Jack Saturday

Monday, September 24, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1822-1825

Re: I got laid off at Telltale:

None of my sleepless nights or long hours on weekends trying to ship a game on time got me severance today. Don’t work overtime unless you’re paid for it, y’all. Protect your health. Companies don’t care about you.
Brandon Cebenka

I hate how gaming companies work. Hire staff, crazy push at end of development to get a product out, and then fire any “excess” staff once the product is complete. I’ve never been happier since I got out of the industry.
Georgie V

I have found that employees are objects to employers.  Best to not stay in one job too long and not to think you are irreplaceable or valued as a person.  You are likely to be betrayed.
rose ingala



We might think that the existence of millions of working poor Americans... would cause us to question the notion that indolence and poverty go hand in hand. But no. While other inequality-justifying myths have withered under the force of collective rebuke, we cling to this devastatingly effective formula. Most of us lack a confident account for increasing political polarization, rising prescription drug costs, urban sprawl or any number of social ills. But ask us why the poor are poor, and we have a response quick at the ready, grasping for this palliative of explanation. We have to, or else the national shame would be too much to bear. How can a country with such a high poverty rate — higher than those in Latvia, Greece, Poland, Ireland and all other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — lay claim to being the greatest on earth? Vanessa’s presence is a judgment. But rather than hold itself accountable, America reverses roles by blaming the poor for their own miseries.

Here is the blueprint. First, valorize work as the ticket out of poverty, and debase caregiving as not work. Look at a single mother without a formal job, and say she is not working; spot one working part time and demand she work more. Transform love into laziness. Next, force the poor to log more hours in a labor market that treats them as expendables. Rest assured that you can pay them little and deny them sick time and health insurance because the American taxpayer will step in, subsidizing programs like the earned-income tax credit and food stamps on which your work force will rely. Watch welfare spending increase while the poverty rate stagnates because, well, you are hoarding profits. When that happens, skirt responsibility by blaming the safety net itself. From there, politicians will invent new ways of denying families relief, like slapping unrealistic work requirements on aid for the poor.
Americans want to believe jobs are the solution to poverty. They’re not
Matthew Desmond, The New York Times 15:14:29.










Monday, September 17, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1819-1821

The Great Displacement is a term I’ve given to the automation of jobs by technology. Between 2000 and 2015, the U.S. automated about four million manufacturing jobs, and we’re on the cusp of automating call-centre workers, fast-food workers, truck drivers, retail workers, and the like. We are eliminating the most common jobs in the U.S. economy. We’re entering the most dramatic economic shift in human history, and anybody who believes the labour market is self-healing is mistaken.
If that’s true, then why do we keep hearing that unemployment is historically low?
The headline unemployment rate is essentially government malpractice. It only measures people who are actively looking for work. So if someone were to stop looking for a job, then it helps the unemployment rate. The more important statistic is labour-force participation. That’s down to 62.7%, which is a multi-decade low, comparable to El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. It reflects the fact that 95 million working-age Americans have left the workforce, and 1 in 5 working-age men hasn’t worked in the last 12 months.
Dumb Questions for Smart People: Automation, Unemployment, and Universal Income
By Wil S. Hylton
Wealthsimple



Of the 13,000 firefighters battling blazes across the state, more than 2,500 are prisoners. While salaried firefighters earn an annual mean wage of $74,000 a year plus benefits, prisoners earn $1 per hour when fighting active fires. According to some estimates, California saves up to $100 million a year by using prison labor to fight its biggest environmental problem.
A New Form of Slavery? Meet Incarcerated Firefighters Battling California’s Wildfires for $1 an Hour
Democracy Now



Amazon’s Move Signals End of Line for Many Cashiers
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
The next jobs set to disappear may be ones that are a bigger part of people’s daily lives: retail workers and cashiers in stores and restaurants. NYT HEADLINE
June 17, 2017

Monday, September 10, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1816-1818

Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000. And while many of these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of 10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back...
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills
By ADAM DAVIDSON
New York Times
Published: November 20, 2012


...why are Europeans so much happier and saner than Americans? Well, the reason is that Europeans don’t live under the constant, pervasive threat of genuine violence that Americans do. It’s not just that they don’t have access to guns — remember, we’re talking a deeper level of violence. It’s that they have “safety nets.” Healthcare, childcare, elderly care, retirement, pensions, and so on. And so they merrily go on with their lives, and become happier, healthier, saner people — they are not as psychologically and culturally and socially insecure precisely because they are not constantly threatened and intimidated with structural and institutional violence.
...
Predatory capitalism is. It is as if it is pointing a gun at the average American, laughing, and saying: “you had better sell me your labour, now, at the lowest possible price — or else.” Just like a mafia boss might. The result is that the strange paradox we see: Americans work harder than anyone else in the rich world, even in the poor world — but they only realize shrinking lives from all that hard work. And yet, every year, the cycle repeats itself. Americans work harder, only to lose more. More longevity, income, savings, assets, trust, meaning, purpose, democracy.
umair haque
Why America’s a More Violent Society Than You Think





We’re all on the same side. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, as the expression goes, but we must let go of a system that is making us sick, making us crazy, and killing us. During my entire life, success has been defined, incorrectly, by the amount of money a person has, rather than the amount of compassion. Similarly, the entire system has been defined in terms that make no sense because the system rewards money over happiness, and death over life. As John Ralston Saul pointed out in his 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards, “never has failure been so ardently defended as success.”
...
Time is not on our side, and it might be too late already to prevent our own near-term extinction. It’s long past time to let go of a system that enslaves us all while destroying all life and therefore all that matters. And it’s not merely time to let go, but to terminate this increasingly violent system that values the property of the rich more than the lives of the poor.
Guy McPherson
the good men project