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