Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1603-1605

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
Socrates

 In a 2013 survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission, while another poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries showed that only 13% of workers actually like their job. A recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37% think they have a job that is utterly useless.
...I’m not talking about the sanitation workers, the teachers, and the nurses of the world. If these people were to go on strike, we’d have an instant state of emergency on our hands. No, I’m talking about the growing armies of consultants, bankers, tax advisors, managers, and others who earn their money in strategic trans-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstorm the value-add on co-creation in the network society. Or something to that effect.
... I firmly believe that a universal basic income is the most effective answer...
A growing number of people think their job is useless. Time to rethink the meaning of work
World Economic Forum
April 12, 2017
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Finance Minister Bill Morneau last year warned Canadians they will have to get used to precarious work. Now a new survey from a staffing agency suggests precarious work will increasingly become the norm over the next decade.
...The survey squares with some other research suggesting a trend towards precarious work. In the three years following the financial crisis of 2008-09, growth in temp work tripled that of permanent work in Canada.
..."Temp agencies not only benefit from, but also drive predatory employment practices that target immigrants and women of colour disproportionately,”
Precarious Work Is Awesome And Canada Will Get Way More Of It: Report
By Daniel Tencer
The Huffington Post Canada
Posted: 04/19/2017  
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1600-1602

According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, sociologists and authors of the book $2.00 per Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, in 2011 more than 1.5 million US families—including three million children—lived on as little as two dollars per person per day in any given month.

... From families who depend on their mother making plasma donations twice a week for their income, to others with nothing but a carton of spoiled milk in their refrigerator, Edin and Shaefer documented family households living “from crisis to crisis.” One of their informants told Shaefer that she had been beaten and raped and was always “looking out for the next threat.”

...the long-term consequences of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform initiative.

...As Edin and Shaefer found, the number of families living on less than two dollars per person per day has more than doubled since 1996.
Over 1.5 Million American Families Live on Two Dollars Per Person Per Day
Project Censored
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According to Statistics Canada, 1 in 7 Canadians live below the poverty line.  That is about 5 million people with at least a million being children.  In 1989, The House of Commons vowed to end child poverty by 2000 – it is higher now than then.  Almost 900,000 need food banks every month (38% children).  Four million are in need of decent affordable housing, and there are thousands of homeless struggling with street life.  And remember, poverty doesn’t just cost the poor their dignity, it costs us all billions of tax and health care dollars every year. As former Senator, Hugh Segal put it, “Our present system doesn’t fight poverty.   It institutionalizes it”.
The Basics on Basic Income
by Art Eggletonon March 14, 2017
Basic income News
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A CBC report earlier this week about TD employees pressured to meet high sales revenue goals has touched off a firestorm of reaction from TD employees across the country — some of whom admit they have broken the law at their customers' expense in a desperate bid to meet sales targets and keep their jobs.

Hundreds of current and former TD Bank Group employees wrote to Go Public describing a pressure cooker environment they say is "poisoned," "stress inducing," "insane" and has "zero focus on ethics." 
   
Some employees admitted they broke the law, claiming they were desperate to earn points towards sales goals they have to reach every three months or risk being fired. CBC has agreed to conceal their identities because their confessions could have legal ramifications.

'We do it because our jobs are at stake': TD bank employees admit to breaking the law for fear of being fired
CBC News
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1597-1599

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the unrelenting march of technology — specifically, artificial intelligence, or A.I. — would eventually affect the legal market and other white-collar professions.

But what is different now from, say, the introduction of automobiles at the expense of horse-driven cabs is the sheer magnitude of all those affected by A.I.
Of Lawyers and Robots
letter to the Editor
New York Times
APRIL 3, 2017 

 I see the lib-left jackal pack in the media and opposition have decided to make a big “to-do” out of Bombardier paying its managers what they’re worth. Columnists have fulminated, questions have been asked in Parliament, demonstrators have filled the streets over the company’s decision to set aside a small portion of the nearly $3.7 billion it has recently received in various forms of government assistance as a reward for the current occupants of its executive suite. And sure, on the surface, at first blush, it’s easy to say that, at a time when the company is laying off thousands of workers, raising the compensation for senior executives by an average of 50 per cent looks a little — what’s the word — unselfish? Giving? Generous to a fault?

Kudos to our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, then, for pointing out that this is simply the free market at work.

...“What’s secured already is actually more than we require,” Bombardier VP Rob Dewar even went so far as to announce at one point. The federal money, he said, is “really just an extra bonus that would be helpful but is very clearly not required.”
Bombardier nabbed $3.7B in subsidies, yet the mob demands we punish its executives
Andrew Coyne | April 3, 2017
National Post

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 In April 2015, the Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, wrote, “Something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.” Describing the upshot of a UK symposium held that month on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, Horton summarized the “case against science”: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming.”

...Countering the pharmaceutical industry’s undue influence on the medical profession, Angell concluded, would require “a sharp break from an extremely lucrative pattern of behavior.”
Crisis in Evidence-Based Medicine
Project Censored

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1594-1596

...a college education, in and of itself, does not create good jobs at good pay.
...
Right now, the outlook for more good jobs at good pay is not good. According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 20 occupations expected to add the most new jobs from 2012 to 2022, only one — general and operations management — requires a bachelor’s degree. It also pays well — the median salary in 2012 was $95,440. Most of the other big-growth occupations offered very low or moderate pay, with the biggest growth areas generally being the worst paying, including home health care, retail sales and food service.
...
All of which means that a major challenge for policy makers and business leaders is to confront the obvious: that most new jobs are likely to be lower-wage jobs.
The Opinion Pages
New York Times
Making College Pay
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
FEB. 12, 2014
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 With our tasks taken over by machines, we will come to exist in the utopia of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” as Bastani likes to call it—a state of limitless opulence in which we will have all the time in the world to fulfill whatever creative ambitions we might happen to possess.

But to my mind, it seems more likely that automation will impoverish us, and perhaps even lead to our extinction. Under capitalism, each of us reduces to our function in the labor market. This is how the capitalist state considers us, at least: as things that perform, either successfully or otherwise, a certain useful (i.e., profitable) purpose. If this function were to disappear (and no other function could be found to replace it), then so, too, would any reason capitalism might have for keeping us alive. Total functionlessness would mean human obsolescence. Why should the obsolete expect to live in conditions of opulence? It would be far more realistic to expect the abattoir.
The God in the Machine
Tom Whyman
The baffler
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"..any reason capitalism might have for keeping us alive."? No - any reason for us to keep capitalism alive. It is smaller than us.
Jack


 A Basic Income would create a universal standard of living that would replace the “welfare state” model AND save the state money.

Look at the 1970’s Seattle Experiment and Canadian Experiment. In both cases people became richer, local economies grew, education standards rose, crime fell and health spending decreased by over 8%. Fun digression: the Seattle Experiment was abandoned because an incorrect finding was that Basic Income increased the Divorce Rate. Forget for a minute that this was untrue and think on the reasoning. We couldn’t have a Universal Basic Income because Women might gain too much independence. Long live the Patriarchy!
Nothing Less Than Utopia
Tony Groves
March 27, 2017
Broadsheet
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