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Monday 22nd of July 2024
Amazon.com
It may be tempting to see the Amazon
surveillance as purely a warehouse
problem, and surveillance-driven variable
pay as a gig problem, but employers face
no legal limit to incorporating new types
of variable pay into formal employment
— and abuses faced by independent
contractors are merging with those
faced by formal employees.
…
Corporations may soon jettison the
fixed-wage model that has been a feature
of blue-collar employment for decades.
Zephyr Teachout,
New York Review of Books, Augsut 18, 2022
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American Dream
Not living paycheck to paycheck
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American Dream
Retiring
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American Dream
Retiring
with enough money to live on
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American Dream
Taking a paid vacation
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American Dream
Telling them to
take this job and shove it
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Artificial intelligence
Paid-by-the-hour workers in
low-wage industries such as retailing
will be especially vulnerable.
That could fuel a resurgence of
labour unions seeking to represent
employees' interests and to set norms.
Even then, the choice in some jobs will
be between being replaced by a robot
or being treated like one.
The Economist, March 31, 2018
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Artificial intelligence
When AI comes for your job,
you may not lose it,
but it might become more alien,
more isolatimg, more tedious.
Josh Dzieza,
New York Magazine, June 19 — July 2, 2023
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Automation
The McKinsey Global Institute reckons
that by 2030 up to 375m people,
or 14% of the global workforce,
could have their jobs automated away.
Bosses will need to decide whether they
are prepared to offer and pay for
retraining, and whether they will
give time off for it.
Many companies say they are
all for workers developing new skills,
but not at the employer's expense.
The Economist, March 31, 2018
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Big brother
… in their capacity
to track employee performance,
to speed it up,
to measure it against targets,
managers at Walmart and Amazon
are empowered in ways that their
predecessors of a century ago
could only dream of.
Simon Head,
Mindless: Why Smarter Machines
are Making Humans Dumber
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Big brother
Software that regularly
snapshots workers' computer screens,
counts mouse and keyboard clicks,
captures webcam images,
peeps relentlessly
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By the numbers
A 2014 study … found that students
who are enrolled only part time
in classes (often because they
need to work to cover costs)
drop out at a rate of 68 percent,
compared to 19 percent for
full-time students.
American Scientist,
November-December 2016,
citing National Student Clearinghouse data
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By the numbers
About 3.5m people were employed
as cashiers in US stores last year,
according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics – more than in any other
occupation aside from sales.
¶
The BLS expects that number to rise
just 2 per cent in the next decade,
far less than the 7 per cent increase
it projects for the entire US economy.
Financial Times, December 10/11, 2016
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By the numbers
Between ages 25 and 45, the gender
pay gap for college graduates,
which starts close to zero,
widens by 55 percentage points.
For those without college degrees,
it widens by 28 percentage points.
…
The average college-educated man
… improves his earnings by 77 percent
from age 25 to 45, while similar women
improve their earnings by only 31 percent.
Men without college degrees increase
their earnings much faster than similar
women in the first decade of their career,
but by age 45, women catch up.
New York Times, May 17, 2017
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By the numbers
Daily wage
a prisoner in Portland, Oregon,
is paid to clear out homeless camps:
$1
Harper's Index, November 2017
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By the numbers
Factor by which
the gender pay gap in the White House
has increased under Trump:
3.4
Harper's Index, October 2017
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By the numbers
Globally, the McKinsey researchers
calculated that 49 percent of time
spent on work activities could be
automated with “currently
demonnstrated technology”
either already in the marketplace
or being developed in labs.
That, the report says, translates into
$15.8 trillion in wages
and the equivalent of
1.1 billion workers worldwide.
But only 5 percent of jobs
can be entirely automated.
New York Times, January 12, 2017
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By the numbers
If current trends continue,
a quarter of men between 25 and 54
will be out of work by mid-century.
Lawrence Summers,
Financial Times, September 24-25, 2016
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By the numbers
Portion of Americans who have
worked as independent contractors
who would not do so again:
2/3
Harper's Index, December 2016
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By the numbers
Portion of Americans who think
that most of the work
currently done by humans
will be automated in fifty years:
2/3
Who think their job will still exist
in its current form:
4/5
Harper's Index, June 2016
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By the numbers
Portion of U.S. workers
who believe strongly in
their company's values:
1/4
Harper's Index, December 2016
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By the numbers
Seventeen percent of workers
told Gallup this year that they
worked 60 hours or more a week,
nearly double the 9 percent
who said so in 2005.
New York Times, December 27, 2015
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By the numbers
The share of U.S. workers
testing positive for illicit drug use
reached its highest level in a decade …
Overall, 4% of worker drug tests were
positive in 2015. Among safety-sensitive
workers, positive tests rose to 1.8%
from 1.7%. In the general workforce,
positive tests rose to 4.8% from 4.7%.
… in 2014, the year of the most recent
survey, about 10% of Americans over
age 12 had used an illicit drug
in the prior 30 days.
Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2016
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By the numbers
The Treasury Department
has discovered … that 18 percent
of workers are covered by
noncompete agreements.
They aren't all high-end engineers
with trade secrets in hand.
The list includes fast-food workers.
New York Times, November 2, 2016,
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Capitalists say
The only training worth paying for
is paying your current job holders
to train their H-1B replacements
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Children
Statistically,
kids are safer from mass shootings
in a meatpacking plant than in a school.
Maybe they'll lose a limb, but hey,
they'll probably survive.
…
Best of all, they're
cheap
and their brains haven't developed enough
to form unions!
Arguments advanced by a lobbyist for
water-downed child labor laws like those
being passed in many Republican-led states,
as represented in an April 26, 2023, cartoon
by Jen Sorensen
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Christmas
Nobody would come see Santa.
Your mind starts going, why?
Do I have something in my beard?
You have to get yourself
snapped out of that.
Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2018,
quoting a professional Santa Claus
describing what it's like
working in a dying mall
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Communism
The economic system of
the modern workplace is communist,
because the government
– that is, the establishment –
owns all the assets, and the top
of the establishment hierarchy
designs the production plan,
which subordinates execute.
There are no internal markets
in the modern workplace.
Indeed, the boundary of the firm
is
defined
as the point at which
markets end and authoritarian
centralized planning and direction begin.
Elizabeth Anderson
Private Government
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Deindustrialization
Today in Fort Wayne,
I talked to somebody from Arlington
that heard from someone in Lordstown
that heard from someone in Wentzville
that is related to someone in Lansing
that heard about a psychic in Detroit
that contacted Elvis, and Elvis said
that he heard from 'a good source
that is high up' that the day Hell
freezes over, GM is going to
reopen the Janesville plant.
Probably just a rumor.
Posted March 29, 2012, to Facebook group
Janesville Wisconsin GM Transfers, 500+
workers commuting to plants across the South
and Midwest years after Janesville shut down
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Democracy
If
democracy is justified
in governing the state,
then it must
also
be justified
in governing economic enterprises;
and to say that it is
not
justified
in governing economic enterprises
is to imply that it is not justified
in governing the state.
Robert A. Dahl,
A Preface to Economic Democracy
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Economics
In the new version
of the law of supply and demand,
jobs are so cheap
— as measured by the pay —
that a worker is encouraged
to take on as many of them
as she possibly can.
Barbara Ehrenreich,
Nickel and Dimed
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Employment
The crucial problem
isn't creating new jobs.
The crucial problem
is creating new jobs that humans
perform better than algorithms.
Consequently, by 2050 a new
class of people might emerge –
the useless class.
People who are not just unemployed,
but unemployable. … So what will
the useless class do all day?
Yuval Harari,
The Guardian, May 8, 2017
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Employment
The economy increasingly requires
people with very high skills or very few.
The far more numerous jobs requiring
“middle” skills that could be learned
principally on the job
are disappearing.
Edward Luce,
Time to Start Thinking
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Employment
They [economists Paul Beaudry,
David Green and Benjamin Sand]
show that since 2000 the share of
employment accounted for by high-
skilled jobs in America has been falling.
As a result, college-educated workers
are taking on jobs that are
cognitively less demanding,
displacing less educated workers.
Economist, January 14, 2017
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Feelings
Handshakes have given way to
bear hugs, back pats and
lingering embraces in some
corners of the corporate world. …
Huggers say their touchy-feely approach
breeds teamwork, trust and
better business results.
Huggees don't always agree.
Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2017,
on co-worker hugging, mostly by CEOs
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Gig economy
Most sharing-economy workers make
under $500 a month from such firms,
according to data collected by
consumer-lending startup Earnest. …
While the paltry sum reflects how many
people are just dabbling (as opposed
to working full-time), it also highlights
how tricky it can be to earn a living at
companies that don't actually “hire”
workers. … It's perhaps telling
that Airbnb paid out the most
on average–$926–per month.
Returns on capital (rather than labor)
are pretty good these days.
fortune.com, June 27, 2017
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Government
Government is everywhere,
not just in the form of the state,
but even more pervasively
in the workplace.
Elizabeth Anderson,
Private Government
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Income growth
An analysis of American wage growth
by economists at the New York
Federal Reserve showed that
the bulk of earnings growth took
place between the ages of 25 and 35;
on average, after the age of 45 only
the top 2% of lifetime earners
see any earnings growth.
So it is vital for people to move
quickly into work once qualified
and to hold on to jobs
once they get them.
Economist, January 14, 2017
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Journalism
I...worked on this story for a year...
and...he just...he tweeted it out.
Like. I spent hours and days and weeks
and months. And his son just, hit tweet.
I tracked down sources. Followed so
many dead leads. Labored over this.
And then he just, you know,
tweeted out the proof.
Like, so many people out there were
trying to track this down. And it just...
got delivered on a tweet. What the hell.
Jared Yates Sexton, independent journalist,
July 11, 2017, tweets after Donald Trump, Jr.
released emails proving the Trump campaign's
williingness to collude with the Russian
government to defeat Hillary Clinton
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Kwiple dictionary
cost cutting (kôst kut'ing),
n.
Euphemism for
firing people.
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Kwiple dictionary
entrepreneur (än'trə prə nûr’),
n.
What owners of software
platforms for service industries
call workers who depend on the
platform to get work, who use
their own assets, and who
assume all work-related risks.
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Kwiple dictionary
flexible labor (flek'sə bəl lā'bər),
n.
Disposible workers. Human Pez.
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Kwiple dictionary
the office (thə ô'fis),
n.
A place where you must take
stupid stuff seriously
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Kwiple dictionary
pregnancy (preg'nən sē),
n.
The Number 1 killer of women's
careers. Called
off-the-job injury
by lawyers for UPS.
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Kwiple dictionary
right to work law (rīt tōō wûrk lō),
n.
A law intended to kill unions by
guaranteeing those who don't
join all the rights and benefits
unions win for their members,
without having to pay union
dues. Popular with Republicans
and free riders, a large subset
of the morally handicapped.
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Kwiple dictionary
self-employed (self em ploid'),
adj.
How 50- and 60-year-olds
describe themselves after
exhausting unemployment
insurance. Also called
freelancing.
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Kwiplers say
Develop a publicly-funded, national,
employee-owned digital platform
for hiring and providing benefits
and pensions for gig economy workers
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Kwiplers say
If your boss's name is Al Gorithm,
you're fucked
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Kwiplers say
It
can
wait
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Making money
the old-fashioned way
Being paid a living wage
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Making money
the old-fashioned way
Having a job for life
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Making money
the new-fashioned way
Being a
permanently temporary worker
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Making money
the new-fashioned way
Demanding clawbacks from workers
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Making money
the new-fashioned way
Wage theft
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Making money
the new-fashioned way
Winking and nodding
at overtime pay laws
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Making money
the new-fashioned way
Working two or more
part-time, minimum-wage jobs
with no benefits
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Manufacturing
The factory
is a device for making workmen hurry.
Aldous Huxley,
The Olive Tree
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Manufacturing
The factory of the future
will have only two employees,
a man and a dog.
The man will be there to feed the dog.
The dog will be there to keep the man
from touching the equipment.
Warren Bennis
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Mergers and acquistions
Rule #1:
Sacrifice everyone else
on the altar of preferred shareholders
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Offices
This is the great irony
of modern working life.
Just as architects and designers are
learning how to build better offices,
people are losing the habit
of working in them. … After all,
where is the joy in office life if you
can't rely on seeing the same people
every day and saying to them:
wasn't
Homeland
brilliant last night?
Lucy Kellaway,
Financial Times, November 30, 2015
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Politics
It's tough campaigning,
kissing hands and shaking babies.
Pat Paulsen
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Poverty
The next time you feel as though
you're shouldering more than your
fair share of society's burdens,
ask yourself:
How badly do I have to pee right now,
and do I need permission?
Judy Tirado,
Hand to Mouth
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Poverty
This is my bottom-line point
about work and poverty.
It's far more demoralizing
to work and be poor than to be
unemployed and poor.
Linda Tirado,
Hand to Mouth
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Punt returners say
Too fucking busy, and vice versa.
Dorothy Parker,
responding to an editor
who reminded her of an overdue piece
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Remote work
If you can do it in Tahoe,
you can do it in India.
Unnamed American executive attending
the 2022 Davos World Economic Forum
quoted by Rana Foroohar,
Financial Times, May 29, 2022
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Republicans say
Abolish the minimum wage
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Republicans say
All employment should be “at-will,”
when redefined to mean all employers
should have the right to fire anyone
at any time for any or no reason
without exception
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Republicans say
Call them “bureaucrats,”
not “civil servants”
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Republicans say
Let employers
who oppose hiring employees
require low-wage workers
to become a corporation
or pay franchise fees
before hiring them
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Resisters say
Equal pay
for
equal work
Placard,
Washington, DC,
International Women's Day March,
March 8, 2017
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Retailing
Retail used to be a career.
You actually sat with your
store manager and told them,
“This is where I see myself
in five years time.”
No one thinks like that anymore.
It's just a warm body who can
pick up the clothes that
were thrown on the floor.
A 37-year-old store manager
looking to change careers
after having worked in retailing
since he got a summer job as a
16-year-old high schooler
Quoted in The Guardian, August 16, 2017
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Robots
A computer doesn't need to
replicate the entire spectrum
of your intellectual capability
in order to displace you from your job;
it only needs to do the specific things
you are paid to do.
Martin Ford,
The Rise of the Robots
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Robots
A decade ago, industrial robots
assisted workers in their tasks.
Now workers
– those who remain –
assist the robots in theirs.
Sheelah Kolhatkar,
New Yorker, October 23, 2017
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Selfie
My life mantra is that the solution
to most human problems is earplugs,
and nothing could induce me to attend
the “happy hours” in the canteen.
No doubt I am unusually misanthropic,
but it turns out that few people
meet anybody at a WeWork.
Simon Kuper,
Financial Times, April 6, 2023
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Sexual harassment
I would like to think
she would find another career
or find another company
if that was the case.
Donald Trump,
responding to a question about
what his daughter Ivanka should do
if she were sexually harassed on the job
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Sexual harassment
If you want to make the money,
you'll learn to laugh.
A West Virginia waitress
dependent on tips to make a living,
quoted in New York Times, March 12, 2018
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Silicon Valley
Creator of job losses elsewhere
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Sleepers at the wheel say
Any job is better than no job
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Sleepers at the wheel say
Higher productivity
results in higher wages
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Sleepers at the wheel say
In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun
“A Spoonful of Sugar,”
by Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman,
for
Mary Poppins
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Sleepers at the wheel say
Lower unemployment
results in higher wages
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Snapshot
Mr. Vanderbilt has no time for dentists,
he has to work, work hard and always.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
portrayed by Billy Wilder,
who noticed Vanderbilt's bad teeth
while interviewing him for a newspaper
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Social media
I'd still rather do this
than work 9-5 somewhere.
A Cameroonian immigrant
quoted in
Get Rich or Lie Trying,
Symeon Brown's book about social media
influencers, who starred in a live-streaming show
where Americans paid to racially abuse him
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State of the union
About 78 per cent of US workers
live pay cheque to pay cheque,
according to a 2017 study by
CareerBuilder, a jobs portal.
A survey the same year
by the Federal Reserve found that
nearly half of American families could
not cover a $400 emergency expense
without borrowing or
selling something to do so.
Financial Times, January 20, 2019
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State of the union
Companies urging workers
to create a “culture of candor”
by “front-stabbing” each another
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State of the union
Employers assuming workers
have no other responsibilities
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State of the union
Entry-level jobs now the best job
many will have in their lifetime
© 2015 Kwiple.com
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State of the union
Getting a job
requires more work and time
than ever
© 2016 Kwiple.com
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State of the union
Go voluntarily
and we'll say we laid you off
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State of the union
c
A higher education
paves the way to prosperity
—————–
—————–
student debt and unpaid internships
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State of the union
A lifetime of temporary work
becoming the new normal
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State of the union
Longer hours, lower pay
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State of the union
Prime-aged workers being displaced
by younger and older ones
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State of the union
Stagnant wages
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State of the union
Starting wage becoming ending wage
as incremental wage raises
are replaced by occasional
cash or non-cash “bonuses”
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State of the union
Too little living-wage work,
too much overwork
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Surely you jest
Under-the-desk hammocks
for napping at work
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Surveillance
Nothing except unionization or new laws
would stop an employer from taking all
the data it is gathering from sensors and
recordings and using them to more precisely
adjust wages, until each worker gets the
lowest wage a which they are willing to work,
and all workers live in fear of retaliation.
This is no more sci-fi than Facebook and
Google serving users individualized content
and ads designed to keep us on their
services as long as possible, allowing
them to sell as many ads as possible.
Zephyr Teachout,
New York Review of Books, Augsut 18, 2022
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Surveillance
Tracking technology may be marketed as
tools to protect people, but will end up
being used to identify with precision
how little each worker is willing to make.
It will be used to depress wages and also
kill the camaderie that precedes union-
ization by making it harder to connect with
other workers, poisoning the community
that enables democratic debate.
It will be used to disrupt solidarity by paying
workers differently. And it will lead to anxiety
and fear permeating more workplaces,
as the fog of not knowing why you got
a bonus or demotion shapes the day.
Zephyr Teachout,
New York Review of Books, Augsut 18, 2022
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Tech bros say
DOWHILE desperate job seekers
{
Load ’em up with debt
Pay ’em a pittance
Replace ’em with robots
Walk away with millions
}
-->
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Tech bros say
DOWHILE willing millennials
{
Lure ’em
Hire ’em
Burn ’em out
Fire ’em
}
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Tech bros say
Moms are persona non grata
as co-workers
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Tech bros say
Replace other people with robots
© 2016 Kwiple.com
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Tech bros say
We don't help you make a living wage,
we help you supplement income
from one job with income
from other jobs
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Technology
… a contrarian indicator of this growing
industrialization of the service economy
is the rapid and parallel growth of the
concierge economy, in which very high-
income consumers use their financial
muscle to escape reliance on the
defective, mass-produced services
available to middle- and lower-income
consumers. So there are concierge doctors
on Park Avenue and mass-production
doctors with HMOIs … In the concierge
economy, the relationship between
technology and work is turned on its
head and information systems are used
to supplement rather than replace the
skills of employees. There are no digital
scripts at the Goldman Sachs private bank.
Simon Head,
Mindless
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Work
Americans shouldn't be ashamed
to get their hands dirty.
The dirt that gets under your fingernails,
my dad would tell me, is clean dirt.
You worked for and it washes off.
A lot of this dirt we have in this nation
is no longer clean dirt.
A former industrial engineer quoted in
The Gilded Rage,
by Alexander Zaitkin
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Work
Businesses treat their
least powerful employees
as poorly as they can get away with,
end of story.
Timothy Noah,
The Great Divergence
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Work
Companies now use
gamelike techniques to
cut labor costs by motivating
workers to become lower-cost
Heroes of Late-Capitalist Labor
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Work
Employees have to assume that
everything they say can be recorded.
What does it mean when all the words,
and the tone of those words,
might be replayed?
Whispering has lost its power.
Zephyr Teachout,
New York Review of Books, Augsut 18, 2022
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Work
The end of work will not necessarily
mean the end of meaning, because
meaning is generated by imagining
rather than by working.
Work is essential for meaning
only according to some ideologies
and lifestyles.
Yuval Harari,
The Guardian, May 8, 2017
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Work
… for most people work brings
few rewards beyond a payslip.
As the pollster Gallup showed in
its momentous survey of working life
in 155 countries published in 2017, only
one in 10 western Europeans described
themselves as engaged in their jobs.
This is perhaps unsurprising.
After all, in another survey conducted by
YouGov in 2015, 37 per cent of working
British adults said their jobs were not
making any meaningful contribution
to the world.
James Suzman,
Financial Times, August 28, 2020
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Work
The goal,
Dr. [Susan] Lambert [University of
Chicago professor of social work] told me,
is “one reasonable job per person.”
Not “two for one and half for another.”
Bryce Covert,
New York Times, July 20, 2021
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Work
Hard work is damn near
as overrated as monogamy.
attributed to Huey Long
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Work
I smoke a lot of weed when I write,
generally speaking.
I don't know if it helps me write.
It makes me not mind that I'm writing.
And I don't know if it makes me work better,
but it makes me not care that I'm working.
Who wants to work?
But if you're stoned,
it doesn't seem like work.
Seth Rogen
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Work
I want to be an American so I can work,
that is the only wonder here—work!
Rodolpho,
an illegal immigrant
in Arthur Miller's
A View From the Bridge
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Work
I would suppose that workers
sacrifice more of their lives by working
than investors sacrifice by investing.
Robert A. Dahl,
A Preface to Economic Democracy
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Work
In the new work culture,
enduring or even merely liking one's job
is not enough.
Workers should
love
what they do,
and then promote that on social media,
thus fusing their identities to
that of their employers.
Why else would LinkedIn build
its own version of Snapchat Stories?
This is toil glamour
and it is going mainstream. …
Workplace indifference just doesn't have
a socially acceptable hashtag.
Erin Griffith,
New York Times, January 26, 2019
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Work
In today’s economy,
few workers get to be judged on output
that is discrete and identifiably theirs
(such as a newspaper column).
More often, they are among the many
contributors to a rolling and amorphous
process: a corporate merger, say,
or IT maintenance.
One effect is that, in all candour,
I have no idea what most of you do.
Janan Ganesh,
Financial Times, October 2, 2021
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Work
[I]t is the state that
establishes the default constitution
of workplace governance.
It is a form of authoritarian,
private government, in which,
under employment-at-will,
workers cede
all
their rights
to their employers, except those
specifically reserved for them by law.
Elizabeth Anderson,
Private Government
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Work
It's true hard work never killed anybody,
but why take the chance?
Ronald Reagan
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Work
The jobs you work
increasingly relfects
the money you already had.
Sarah Kendzior,
The View From Flyover Country
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Work
The logical conclusion
of workplace surveillance is that
the private sphere ceases to exist at home
because it ceases to exist at work,
where visibility into the worker's life
is unrestrained.
Zephyr Teachout,
New York Review of Books, Augsut 18, 2022
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Work
Low prices mean low wages.
Speed, reliability and convenience
mean pressure, monitoring and
unpredictable hours.
In other words,
the same things that make this
a wonderful time to be a consumer
make it a terrible time to be a worker.
Sarah O'Connor,
Financial Times, November 30, 2016
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Work
Most workers in the United States are
governed by communist dictatorships
in their work lives.
Elizabeth Anderson
Private Government
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Work
The way to make work work
is to cut it back.
Bryce Covert,
New York Times, July 20, 2021
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Work
When reporters write about Google,
they write about it as if
it was inevitable.
The actual experience was more like,
“Could you work 130 hours in a week?”
The answer is yes,
if you're strategic about
when you sleep, when you shower,
and how often you go to the bathroom.
Marissa Mayer,
Google's first female engineer
Gizmodo's article about Mayer's speech
including this statement was entitled,
“Marissa Mayer: You, Too,
Can Work 130 Hours a Week
If You Plan When to Take a Shit”
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Work
You will be rewarded
by not being fired.
Shirley Tilghman,
president of Princeton University,
on the rewards to expect from hard work
after graduating and entering the worforce,
in her 2011 commencement address,
quoted by Edward Luce in
Time to Start Thinking
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Work requirements
On welfare, Angie was a low-income
single mother, raising her children
in a dangerous neighborhood in a
household roiled by chaos.
She couldn't pay the bills.
She drank lots of beer.
And her kids needed a father.
Off welfare, Angie was a low-income
single mother, raising her children
in a dangerous neighborhood in a
household roiled by chaos.
She couldn't pay the bills.
She drank lots of beer.
And her kids needed a father.
Jason DeParle,
American Dream
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