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]

But you know that when their 15 minutes expire, they’ll become our bosses. Double-whammy bar, indeed.

— Bad fads define summer of 2008 [via]

Here’s what worries me most - like many other laid off auto workers, my dad’s in his late fifties, with a bad back, arthritis starting to set in, and a minimal college education in auto repair, no thanks to the GI Bill. He can send me email, watch the funny YouTube videos I send him, but that’s about as far as his computer skills go. With a crummy economy, how does my dad compete with all the hungry, tech-savvy college graduates that don’t have families to support?
This is not the American Dream, this is the Auto Industry Nightmare.

— The Auto Industry Nightmare [via]

This move will leave the county clerk staff with more time to do what they do best, play freecell solitaire on their court computers.

— Comment by Faustus on County Clerks in California Closing Doors on Marriage Ceremonies

As much as I enjoy celebrating labor radicalism, today is not the day for it; today belongs to the establishmentarian unionists and the government labor bureaucracy and the bosses who use union patronage as a means of control over workers. They made it and they can have it.

— Happy Labor Relations Day

By covering up the history of May Day, the state, business, mainstream unions and the media have covered up an entire legacy of dissent in this country. They are terrified of what a similarly militant and organized movement could accomplish today, and they suppress the seeds of such organization whenever and wherever they can. As workers, we must recognize and commemorate May Day not only for it’s historical significance, but also as a time to organize around issues of vital importance to working-class people today.

— May Day - the Real Labor Day