Overheard

Somebody working at a McDonalds franchise in Denmark makes about $21 an hour.

They're in a union. They get 5 or 6 weeks paid vacation every year. They can take up to a year paid maternity leave. They get life insurance, healthcare insurance, and a pension plan if they're over 20 years old.

A Big Mac in Denmark will run you about $5.50

Somebody working at a McDonalds franchise in USAmerica Inc makes about $9.50 an hour with no benefits.

A Big Mac in the US goes for about $5.50

McDonald's gross profit for the twelve months ending December 31, 2023 was $14,563,000,000 - 14½ billion dollars - a 10.26% increase year-over-year. And they paid the CEO almost $20 million.

Workin' For A Livin'

I was never a fan of unions. Growing up in the 60s, there was always the perception that unions were mobbed up, and there was just something kinda dirty about the whole thing.

Then in the 70s, when things started to come apart, unions were seen as being a big part of the problem. They weren't really, but the prevailing narrative was that we were paying too much for everything because the unions were feather-bedding the crap out of American manufacturing, so the noble capitalists had no choice but to say 'fuck this shit, we're moving it all to Indonesia'.

Working people have been always been the targets of cynical manipulators who tell us the wrong thing is the problem, and that we need to blame the wrong people for it.

Maybe we're finally start to get wise, and maybe the pendulum has started to swing back in the other direction.

Union membership is growing in the state after years of declines.

Employee walkouts, work stoppages and union drives seemed like a big part of 2023. But you may not know it from national data released earlier this week. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said union membership was “little changed” last year, comprising 10% of the national workforce. In 2022, it was an iota higher, 10.1%.

Rates, of course, don’t tell the whole story.

“I can say that both phenomena are true: There has been a lot of union activity over the past year and the unionization rate hasn’t changed much,” said Johnnie Kallas, director of the Labor Action Tracker, which tracks work stoppages and other labor actions nationwide. The tracker, which Kallas helped develop while at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, documented 451 labor actions in the U.S. last year, 414 in the prior year and 270 in 2021.

A key explanation? “There were nearly 200,000 more union members in 2023 than 2022, but those increases did not keep pace with considerable job growth last year, hence a stagnant or very slightly decreasing unionization rate,” said Kallas, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations.

While there have been worries of a recession for the past couple of years, there was no recession in 2023. The nation’s economy grew 3.3% annually in the fourth quarter and 3.1% for the year, according to the U.S. Commerce Department update Friday. And overall job growth continued to surprise economists.

Colorado experiencing more union activity

But Colorado was different. The state’s union membership rate ticked up, at least from a low point in 2021. Last year, the number of union members increased 6.2% to 189,000 workers. Union members make up 6.9% of the state’s employed population. A year earlier it was at 6.7%, which is below the national average.

The state added 11,000 union members last year, and 13,000 in the prior year. Those included baristas at Starbucks and staff at Urban Peak, the first unionized shelter for unhoused people in Colorado. Momentum, especially among service workers, continued this month with more filing with the National Labor Relations Board to start a union, including 238 employees at the Denver Art Museum, about 180 workers from Alamo Drafthouse Cinema locations in Westminster and Denver and five at the CobbleStone Car Wash in Lakewood.

But few, if any, actually have a contract.

“It takes a tremendous amount of new organizing to translate into increased union density,” Kallas said. “In some cases, workers have made important organizing gains, but have had difficulty achieving a first contract.”

Membership has thrived at the Service Employees International Union Local 105, which has increased membership by 50% in 10 years. About 70% was new growth of workers at companies seeking representation, said Stephanie Felix-Sowy, who helped 3,000 Kaiser Permanente health workers in Colorado get a new contract after a three-day strike in October. Local 105 also represents janitors, security staff and other service workers, including more recently, about 2,000 who work at Denver International Airport.

“Colorado historically is not a super union-dense state,” Felix-Sowy said. “Being able to do that work within those particular industries has been really game changing for our members and their ability to move their priorities forward.”

After COVID, the union saw even more interest in collective bargaining. It’s currently working with home care workers and expanding its reach into airport workers. Last month, it helped organize a walkout of dozens of Denver airport cargo workers seeking safer working conditions from their employer, Swissport International.

“It’s starting to come to light and workers in these industries are fed up with seeing record profits,” Felix-Sowy said. “Even through COVID, we saw airports getting millions and millions of dollars from the government and workers not seeing that, and then a few years later, seeing record profits again. It’s just like all of these pieces, specifically in Colorado, have really led to folks looking for an outlet. I think it’s the same way that we saw generations ago.”

➔ On the other hand … union membership has been in decline for years. During the early 1950s, about one-third of private sector workers belonged to unions. Now it’s 6%. The Associated Builders and Contractors said Friday that most construction workers employed by private companies aren’t in a union. Nationally, the industry reached an all-time high of 89.3% who are not part of a union. ABC is a trade group primarily for construction companies.

Housing: Rent or buy?

With mortgage rates still above 6%, buying a house hasn’t gotten any cheaper even as sales prices halted their spectacular rise in 2021 and 2022. Interest rates, according to the Colorado Association of Realtors, “defined the 2023 housing market.”

In 2023, potential sellers held on to their homes and “stopped the move-up market where a huge percentage of current homeowners have mortgages under 3.5% and don’t want to trade that in,” said Fort Collins Realtor Chris Hardy in a CAR update.

Last year, Colorado sellers listed 81,115 single-family homes for sale. Before the pandemic, there were 108,007, according to CAR data. Even just counting the past 12 months, the number of available houses for sale — or sold — fell by double digit rates from 2022. The median sales price in 2023? Up in some parts of the state, down in others.

But in December, prices inched up again, from a year ago, with the median price of single-family houses in Colorado at $549,950, up 3.8%. Median prices for the full year, though, were down 0.7%. The townhouse and condo market was up 3% in December to $424,995, and the annual median price was unchanged at $420,000.

Home prices are still high, though, so sellers are getting more than they paid for if they’ve owned it for more than a couple of years. But it’s become more difficult for renters to save up and qualify for a mortgage. However, interest rates are expected to fall this year, at least that’s what the body that makes that decision said it will consider.

Meanwhile, rent or buy? That’s a personal question. But even with a 20% down payment on December’s median-priced house in Denver ($593,500), the monthly mortgage is more expensive than a two-bedroom rental (at $1,914 a month), according to Realtor.com’s “Rent or buy calculator.”

Here’s how the rental numbers stack up:

“Despite all the craziness around increasing costs and increasing affordability challenges that we’ve been facing, the homeownership rate in Colorado actually continues to climb steadily since 2016. In 2022, we reached 67.4%, which is the highest level since 2010,” said Cooper Thayer, a Castle Rock Realtor at Thayer Group who presented the economic update at the Colorado Association of Realtors housing market update this week. “We’re seeing the cost of buying exceed the cost of renting right now so it’s really great to see, in Colorado specifically, our home ownership rate is still on the rise despite these challenges.”

Welcome To The Future

The Boomer Mantra:

• Lunch is for wimps
• Only the strong survive
• Fuck it - I'll sleep when I'm dead

I am a master of the universe

Gen X Is in Charge. Don’t Make a Big Deal About It.

The original “latchkey kids” are grown up, in the boss’s seat and ready to make the rules. If that’s OK?

The average age of incoming C.E.O.s is around 54. While American government remains squarely in the hands of baby boomers — and while its leadership, at least in certain branches, becomes noticeably older — corporate boardrooms are undergoing a transition. It’s Gen X’s moment, that generation most known for being crowded out of sweeping cultural age analyses by millennials on one end and boomers on the other.

Or as Patton Oswalt, a Gen X comedian, put it: “Gen X is trending, which probably means that, uh … eh, whatever. Nevermind.”

There are plenty of fair critiques of those generational analyses. People are far more complicated than the year they were born — in Gen X’s case, some time between 1965 and 1980. But it’s still true that with new leaders often come new rules. For the country’s newest chief executives, that has meant more trust in flexible and informal ways of working.

Take Darby Equipment, a manufacturing company in Tulsa, where remote flexibility for years seemed like an alien concept. The former chief executive, Bob Darby, reigned the company, a family business, with a commitment to an in-person regimen. People were expected to show up on time, sit at their desks and stay until evening, no matter what was going on in their personal lives.

His sons, Ryan and Bobby Darby, nudged their father to consider when he might step down. But the elder Mr. Darby couldn’t imagine the company functioning without him. Employees called him the “pacesetter”: He arrived every morning before 8 a.m., which encouraged others to do the same. When Mr. Darby’s sons asked him whether he’d like to carve out more time for golfing and fishing, he scoffed at the idea.

“He was basically telling us he didn’t think we were going to be able to keep all the balls in the air,” said Ryan Darby, 47.

During the pandemic, the elder Mr. Darby decided to retire. His sons stepped into company leadership with a fresh set of notions about where and when the work could get done. They’re more comfortable with some employees working remotely.

The labor force participation of people over 55 was near its lowest rate in 15 years last fall. And the average age of incoming chief executives has been on the decline.

Research from Stanford points to generational divides on remote work. Workers over 55 (mostly boomers) prefer to work remotely around 35 percent of the time, while workers in their early twenties (Gen Z) preferred to be remote about 45 percent of the time and workers in their 30s and 40s preferred to work from home closer to half the time. In other words, Gen Xers have become the unlikely warriors for flexible work.

Of course, stage of life comes into play. A survey of 120,000 American workers, also from Stanford, found that desired remote work levels were 7 percent higher among those living with children under 18.

“Gen X are the latchkey kids — we grew up very independent,” said Robert Glazer, 47, the founder of the marketing company Acceleration Partners. “Gen X was one of the first generations to expect a little more from work, trying to set boundaries but not expecting the workplace to change around them.”

When companies were first calling people back to the office, many assumed that the youngest workers would be the most rebellious. The reality has been more complicated. In many cases, executives say, young people are eager to be back in the office and surrounded by colleagues, while middle-aged employees with child and elder care responsibilities are fighting to keep their afternoon freedoms.

David Burkus, a consultant and the author of “Under New Management,” advises dozens of companies on management issues, including return-to-office plans. He’s seen firsthand the generational divisions underlying them. This was particularly salient for a law firm he recently consulted for to send some 700 lawyers back to the office.

“Baby boomers, who were predominantly empty nesters, were pushing to get people back in the office,” he said. “Then you had Gen Xers and geriatric millennials pushing for flexibility.”

“I went into it expecting it to be clear that the younger you are, the more flexibility you want,” he added. “I didn’t find that.”

Joy Meier, who runs human resources for the 4,000 employees at E2open, a supply chain software company, has also watched those generational differences unfold as she surveyed employees about their return-to-office preferences.

Ms. Meier, 49, found that many young workers wanted to be in person, sometimes even five days a week, describing a sense of loneliness at home and an eagerness to jump start their careers; a handful even departed the company in pursuit of more in-office time. Many senior employees wanted to be in the office, too, because that was how they’d spent their whole lives. (Some also had less comfort with technology.) Then there were the Gen Xers, like Ms. Meier, who has four children at home and embraced the company’s hybrid policy, which requires most staffers to come in three days a week.

“There’s definitely more of a desire for flexibility among people who are advanced in their careers and have family commitments,” she said.

She recalled years before the pandemic watching a female colleague anxiously negotiate for the ability to leave the office at 3 p.m. to pick up her children from school. “She was so happy when her boss approved that,” Ms. Meier said. “That was a unique thing back then.”

At Darby Equipment, the company’s new pacesetter is Aaron Soto, the director of operations. Mr. Soto, 44, is also sensitive to the workplace’s shifting generational norms. He recognizes that some of the junior employees want positive reinforcement frequently, he said, so he keeps a spreadsheet tracking how many thank-you cards each employee has received from managers.

Of course, talking about generational divisions can easily backslide into finger pointing. Management experts point out that most of the variance in workplace performance isn’t about how old someone is, but how good their boss is. Broad generational brushstrokes can paper over the deeper conversations needed between workers and their bosses.

“The single best predictor for whether folks will succeed at work is the competence of their boss, regardless of generation,” said Melissa Nightingale, a co-founder of Raw Signal Group, a management training firm. “That boss is on the hook for their on-boarding, their feedback, their career growth and more. If the boss can’t do those things, they’re screwed.”

Still, when old bosses leave and new ones arrive, there are opportunities for rethinking. Workers who benefit from leaving the office early for school pickup can say so. Workers who want more feedback can ask for it. There’s a chance to look at the way things have always been done and ask: Why?

“A lot of experts make it sound like you’re putting people in boxes based on their birth year, but what we want people to understand is that generations are clues, not a box,” said Jason Dorsey, a workplace researcher. “Just because you’re born in a certain year doesn’t mean someone knows everything about you.”

Generations change as they grow up, too. For years, Gen X seemed defined by a vexed sense of aimlessness. As Winona Ryder’s character in “Reality Bites” puts it: “I was really going to be something by the age of 23.” The angst, for many, is fading. Cue a sense of workplace confidence; they became something.

Twilla Brooks, 48, recalled that when she was starting her career, as an assistant buyer for Robinsons-May, a former department store chain, she had to be in the office before her boss arrived and stay until her boss left. She raced through Los Angeles traffic before 8 a.m., petrified of letting her manager down, because in her words: “That was what you needed to do in order to make it.”

Last year, Ms. Brooks left an executive role at Walmart to start her own marketing company. Now, with no office, she decides where and when to work. “There’s a lot more flexibility in my schedule,” she said. “Because it’s my schedule.”

It's The Humanity, Stupid

The money term: Surplus Humans

Over the next 20 years or so, we'll be making decisions on whether or not most people are even necessary.

And from what we've seen recently - the amorality of social media's use of algorithms - it does not bode well to leave those decisions to lizards like Mark Zuckerberg.

Aeon:

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.

Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.

And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?

But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.

For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?

I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living without a job – can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?

We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.

But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?

Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.

I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.

Of course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.

But in fact raising taxes on corporate income can’t have these effects.

Let’s work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods were produced offshore, overseas, by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.

Chinese workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate accounting is. That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner or, more recently, Transformers.

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.

So investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment. Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that permits us to love our neighbours and to be our brothers’ keeper is not an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a moral conundrum.

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.

When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.

That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social, cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails, as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for markets.

And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right, because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the acquisition of character.

Which is to say that everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.

Why?

Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.

Think about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating differences between males and females, for example by merging the meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently, prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their production and maintenance of families. Of course, these definitions are now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound and parallel changes in the labour market – the entry of women is just one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.

When work disappears, the genders produced by the labour market are blurred. When socially necessary labour declines, what we once called women’s work – education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a ‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labour of love, caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper – socially beneficial labour – becomes not merely possible but eminently necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.

Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of slave labour, convict labour, sharecropping, then segregated labour markets – in other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by racism. There never was a free market in labour in these united states. Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged market produced the still-deployed stereotypes of African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.

And yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.

But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant, environmental degradation.

Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.

Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?

Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’

We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.

Today's Beau

On Gov Cuomo, and learning about not being a dick - almost literally.

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

What you're really asking is: "How can I get away with it?"

BTW, if Cuomo did anything for which he deserves to burn, then let that fucker burn.

And here's the consent thing Beau mentioned:

How To Prevent Rape

1. Don’t put drugs in a woman’s drink
2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone
3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, always remember not to rape her
4. If a woman steps into an elevator with you, don’t rape her
5. Should you encounter a woman who’s asleep or otherwise unconscious, the safest thing to do is not rape her
6. Don’t break into a woman’s house, and don’t pounce on a woman in the parking garage, so as not to rape her
7. Remember, some women will go alone to the laundry room or storage lockers - avoid raping them
8. Buddy System - often, a friend is all you need to help you not rape
9. Be honest - state your intentions so the woman doesn’t get the mistaken idea that you won’t try to rape her
10. Always carry a Rape Whistle. If you’re about to commit rape, blow the whistle and wait for somebody to come and stomp your punk ass ’til there’s nothing left but a greasy spot on the pavement

Hoping For The Harbinger

13,000 people working for one of the largest grocery chains in New England went out on strike and began picketing a local store in Somerville MA on Friday.

Elizabeth Warren stopped in to see them - and brought some donuts and coffee.

“This is a company that made $2 billion in profits, that then got a fancy tax break in Washington from the Republicans and now wants to squeeze our workers right here in Massachusetts,” Warren told the workers. “Well, we’re not going to put up with it.”

Speaking to reporters, Warren reiterated the message that she has been campaigning on for years, that the wealthy are taking advantage of the working class. “This is the problem all across this country is that those at the top think that they can just keep sucking out every bit of profit and leave nothing for the working people, the people who actually get out there and make it happen every day,” Warren said.

“What people are asking for here is they’re just asking for fair wages, they’re asking for health care benefits and just as shot at a decent retirement,” she said.
Say whatever you want about Warren - maybe you feel the need to shit on her for being opportunistic and trying to make political points and blah blah blah.

First - she showed up. She talks about this kind of thing all the time - and she showed the fuck up.

Second - making political points is what politicians do. It's what we want them to do. It's what we pay them to do.

Third - where was that champion of the workin' guy POTUS? Anybody know? Oh yeah - golf. And why would we expect anything different from him? 

Shit - that fuckin' idiot probably can't even spell UFCW.

The New Economy

...which isn't new at all - this shit's been going on for 40 years.

Axios:

Very few Americans have enjoyed steadily rising pay beyond inflation over the last couple of decades, a shift from prior years in which the working and middle classes enjoyed broad-based wage gains as the economy expanded.

Why it matters: Now, executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further.

Quick take: This was rare, candid and bracing talk from executives atop corporate America, made at a conference Thursday at the Dallas Fed. The message is that Americans should stop waiting for across-the-board pay hikes coinciding with higher corporate profit; to cash in, workers will need to shift to higher-skilled jobs that command more income.

Troy Taylor, CEO of the Coke franchise for Florida, said he is currently adding employees with the idea of later reducing the staff over time "as we invest in automation." Those being hired: technically-skilled people. "It's highly technical just being a driver," he said.
The moderator asked the panel whether there would be broad-based wage gains again. "It's just not going to happen," Taylor said. The gains would go mostly to technically-skilled employees, he said. As for a general raise? "Absolutely not in my business," he said.
John Stephens, chief financial officer at AT&T, said 20% of the company's employees are call-center workers. He said he doesn't need that many. In addition, he added, "I don't need that many guys to install coaxial cables."

Because of the changes coming, AT&T is pushing employees to take nano-degree programs to prepare them for other jobs — either at AT&T or elsewhere.

Duck Before You Drown

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

The folks at Camp Runamuck, and their auxiliary down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, have yet another present for those economically insecure folks who didn't want the lady to replace the black guy because Mexicans and ISIS and telling-it-like-it-is. And economic insecurity. You can die on the job now and not burden your boss with unnecessary paperwork. From The Washington Post:

In a narrow result that divided along party lines, the Senate voted 49 to 48 to eliminate the regulation, dubbed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. Finalized in August and blocked by a court order in October, the rule would limit the ability of companies with recent safety problems to complete for government contracts unless they agreed to remedies. The measure to abolish it had already cleared the House. The next step after the Senate vote will be the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it. A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers — meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.

Chipping away at the protections - the institutions that are there to help us push back.

The Cost Of Things

Jeff Scon at Moyers & Company

After the most recent Super Bowl, I read an article that estimated it cost employers $1 billion in lost productivity on the Monday afterward — a mix of people calling in sick, showing up late and spending time discussing the top commercials (46 percent), the halftime show (12 percent), and the game play and strategy (12 percent).

Ask yourself: How much time during the last week did you spend ‘on’ Trump?

This article got me thinking about how much the Trump presidency will cost the US economy during the next four years due to similar losses in productivity.

Trump’s narcissistic behavior — manifested in his unfiltered and uncontrolled Twitter communications and his preoccupation with being the center of attention — has created an unrelenting daily media frenzy. Every day brings a new crisis, new accusations, insults and lies that suck us into spending time “on” Trump.

Ask yourself: How much time during the last week did you spend “on” Trump?

Here's a snapshot of Schon's quickie pass at the math:

 

And what do you think we might be able to do with that kinda money? Go check the end of his piece.

A PolToon

...while the Executive Committee sits in a conference room (that prob'ly cost more than your fucking house) wondering, "Whatever happened to company loyalty?"

Workplace Poetry

Thadra Sheridan

Button Poetry (on YouTube)

hat tip = Addicting Info

Who Ya Gonna Be?

Now, if the obviously very clever and talented film makers could just come up with the 3rd and 4th alternatives - you know, kinda like real life - maybe it could help us figure out how not to buy into the bullshit of a strictly binary universe.

I do dearly love this little film tho'.

Dead Americans

Between 2000 and 2010:

via: bls/gunpolicy.org

Don't Get Pushed Around

The War Goes On

In this particular case, I refer to The War On Women.

via Addicting Info:

On Friday, the Illinois court of appeals upheld a decision that allows pharmacists and medical dispensaries to refuse to give out emergency contraceptives on the grounds of religion.

So here's a thought; maybe I could go to Pharmacy Tech school, wait around for that job at CVS to open up, and then after I'm kinda established, I could convert to the Christian Science brand of religion.  At that point, it seems like I'd be in the perfect position.  I could simply refuse to fill or dispense any prescriptions because my religion forbids it, which means I wouldn't be required to do any actual work.  And they couldn't pressure me or fire me because I could sue their asses off for Religious Discrimination in the workplace.

Workin' In The USA

10 Years Of Hell

One thing that hasn't seen much improvement under Obama is BLS's difficulties figuring out what's actually happening with unemployment.  I'd like to see somebody go back and chart the monthly stats as first reported against the real numbers that come out (quietly) several weeks later.

In case you can't see this well, go to calculatedriskblog.com

Work Force Demographics

A very cool interactive chart.  Click on MALE and then on FEAMLE to get a rather jarring look at the way the mix has shifted over the years. 

I don't know what any of it really means, so if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear 'em.