Home » Posts tagged 'work'

Tag Archives: work

Writing as part of Jarvis Cocker’s Big Issue takeover before his untimely death earlier this month, David Graeber explains his confusion about why we’d destroy the planet if we don’t have to.

Our society is addicted to work. If there’s anything left and right both seem to agree on, it’s that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship. We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn’t working harder than they would like to be working, at something they don’t enjoy, is a bad, unworthy person. As a result, work comes to absorb ever greater proportions of our energy and time.

Much of this work is entirely pointless. Whole industries (think telemarketers, corporate law, private equity) whole lines of work (middle management, brand strategists, high-level hospital or school administrators, editors of in-house corporate magazines) exist primarily to convince us there is some reason for their existence. Useless work crowds out useful (think of teachers and administrators overwhelmed with paperwork); it’s also almost invariably better compensated. As we’ve seen in lockdown, the more obviously your work benefits other people, the less they pay you.

The system makes no sense. It’s also destroying the planet. If we don’t break ourselves of this addiction quickly we will leave our children and grandchildren to face catastrophes on a scale which will make the current pandemic seem trivial.

If this isn’t obvious, the main reason is we’re constantly encouraged to look at social problems as if they were questions of personal morality. All this work, all the carbon we’re pouring into the atmosphere, must somehow be the result of our consumerism; therefore to stop eating meat or dream of flying off to beach vacations…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership

December 5, 2021

Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership

I’ll begin with a brief account of how our modern global grain trading system was invented in Chicago in the 19^th century, which is maybe a bit of a jolt from the present focus of this blog cycle on the forms of property but hopefully my purposes will become clear.

Prior to the railroad/grain elevator/futures market nexus that began to emerge in the 1850s, prairie grain farmers sold their product in sacks that retained their identity with the source farm through to the point of sale. The innovation of the railroad/elevator system was to create standardized grades of grain that enabled the harvest from individual farms to be amassed together in vast quantities as a fungible commodity like money. The innovation of the futures market was to remove uncertainty about future price fluctuations, essentially by enabling speculators to assume the burden of the risk by betting on movements in grain prices. Before long, the value of the futures being traded greatly exceeded the value of the physical grain in existence.

These innovations called forth vastly more economic activity than previously possible, created a torrent of cheap grain that flooded global markets and pushed farmers in other places out of grain production (and often out of farming altogether), and stimulated the growth of prairie grain farming, while removing from farmers themselves substantial economic autonomy, fostering perhaps a self-interest on their part in the grading of their grain at the margin, but not a more holistic interest in the story of their grain from field to fork. They also pretty much forged the global economy as we know it today (I’ll ignore the meat/livestock side of the story for brevity, but the globalization of meat production was another prong to the same history)¹.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Money: How Its Past Predicts Its Future

January 11, 2019

Money: How Its Past Predicts Its Future

What is money, where does it come from and more importantly where does it go?

At first glance, it might appear inexplicable and bizarre that our governments and our rulers have managed to keep their stronghold over the monetary system for 2000 years, especially when one thinks about the countless ways in which they abused that power and used their monopoly to the detriment of their own citizens. It was a mass delusion that facilitated this, a blind belief that they, and they alone, can be trusted with this vital task while looking out for our best interests as well. However, now, as mistrust against our rulers is justifiably deepening, it is becoming increasingly clear that only we as individuals can ensure our best interests and it is only a matter of time before the entire ill-founded edifice comes crumbling down.

To answer all these questions about money, we need to first understand its history — keeping in mind that those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. Everything started when people settled down and instead of living off nature they started adding value to it; this was the beginning of private property rights. In addition, men started to realize that some people are better at performing specific duties than others and thus set into motion what we today understand as the division of labor. This increased economic output and in general terms, everyone became better off. This transition in how work was performed in an economy made trade between individuals a necessity. Thus barter, or the exchange of real goods and services against other real goods and services, became commonplace. Barter also had its disadvantages, because it required what is known as a “double coincidence of wants” in order to function.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Jobs for All

December 3, 2018

Climate Jobs for All

Building Block for the Green New Deal

It was an iconic moment: Young people occupy Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding a Green New Deal to put millions of people to work making a climate-safe economy — when suddenly newly-elected Congressional representative and overnight media star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins them with a resolutionin hand to establish a Select Committee for a Green New Deal. But those who actually read her resolution closely may have been puzzled – or stunned – by its call for “a jobs guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.” What is a “jobs guarantee program” and what does it have to do with protecting the climate?

The federal jobs guarantee (JG) is a concept also known as “jobs for all” and the federal government as “employer of last resort.” It envisions a federal program somewhat like the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) that would provide funds for non-profit organizations, local governments, and other agencies serving the public to employ anyone who wants a job at a wage roughly comparable to the demands of the Fight for $15 campaign. According to columnist Jonathan Chait, the jobs guarantee plan “has materialized almost out of nowhere and ascended nearly to the status of Democratic Party doctrine.”

The advocates of JG generally include climate protection as one of many types of work beneficial to the public that might be included in a jobs guarantee program. However, they generally have not said how such a program might specifically address the climate emergency.

This May Varshini Prakash and Sarah Meyerhoff, two leaders of the youth climate movement Sunrise, wrote an article titled “It’s Time for the Climate Movement to Embrace a Federal Jobs Guarantee.” They called for a policy through which “the government directly employs anyone who wants a job but doesn’t have one.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Workers’ Power vs. Climate Destroyers: What It Will Take to Save the Planet

August 30, 2018

Workers’ Power vs. Climate Destroyers: What It Will Take to Save the Planet

Humanity faces a multi-faceted crisis. Endless wars of imperial aggression, both overt and covert– from Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan to Yemen, Palestine and Central and South America. These conflagrations compel those at the bottom of the economic pyramid to fight and die to protect the wealth and privileges of those at the top. These wars destroy human beings and our natural environment, but also opportunities and resources that could be allocated to human betterment. Nuclear arsenals remain on hair trigger alert, with fearsome destructive potential, one accident or a single myopic policy decision away from wiping out the entire human race. Economic inequality, having already reached obscene proportions, is showing no sign of slowing down or reversing course. Racism, xenophobia, sexism and other forms of hate-filled discrimination are used to distract and divide those victimized by the current state of affairs and to hinder a united fight by all of the oppressed against our common oppressors.

And then there’s the matter of climate Armageddon. The world is heating up as a result of economic and energy policy choices. These choices have maximized profits for the 1% while threatening the very biosphere we all depend on for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We know that the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting additional carbon in our atmosphere are driving rapid planetary warming. We know this, not because a majority of climate scientists believe it to be true – that’s not how science works; after all, majorities of scientists have been wrong on occasion. We know this crisis is real because a substantial amount of data has been collectedthat corroborates the climate change hypothesis, and because key scientific predictions based on the theory of human-accelerated climate change have been born out by evidence and experience. Climate change has been directly implicated in:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Energy slaves, “hard work,” and the real sources of wealth

August 9, 2018

Energy slaves, “hard work,” and the real sources of wealth

Many Canadians and Americans struggle financially. Millions are unemployed. Many others live paycheque-to-paycheque. A 2017 report by the US Federal Reserve Board found that 40 percent of US citizens couldn’t cover an unexpected expense of $400 without selling something or borrowing money. There’s a lot of denial and misunderstanding regarding the financial challenges faced by a large portion of our fellow citizens.

Equally, though, there is misunderstanding, denial, and myth-making regarding those among us who are more financially secure, those who are well off—“the rich.” Most glaring is the way we mischaracterize the sources of our wealth, luxury, and ease. We lie to ourselves and each other regarding why we have it so good. The rich often claim that their wealth is a result of “hard work.” We hear people objecting to even the smallest tax increase, saying: “I worked hard for my money and no one is going to take it from me.”

The reality, however, is quite the opposite. The rich don’t work very hard. Every poor women or girl in Asia or Africa who gets up at dawn to walk many kilometres to carry home water or firewood for her family works harder than the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires. Every farmer with a hoe or toiling behind an oxen works harder than any CEO. My farmer grandparents worked far harder than I do, yet I live much better. I would be self-delusional in the extreme to attribute my middle-class luxury to “hard work.”

No, those of us in North America, the European Union, and elsewhere in the world who enjoy privileged lives live well, not because we work hard, but because of the vast energy windfall of which we are the beneficiaries. We live lives of comfort and ease because our work is done for us by “energy slaves.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beware Former Central Bankers Telling You to Work More

June 9, 2018

Beware Former Central Bankers Telling You to Work More

I’m not the only one of course. The financial crisis of 2008/09 similarly shattered the worldview of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people across the globe. I believe that the old manner of doing things as far as organizing an economy and society died for good during that crisis and its aftermath. Sure it’s been shadily and undemocratically propped up ever since, and we haven’t yet transitioned to what’s next, but for all intents and purposes it’s dead. It’s dead because it has no credibility.

– From last year’s post: The Generational Wheels Are Turning

Hard work is fundamental to our continued existence and advancement as a species. I would never devalue the importance of hard work, particularly when combined with intense passion and drive, which leads to extraordinary technological progress and soaring artistic creations. Nevertheless, my ears perk up whenever I hear an older person lecture millennials about how they need to work more just to have a reasonable chance at a retirement compared to generations that came became before.

Yet that’s exactly what happened when I read an article published at Politico by 75-year old Alicia Munnell, and academic who also worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the U.S. Treasury Department under Bill Clinton.

She seems to understand the problem. She notes:

A comparison of millennials (adults currently ages 25 to 35) with earlier cohorts (Gen-Xers and late baby boomers) when they were the same age shows that even though a higher percentage of both millennial men and women have college degrees, they are behind in almost every economic dimension.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why do we need jobs if we can have slaves working for us?

November 27, 2017

Why do we need jobs if we can have slaves working for us?

We normally assume that anything that creates jobs is a good thing, but is it, really? Is our current prosperity related to having “jobs”? Isn’t it, rather, the result of the large number of “energy slaves” working for us in the form of fossil fuels? Today, everyone of us has probably more slaves in terms of available energy output than even the richest in the ancient world could have. But, in the ancient world, the rich Roman patricians knew the source of their wealth and practiced “otium” (a term untranslatable in English) intended as the search of pleasure and knowledge free from the needs of everyday survival – with their human slaves taking care of that. In our times, instead, we tend to neglect, or even actively deny, the role of our fossil slaves. We state, and maybe even believe, that our antics (“jobs”) are what makes us live and we engage with gusto in the equivalent of digging holes in the ground and filling them up again as a good way to make us rich by increasing the numerical value of that curious deity we call “dʒiːdiːˈpiː” (or “GDP”). Maybe it is because, deep down, we know that, sooner or later, our fossil slaves are going to evaporate into thin air and leave us.

This is a post by Nate Hagens and DJ White. Rich in ideas and concepts, it is longer than the average post on Cassandra’s Legacy but well worth the effort of reading, savoring each sentence in it. Working drafts copyright ©2010-2017 – Not to be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the authors

by NJ Hagens & DJ White, EarthTrust

First, some review of relevant points:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why We Do Things the ‘Hard Way’

June 23, 2016

farmer's Hands

WHY WE DO THINGS THE “HARD WAY”

During the past year or so I have frequently wondered why we do things the hard way. Surely it is a lot easier to get a 9-5 job, drive a nice car, have a nice house, buy all our food and just live a “normal” life? Okay, so that would most likely mean mortgage, car loan and credit cards, but everyone else does it, why not us? It is an attractive proposition for someone struggling to make ends meet whilst living the Permaculture Dream. I totally understand why we warn our students about “Permaculture Divorce”, and I am sure a great number of people have decided to pull the pin on this grassroots living thing after doing it for a few years.

When I grew up my parents wanted me to have everything that they did not. Having lived through World War II, they wanted my belly to always be full and they gave me as much as they could (which is of course greatly appreciated and understood!) Over the past 30-40 years I have seen materialism escalate to the social disease it is now. The problem now is that we as parents can no longer offer our children a better future than we had unless things change drastically. Kids are now said to not be able to live longer (in years) than their parents anymore. The world is sicker, more polluted and resources are running out. What future is there for our children?

It is said that each person in the Western World has on average 100 – 150 slaves working for them (in the form of fossil fuel). And that is beside the low paid workers that make all our “stuff”, who may as well be slaves for the returns they get for their labour.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Charles Hugh Smith: Fixing The Way We Work

November 16, 2015

Charles Hugh Smith: Fixing The Way We Work

Closing the wealth gap with meaningful work

Charles Hugh Smith returns to the podcast this week to discuss the theme of his new book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.

Automation and artificial intelligence are changing the landscape of work. Tens of millions of jobs are on track to be eliminated over the next decade or so by these advancing technological innovations in the US alone.

The way in which our current economy is constructed, the fruits of those cost savings are likely to go into a very small number of private pockets, while the millions of displaced workers will find themselves with no income and no work to do. It’s a huge looming problem that is not being address in national dialog right now.

But there’s opportunity to course-correct here. To use our new technologies to increase total productivity in a way that empowers rather than diminishes the individual worker.

What if we could hit the reset button on the way we create money, work, commerce and community?

This is not an idle question, for technology now enables us to hit that reset button and organize the creation of money, work, commerce and community in new ways. If we could start from scratch, what would a new system look like?

To answer that, we must understand why the current system is failing. The current system is based on five principles that are assumed to be true:

Money created by banks trickles down to create work for all

Technology creates more jobs than automation destroys

Centralization is the solution to large-scale economic problems

Expanding debt and consumption (i.e. growth) is the path to prosperity

Maximizing private gain organizes the economy to the benefit of all

All five have proven to be untrue. No wonder inequality is rising and opportunity is declining. Clearly, we need a new system that offers what the current system cannot: meaningful work for all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Reason You Work So Hard to Participate in the Rat Race

September 29, 2015

The Reason You Work So Hard to Participate in the Rat Race

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A man in debt is so far a slave.” Money has no intrinsic value yet we spend our days damaging our health and spirit in order to obtain it. Why do we sacrifice our well-being for it? Is it the cliché that “we just want to provide a better life for our kids than we had?” Is it just way of the civilized world? The most important question to ask, however, is what power do we have to change this way of thinking and living? The reality is simple: money is a vehicle for social control. Debt makes us good, obedient workers and citizens.

The traditional workweek started in 1908 at The New England Cotton Mill in order to allow followers of the Jewish religion to adhere to Sabbath. With the passage of The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the 40-hour workweek became the norm. Data from the 2013 American Community Survey showed that the average commute time in America is about 26 minutes each way. According to a Gallup poll, the average workweek in America is 34.4 hours, however, when only taking into account full time workers, that average shoots up to 47, or 9.4 hours per day during a 5-day workweek. Keeping averages in mind then, between commuting, working and figuring in an hour for lunch (usually less), that puts us at approximately 11 hours and 40 minutes for the average full time worker. If you have a family with young kids, just add in another few hours for homework, baths, etc.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Energy, the repressed: Paging Dr. Freud

August 3, 2015

Energy, the repressed: Paging Dr. Freud

Jeremy Rifkin announced the end of work in a book by that title in 1995. Today, we are once again being told that the end of work is nigh. The Atlantic Monthly tells us so in a piece entitled, “A World Without Work.” Automation and computer technology will bring unimaginable change and prosperity–and result in the loss of millions of jobs that will not be replaced.

I heard this before when I was young. In the 1960s there was talk of a three-day workweek for similar reasons. Obviously, it didn’t work out.

My purpose here is not to provide a detailed critique of such prognostications. Rather, I ask the same question I ask when I see a science-fiction film depicting widespread space travel and planetary colonization. Where are they getting all the energy to do these things?

In the Atlantic piece–a clever and rather more subtle discussion of the post-work world than I’ve seen elsewhere–the word “energy” appears exactly zero times. It is assumed that humans will somehow extract enough energy to run all the new machines that will serve (or run?) us. It is assumed that climate change will not be so disruptive as to make our current technical civilization crumble or at least falter significantly. It is assumed that the modeled effects of climate change on the world’s major grain growing areas–lots of drought–won’t change our priorities drastically toward growing more food in more places. In short, the future is just the past with a lot more energy-guzzling gadgets and apparently a lot more playtime.

Victorian culture repressed sex, not the act itself–population rose briskly in 19th century Britain–but discussion of sex, examination of it. Today, one can walk into any decent-sized bookstore and get an illustrated manual on sexual positions. Today, people get therapy to improve their sex lives, brag openly about their sexual conquests, and have frank discussions with one another about each other’s sexual preferences. That repression is over–to the dismay of some and to the delight of others.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity

June 9, 2015

Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity

With over 93 million unemployed working age adults in America and the economy beginning to go negative again, if you are fortunate enough to have a job it may not last much longer. It is easy to keep a positive attitude about the economy when you get a paycheck every week but life after the paychecks stop will change your outlook a great deal. That is the reality that is about to overtake the working class in the coming months.

The primary mechanism that has tipped the economy onto a downhill trajectory is the route that circulating money has taken in the past few decades. In the past much of the money was kept in circulation in the local economy resulting in the creation of many local jobs. With the new corporate model, most of the profit is siphoned out of the local economy and goes to wall street profiteers. This has resulted in the destruction of many local jobs while the few at the top of the wealth pyramid get richer much faster as time goes on.

The only way a nation can maintain a middle class is to keep money circulating in the local arena. The lack of this local circulation has finally caught up to the middle class and it has begun to shrink at an alarming rate. If the corporate model plays out to the end, it will mean the total destruction of the middle class and the beginnings of a two tiered system where there are a few very wealthy persons lording over a very large poverty stricken majority. That is where we are heading.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Salt Mind

May 29, 2015

The Salt Mind

The plan was always for me to return to ‘work’, aka gainful employment, after finishing several major sustainability improvement projects to our mountain top homestead. After nearly two years of continuous work on over a dozen undertakings large and small, several months ago the time finally arrived. Of course, the plan always assumed local and national financial conditions were such that a job was available for me to fill. If not…..well, that was precisely why we had improved our ability to self sustain in the face of national (or global) economic disaster.

So for those of you who have been wondering where the hell Cog is………now you know. Cog has been willingly laboring away at the local (assuming anything twenty four miles away can be termed ‘local’) big box retail salt mine. And no, I am not a Wal-Mart greeter……yet. Suffice to say I work in a physically demanding retail sales environment as an hourly wage slave working swing shifts any day or evening of the week including holidays and weekends. At least it comes with full benefits, though I don’t think I will be joining the 401(k) ‘retirement’ plan or the company discount stock purchase plan anytime soon.

Combine nine hour work days with an hour and a half of commute, add in the physical exhaustion experienced as I return to fighting shape and my weight of thirty plus years ago, sprinkle on top the occasional errand while visiting civilization, the time spent on daily prep for work as well as the unwind when returning home (one does not go directly to sleep after getting home at midnight) and clearly my writing has suffered.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Social Depression

May 21, 2015

Our Social Depression

This erosion of opportunities to complete life’s stages and core dramas is rarely recognized, much less addressed.

The consequences of economic stagnation are not limited to finance: stagnation is causing a social depression. We can best understand this social depression by examining how the natural stages of human life are being disrupted.

Each stage has various tasks, goals and duties, which establish the foundation for the next stage.Confucian thought views life as a developmental process with seven stages, each roughly corresponding to a decade: childhood, young adulthood (16-30), age of independence (30-39), age of mental independence (40-49), age of spiritual maturity (50-59), age of acceptance (60-69), and age of unification (70 – end of life).

I see each stage as centered on a core human drama: for the teenager, establishing an identity and life that is independent of parents; for the young adult, finding a mate and establishing a career; for the middle-aged, navigating the challenges of raising children and establishing some measure of financial security; for those in late middle-age, helping offspring reach independent adulthood and caring for aging parents; early old age, seeking fulfillment now that life’s primary duties have been accomplished and managing one’s health; and old age, the passage of accepting mortality and the loss of vitality.

The End of Secure Work and the diminishing returns of financialization are disrupting these core human dramas and frustrating those who are unable to proceed to the next stage of life:

1. Teenagers are being pressured to focus their lives on achieving a conventional financial success (see “Training for Discontent” in From Left Field) that is becoming harder to achieve.

2. Young adults without secure full-time careers cannot afford marriage or children, so they extend the self-absorption of late adolescence into middle age.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: work

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts