May Day
From my livejournal post of last year:
120 years since the Haymarket massacres.
85 years since Sacco and Vanzetti.
And nobody has learned a Goddamn thing.
Why do journalist’s work for a slave wage?
Why do waitor’s work for no wage at all?
Why do we still not have an official 8 hour work day?
or less, for fuck’s sake??
I’m not a communist, and I’m barely a socialist, but I’ve got my eyes wide open.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that in the post-industrial age of faxes, e-mail, laptops cellphones and spellcheckers, work has become more efficient. Orders of magnitude more efficient.
What that means is, that what a typist does now in an hour, s/he used to do in a whole day.
For the same equivalent pay, or less.
Ergo
The already-filthy-rich are getting richer than God, while the middle class is being eroded into nothingness.
Quality of life is rising, but there’s no one there to enjoy it!
Every year the same refrain. I wonder if I’ll ever have any better answers?
I recently posted on my delicious this article: The Overworked American / Juliet B. Schor, which kind of begins to give an answer, but I guess I’ll need to read the book. Our culture values work over leisure, it’s rather simple, the question is why.
A friend sent me via email another interesting link:
Don’t let the May 1st universal proletarian festivities (or mourning, depending on your dispositions and/or mood) confuse you – workers rights be damned (or actually put aside for the greater, patriotic, good); today’s “Loyalty Day” in the States.
Read on for a delusional and slightly distorted dose of the concept of “Loyalty” in the “United” States, W.-style:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020502-20.html
Yep, you heard it right here, folks. Happy Loyalty Day to all of you. We are so doomed.
Tagged as hate work, may day, socialism + Categorized as Current Events, Social Politics