David Graeber explores the question of meaningless jobs in his thought-provoking and hilarious new book, Bullshit Jobs.
Capitalism treats blue-collar and white-collar wage earners differently than salary earners. Since the 1980s, anybody who has a non-bullshit job, who is doing actual work, has seen their work downsized, sped up and Taylorized.
Shorter hours shouldn’t have to mean every worker for herself.
A loss of income causes more than financial distress. It severs, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out, the vital social bonds that give us meaning.
Amid endless political cacophony in Washington, D.C., House Republicans are quietly advancing legislation that would drive a freight train through a central tenet of New Deal-era labor law: overtime. With Obama’s landmark overtime expansion blocked in the courts, conservatives roll out a plan that would undo overtime pay as we know it.
The American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working oneself to death than to argue that an individual working her/himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink especially clear.
Declines in manufacturing employment are shaping the structure of the American family.
Even the most expensively educated - Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others - have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams.
Reader Comments - Obama and the TPP; Stop-and-Frisk; White Americans and Police Accountability; Vietnam and Anti-War History and the Ongoing Debate; Remembering Jackson State Murders; Greece, Organizing New York; Those Who Work in Customer Call Centers;
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