If #POTUS - president of USA - can spend a quarter of his days in office playing #golf then it’s about time workers have a #fourhourday or at least a #fourdayweek ?
#Capitalism #wageslavery
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"By popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself?"
"For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after the novel was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.
If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.
“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.
Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.
Gen X-ers grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.
When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.
More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/style/gen-x-creative-work.html
The New York Times · The Gen X Career Meltdown
The Recucklican mind could never understand this.
Also #socialism is when #Facebook #censors your posts. 
This Sci-Fi Show Exposes How Elites Justify Evil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIkJpfgKr4
"The bad news, as demonstrated by the American story, is that an age of leisure will not automatically flow from increased productivity. The good news is that political interventions can bring us closer to this vision.
“While Keynes’ predictions regarding productivity growth have actually been exceeded over the past nearly 100 years,” conclude Behringer, Gonzalez Granda, and van Treeck, “the obstacles to more leisure time are primarily socio-political in nature.”
The Scandinavian social democracies, even in their recently weakened states, offer the starkest counterexample. They are highly productive, but their workers put in six to ten fewer hours per week than their American counterparts do, a trend that holds for low and high earners alike.
Unions have proven essential in translating productivity gains into shorter working hours. American union membership has collapsed since the postwar period; Scandinavian union rates have fallen recently, but workers in the region still maintain a powerful, centralized collective bargaining system that secures shorter workweeks, generous paid leave, and predictable schedules.
The comprehensive welfare systems in these countries further reduce overwork. With universal health care, subsidized childcare, free education through university, and robust social safety nets, Scandinavians don’t face the same financial pressures that drive Americans to sacrifice their free time for a paycheck. Importantly, these welfare policies have also increased female workforce participation, reducing women’s spousal dependency and decreasing the pressure on men to work long hours to support their families.
Scandinavian societies have seen inequality expand and their welfare states erode in recent years, but these features are still significantly more pronounced than in the United States."
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/work-keynes-scandinavia-class-leisure/
jacobin.comWe Shouldn’t Have to Work This HardPoorer Americans work long hours to afford basic necessities. Richer Americans work long hours in pursuit of “the good life” that’s perpetually just beyond their grasp. All of this tedious work is a waste of our precious time and resources.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/20/down-syndrome-australia-subminimum-wage
$4.20 per hour is not enough to live on – but exploitation is “legal”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/28/larry-was-paid-420-an-hour-in-australia-its-not-enough-to-live-on-but-its-completely-legal
Abolish Sub Minimum Wage https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dj4N8NtD9RKJj7eypPgKkIPggKI2aONCrwBOEzjrEIg/edit?tab=t.0
#Capitalism #livingWage #minimumWage #subminimumWage
#wageslavery #workingpoor
The Guardian · Charlotte’s friends with Down syndrome are paid $3 an hour. It’s legal in Australia - and she’s taking a stand
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“For all the working folk in every country”
The Organizer (Live / 1984) · Jeff Cahill &
Mark Ross
No JOB is a "dream job". Unless It's a nightmare. #WageSlavery sucks.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-surges-2-trillion-2024-three-times-faster-year-while-number Billionaire wealth surges by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before, while the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990. #fascism #News #Economy #wageslavery #greed #work
Today in Labor History February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike began. 65,000 workers participated. Longshoremen, trolley operators and bartenders also participated. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AF of L and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee. Army veterans created an independent police force to maintain order. The Labor War Veteran's Guard prohibited the use of force and didn’t carry weapons. The regular police made no arrests in any actions related to the strike. Overall, arrests dropped to less than half their normal number.
A pamphlet that was distributed during the strike said, “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil."
The strike ended when they brought in federal troops and the workers were pressured to quit by bureaucrats from the national unions, particularly the AFL.
Today in Labor History February 3, 1910: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones addressed Milwaukee brewery workers during a two-month stint working alongside women bottle-washers while on leave from the United Mine Workers:
"Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul-mouthed, brutal foremen . . . the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, in their wet shoes and rags, for they cannot buy clothes on the pittance doled out to them. . . . Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption . . . An illustration of what these girls must submit to, one about to become a mother told me with tears in her eyes that every other day a depraved specimen of mankind took delight in measuring her girth & passing comments."
Today in Labor History February 1, 1865: President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. However, the 13th Amendment does not abolish all forms of slavery. The state is still permitted to force prisoners to work for free, or for wages far below the minimum wage. They are even allowed to do this and sell the products made by prisoners for a profit, sometimes even getting tax breaks for doing so. And, so long as capitalism exists, wage slavery will still persist. Sadly, with the right-wing backlash against everything “woke,” politicians and pundits successfully convinced California voters to vote against Prop 6, which would have banned prison slave labor in their state.
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