"If work were so
pleasant,
the rich would keep it for themselves"
- Mark Twain
In the previous four installments, I
use the story of a bookseller in a ridiculous customer service situation as a
frame to talk about the fate of those working in the service industry (1/3 of
the economy), eventually expanding my ire to most work in general. Section 1: (What
is a real job?) can be found here. Section 2 (the
customer is always right?) can be found here. Section 3 (
the insidious happy customer service mask that hides the truth of work in the
US) can be found here here . And Section
4 is the end of the bookseller’s
story, along with question about the sustainability of an economy that treats
so many workers like waste. Holy crap, this should be a book. Or a Michael Moore-ish type movie.
And so, onwards and upwards…
Strikes, New Fights
There’s
hope! There have been numerous strikes and protests at Walmart and McDonald’s
in the last few years. This last Black Friday – November 28, 2014 – was the
third consecutive year that Walmart employees stood outside stores, demanding
higher wages, more hours, and associated benefits.
Whenever you hear about small
victories like this, you have to keep in mind that quite a number of workers
were harassed, demoted, and fired just to get to this point. These are people
who put their jobs on the line to help raise the standard of living for others.
 |
| Kshama Sawant |
 |
| Sweatshop: Bangladesh |
Why such monstrous waste? So a limited few can accumulate wealth beyond imagining.
Is this a fair trade-off?
We all know the answer to that one.
Imagine:
Moving Beyond the Service Economy
Moving Beyond the Service Economy
"It has become an
article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself; a
convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others."
Long before I worked organizing a
union in the Border’s chain, I imagined a world that could move beyond the call
for safe work at decent wages. Yes, fighting for better wages, for better
working conditions, is important work and needs to be done – people’s lives
depend upon it – but, in the end, I found that this fight ended the same way:
more money =
acceptance of the status quo
 |
| Tick, tick, tick... |
As I keep saying, ad nauseum: most of
the jobs out there are wasting our creative potential. They are time killers,
soul killers. We do them for most of our waking hours. No one I know woke up
one morning when they were ten years old and announced to their family that
they had a desperate urge to become a cashier at Target when they grew up.
What would an economy look like where
most people were fulfilled by their work – not fulfilling menial, and mostly
useless, services for others? What would the world look like where all work had
dignity; a world where no work
contributed to the destruction of the planet.*
Impossible? It’s not like Capitalism
appeared out of the natural cycles of the earth. It was originally imagined and
implemented out of a European male desire for power and wealth (women were
mostly kept out of the process for the first 500 years).
 |
| Jesus & Dinosaur |
You can’t eliminate poverty in the
current economy because the economy requires a certain percentage of poor people, a certain percentage of the world toiling
at mindless, humiliating jobs. This is a world of finite resources. There’s
only so much to go around. It’s easy to do the maths. When all wealth flows to
the top, it leaves less for everyone else. A kindergartener can look at pie chart and figure this out.
Why not imagine an economy where all
of us can feel fulfilled, have dignity, and contribute in a meaningful way?
What would that kind of economy look like?
Ever the anarchist, I leave you to
imagine a new economic model yourselves. There are plenty of models to choose from
and most can easily be found online. The first requirement in the search is abandoning
this belief: for some to benefit, others
have to suffer. The second requirement is harder - an open mind - and the
question: what do I truly want from
work? Then, the final question: how do we get from here to there?
A
good - but long - article on the history of labor in general and analysis of
modern wage-slavery by the Anarchist Federation UK (on the libcom.org site) can
be found here.
Me,
I’m thinking that in a more fulfilling economy everyone would have to clean their own goddamn toilets.
After that,
the rest would slowly - oh so slowly - begin to take care of itself.
I’m thinking that in a more fulfilling economy everyone would have to clean their own goddamn toilets.
After that,
the rest would slowly - oh so slowly - begin to take care of itself.
*
Here’s a great poem by Gary Snyder about
workers and the destruction of the world:
Dillingham, Alaska, The Willow Tree Bar
Drills chatter full of mud and compressed
air
All across the globe,
Low-ceilinged
bars, we hear the same new songs
All the new songs.
In the working bars of the world.
After you done drive Cat. After the truck
Went
home.
caribou
slip,
front
legs folded first
under
the warm oil pipeline
set
four feet off the ground –
On the wood floor, glass in hand,
laugh
and cuss with
somebody
else’s wife.
Texans,
Hawaiians, Eskimos,
Filipinos,
Workers, always
on
the edge of a brawl –
In
the bars of the world.
Hearing
those same new songs
in
Abadan,
Naples,
Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks,
White
or brown,
Drinking it down,
the pain
of the work
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