Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1669-1671

In New Orleans, a mom with one child needs to earn $17.52 to make ends meet.  In New York, the mom with one child should earn $19.66 to make it.   If we now realistically calculate the number of people who work and do not earn a living wage, the numbers of working poor in the US skyrocket to several tens of millions.
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The US Labor Department estimated recently that 13 million people were unemployed.  Another 8 million people were working part-time but wanted full-time work.  Even more millions who are not working are not counted in those numbers because they have been unemployed so long. 
Why Don't We Pay People Enough? 8 Facts About America's Struggling Working People
 AlterNet / By Bill Quigley

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 Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots.

The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent...
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The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.
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The study analyzed the effect of industrial robots in local labor markets in the United States. Robots are to blame for up to 670,000 lost manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007, it concluded, and that number will rise because industrial robots are expected to quadruple.
Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs
Claire Cain Miller @clairecm
New York Times
MARCH 28, 2017

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76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors - an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.

Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the  poverty line. Some are on  welfare or homeless. Others depend on  charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally  not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be  fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.
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With roughly 40 percent of academic positions  eliminated since the 2008 crash, most adjuncts will not find a tenure-track job.
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when 76 percent of professors are viewed as so disposable and indistinguishable that they are listed in course catalogues as  "Professor Staff", administrators view  computers which grade essays as a viable replacement.
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76 percent of faculty are treated as dispensable automatons.
Academia's Indentured Servants
April 12, 2013
Sarah Kendzior
Al Jazeera

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1666-1668

I DEMAND a return on investment for the taxes i paid that went to r&d for computers, robotics, and automation, not to mention the government loans for rich fucks to obtain more capitol and implement all this. the computer revolution was created by all of us, we should all benefit! place a tax on each form of automation our nation uses, put it towards universal income, and let us all reap the benefits of eliminating tedious tasks
Ron Walsh
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 Nowadays, everyone needs an income – to be able to live and to work to our full potential. A real Unconditional Basic Income is not a neoliberal austerity measure for the few who currently appropriate natural resources and the wealth created by the paid and unpaid work of earlier and present generations. Basic income builds a solid basis for the welfare state. No ‘natural’ laws govern the current race to the bottom with austerity and tax competition. These are the result of policy choices, and we can choose different ones. Therefore we say:

    Redistribute the wealth – here and everywhere!
International Basic Income Week

No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.
Jobs aren’t the solution to America’s problems—they’re the cause.
James Livingston











 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1663-1665

Drugs and Depression: As the pharmaceutical industry keeps pushing opioids, Americans are suffering "deaths of despair" – death by drugs, alcohol, and suicide. One out of every six Americans has taken a psychiatric drug such as an antidepressant or sedative in the past year. About 75% of heroin addicts used prescription opioids before turning to heroin, which is killing people at a rate three times greater than just seven years ago. Americans are also dying from alcoholism at a record rate. Suicide is at its highest level in 30 years.

Job Stress: The suicide rate is also clearly linked to unemployment and deteriorating work conditions, especially since the 2008 recession.
Paul Buchheit
A Beautiful Moment of Socialism. But Now Killer Capitalism Resumes
CommonDreams
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When work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
Albert Camus

 First of all, I was a white male, with all the privilege that comes with that. I received a free education from a world-respected university paid for by the taxpayers of California (education used to be free in California). I even had a mother that could lend me a year’s wages to start one of my first businesses. I had cities and counties that would give me zoning and permit entitlements to turn a few hundred thousand dollars of raw land into hundreds of millions of dollars of recreational community subdivisions. I traveled on roads I didn’t pay for and used the country’s legal system to bash competitors before they could start. I was not just the inheritor and beneficiary of the rich people that had gone before me, of those that had skewed and rigged the rules and prepared the way, but also of every single person that had allowed it to happen. My fortune was built from riches plundered from the earth and watered by the blood, sweat and tears of everyone that helped to make me rich, not just my employees, suppliers and customers, but the whole society.

Thanks everyone.

The thank you is sincere but it might sound a bit hollow to your ears. Thank you doesn’t really seem like a lot to say when you have accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars and most people have very little money to fall back on. Imagine eating at a sumptuous private banquet every night that the whole society has paid for, while most people are too stressed from overwork and worry to do more than grab some fast food on the way home and others can only hope to find some moldy food in a dumpster. There is no fairness in that. No equality. No justice. Indeed, it is shameful.
Wealth Belongs To All Of Us – Not Just To The Rich
By Dariel Garner
Popular Resistance
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1660-1662

…your average foodie will ask way more questions about how humane the conditions were of the chicken they’re about to eat, than about the working conditions of [the] waiter who is right in front of them.
5 Reasons Working in a Restaurant Sucks
By Katherine Greider
The Washington Monthly
via AlterNet 

 Please, all you empty suits, come to my part of town where young men are rooting through trash cans and mentally ill homeless people gnaw their gums at the bus stops. Come with me to interviews where 20 college graduates, dressed in their Sunday best, winnowed from hundreds of applicants, do a cattle call for a single clerical position. For $8/hr.
Leilani Karp
Los Angeles
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Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs
New York Times
Published: March 3, 2013

 The expression “a liberal education” originally meant one worthy of freemen. Such is education simply in a true and broad sense. But education ordinarily so-called-- the learning of trades and professions which is designed to enable men to earn their living, or to fit them for a particular station in life--is servile.
Henry Thoreau, 1859