Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1708-1710

It was 2010, and Scott had just graduated from college with a bachelor’s in economics, a minor in business and $30,000 in student debt.
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After six months of applying and interviewing and never hearing back, Scott returned to his high school job at The Old Spaghetti Factory. After that he bounced around—selling suits at a Nordstrom outlet, cleaning carpets, waiting tables—until he learned that city bus drivers earn $22 an hour and get full benefits. He’s been doing that for a year now. It’s the most money he’s ever made. He still lives at home, chipping in a few hundred bucks every month to help his mom pay the rent.
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In theory, Scott could apply for banking jobs again. But his degree is almost eight years old and he has no relevant experience. He sometimes considers getting a master’s, but that would mean walking away from his salary and benefits for two years and taking on another five digits of debt—just to snag an entry-level position, at the age of 30, that would pay less than he makes driving a bus.
Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
By Michael Hobbes
Huffpost
[emphasis JS]

 There is a danger in assuming we know what the earth needs from us. But there is a danger in ceding ground to the powers that run the system that grinds this world to dust in the name of money.

“Sit with it,” the teacher said. It is a common Zen response, and though some see it as a kind of shoulder-shrugging, to me it looks like the opposite. What it really says is: Pay attention. Our culture is hopeless at paying attention. It glorifies action and belittles contemplation.
Paul Kingsnorth

[emphasis JS]

Ms. Lindsley’s experience illustrates the complicated role that human resources departments play in harassment cases. The recent outpouring of complaints from women about mistreatment in the workplace has included numerous accounts of being ignored, stymied or retaliated against by human resources units — accounts that portray them as part of the problem, not the solution.

The lack of trust manifests itself as a self-perpetuating quandary: Women are hesitant to approach human resources departments, and those departments cite the absence of complaints as proof of a respectful workplace.
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for some human resource officers, conducting an investigation into harassment allegations against a top executive or star performer can be hazardous to their own careers. The result can often be that human resources personnel are more inclined to suppress allegations than get to the bottom of them.
Sexual Harassment Cases Show the Ineffectiveness of Going to H.R.

By NOAM SCHEIBER and JULIE CRESWELL
DEC. 12, 2017
New York Times 
[emphasis JS] 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1705-1707

I work in a clinic where the vast majority of my patients are on government-funded health care. I have learned that the stereotypes about these people are true: Most of my patients have never worked a day in their lives.

They are extremely ungrateful for the care that hardworking taxpayers provide for them. Patients have punched me, bitten me, screamed at me, and even urinated on me. I often leave with vomit on my clothes.

Sometimes, I have to bribe my patients with bright-colored objects, juice or graham crackers just to examine them. Do my patients thank me? Do they contribute to the economy? No!

They just suck up low-cost health care, whining the whole time, and then go pick up their free government milk. Often, they are literally carried from place to place in the arms of a real taxpayer.

As a pediatrician, I provide these scowling little freeloaders with life-saving therapies like vaccinations and antibiotics.
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 Research has shown that people are more likely to die when they lose access to health care. Letting more American children die preventable deaths will send a strong message to kids across the country: Pull your thumbs out of your mouths, get potty-trained and GET A JOB!
As a Doctor, I’m Sick of All The Health Care Freeloaders
Rachel Pearson, M.D., Ph.D
Texas Observer
[thanks to Geneva Hagen]

 I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.
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Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.
Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
By Michael Hobbes
Huffpost
[emphasis JS]

  Nearly a third of American workers now need some kind of state license to do their jobs, compared to less than 5 percent in 1950. In most other developed countries, you don’t need official permission to cut hair or pour drinks. Here, those jobs can require up to $20,000 in schooling and 2,100 hours of instruction and unpaid practice.
Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
By Michael Hobbes

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1702-1704

Kate McFarland: I’ve never found it necessary to structure my life around the pursuit of any career path. The goal merely to make sure that my basic needs are satisfied and otherwise to pursue what interests and engages me at the time. I don’t have an “occupational identity” and don’t feel this as a personal deficiency. There’s a famous passage in The German Ideology in which Marx says, in describing the communist utopia, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity” and thus can “do one thing today and another tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” That’s almost a perfect expression of the idea.

Of course, given that “career” implies a full-time paid employment rather than just any area of specialization, anti-careerism more specifically–and perhaps even more significantly–rejects the notion that we’re defined and valued by our contributions to the GDP. It also rejects the idea the success is measured by professional promotions and raises.
Interview: Kate McFarland On Anti-Careerism]
December 3, 2017 Jennifer Lawson

…state and local governments are giving out $80 billion a year in tax breaks and other subsidies in a foolhardy, shortsighted race to attract companies. That money could go a long way to improving education, transportation and other public services that would have a far better shot at promoting real economic growth.

Instead, with these giveaways, politicians and officials are trying to pick winners and losers, almost exclusively to the benefit of big corporations (aided by highly paid lobbyists) at the expense of small businesses. Though they promise that the subsidies are smart investments, far too often the jobs either don’t materialize or are short-lived, leaving the communities no better off.
Race to the Bottom
Editorial
New York Times
Published: December 5, 2012 




 Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery.
Herbert Marcuse

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1699-1701

Change is slow and difficult, but there are solutions on the horizon. In The Real Wealth of Nations (2007), Riane Eisler, a social scientist and activist, suggests that social activists should focus on shifting the culture from an archaic domination system inherited from past eras to partnerships towards primary relations between women and men and parents and children.
The Building Blocks of Education
By Libby Simon
PsychCentral

 Solar energy is on the rise in Germany, with a record 1.3 million photovoltaic systems in 2012. The increase comes as new consumer taxes on energy are to take effect in the country.

The recent solar boom means the alternative form of energy now reaches 8 million homes in Germany, a 45 percent increase compared to 2011, the German Solar Industry Association (BSW) said on Tuesday.

"Germany is now reaping the fruits of its efforts in solar technology," said the BSW's chief executive, Carsten Körnig. "Its share of the power supply has quadrupled in just three years. At the same time, the price of a new solar power system installation has halved."
Solar energy on the rise in Germany
Date 01.01.2013
Author Dave Raish
DW
[emphasis JS]

 How did they get conned into thinking that they're lucky to have that job, at six or seven dollars an hour, and that their women have to go off and work? I'm talking about men to start with, and that the women have to go off and work, and that the children have to go God knows where -- and so on and so forth. Where did the idea come from that you're "lucky" to have a job? A job without benefits, a job without pension, a job without health care, a job without any permanence whatsoever.
James Hillman
ReVisioning Psychology