Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1759-1761

A Wristband to Track Workers’ Hand Movements? (Amazon Has Patents for It) 
By CEYLAN YEGINSU

The e-commerce giant has won two patents for a tracking technology that can nudge a human hand in the right direction — toward a warehouse bin, say.
Headline
NYT

 The World Bank estimates that, within the next twenty years, up to 57% of the world’s jobs face the prospect of automation. Where’s the outrage? Not in America, where one Pew Foundation study found half of its participants realize that automation will probably do most or all the work done by humans in the next fifty years. Why isn’t this issue at the forefront of every election? Like the melting ice-caps, the danger has arrived, but the entirety of the damage has yet to be felt.
The Hidden Danger of Workforce Automation
Jarl Jensen
Medium

The Sutta on The Wrong Sacrifice and The Right (Digha Nikaya 5) tells the story of a king who asks his wise brahmin advisor how to perform a “great sacrifice.” The brahmin points out that the country is afflicted with theft and violence, and if the king were to assure that everyone had the resources they needed for their work, these social ills would end. The king does so, and the problems disappear. The argument recognizably follows a logical pattern that permeates the earlier Buddhist discourses known as dependent origination. “When this is, that is; with the cessation of this, comes the cessation of that.”
Opinion: Why the Buddha Would Advocate for Universal Basic Income
By Matthew Gindin

Oct 25, 2017
tricycle 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1756-1758

“If your feelings are different from what you’re showing, you can start to get back strain, neck strain and stomachaches,” Grandey says. The toll of emotional labor at work can follow people after hours, too. A 2013 study of bus drivers found that those who reported faking emotions during the day were more likely to suffer from insomnia, anxiety and emotional exhaustion at home. A 2014 study of hotel managers by Grandey and colleagues found that people who had to feign their feelings on the job tended to be less helpful at home, presumably because they were too tired to pick up a broom or dishrag. And in yet-to-be-published research, Grandey and colleagues also found that people who fake positive emotions at less-than-positive jobs tend to drink more alcohol at home, perhaps because they feel inclined to cut loose after keeping things buttoned up. Other studies have suggested a similar lack of control with food. “You feel like you don’t have any willpower,” Grandey says.
Barista’s burden
Chris Woolston
Knowable Magazine
 [emphasis JS]

 We should be looking for new ways to organize, new ways to think and act ourselves into freedom. Instead, today we are on the road towards an existence plugged into a bio-monitor, our sleeping patterns logged, our calorie intake mandated by the people who pay us just enough to live.
Downward-Facing Capitalist Dogma
Josh Hall
The Baffler

 The 20th century income distribution system has broken down irretrievably. Globalisation, technological change and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers – those owning financial, physical or so-called intellectual property – while real wages stagnate. The income of the precariat is falling and becoming more volatile. And chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits or workfare. In short, a basic income is becoming a political imperative.
Guy Standing
The Guardian
Thu 12 Jan 2017
[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1753-1755

As some in the feminist school point out Adam Smith, when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, moved back in with his mother. She washed his clothes, cooked his meals and kept the candle wick trimmed. Without this labour (and the years spent raising and supporting him) his foundational work of modern economics would probably never have been written. And yet this essential labour does not figure in The Wealth of Nations and to this day remains outside the accounting practice of economics as it is practiced by government policy makers.
Artists, Housework and Learning to Unsee
John O'Brien
 [emphasis JS]

 We tell these girls they will go to a great college and doors will open up and they will “do great things” the world.

And some do great things in the world. Until age 30. Then most women choose to give more time to family than their career. Women don’t want to be the breadwinner. And women don’t want to work the ten-hour days that are required of people who have outstanding careers. Because they won’t see their kids.

So when you congratulate your daughter for getting good grades so she can go to a good college to get a good job, you devalue the job she is most likely to gravitate to: taking care of a family. You degrade that job as not a valid choice, the same way people in the 1950s degraded math and science as not a valid choice for girls.

When you tell girls what they should do with their future, you undermine the achievements of women’s rights in the 20th century. When we constantly devalue the choice most women are making — to scale back their career and focus on family — we take away the pride girls have in who they are: smart, educated, hard-working. You can be all those things and still decide taking care of family is most important.

Parents should validate that option as much as they validate the option of being president or running a science lab. Because your smart, educated daughter is much more likely to stay home with kids than do any of those jobs that require never seeing their kids.
Misogynist conversations women have all the time
Penelope Trunk
women
 [emphasis JS]


They were educated, hardworking, and ambitious, and now they were also poor—applying for food stamps, showing up in shelters, lining up for entry-level jobs in retail. This would have been the moment for the pundits to finally admit the truth: Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

For most women in poverty, in both good times and bad, the shortage of money arises largely from inadequate wages. When I worked on my book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, I took jobs as a waitress, nursing-home aide, hotel housekeeper, Wal-Mart associate, and a maid with a house-cleaning service. I did not choose these jobs because they were low-paying. I chose them because these are the entry-level jobs most readily available to women.

What I discovered is that in many ways, these jobs are a trap: They pay so little that you cannot accumulate even a couple of hundred dollars to help you make the transition to a better-paying job. They often give you no control over your work schedule, making it impossible to arrange for child care or take a second job. And in many of these jobs, even young women soon begin to experience the physical deterioration—especially knee and back problems—that can bring a painful end to their work life.
It Is Expensive to Be Poor
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Atlantic
 [emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1750-1752

KELOWNA — Well-meaning people who give away bottles and cans near recycling depots are only perpetuating poverty, Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran suggests.

...Council voted 6-3 to support changes to panhandling regulations that, for the first time, make it a ticketable offence to give away money, or recyclable items of some value, to other people in certain circumstances.

...Another change will see drivers who give money to panhandlers on medians at intersections also fined $250, as offering such donations is said to only encourage a form of begging that’s regarded as particularly unsafe and intimidating.

“That’s not a safe situation, and I know it makes people uncomfortable,” Coun. Luke Stack said.

Kelowna to fine those who donate empties near depots or give cash to intersection panhandlers

RON SEYMOUR, THE DAILY COURIER 

Published on: March 27, 2018

It takes a deft touch to draw a decent heart in latte foam, but that’s not the hardest part about working as a barista. The real backbreaker: cheerfully greeting a hundred people in a row, even that one guy who hasn’t left a tip in three years but always complains that his coffee isn’t hot enough except for the times that it’s too hot.

For baristas, salespeople, flight attendants and many other service workers, fake smiles and forced pleasantries often come with the job description. But psychologists warn that emotions can’t just be flipped on like an espresso machine, and smiles aren’t as easy to put on as name tags. Feigning feelings at work — what psychologists call “emotional labor” — can be as mentally and physically taxing as any other type of workplace stress, but few workers or employers recognize the threat, says Neal Ashkanasy, a professor of business management at Queensland University in Brisbane, Australia. “People just put expressions on their faces without any idea what kind of stress it’s causing,” he says.
Barista’s burden
Chris Woolston
Knowable Magazine
[emphasis JS]

 

Equal parts Don Quixote and Che Guevara, Villarino describes his peregrinations as protests not just against boredom but also against parochialism and even capitalism. “The 12-hour workday,” he wrote in an early manifesto, “is more dangerous than hitchhiking.” As a Latin American, from a downwardly mobile middle-class family — he watched his parents be crushed by those 12-hour days —

...

 “I realized that you could work your whole life for a house, a career,” he said, “and overnight it all could vanish.” 

THE WORLD’S BEST HITCHHIKER ON THE SECRETS OF HIS SUCCESS  
NYT
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