If #POTUS - president of USA - can spend a quarter of his days in office playing #golf then it’s about time workers have a #fourhourday or at least a #fourdayweek ?
#Capitalism #wageslavery

Cartoon characters teaching us about capitalism

https://youtube.com/shorts/sQ_rw7Qxl6I

"For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after the novel was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.

Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.

Gen X-ers grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.

When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.

More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/style/gen-x-creative-work.html

This Sci-Fi Show Exposes How Elites Justify Evil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIkJpfgKr4

#Tipping: #LastWeekTonight with #JohnOliver
#Labor #LaborRights #WageSlavery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89R9ZxKaIOw

#food #groceries #profit #greed #competition #wageslavery https://www.readthemaple.com/poverty-wage-plutocrats-a-guide-to-canadas-grocery-chain-oligarchs/

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-surges-2-trillion-2024-three-times-faster-year-while-number Billionaire wealth surges by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before, while the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990. #fascism #News #Economy #wageslavery #greed #work

Today in Labor History February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike began. 65,000 workers participated. Longshoremen, trolley operators and bartenders also participated. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AF of L and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee. Army veterans created an independent police force to maintain order. The Labor War Veteran's Guard prohibited the use of force and didn’t carry weapons. The regular police made no arrests in any actions related to the strike. Overall, arrests dropped to less than half their normal number.

A pamphlet that was distributed during the strike said, “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil."

The strike ended when they brought in federal troops and the workers were pressured to quit by bureaucrats from the national unions, particularly the AFL.

Today in Labor History February 3, 1910: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones addressed Milwaukee brewery workers during a two-month stint working alongside women bottle-washers while on leave from the United Mine Workers:

"Condemned to slave daily in the wash-room in wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul-mouthed, brutal foremen . . . the poor girls work in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, in their wet shoes and rags, for they cannot buy clothes on the pittance doled out to them. . . . Rheumatism is one of the chronic ailments and is closely followed by consumption . . . An illustration of what these girls must submit to, one about to become a mother told me with tears in her eyes that every other day a depraved specimen of mankind took delight in measuring her girth & passing comments."

Today in Labor History February 1, 1865: President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. However, the 13th Amendment does not abolish all forms of slavery. The state is still permitted to force prisoners to work for free, or for wages far below the minimum wage. They are even allowed to do this and sell the products made by prisoners for a profit, sometimes even getting tax breaks for doing so. And, so long as capitalism exists, wage slavery will still persist. Sadly, with the right-wing backlash against everything “woke,” politicians and pundits successfully convinced California voters to vote against Prop 6, which would have banned prison slave labor in their state.

https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/

https://open.substack.com/pub/echoesofdystopia/p/what-is-the-true-purpose-of-school?r=54w5rv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Eat the rich!

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-20/oxfam-calls-for-australias-richest-to-pay-more-tax/104821814

The greatest threat to the #capitalist world order is true international #WorkingClass #solidarity and #MutualAid. Stop sitting around feeling angry and hopeless -- that's what they want. Join #IWW and learn how we can end #WageSlavery and the #exploitation grind. #UnionStrong

Do people care?

Hell, yeh, they do!

They care that they pay these companies thousands of dollars each year (if they're lucky enough to be able to afford insurance at all) just to get denied coverage, esp when the condition is most dire. That these companies kill tens of thousands each year with these denials, while the execs make millions of dollars. That execs, in general, are getting richer and richer, while they're income barely changes. That they are being asked to do more, while being offered the same, or less. That they can barely afford their rents. That billions of their tax dollars are being spent supporting genocide, regime change, propping up dictators and ethno-religious terrorists.

#Wage-slavery or #starvation? -- That's not a choice, it's a threat!

"Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Albert Einstein (1949): "Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism."

https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/