Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1735-1737

By now it’s no longer just the Silicon Valley trend watchers and technoprophets who are apprehensive. In a study that has already racked up several hundred citations, scholars at Oxford University have estimated that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next 20. “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame,” notes a New York University professor. “But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next.”

Rutger Bregman

World Economic Forum

 

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.
Rutger Bregman, 
World Economic Forum 

You must suffer to earn money. You are expected to “earn a living.” “Earning a living” means enduring your job and paying your dues like everyone else, in order to prove you’re worthy of subsistence in the eyes of capital, and in the eyes of those among your fellow hapless wage laborers who have internalized the Protestant work ethic.

And you must suffer in the proper way: silently, while  performing “positivity.” It’s not enough to be structurally exploited  by the need to sell your hours to employers so you can survive.  It’s not enough to conceal your misery about it, either. You must also express gratitude for your job. After all, it could be worse.  You’re lucky to have a job at all!  If you speak up about your  suffering, you risk being branded as “difficult” or “entitled” – a  complainer who deserves their fate.

This is what passes for a work ethic in the USA: the logic of the abuser, writ large.
D. JoAnne Swanson
The Anticareerist

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1732-1734

Andrew Yang, a well-connected New York businessman who is mounting a longer-than-long-shot bid for the White House.
...
“All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,” Mr. Yang, 43, said over lunch at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan last month, in his first interview about his campaign. In just a few years, he said, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.”

“That one innovation,” he continued, “will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”
His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming.
The Shift
By KEVIN ROOSE
NYT
[emphasis JS]

On a Saturday morning in 2013 in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, an 18-year-old recycling worker, Luis Camarillo, was loading materials into a truck when the vehicle’s compactor crushed him. He was rushed to a hospital, where he died.

Mr. Camarillo’s death, while seemingly a freak accident, was in fact not unusual.
The Brutal Life of a Sanitation Worker
By CARL ZIMRINGFEB. 9, 2018

NYT

 A move to allow restaurants and other employers to impose tip sharing on workers, and in some cases keep the money, is under fire from labor groups.
Labor Dept. Plan Could Let the Boss Pocket the Tip  
By NOAM SCHEIBER
FEB. 4, 2018
NYT headline

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1729-1731

Bataille conceives of a general economy of global energy flows which inevitably generates a surplus of energy which must be expended. Under capitalism, excess (human energy not necessary to survival) is diverted into accumulation and endlessly-climbing profits for the ruling class…  Play is the refusal of regimentation, supervision and clocks. In this sense, play is a precondition for resistance, which demands time and energy for spontaneity, contemplation, communication, and unity. Play must be recovered.
Laura Martz
from
Free Time! Ludicity and the Anti-work Ethic

[emphasis JS]

In an “accidental” basic income pilot in North Carolina, where a longitudinal study of child development coincided with the decision of a Cherokee community to distribute casino profits to all tribal members, children in recipient families had fewer behavioural disorders, performed better in school, and were less likely to drift into crime.

Universal basic income is becoming an urgent necessity
Guy Standing
The Guardian
Thu 12 Jan 2017

 Today, the number of newsprint employees is down by over 55% since December 1998. The number of print magazine employees is down by 40%.
Bambi vs. Godzilla
Gary North
Specific Answers

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1726-1728

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed.
...
I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live.
The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They're Not What You Think
By Johann Hari
Huffpost
[emphasis JS] 

Another Whole Foods supervisor, meanwhile, says that they dread coming to work for fear that someone from the corporate office will be there to brutally evaluate their team’s work.

“I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about maps and inventory, and when regional leadership is going to come in and see one thing wrong, and fail the team,” they said. “The stress has created such a tense working environment. Seeing someone cry at work is becoming normal.”
Whole Foods Workers Revolt After Amazon Imposes Dystopian Grading System
By Brad Reed
via Alternet
[emphasis JS] 

Able-bodied is not truly a demographic label, though: There is no standard for physical or mental ability that makes a person able. Rather, the term has long been a political one. Across centuries of use, it has consistently implied another negative: The able-bodied could work, but are not working (or working hard enough). And, as such, they don’t deserve our aid.

“Within that term is this entire history of debates about the poor who can work but refuse to, because they’re lazy,” said Susannah Ottaway, a historian of social welfare at Carleton College in Minnesota. “To a historian, to see this term is to understand its very close association with debates that center around the need to morally reform the poor.”

In Washington, “able-bodied” has retained its moral connotations but lost much of its historical context. The term dates back 400 years, when English lawmakers used it the same way, to separate poor people who were physically incapable of supporting themselves from the poor who ought to be able to. Debates over poverty in America today follow a direct line from that era.

Under Elizabethan poor law, the job of making these distinctions went to church wardens and parish overseers, people who lived in the community.
Who’s Able-Bodied Anyway?
By Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz
Feb. 3, 2018
New York Times