You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

— “The Abolition of Work” by Bob Black

You tote a lot more to work in a lunch pail than Ring Dings. You pack alimony and autism diagnoses and car notes and the rest of the workingman’s grind. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Also braces, a better school, and a down payment on that spring field trip. And you chew whatever has been dumped on your plate in silence. You don’t go into therapy. You go to work.

—

The Loading Dock Manifesto [via]

Loving this John Hyduk essay

I am also asked by tenured faculty why on earth I would be spending so much time and effort advocating for a group of “others” whose fate I have never shared. I suppose this is a perfectly legitimate question, but I do find it a bit odd. Why wouldn’t I insist that these precarious colleagues be allowed equitable compensation, job security, fringe benefits and academic freedom? And why shouldn’t I want them to have equitable access to unemployment compensation, professional development and advancement?
What kind of callous person would I be if I were not profoundly disturbed by such obvious inequality? And what does it say about my entire profession when over 70 percent of those teaching in American colleges today are precarious, at-will workers? This new faculty majority, frequently and erroneously mislabeled as part-timers, are often full-time, long-term perma-temps, whose obscenely low wages and total lack of job security constitute what is only now being recognized as the “dirty little secret” in higher education.

— Views: Confessions of a Tenured Professor [via]

What is a bad attitude? I’d say it’s a general unwillingness to submit to the conditions of wage-slavery. It’s demonstrated most dramatically in a surly, uncooperative manner on the job, but must usually be more subtle. The worker with a bad attitude is always looking for ways to work less (procrastination, losing things), to surrender less time to the job (coming in late, leaving early, long breaks and lunches, lots of sick days), to further private pleasures and human interaction on the job (talking a lot, smoking dope), and by doing one’s own creative work on the job.
A bad attitude is a fundamentally normal, human response to the utter absurdity of most modern work. It’s a mystery to me why more people don’t demonstrate a bad attitude—i suppose it’s because they fear unemployment and/or lost income and have learned to smile and hide their true feelings. Of course I’ve done that too, and all too often. You can’t get a job in the first place without smiling and lying through your teeth!

— The Making of a Bad Attitude: An Abridged History of my Wage Slavery

How did it come about that a country with a growing underclass of unemployed workers has 12 million illegal immigrants?

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John C commenting on The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever

If only capitalism was that simple, John C!

We are brought together with other workers and assigned different tasks. We specialize in different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks over and over again. Our time at work is not really part of our lives. It is dead time controlled by our bosses and managers. During our time at work we make things that our bosses can sell. These things are objects like cotton shirts, computers and skyscrapers or qualities like clean floors and healthy patients or services like having a bus take you where you want to go, having a waiter take your order or having someone call you at home to try to get you to buy things you don’t need. The work is not done because of what it produces. We do it to get paid, and the boss pays us for it to make a profit.
At the end of the day the bosses re-invest the money we make them, and enlarge their businesses. Our work is stored up in the things our bosses own and sell—capital. They are always looking for new ways to store up our activity in things, new markets to sell them to, and new people with nothing to sell but their time and energy to work for them. What we get from work is enough money to pay for rent, food, clothes and beer—enough to keep us coming back to work.
When we’re not at work, we spend time traveling to or from work, preparing for work, resting up because we’re exhausted from work or getting drunk to forget about work. The only thing worse than work, is not having it. Then we waste our weeks away looking for work, without getting paid for it. If welfare is available, it is a pain-in-the-ass to get and is never as much as working. The constant threat of unemployment is what keeps us going to work everyday. And our work is the basis of this society. The power our bosses get from it expands every time we work. It is the dominant force in every country in the world.

— WORK . COMMUNITY . POLITICS . WAR

We are in a deep malaise here, but this is not new. It’s often said that in the private sector that Detroit is not the place to start a “service industry.” When you hear that the service is terrible in Detroit, imagine us raising our collective glass in cheer, because we did not come here to serve anyone.

— Elena Herrada, ‘We Came to Work’ [via]

Sahlins had already remarked upon the superior “quality of working life” enjoyed by primitive producers, to borrow a catchphrase from the pseudo-humanist experts in job redesign and job enrichment. In addition to shorter hours, “flextime” and the more reliable “safety net” afforded by general food sharing, forager’s work is more satisfying than most modern work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country. We have bosses; they have companions. Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great utopians called for. Our “commute” is dead time, and unpaid to boot; they cannot even leave the campsite without “reading” the landscape in a potentially productive way. Our children are subject to compulsory school attendance laws; their unsupervised offspring play at adult activities until almost imperceptibly they take their place doing them. They are the makers and masters of their simple yet effective toolkits; we work for our machines, and this will soon be no metaphor, according to an expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: “In general, robots will work for men, but there may be exceptions in which some robots are higher in the hierarchy than some humans.” The last word in equal employment opportunity.

— Primitive Affluence: A Postscript to Sahlins

I thought this did an ok job of discussing (or rehashing) the ridiculous amounts of extraneous/unenjoyable/fairly unnecessary work that we do (in comparison to subsistence work) without engaging in too much fetishization of the ‘primitive’.

I have had a couple bad weeks at work and Bob Black is really speaking to me as a result.