Look around the average American workplace and it’s not too hard to find. Twenty-seven percent of all adult Americans report experiencing work abuse and an additional 21 percent of Americans report witnessing it, meaning some 65 million Americans have been affected.

“Anything that affects 65 million Americans is an epidemic,” said Gary Namie, co-founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute. “But it’s an un-discussable epidemic because employers don’t want this discussed.”
What To Do About Your Jerk of a Boss Before You Get PTSD
Millions of workers are suffering from anxiety, depression and even PTSD because of bully bosses.
By Alyssa Figueroa / AlterNet March 5, 2015
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The number of people with graduate degrees receiving food assistance or other forms of federal aid nearly tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census. More specifically, 28 percent of food-stamp households were headed by a person with at least some college education in 2013, compared with 8 percent in 1980, according to an analysis by University of Kentucky economists.

The hypereducated poor, as I've come to think of them, are as hidden to the country at large as Bolin is at Columbia. "Nobody knows or cares that I have a PhD, living in the trailer park," says a former linguistics adjunct and mother of one child, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, and was on welfare and food stamps. A St. Paul, Minnesota, librarian, who admits that few of her friends have any clue how broke she is, puts it this way: "Every American thinks they're a temporarily embarrassed millionaire: I am no exception."
Alissa Quart / AlterNet January 9, 2015
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Uber workers aren’t alone. There are millions like just them, also outside the labor laws — and their ranks are growing. Most aren’t even part of the new Uberized “sharing” economy.

They’re franchisees, consultants, and free lancers.

They’re also construction workers, restaurant workers, truck drivers, office technicians, even workers in hair salons.

What they all have in common is they’re not considered “employees” of the companies they work for. They’re “independent contractors” – which puts all of them outside the labor laws, too.

The rise of “independent contractors” Is the most significant legal trend in the American workforce – contributing directly to low pay, irregular hours, and job insecurity.
...
For example, FedEx calls its drivers independent contractors.

Yet FedEx requires them to pay for the FedEx-branded trucks they drive, as well as the FedEx uniforms they wear, and FedEx scanners they use – along with insurance, fuel, tires, oil changes, meals on the road, maintenance, and workers compensation insurance. If they get sick or need a vacation, they have to hire their own replacements. They’re even required to groom themselves according to FedEx standards.

FedEx doesn’t tell its drivers what hours to work, but it tells them what packages to deliver and organizes their workloads to ensure they work between 9.5 and 11 hours every working day.
Robert Reich: Why Work Has Become a Nightmare and How to Stop It
AlterNet, February 23, 2015
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Monday, March 02, 2015

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1265-1267

In 2013, researchers at the Oxford Martin School predicted that in the next two decades 47% of US jobs would be in danger of being lost to automation. McKinsey Global Institute research suggests that 140 million knowledge workers worldwide are at risk of the same fate. Most policymakers do not even want to think about the prospect of mass automation, because it is unlike any change we have seen before.
Paul Mason
theguardian
[emphasis JS]


The arrival of humanoid robots should be a cause for celebration. With the robots doing most of the work, it should be possible for everyone to go on perpetual vacation.
Marshall Brain, Robotic Nation



Leisure consists in all those virtuous activities by which a man [sic] grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually. It is that which makes a life worth living.
Cicero