Marx's principal point regarding the commodification of time was that an empty, abstract, quantifiable time that was applicable anywhere, any time was a precondition for its use as an abstract exchange value on the one hand and for the commodification of labour and nature on the other. Only on the basis of this neutral measure could time take such a pivotal position in all economic exchange.
Citing Marx' critique on how time is commodified for value, labor and natural resources.
Unschooled reductions in government and reflexive conservatism create more problems and inefficiencies than they purport to resolve.
Recent research on the actual work involved in putting technologies into usehighlights the mundane forms of inventive yet taken for granted labor, hidden in thebackground, that are necessary to the success of complex sociotechnical arrangements.
People have come to believe that they, their jobs, their communities, and the social contract that binds them to work and place and each other are under threat. And they’re not wrong.
I have a lot of criticisms of the self-occupation link. But this is really interesting connecting self-occupation-community-social contract.
the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems
It is the same as what we learnt before from British economy history. Under the rule of Mrs. Thatcher, through the destruction of labor movement and opening foreign competition to weak the forces of global trade. Inducing the heavy industry system, the large state-owned enterprises carry out radical privatization reform and other measures to complete the transformation of economic structure, So that the British from a traditional heavy industrial countries, into a service-oriented emerging economies. Mrs. Thatcher has focused on weakening public spending such as education, health care and social welfare, and she claims to "turn Britain from a society of interdependence to a self-sustaining society." Under her leadership, Britain has gradually become a country with relatively cheap labor and flexible labor. However, as it shows today, British people are facing an unreasonable high retirement age and suffering from dramatic social classes gap.
Today’s American youth are entering a labor market strikingly different from earlier generations. Over the last decade, global economic integration and the collapse of the Soviet Union have led to what economist Richard Freeman (2008) has called a “dou-bling” of the global labor market, from a pool of 1.46 to 2.93 billion. This has created a chronic shortage of jobs relative to those who seek them. The economic downturn that resulted from the 2007 financial panic has worsened this shortfall (see Figures 1 and 2).2
And the shortage of jobs will only increase with more automation.
he labour power of a class of landless labourers -the proletariat
This better defines the division of labors. People are divided by classes based on the number of properties they own.
All non-communist modes have in common the production of goods by means of the domination and exploitation of one class by anot
This establishes the division of labor, since there's always the dominant class and the subordinate class in society. One class force exploitation on another class.
divisionoflabour
The distribution of peoples' labor in the productive process. Organization depends on tasks, skill sets of laborers, and available means of production.
Division of Labor
This is a key component of capitalism that is unfavorable. Marx thinks this makes people estranged from the products they create and estranged from the process of production, thus causing the workers to no longer feeling associated with their labor. This also causes people to be less skilled, and not able to create whole products which thus makes them dependent on others. This can be connected as a mechanism of social control.
How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons
Persuasion
geographical mobility in America has been on the decline for three decades
How much of this decline is due to an increase in the numbers of remote workers?
For a boss to fire a worker is at most a minor inconvenience; for a worker to lose a job is a disaster. The Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, a measure of the comparative stress level of different life events, puts being fired at 47 units, worse than the death of a close friend and nearly as bad as a jail term. Tellingly, “firing one of your employees” failed to make the scale.
Because of State labor laws, stupid. They make it hard to change jobs, hard to fire workers and hence hard to hire workers. In a libertarian world this would in principle be much smoother.
Once the employee is hired, the boss may ask on a moment’s notice that she work a half hour longer or else she’s fired, and she may not dare to even complain. On the other hand, if she were to so much as ask to be allowed to start work thirty minutes later to get more sleep or else she’ll quit, she might well be laughed out of the company. A boss may, and very often does, yell at an employee who has made a minor mistake, telling her how stupid and worthless she is, but rarely could an employee get away with even politely mentioning the mistake of a boss, even if it is many times as unforgivable.
Here and after the author treats as a libertarian problem what happens today under the rule of the State labor laws.
In a world without State labor laws, contracts would apply. Contracts could evolve and have all these situations expected in their clauses. Also, this seems to me to be a case for actually working law (which the criticism imagines as unexisting in a libertarian society): https://hypothes.is/a/PBirDvnYEeaWvjeIs4H9kg.
a number of studies have found that people on welfare, black Americans included, feel that people take advantage of the system and receive benefits when they should not
Protestant work ethic shit, undermining social safety nets for all.
Inmates were required to work for their wages in food;
While in the concentration camp you had to work for your food.
Oklahoma Correctional Industries; workers scan the original photos and prepare metadata
We can make the argument here that the University of North Texas, the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the Ethics in Journalism Foundation support de facto slave labor. Let's be honest here: "workers" = "prisoners"
Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors - the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes.
Simply saying competition is divisive won’t raise standards for collaboration, and won’t create the grounds for hope. To do this, we urgently need to start collecting new stories and evidence of a different culture forged in kindness, that we know we can build together. Then maybe we need to start making our own videos.
Yes.
If Barack Obama was capable of muscling through the sort of laws that the labor movement—and Barack Obama—would like to see enacted, he would not have to give labor leaders a summit. He could give them political victories. But that does not seem to be the reality of the moment. So we all got invited to the White House instead, to talk about “outreach strategies” and to “#StartTheConvo” on labor issues. I did not get the impression that the conversation needed more starting. We all seemed pretty well decided on what we wanted. Left unspoken was the fact that the working class will not be getting what it wants, any time soon.
Hurts to read.
what labor, whose labor is saved, is replaced in this, an age of economic precarity, adjunct-ification, anti-unionism, automation?
So glad we are talking about labor here, and the costs of digital labor. This ties into such a robust body of work by Gina Neff and others. And the connection to education can definitely be distilled into OLPC - see Anita Chan and forthcoming work by Morgan Ames
The naive economist who truly believes in the equal bargaining position of labor and capital would find all of these things very puzzling.
One of my most astute economist friends once opened my mind to the obvious fact that unions are the result of workers having power rather than the cause. I say this is "obvious" because an organization is created by its constituents and not the other way around. It's easy to forget, when one is entangled in rhetoric that treats unionization as an independent optimization goal, that the proper goal of the economic planner is a balance of power between capital and labor.
One of the things that stuck with me the most in this video is the guy mentions something he heard from an Amish farmer (at 6:35), that labor was part of his profit — that he was able to provide labor for other people was part of his profit.Which is soooooo counter to basically every farm I’ve worked at, where I’ve often felt like I was doing my employers some kind of “disservice” by working for them, because they thought I was “costing them too much” or somehow cutting into their already low profits.
This is clever concept, good enough to get out of a financial hole, or get a startup to hum along!
But these features also make it ripe for conflict between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists who oppose sex work. One of the most frequent attacks on Twitter is that these activists are pimps pretending to be sex workers. This argument defeminizes sex workers into the masculine identity of a pimp and paints them as co-conspirators in trafficking. It’s a form of gendered shaming against female-identified sex workers that pits them over and against victimized women and girls