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?

—

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.

The difference between the kind of exploitation experienced by “trafficking” victims and the exploitation experienced by all the other workers facing low pay and poor conditions is not qualitative but quantitative ­ they are at the extreme end of a continuum of misery under capitalism.
So the so-called human rights approach to “trafficking” is based on a thoroughly confused notion of “exploitation” which does nothing to get to the real roots of workers’ misery, whether in the sex industry or in any other sector. On the one hand, it assumes that all prostitutes are exploited simply because they are prostitutes, as if they had no will or agency of their own; on the other hand it also assumes that workers in any other industry are only exploited if they have been subjected to specific types of coercion, regardless of how low their pay or how poor their working conditions may be.
This only reinforces the stigmatisation of prostitutes as “other” and keeps them divided from workers in other sectors.

— Organise! #72 - Sex work and `trafficking’ ­A vile trade?

What has been equally hard to accept is that white women’s role in the subordination of WoC’s labor has not been indirect or oblivious. Even if we wanted to argue that white women didn’t realize that overworking and underpaying WoC made it physically impossible for many of them to care for their own children (demands on their time meant that domestic servants sometimes only saw their kids on the weekend; low pay meant that adequately feeding, sheltering, and clothing their children was often little more than a dream), there are many times that white women directly and vocally opposed and impeded WoC’s efforts to improve their working conditions and attain a decent standard of living.

— Somebody Better Get Miss Millie!

Axiom q. Anarchy is not about the worker. Most people don’t like work. Why would we want to organize our lives and our politics around something we usually try to avoid? Workers’ collectives are good in that they try as much as possible to remove the oppressive relationship inherent within the capitalist conceptualization of work. But the products people make, or the services they offer still have to slot themselves into the capitalist system. Forget that. Anarchy is about not working for other people at all. It is about working for yourself. And I don’t mean self-employment in the tax collectors’ definition. What I mean is, working on your own garden so that you can feed yourself, working on your own artwork, videos, websites or writing so that you can express yourself, working on building your own collective home so that you can house yourself, working on relationships and learning things that are relevant to your life, working on your sexuality so that you can please yourself. Working for other people is no fun, and an identity based on the exploited role you play in sustaining capitalism is no identity at all. Fuck work. And read Bob Black. Anarchist theory has to move away from Marxist notions of the reified category of worker, and consider the possibilities of creating a world without poverty in a world without work.

— Seeing Past the Outpost of Post-Anarchism. Anarchy: Axiomatic [via]

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

— “In Praise of Idleness” By Bertrand Russell [via]