Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1645-1647

The Buddha said, “Monks, if you want to be free from suffering, you should contemplate knowing how much is enough. By knowing it, you are in the place of enjoyment and peacefulness. If you know how much is enough, you are content even when you sleep on the ground. If you don’t know it, you are discontented even when you are in heaven. You can feel poor even if you have much wealth. You may be constantly pulled by the five sense desires and pitied by those who know how much is enough. This is called “to know how much is enough.’”

Eight Awakenings of Great Beings
Dogen (1200-1253)
Written at the Eihei Monastery on the sixth day, the first month, 1253
[emphasis JS 

Since the recession ended in 2009, income gains have accrued almost entirely to the top earners, the Census Bureau found. The top 5 percent of earners — households making more than about $191,000 a year — have recovered their losses and earned about as much in 2012 as they did before the recession. But those in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution are generally making considerably less than they had been, hit by high rates of unemployment and nonexistent wage growth.

Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy
By ANNIE LOWREY
New York Times
Published: September 17, 2013 

[emphasis JS]

  Instead of repatriating work from overseas, or reclaiming factory labor from the robots on the shop floor, or increasing public spending to create full employment, what if we said, fuck work? Or, more politely: “We prefer not to."
Why Work?
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
The Baffler

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1642-1644

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).
Ernest Callenbach,
Last Words to an America in Decline (2012)

 We will have more and more people who will not need to work. The symptom of this problem is the employment thing. How is it different if we succeed in creating an economy that can provide the basics for everyone without them having to do anything and people who do not have to do anything due to the efficiency and luck of a grandparent? The situations are identical and we had better get use to it.
...
Unemployment is not a problem but a goal. By eliminating scarcity we all succeed. The problem is how to allocate the resources so that everyone has the opportunity to work less and do more of what they want. We definitely are being stupid by forcing people to work and punishing them for it while allowing, even honoring, people who live on capital gains.
Yes, we have this backwards
Mike Meyer
[emphasis JS]

 The requisite jobs don’t exist, and almost half of those that do don’t pay enough to live on (much less build anyone’s character). The United States may be the indispensable nation, but it is clearly a less-developed country—a place where hard labor means a prison sentence, not a living wage, and work means economic impoverishment, not moral possibility.
Why Work?
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
The Baffler

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1639-1641

Put it this way: every Walmart with three hundred or more “associates” costs taxpayers roughly a million dollars in public assistance each year because the wages paid these employees don’t cover their food and health care.
Why Work?
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
The Baffler

 The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.
Oscar Wilde
De Profundis

 Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intensive. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that referred journal. These essays are honest: their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work - in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others - is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: that the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragi-comedy that is often academia.
Mark Edmundson
Who are you and what are you doing here
Best American Essays 2012

Edmundson: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/people/mwe

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1636-1638

They called this Wage Slavery. Slave Owners argued in the House of Representatives during the labor debate That they where actually more Humane, Because they owned their workers.. So they had a vested interest in making sure their property was Fed, Housed and supplied medical care. Where the Rich fat cats in the North Merely wanted to exploit their Work force by paying them Slave wages that couldn't even pay for the basic necessities in life with zero care of their well being. 50% of every full time worker in the USA makes $30,000 a year or less. By OECD standards they live in poverty. 50% of all full time workers working 40-60 hours a week in the USA live in poverty. In 2016, Wallstreet Bonuses,  Just the Bonuses. Equated to DOUBLE the money that All minimum wage workers in the USA made Combined.
DootDoot
Comment
Economic Update: Capitalism's Shadow: Poverty



Price cutting, led primarily by Amazon, has reduced many brick-and-mortar bookstores to rubble, depriving readers of direct interaction with booksellers. Despite some recent good news, the number of independents has been halved in the last two decades, and the chain stores that survive increasingly employ part-time, unskilled staff.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader
By COLIN ROBINSON
New York Times
JAN. 4, 2014



Work no longer serves these dual purposes of building character and providing income commensurate with effort. There’s not enough work to go around, and what there is has been reduced to a simulation of effort—pretend work in the cubicles and at the academic conferences—or backbreaking toil in the sweatshops, the office towers, and the offshore factories. The working world as we now experience it is an exquisite corpse, a collaboration between Charles Dickens, David Lodge, and William Gibson.
Why Work?
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
The Baffler

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1633-1635

Sears Canada's move to file for creditor protection means that 2,900 employees will not be receiving severance.

Part of the company's court-supervised restructuring involves letting go of 17 per cent of its staff, or 2,900 employees, and closing 59 stores.
Sears Canada Laid-Off Employees Won't Receive Severance Packages
Huffpost

When Medicine Hat, a city in southern Alberta, Canada, pledged to put an end to homeless in 2009, there were many sceptics who thought it couldn't be done. A good six years later, the city says it has fulfilled its promise with the help of a surprisingly simple idea: giving every person living on the streets a home with no strings attached.
How a Canadian City Ended Homelessness With a Simple Idea
DAVID RUHM
Goodnet 

Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the Reformation, almost everyone did.

In this sense, the Protestant ethic was never just a matter of church schism and doctrine. “But at least one thing was unquestionably new,” as Max Weber explained, “the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.”
...
insofar as we can experience and measure the end of work—we move beyond the moral universe we call the Protestant ethic. In navigating this historic transition, we see that a world unmoored from the safe harbor of necessity could be full of moral promise, but only if we grasp it as such.
Why Work?
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
The Baffler