More Psychological Control of Wage Slaves

The Grim Truth About America

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread. Read the rest: America: The Grim Truth

And I like the info on vacation time. Most Americans, if they get any at all, get a measly 2 weeks, or ten working days, of paid time off a year. At the company where I work, you have to be there 5 years before receiving an extra week. Then that's it.
Workers have the right to expect more than that, and to be able to look forward to more leisure time, but the wage-slave masters won't give up their control of our lives. It's short-sighted, of course, because a well-rested, more stress-free workforce, is a more productive workforce, but hell, the capitalist bosses don't give a damn, they can just "hire" another slave to replace you anytime they feel like it. Ultimately, for justice to prevail and such exploitation to end, the workers must take control of the workplace directly and run it themselves without bosses or capitalist owners.

...stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

h/t A Division by Zer0

Anarchism Is Necessary

Anarchism is necessary, we can say, to create a just society. As far as I can tell, the best definition of anarchism is “the belief that no one has any special authority to do anything that anyone else doesn’t have.” Anarchy, then, is a society in which this principle is widespread enough to be a truism. If one group of people can arrogate special authority to themselves to rule over others, this alone is a vast injustice in and of itself. But it also creates a cascade of further injustices.

Under statism, the overall socioeconomic system tends to divide into classes, some more privileged than others. This allows people in the more privileged classes to use their power to bully others or manipulate them, even without direct coercion. An example of this is “survival prostitution”. There are people who are so abject and miserably poor that they are willing to do anything for enough money to survive until tomorrow. They do not have the option to say “no”, if they want to live, they must say yes. Wage slavery in the modern corporate capitalist world is, for many people, merely a more extended version of this.

Now yes, the state can and does sometimes offer marginalized groups protection from some of the worst effects of their marginalization, but it is the state which put them in the position of needing that protection in the first place. It is the state which makes people economically dependent. It is the state which destroys the wealth of the lower middle class and poor. It is the state which shifts the supply/demand balance of the labor market so workers are chasing jobs, rather than the other way around. And though everything in our world is not economic, in the sense of being about trade and production, economic freedom gives people more space to carve out social freedom. It is difficult if not impossible to wield social power if you’re barely subsisting.


Anarchism: Necessary But Not Sufficient


h/t Liberty Pulse

Imagine a 20-hour Work Week

Ever wonder why we’re still working 40 hours per week? As if that’s some sort of magic equilibrium between labor/leisure that has just organically emerged over the centuries? It’s insanity, really. And evidence that we aren’t free to choose.

...

I do not believe for a second, that given all of the technological advances in the last 200 years, a majority of people in the developed world would continue to work 40 hours a week, if they had any say in the matter whatsoever. Imagine a 20-hour work week. Imagine creativity unleashed. Imagine what would happen to progress and productivity, if only people were actually rewarded for the work that they do.

Proof You Are Being Exploited

Talk about a crazy week

I did something this week that I've never done before. I called in Tuesday morning and quit my job cold turkey. I quit because my boss was constantly bullying, intimidating, and micromanaging me at work, to the point where I felt uncomfortable even showing up. This man was the biggest psycho I ever worked for, and was a frothing-at-the-mouth asshole to me from my very first day of work.

As soon as I called in to quit, the asshole's tone quickly changed. Suddenly he was "so sorry" about all that happened and believed I was a "perfect employee." He was clearly desperate for me to stay. Well, then maybe he shouldn't have been a total dickhead to me when I was there?

Although I'm unemployed during a depression, I feel absolutely fantastic. I could simply not show up to that hostile, totalitarian work environment for another day. And based on what I've read on websites like the workplace bullying institute, it may have been one of the better decisions I've ever made.

The downside is that I (not the bully) am the one who will ultimately pay the price for being harassed at work. Employers want applicants to list their previous employers and give the OK to contact them--something I obviously can't do in this case. They will assume it is due to my incompetence, which it isn't (by my asshole boss' own admission).

Oh well. I still feel that it was the right decision. If I'm unemployed, then I'm the happiest unemployed man on the planet right now. Fuck that raging asshole of a boss.

Paul Craig Roberts on the US plutocracy

Since SE and I are in the process of finishing off whatever remains of our conservative readers, this recent article by Paul Craig Roberts was just too good to pass up. ;)

Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.
One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.
Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.

Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD report, "Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries," [PDF]concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US...

...The stark increase in US income inequality in the 21st century coincides with the offshoring of US jobs, which enriched executives with "performance bonuses" while impoverishing the middle class, and with the rapid rise of unregulated OTC derivatives, which enriched Wall Street and the financial sector at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of Americans have lost their homes and half of their retirement savings while being loaded up with government debt to bail out the banksters who created the derivative crisis.

Read the rest here.

But for now...on to the next batch of victims! College graduates.

As jobs become increasingly scarce, more and more college graduates are working for free, at internships, which is great for employers but something of a handicap for a young man or woman who has to pay for food or a place to live.

“The whole idea of apprenticeships is coming back into vogue, as it was 100 years ago,” said John Noble, director of the Office of Career Counseling at Williams College. “Certain industries, such as the media, TV, radio and so on, have always exploited recent graduates, giving them a chance to get into a very competitive field in exchange for making them work for no — or low — pay. But now this is spreading to many other industries.”

Bah, humbug. When will these spoiled brats learn to stop complaining? Aren't they aware that they're supposed to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?" (Cue story about some 19th century douche bag who was born poor but became a millionaire.)

Stop complaining about your terrible circumstances. The rich needed your money to buy new cruise ships for each of their islands. Stop being greedy and pay for their bail-outs.

Employees, The Joke's On You

I was at a bookstore and saw, sitting on the magazine rack, what at first appeared to be a strange notice to that very store's employees. Was it a warning for the bookstore's workers to avoid browsing the magazines on their breaks? A notice to keep their filthy worker's hands off the periodicals unless they were handling them as part of the job? No.

Upon closer examination I found that it was just a joke, for sale for $2.99; a "fake" sign reading as follows:

Employee Notice

Due to increased competition, cost escalation and our keen desire to stay in business, management has deemed necessary a change to your terms of employment.

It will now be compulsory to do something called work in between lunch breaks, coffee breaks, tea breaks, smoking breaks and bathroom breaks etc...

Management intends to call this the WORK BREAK!


Yeah, employees are all just a bunch of lazy good for nothing slackers. How dare they take breaks! Go to the bathroom? Hold it in and ruin your kidneys, you low-life wage-slave! Coffee, smokes, tea? Don't make me laugh, those are all just excuses to get out of doing your job.

This is the not so subtle corporate propaganda that permeates everything in this rotten society. That ordinary workers are not willing to work and in fact don't really work unless their game-playing, ladder-climbing, hierarchy defending, scumbag bosses are constantly whipping them into shape, threatening them with termination if they don't kill themselves for a few measly dollars.

The poor souls that actually are forced to sell their labor in order not to starve to death or end up sleeping in their cars are the problem, not the fat cats pulling down millions a year in compensation. Real wages for workers have stayed stagnate or declined in the last 30 years, while during the same period CEO pay has increased by at least TEN times. But it's ordinary Joe that needs to tow the line. Yeah, sure.

Unexcused Absence

Just an alert, you have five unexcused absences in the past six months, a sixth would place you in disciplinary action resulting in a verbal warning; once you receive a warning, any additional unexcused absence will result in a written warning; warnings take 6 months to go away, in other words, you cannot have an unexcused absence for six months after receiving a warning; if you have any questions let me know.

Thank you.

All I can say to this unwarranted threat is @#%#@&! But I'll say more anyway. The entire office has been sick this cold and flu season, some of us several times. It's gone around and around and even hit the managers (boo-hoo) but of course it's the peons who are punished, the poor slobs working full-time for slave wages. So the above went out as an email to more than a few. One poor shaken woman, clearly concerned (there have been several layoffs already) rushed to explain that she had used her sick days for the absences, so why was she receiving the warning. It didn't matter though, sick days or no, if you didn't go to the doctor and get a note it is considered "unexcused". Excuse me? They pay you for the day, but it's "unexcused"?

And what's all this gotta go to the doctor crap? No wonder medical costs in this country are so high, with idiotic rules like this. Must we go to the doctor every time we're too sick to go to work? I was sick and it cleared up on its own. Dana was sick and she went to the doctor, but the second time she didn't, same recovery time, though, in both cases. Thanks, corporate assholes, for clogging our waiting rooms because of your evil nonsense.

I was too sick to work one day, voice gone, couldn't talk anyway without coughing, was given another job that day by the manager, who could see clearly I couldn't talk that day. And yet, when I called in the next day, barely able to speak, it was reported as an "unexcused absence" because I didn't go to the goddamned doctor! They all knew I was sick, I didn't call out to go to the beach. I was so sick I actually wanted to go to work rather than stay home.

And even if you have doctor's notes for every absence, as a very sick friend of mine did, they'll still fire your ass if you miss too many days. It happened to her, and they had no mercy on her. Being sick was no excuse, they said.

Final word to the little prick who sent the email: Shove your unexcused absence up your rotten smelly capitalist ass, you lying lackey for the man!