Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1862-1864

"We own it lock, stock, and barrel...I'm not working for that turkey in the office; he's working for me. And when I go into that office and want some information, I demand it and get it!" - Worker in American Plywood Workers' Cooperatives (cited in Greenberg 1986)
 "We hire the manager. Running the mill is up to him. If we don't like the way he's running it, we can fire his butt."
Worker in American Plywood Workers' Cooperatives (cited in Greenberg 1986)

The dominant work ethic in the United States is founded on the presumption that people will not work unless forced to do so by sheer life-and-death necessity. Does this imply a belief in the value of work or, beneath the surface of this loudly asserted attitude, possibly just the opposite?
Lynn Chancer

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1859-1861

Yasmine Askri, 26, majored in human resources, and after a year of unemployment, she got a business school degree. She was promised a fixed contract after an internship, but it never came. She left the Lille area for Paris to find a job, and spent another year on unemployment, finally finding an interim job for 18 months at GDF Suez. But that contract ended in June. Again unemployed, she has sent out nearly 400 résumés, she said, but has had only three interviews.
“It’s a disaster for everyone,” said Jean Pisani-Ferry, who runs the economic research center Bruegel in Brussels. “They can’t get credit, and they’re treated awfully by employers. And then there are all those young people in jobs that don’t match their skills.” The labor market, he said, is “deeply dysfunctional.”
...
Throughout the European Union, unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 is soaring — 22 percent in France, 51 percent in Spain, 36 percent in Italy. But those are only percentages among those looking for work. There is another category: those who are “not in employment, education or training,” or NEETs...
...
In Spain, in addition to the 51 percent of young people who are looking for work, 23.7 percent of those 15 to 29 have simply given up looking, said Anne Sonnet, a senior economist studying joblessness at the O.E.C.D. here. In France, it’s 16.7 percent — nearly two million young people who have given up; in Italy, 20.5 percent.
Young, Educated and Jobless in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times
 Published: December 2, 2012

Most leftists are uncritically statist, merely complaining that the government is controlled by the wrong people and doesn't do enough of the right things. And though the left of course wants to redistribute corporate profits to workers, it shows little interest in attacking the authoritarian structure of the workplace or the puritanical assumptions of the work ethic.
Their Libertarianism and Ours
by Ellen Willis

As it happens, there are no columns in standard double-entry book-keeping to keep track of satisfaction and demoralization. There is no credit entry for feelings of self-worth and confidence, no debit column for feelings of uselessness and worthlessness. There are no monthly, quarterly, or even annual statements of pride and no closing statement of bankruptcy when the worker finally comes to feel that after all he couldn't do anything else, and doesn't deserve anything better.
Barbara Garson

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1856-1858

What’s happened to the demand? For starters, over 60% of the economy hasn’t seen an increase in their income in nearly fifty years. Such stagnation comes largely from the dramatic increase in automation of the past few decades. On top of that, robots don’t get paid and therefore fail to produce demand. Simply put, they don’t wait in lines for the new Apple phone or go on Amazon shopping sprees, people do. And since robots don’t spend in the economy, they suck the value of work out of the economy.
The Hidden Danger of Workforce Automation
Jarl Jensen
[emphsasis JS]

 Within a cooperatively owned, worker-directed structure, each worker would own an equal share of the company and have an equal vote in determining its leadership and thus the direction of the business.
The practical implications of such a shift are manifold. An enterprise directed by the workers themselves would allow them to determine the allocation of surpluses. They could, of course, simply spread the profits of the company equally among themselves, which last year would have meant that each of Apple’s 123,000 employees would have received an extra $390,000.
...As it stands now, more than 3 million people around the world who build Apple’s products work for independent contractors, often for about $2 an hour.
Think Different
Robert Homan
Boston Review
[emphsasis JS]

Do you see the problem here? The moral philosophy that it was born with made it impossible, more or less, for America to learn history’s greatest lesson. Poverty causes violence, and organized mass violence is just fascism. Poverty is the greatest bad the world has ever known — it is the prime mover, the true cause, of ills. But for America, poverty was not unjust—it was just: not a bad, but a good. The true bad was eliminating poverty — because the poor, who were weak, were parasites, upon the strong. Again, do you see how fascism is hardly a giant leap away from such a belief?
Why Haven’t We Learned Anything From the 1930s?
umair haque

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1853-1855

2016 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (final data)

Industry by event or exposure, 2016 (XLSX 78K)

Industry by transportation incidents and homicides, 2016 (XLSX 68K)

Industry by private sector, government workers, and self-employed workers, 2016 (XLSX 65K)

Primary and secondary source of injury by major private industry division, 2016 (XLSX 69K)

Occupation by event or exposure, 2016 (XLSX 46K)

Occupation by transportation incidents and homicides, 2016 (XLSX 45K)

Worker characteristics by event or exposure, 2016 (XLSX 15K)


Event or exposure by age, 2016 (XLSX 28K)

Event or exposure by major private industry division, 2016 (XLSX 31K)

Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI)
[emphasis JS]

How tired are you? 
Really, I’m asking. I don’t mean sleepy or exhausted – I’m talking bone tired weary of them.

All of them.

The ones who told you the definition of success, how to raise your children, what to drive, how to furnish your home, what to feed your pet, what disease you’re prone to, what your portfolio should look like, how to find your balance, how to know you’ve found the one, how to know your relationship is over, and the list goes on.

...It’s getting up in the morning, eating what your body really wants to eat, putting on what you really want to wear, and refraining from your morning shoulds of news, email, messages and phone calls at least until you get into your car to begin your day.

Unplugging from them means launching your morning in the way you need to ease into the day. Through music, nature and quiet time if that’s what your soul wants. If your inner longing wants to run, well then run, but if your inner knowing says hell no, let me sit here and drink my coffee and listen to the birds, well then listen.
Is Tired in Your Job Title? Yawn...
December 5, 2018 by Tamara Star
The Good Men Project

Apple’s plans to return an unprecedented $100 billion to investors over the next year through stock buybacks will only exacerbate this pool of passive income and thus directly increase income inequality at a level unknown in recent history. Such a huge buyback is possible because for the last decade Apple has been storing profits in overseas tax havens to the tune of more than $285 billion—cash reserves large enough to meet the International Food Policy Research Institute’s yearly goal to end hunger by 2030 and buy Boeing or McDonalds with what is leftover.
Think Different
Robert Homan
Boston Review
[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1850-1852

This was history’s greatest lesson, ever, period, full stop — that poverty is the greatest bad known to humankind. (In the same way that we speak of books or healthcare as “goods.”) Until the second world war, we didn’t have an explanation for war, violence, ruin — and hence, we had no power over it whasoever. Human history was therefore just a long cycle of violence, repeating itself forever. War, violence was imagined to be a thing unto itself, which no one could explain or predict. Only following the war did human beings understand, for the first time, that it was poverty which ignites violence, tribalism, and regress. We gained the power to stop and prevent war, for the first time in human history. That is why under the global consensus of the 1950s, war and violence finally began to slow, as poverty began to fall.
Only one nation didn’t seem interested in learning this lesson — and my second reason we haven’t learned anything from the 1930s is hubris.
Why Haven’t We Learned Anything From the 1930s?
umair haque

I suppose for a lot of people the individual civilizing mission feels more doable than structural change, so they feel compelled to concentrate their limited energy in that way. But I think that in a culture where women have more economic opportunities, men self-civilize in a way because they realize that if they want to be in relationships with women they can’t be abusive, they can’t take women for granted.
There were brilliant socialist feminists in the seventies, people like Silvia Federici and others, who were making the case that large structural changes would reorganize relationships between men and women. What happened is that, as Nancy Fraser has written about, feminism was largely co-opted by neoliberal capitalism. So we ended up getting a kind of Sheryl Sandberg-style “lean in” feminism, which is all about individual success and creating conditions for a handful of women to be as filthy rich as a handful of men are.
The idea of socialist feminism evaporated with the general global backlash against Marxism and the rise of neoliberalism.
from
No Scrubs
An interview with
Kristen R. Ghodsee

The last time that GM was in trouble, during the 2009 fiscal meltdown, it was the federal government that rode to the rescue with a bailout that totalled $10.8 billion in loans, share purchases and subsidies. Some of that money was paid back, but the net loss on the package is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $4 billion to $5 billion — including a $1 billion loan write-off that Ottawa buried deep in its books.
One number cruncher from the conservative Fraser Institute think tank figures the net cost to taxpayers at roughly $474,000 for each of the company's Canadian workers.
Either way, the reality is that there are select few industries in Canada that aren't receiving some form of corporate welfare.
Here's how GM's government subsidies stack up against other businesses in Canada
CBC