Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1316-1318

Given the dismal first quarter, the economy is set to grow at an annual rate of 2 percent to 3 percent for the year, its pace through much of the recovery that began in mid-2009. That is enough to deliver lopsided results, in which income and wealth accrue to those at the top of the economic ladder. It is not enough to pull up wages and salaries for everyone else.

...

The overarching cause of the economy’s inability to achieve and sustain robust growth is the continued failure to employ everyone who wants and needs a job.

...

Unemployment is still above the pre-recession levels in Washington, D.C. and 36 states....

...

The average unemployment rate in the past year for college grads ages 21 to 24 was 7.2 percent, compared to 5.5 percent in the pre-recession year of 2007. Their underemployment rate, which includes those who do not have full-time hours, is 14.9 percent, compared to 9.6 percent in 2007

The situation is even worse for recent high school graduates....

The Economy Will Rebound, but Prosperity Won’t

By TERESA TRITCH  MAY 29, 2015

    New York Times
     [emphasis JS]

...when I find a remark disgusting, or have my hands, shoulders and hips held for uncomfortably long periods of time by men I don’t know, I have to suppress my natural reaction. I try to ignore it, or feign amusement, all for the sake of the guest’s experience, my job security and the chance of a good tip. It’s easy to have ideals, but reconciling them with the need to pay rent is a more difficult task in a town with few professional opportunities.

Brittany Bronson

Can You Be a Waitress and a Feminist?

New York Times

APRIL 17, 2015

Thing I've always noticed, people don't commit suicide for love,
as you'd expect, that's just a fancy of novelists; 
they commit suicide because they haven't got any money.
I wonder why that is.
The Night-Nurse
Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1313-1315

41 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds were recently enrolled in college, a higher share than in previous generations. But the unemployment rate of college graduates ages 21 to 24 remains high at an average of 8.5 percent over the past year. Underemployment — which includes those who are officially unemployed, those who want to work but haven’t looked recently for a job and those stuck in part-time jobs — is 16.8 percent.

Equally worrisome, 44 percent of young college graduates in 2012 were working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree.
Starting Out Behind
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New York Times
JUNE 7, 2014
[emphasis JS]

Why are there no amazing new bands in England anymore? Ever since the ’60s, it used to be every five, 10 years, we’d see an incredible band. I asked a lot of friends of mine, well, what happened? And they all said, well they got rid of the dole. All those guys were on the dole. Actually in Cockney rhyming slang, the word for dole is rock and roll — as in, “oh yeah, he’s on the rock and roll.” All rock bands started on public relief.
No more “deserving” vs. “undeserving”: why we need a guaranteed basic income (and a parallel to intuitive eating)
Laura (dusty_rose)
TUTUS AND TINY HATS
[emphasis, link, JS]

BOSTON — Abe Gorelick has decades of marketing experience, an extensive contact list, an Ivy League undergraduate degree, a master’s in business from the University of Chicago, ideas about how to reach consumers young and old, experience working with businesses from start-ups to huge financial firms and an upbeat, effervescent way about him. What he does not have — and has not had for the last year — is a full-time job.

Five years since the recession ended, it is a story still shared by millions. Mr. Gorelick, 57, lost his position at a large marketing firm last March. As he searched, taking on freelance and consulting work, his family’s finances slowly frayed. He is now working three jobs, driving a cab and picking up shifts at Lord & Taylor and Whole Foods.

Out of Work, Out of Benefits, and Running Out of Options

By ANNIE LOWREY

New York Times

APRIL 3, 2014

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1310-1312

there are more working-age people in the United States receiving some form of welfare than there are working-age people who do not.
Why and How Should We Build
a Basic Income for Every Citizen?
by Marshall Brain
September 15, 2014

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

David Graeber 

The Baffler

Over the years, the government has fined drug companies billions of dollars for pushing unapproved uses of drugs. More perilously, drugs get approved prematurely and result in mass sickness and fatalities. This human toll takes an estimated 100,000 deaths a year in the U.S. from adverse effects of such drugs. For example, the drug Vioxx, sold by Merck & Co., Inc., as an anti-inflammatory drug, stayed on the market from 1999 to 2004 despite documented cardiovascular risks. According to the well-regarded medical journal Lancet, an estimated 88,000 Americans had heart attacks from taking Vioxx and 38,000 of them died!
The Havoc of the Unrestrained Drug Industry
Ralph Nader
September 12, 2014
[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1307-1309

Philip could not get out of his eyes the dead girl lying on the bed, wan and white, and the boy who stood at the end of it like a stricken beast. The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant. It was cruel that a stupid chance should have cut off her life when she was just entering upon it; but in the very moment of saying this to himself, Philip thought of the life which had been in store for her, the bearing of children, the dreary fight with poverty, the youth broken by toil and deprivation into a slatternly middle age--he saw the pretty face grow thin and white, the hair grow scanty, the pretty hands, worn down brutally by work, become like the claws of an old animal--then, when the man was past his prime, the difficulty of getting jobs, the small wages he had to take; and the inevitable, abject penury of the end: she might be energetic, thrifty, industrious, it would not have saved her; in the end was the workhouse or subsistence on the charity of her children. Who could pity her because she had died when life offered so little?

But pity was inane. Philip felt it was not that which these people needed. They did not pity themselves. They accepted their fate. It was the natural order of things. Otherwise, good heavens! otherwise they would swarm over the river in their multitude to the side where those great buildings were, secure and stately, and they would pillage, burn, and sack.
Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage

...if American workers can’t get more regular and predictable hours, they at least need stronger safety nets.

These would include high-quality pre-school and after-school programs; unemployment insurance for people who can only get part-time work; and a minimum guaranteed basic income.

All the blather about “family-friendly workplaces” is meaningless if workers have no control over when they’re working.
Robert Reich
How the New Flexible Economy is Making Workers’ Lives Hell
MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2015
[emphasis and link, JS]

The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.

The decline reverses a historical pattern, researchers say, with public sector employees typically holding onto their jobs even during most economic downturns.
Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard
By PATRICIA COHEN, MAY 24, 2015
New York Times

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1304-1306

The idea is that once you’ve fought and clawed your way up the tenure ladder, the prize is academic freedom, the general premise being — particularly at research universities, like the one I’m fortunate enough to be employed at — that there’s social value in fostering free intellectual inquiry. It’s a value fast disappearing in the increasingly corporatized university landscape, where casual labor is the new reality. Adjuncts, instructors, part-timers — now half the profession, according to the American Association of University Professors — simply don’t have the same freedoms, practically speaking.

What’s being lost, along with job security, is the liberty to publish ideas that might go against the grain or to take on risky subjects in the first place. With students increasingly regarded as customers and consumer satisfaction paramount, it’s imperative to avoid creating potential classroom friction with unpopular ideas if you’re on a renewable contract and wish to stay employed.
Laura Kipnis
My Title IX Inquisition
May 29, 2015
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
[emphasis JS]

“It’s been very difficult to find a job,” said Ms. de Buyzer, who like most of the trainees has been collecting unemployment benefits. “When you look for a long time and don’t find anything, it’s so hard. You can get depressed,” she said. “You question your abilities. After a while, you no longer see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
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Last year, a staggering 52.6 percent of unemployed people in the eurozone were without work for a year or more, the highest on record, according to Eurostat, and many of those have been jobless more than two years.
...
In Greece, which has plunged back into a recession, 73 percent of job seekers have not landed work in more than a year; in Italy, it is 61 percent. But the trend is rising even in more prosperous nations like France, where the rate recently approached 43 percent, the highest in two decades.
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Today, more than half of all new jobs in the European Union are temporary contracts, according to Eurostat.
In Europe, Fake Jobs Can Have Real Benefits
New York Times
By LIZ ALDERMAN MAY 29, 2015

My advice to graduates. First, wake up. Who can blame you for being bored Shi’ite-less? You’ve spent four years of your life being indoctrinated and trained and habituated and conditioned to what? Conditioned for failure. And for what? Exactly. Look, you’ve heard the gloomy job prognostications and when it hits you how you’ve wasted your time and money, well . . . you’ll see.
My Brutal Advice to Recent Graduates
Lionel Nation
Published on May 26, 2015