Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1340-1342

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, nay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau

 In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell...

Bo Olson ... lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
...
“You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus,” said a marketer who spent six years in the retail division. “It’s a horrible feeling.” …
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big
Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
By JODI KANTOR and DAVID STREITFELD
AUG. 15, 2015
New York Times
[emphasis JS]

from the comments section:

 "The ones that burn out are the lucky ones, at least they escape. The one's that don't? You can see them - they're dead behind the eyes." - thats what an ex Amazon employee told me recently.
...
Decades ago we learned how to treat production line workers badly. More recently we learned how to treat call centre and admin workers like replaceable machines. What Amazon has achieved is to build a machine that is able to treat managers and senior professionals as automatons."
Glenn Elliott

"Oh the humanity..."
Wait. There is none. All this chest thumping and back stabbing to deliver an Elsa doll in 23 minutes? Get a grip. These people aren't saving lives in an ER for 18 hours at a stretch, they're not feeding the hungry, housing the homeless. They barely have time to engage their families let alone contribute positively to their communities or the world outside their cubicle/abattoir. This is success?
joe

 ...when you take a person and put him in a job which he does not like. He gets irritable in his groove. His duties soon become a monotonous routine that slowly dulls his senses. As I walk into offices, through factories and stores, I often find myself looking into the expressionless faces of people going through mechanical motions. They are people whose minds are stunned and slowly dying.
William J. Reilly
How To Avoid Work

thanks to Maria Popova