Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1500-1502

a 27-year-old salesman for Abbott Laboratories’ operations in India — in fact, one of the American health care company’s top performers there — rode his motorcycle to a remote railroad track and jumped in front of a train.

In his pocket, a note in blue ink, handwritten in a mix of Hindi and English, said, “I’m going to commit suicide because I can’t meet my company’s sales targets and my company is pressuring me.”

Ashish Awasthi’s death last month resonated across India and through the halls of the health care giant. More than 250 fellow Abbott drug representatives in India walked off the job for a day, protesting what some called the company’s overly aggressive sales policies.

...

Dhirendra Yadav, 26, a former sales agent in central India in the neurology division, said he resigned in December 2013 under what he called “immense pressure to conduct business in unethical ways.” He said his former manager — who later became the manager of Mr. Awasthi, the man who committed suicide — insisted that he use his own money to buy medicines costing nearly 15,000 rupees, or about $220, to help his group meet a sales target. That would be more than half of a typical representative’s monthly pay.

…

India’s economy — despite its 7.6 percent growth — still produces far too few jobs for the one million people who enter the work force each month.
Driven to Suicide by an ‘Inhuman and Unnatural’ Pressure to Sell
By GEETA ANAND and FREDERIK JOELVING
New York Times
AUG. 11, 2016
 [emphasis JS] 

 
WASHINGTON — The United States, the wealthiest nation on Earth, also abides the deepest poverty of any developed nation, but you would not know it by listening to Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump, the major parties’ presidential nominees.
The Millions of Americans Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Barely
Mention: The Poor
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
New York Times
AUG. 11, 2016
 [emphasis JS]

 

 

I’m actually not worried about it because it’s going to ultimately be very easy and require a very small fraction of our output to support all the material needs of the human race.
Ray Kurzweil

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1497-1499

Loving money may not be good for your love life, according to new research that finds that materialists have unhappier marriages than couples who don't care much about possessions.

The effect holds true across all levels of income, said study researcher Jason Carroll, a professor of family life at Brigham Young University. And a materialist marrying a like-minded soul may not get off the hook: The least satisfying marriages were those in which both spouses cared strongly about material goods.

"We thought it would be the incongruent or unmatched pattern that would be most problematic, where one's a spender and one's a saver," Carroll told LiveScience. "Our study found that it's the couples where both spouses have high levels of materialism that struggle the most.

...

 So what can be done if you love your spouse but really want that shiny new BMW, too? Carroll said that for most people, materialism isn't black-and-white: People think they can pursue their toys but keep their relationship strong at the same time, and they may not realize how much their ambitions are hurting their loved ones. For most couples, breaking the materialistic thought process should help, Carroll said.

"I think it's about people stepping back and taking an inventory of their values and what really is important to them," Carroll said. "Are we allowing some of our materialistic ambitions to get in the way of things that really, at the core, matter a lot to us?"

Love of Money May Mess Up Your Marriage
Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | October 13, 2011
[emphasis JS]

I had a summer job as a student squeezing plastic milk bottles for 12 hours overnight to see if they leaked. When they did you smelt of sour milk by the time you went home. Mark Thomas, Manchester

Filling pork pies with jelly one at a time to ensure the "handmade" label. Leigh Dickinson

I worked for weeks unpacking small cereal bars from large boxes and then repackaging the same cereal bars into smaller boxes. Pointless. Jude Connor

I put pepperoni on 14,000 pizzas per day at a factory in Nottingham. If the conveyor belt broke down, we made smiley faces on the pizzas with the pepperoni. So if you ever see a smiley pizza, that's why. Pete Minting, Helensburgh

Working at a pork scratching factory removing the ones that had been cooked but still had hairs to then be re-cooked, to burn them off. I had 12 hours a day just watching them go past on a conveyor belt. I left after two weeks and have never eaten one since. Maria, Sheffield

Some of the world's most boring jobs
BBC News
1 August 2016
[emphasis JS]

Thanks to Kate McFarland
@kate_bi_news 

 

For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

Wendell Berry,

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981) xiii.

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1497-1499

Loving money may not be good for your love life, according to new research that finds that materialists have unhappier marriages than couples who don't care much about possessions.

The effect holds true across all levels of income, said study researcher Jason Carroll, a professor of family life at Brigham Young University. And a materialist marrying a like-minded soul may not get off the hook: The least satisfying marriages were those in which both spouses cared strongly about material goods.

"We thought it would be the incongruent or unmatched pattern that would be most problematic, where one's a spender and one's a saver," Carroll told LiveScience. "Our study found that it's the couples where both spouses have high levels of materialism that struggle the most.

...

 So what can be done if you love your spouse but really want that shiny new BMW, too? Carroll said that for most people, materialism isn't black-and-white: People think they can pursue their toys but keep their relationship strong at the same time, and they may not realize how much their ambitions are hurting their loved ones. For most couples, breaking the materialistic thought process should help, Carroll said.

"I think it's about people stepping back and taking an inventory of their values and what really is important to them," Carroll said. "Are we allowing some of our materialistic ambitions to get in the way of things that really, at the core, matter a lot to us?"

Love of Money May Mess Up Your Marriage
Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | October 13, 2011
[emphasis JS]

I had a summer job as a student squeezing plastic milk bottles for 12 hours overnight to see if they leaked. When they did you smelt of sour milk by the time you went home. Mark Thomas, Manchester

Filling pork pies with jelly one at a time to ensure the "handmade" label. Leigh Dickinson

I worked for weeks unpacking small cereal bars from large boxes and then repackaging the same cereal bars into smaller boxes. Pointless. Jude Connor

I put pepperoni on 14,000 pizzas per day at a factory in Nottingham. If the conveyor belt broke down, we made smiley faces on the pizzas with the pepperoni. So if you ever see a smiley pizza, that's why. Pete Minting, Helensburgh

Working at a pork scratching factory removing the ones that had been cooked but still had hairs to then be re-cooked, to burn them off. I had 12 hours a day just watching them go past on a conveyor belt. I left after two weeks and have never eaten one since. Maria, Sheffield

Some of the world's most boring jobs

BBC News

1 August 2016

[emphasis JS]

Thanks to Kate McFarland
@kate_bi_news 

 

For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

Wendell Berry,

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981) xiii.

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1494-1496

Blake’s isolation was — I sometimes think it still is — absolute. It was the isolation of a mind that sought to make the best of heaven and earth, in the image of neither. It was isolation of a totally different kind of human vision; of an unappeasable longing for the absolute integration of man [sic], in his total nature, with the universe. It was the isolation of a temperament run on fixed ideas; and incidentally, of a craftsman who could not earn a living.

...

...the engraver who stopped getting assignments because he turned each one into an act of independent creation.

Alfred Kazin
quoted by Maria Popova

[emphasis JS]

In a future where automation has taken most human “jobs,” will humans stop working? It all depends on how you define work, says Ray Kurzweil. He favors the idea of a universal basic income to cover the necessities, but he doesn’t think that means we won’t work.
 
We’ll just do more of the things we’ve always wanted to but didn’t have time.
…
Once we no longer have to work to live—we can begin to live to work. And then we’ll be free to engage fully and unabashedly in passionate pursuits, regardless of income. Imagine the innovation and invention that might follow if our whole civilization pursued its highest aspirations instead of spending most of our time working for basic sustenance.
Ray Kurzweil: The Future Offers Meaningful Work, Not Meaningless Jobs
By Andrew O'Keefe
SingularityHUB
Aug 11, 2016
[emphasis JS]

 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. ...

In their book, Wyatt and Hare, who was a work abuse victim, call the majority of workplaces (95 percent) “authoritarian work organizations.”

“These are places that have, to some degree or another, a slave-to-slave-owner mentality operating,” Wyatt said.
How to deal with your narcissistic bullying boss before you get PTSD
Alyssa Figueroa, AlterNet
10 Aug 2016

 

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1491-1493

A Frenchman is suing his former employer for "bore out" - boredom's equivalent of burnout - which he says turned him into a "professional zombie". Frederic Desnard wants 360,000 euros (£300,000) for being "killed professionally through boredom" by his 80,000-euro-a-year job as an executive in a perfume business. But is "bore out" real?

"It was just so boring. I felt ill knowing I had to go back on Monday morning," says Steve Coster about his time as an insurance broker.

Is there such a thing as 'bore out'?

...

It can have "severe" consequences including reduced life expectancy, she says, highlighting a study of 7,000 UK civil servants which found very bored workers were more likely to die during a 24-year research period than those who were not bored.

Is there such a thing as 'bore out'?

By Alex Morrison, Alex Therrien & Emma Ailes 

BBC News
26 July 2016

[emphasis JS] 

Thanks to Kate McFarland
@kate_bi_news

 …a woman in New York was arrested for defecating on her boss's desk after she won $3 million in the lottery…
Harper's Weekly Review
August 3, 2016

 

From an email exchange: Jack S. to Gerry Spence:

…there is plenty of wealth to go round and that there

should be a guaranteed income for all.  What is your opinion of this?

Jack Saturday

Couldn't agree more.  Gerry

Gerry Spence

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1488-1490

In a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of American workers said they were not engaged with their jobs, or were actively disengaged.

Being ‘Good’ Isn’t the Only Way to Go

By AARON HURST

New York Times

APRIL 19, 2014

 Essentially we’re just asking people to think about the world they live in. We would hope that people would question a system that can land a spacecraft on a comet millions of miles away but can’t figure out the three-day week or eradicating poverty on this planet. We don’t want to tell people they have to feel bad about these things, we just want people to realize that everyone’s in the same boat, and we want to ask people to act collectively, to demand better things.

   spokesperson from STRIKE!    
    [emphasis JS]

Paul Solman: What was the most trenchant objection you heard when you came out with that book 10 years ago?

Charles Murray: The ordinary objection to the guaranteed basic income is first, work disincentives. There are answers to that. You have a very high cutoff point, whereby people have to start losing their stipend. So I made the cutoff point $25,000 in income that you get to make or keep.

It could be higher. This is a matter of the details. It’s absolutely essential that you allow people to get jobs and keep hold of their money for a substantial amount of money. Another important objection is that you’re just going to have people go out and use the money for a get-together and rent a house on a remote beach in California and surf their lives away.

Paul Solman: And smoke dope.

Charles Murray: My reaction to that is, so what? We have a huge problem with people dropping out of the workforce right now. It’s not going to be any worse [with a guaranteed income]. And in fact, it’ll be better because I think we’re going to make it much more visible to people that they can have a middle class life if they combine some work with the basic income.

So there are lots of reasonable objections to a guaranteed basic income. There are lots of ways you can do it wrong, where it’ll make matters much, much worse than they are now. My argument is that you can do it right and avoid all the obvious pitfalls.

What’s Wrong with the Current System?

Paul Solman: What’s an example of doing it wrong?

Charles Murray: Doing it wrong would be to add a guaranteed basic income onto the current system. Then you have all of the defects of the current system, all the ways the government stage manages people’s lives, all the ways in which they have incentives to game the system, and you add on just a whole bundle of cash to that.

Paul Solman: And I know, having read you for years, that part of your objection to the current system is the sprawl of the bureaucracy and costs that don’t actually benefit anybody but the people who have the jobs.

Charles Murray: In a sense, I’ve always taken the view that saving money isn’t a big deal with this. It’s nice if we don’t pay bureaucrats that aren’t doing anything useful. It’s nice if we save some of that money.

But what I’m talking about is going to be expensive. It’s actually now not going to be as expensive as the current system. When I wrote “In Our Hands” in 2004, I calculated the cost of that system would cross with the costs of the existing system in 2011, and I was right.
Libertarian Charles Murray: The welfare state has denuded our civic culture
BY CHARLES MURRAY  April 10, 2014
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