#and underpaying/overworking workers

[self-spaghettification]

they/themavos real

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

in todays news of asinine bullshit discourse on tiktok: apparently there's a hot debate over whether or not you're entitled to nice greetings and conversations with cashiers/retail workers. and. now here's the kicker. whether or not thinking no one's entitled to the pleasantries of an overworked exhausted employee is counterintuitive to the idea of a "third space". yes this is real life

[danzsoldier]

why do indie animation studios keep turning out to be honestly horrible like this isn’t even funny

[nothorses]

my problem with how internet leftists talk about teachers is that they fall into the same trap that every shitty non-profit work environment does: the work Actually Matters, therefore worker's rights no longer apply.

"the customer is always wrong", but if you're a teacher, you can't have that mentality about your customers (your students and their parents), because that leads to abuse and trauma. which, to be clear, is literally true! teachers are responsible for the harm they cause, regardless of what leads to it!

but when teachers speak up and say that they need better pay, smaller classrooms, and better protections as workers in order to mitigate the burnout and trauma that leads to these problems, snarky internet leftists love to shit on them for asking for real help instead of bootstrapping their way out of mental health struggles caused by shitty, abusive working conditions.

it's okay for a barista to take their stress and frustration out on the next customer- regardless of the harm this causes or how undeserving the recipient of it may be- because they're abused and at the mercy of a system that overworks and underpays them. but if a teacher asks that we grapple with the complexity of:

real systemic problems that lead to individuals lashing out and causing harm,

that harm still not being acceptable or allowable on an individual level, and

those systemic issues still needing to be addressed in order to reduce said harm on a wider scale,

people start acting like every teacher who wants a raise is Count fucking Olaf.

yall don't want real solutions to the problems you bring up, you want to feel morally righteous.

[tangibletechnomancy]

Economic anxiety has a way of bringing out reactionary sentiment in anyone if they're not careful.

It is deeply, deeply frustrating to watch it play out in front of me in leftist spaces such that self-proclaimed leftists are using actual, literal fascist arguments about Real Art vs. Fake Art and Real Labor vs. Lazy Button-Pushing.

These things don't become any less bad when you SAY your enemy is "some rich techbro" while calling broke disabled hobbyists "evil soulless automatons".

The central logic doesn't become true when you SAY you're targeting an inhuman machine while you screech obscenities about a great replacement at its operator.

When you say one minute "there is no unskilled labor, only undervalued skills", it doesn't magically absolve you of saying "nooo, you were supposed to automate away the BAD and DEMEANING jobs with no financial safety net for the workers, not THIS one I consider RESPECTABLE" in the next breath; it only makes you a fucking hypocrite.

"Fair use for me but not for thee" is not a rational position to prevent plagiarism and forgery; it's just a means to codify an ingroup and an outgroup.

"Degenerate art" is always, ALWAYS a reactionary and proto-fascist thing to believe in, even if you wrap it up in other fancy words because you know "degenerate" is a Bad Word. "There is Good Art that makes society better and Bad Art, if you can even CALL it Art at all, that will rot our brains and turn us all into mindless drones if it's allowed to survive" cannot be made into anything but a reactionary position! Period! End of!

"Lazy button-pushers" are EXACTLY what corporations want you to think ANY automation operator is, so they can take credit away from those employees and criminally underpay them. They said the same damned thing about digital artists back in the early days of Photoshop. They say the same thing about overworked VFX artists today. You are DIRECTLY helping them make it worse with this argument.

The same old fucking trick of making you uncertain of your financial future so you lash out at other victims of the system because you "can't take the risk" of coming together to fight the actual enemy? Is working a FUCKING treat on way too many people who pride themselves on Not Being Like That - and it's even worse because a lot of the time pointing this out will get nothing but denial because maintaining pride in a leftist, progressive, pro-labor, pro-human Identity is more important to way too many people than ACTUALLY identifying the root of reactionary sentiment and the strategies used to spread it.

It makes me genuinely feel like I've fallen into a Fox News convention, hearing all these blatantly reactionary arguments and actively self-defeating strategies to Protect Labor.

[bump-inthe-night]

Vivziepop fails to show that Angel is an overworked sex worker in Hazbin Hotel.

He’s a famous pornstar who also works as a stripper and prostitute. However, in Hazbin Hotel, Vivziepop primarily focuses on Angel’s job as a pornstar, with his two other jobs getting little attention. So what’s the actual purpose of him having these two other jobs? Simple: Vivziepop only made Angel a pornstar, stripper, and prostitute because she thought it would make him appear more exploited and “compelling” as a character.

It’s common for sex workers to work part-time and have a main unrelated job; some of them do two sexual jobs. In Angel’s case, he’s supposed to be working three sexual jobs, yet he’s often shown spending more time doing anything else. He surprisingly has plenty of free time to spend at Charlie’s hotel, despite the tight leash Valentino is supposed to have on him. Pornography, stripping, and prostitution are time-consuming jobs, so how Angel has enough time for redemption is beyond me.

Vivziepop should’ve given him one job and explored it instead of giving him three. Since she mainly focuses on his job as a pornstar, she could’ve done research to properly explore it in Hazbin Hotel. The sex industry heavily exploits pornstars, whom they underpay and abuse.

In the show, Angel could’ve been an overworked pornstar who uses Charlie’s hotel as a safe place to sleep and eat when he can. He rarely spends time at the hotel, and his job is preventing him from focusing on redemption. However, Charlie sees the wear Angel's job is having on him and confronts Valentino, who is a representation of one of the many predators in the sex industry that exploit workers.

This would’ve been far more interesting to watch than what we actually got.

[beevean]

I like the attention to detail pointing to just how bad working conditions for the Pony Express were. From the poor condition the Tulpa was clearly, the warning not to ingest the water from the ship's tap and shower, to sleeping more than 5 hours a day being strongly discouraged no matter how much you work your ass off. With policies and conditions so heinous, things would still have went to utter shit one way or another even without Jimmy intentionally crashing their freighter.

Another prevalent theme of MW is precisely this. Pony Express is an old company that treats its workers like mules (hence the horse motif) and sticks them in a cheap ship to keep up with the increasing popularity of machines. They are underpaying and overworking their staff and it's not even worth it because machines are that more convenient to companies, so they eventually go down regardless of the corners they cut at the expense of their employees.

Curly doesn't know if he wants to continue living this life, and feels guilty for not being happy about reaching an important position. Jimmy fears the prospective of returning to a life of struggling, a life where he'd be a failed nobody. Anya is forced to work in a hostile environment to keep pursuing her real dream of becoming a recognized nurse. Swansea has completely resigned himself to his wasted life, which makes him cynical and apathetic. Daisuke has no goal in life and no real talents, and has only taken the internship to make his parents happy and perhaps prove himself that he's not a total screw-up.

The psych evals really feel like going through the motions, don't they.

Maybe without Jimmy on board doing his Jimmy thing they would have been able to finish their job, because no one has the same explosive personality of our favorite co-pilot. But it wouldn't have been a nice trip, with all of their neuroses eventually clashing - especially if Curly still does his Curly thing and puts his honesty above the company's order of not revealing that they're out of job so early.

This is why the game can't just be reduced to "Jimmy is a sexist rapist asshole and Satan incarnate". There is a lot to dissect about the setting too.

[whompthatsucker1981]

real actual nonhostile question with a preamble: i think a lot of artists consider NN-generated images as an existential threat to their ability to use art as a tool to survive under capitalism, and it's frequently kind of disheartening to think about what this is going to do to artists who rely on commissions / freelance storyboarding / etc. i don't really care whether or not nn-generated images are "true art" because like, that's not really important or worth pursuing as a philosophical question, but i also don't understand how (under capitalism) the rise of it is anything except a bleak portent for the future of artists

thanks for asking! i feel like it's good addressing the idea of the existential threat, the fears and feelings that artists have as to being replaced are real, but personally i am cynical as to the extent that people make it out to be a threat. and also i wanna say my piece in defense of discussions about art and meaning.

the threat of automation, and implementation of technologies that make certain jobs obsolete is not something new at all in labor history and in art labor history. industrial printing, stock photography, art assets, cgi, digital art programs, etc, are all technologies that have cut down on the number of art jobs that weren't something you could cut corners and labor off at one point. so why do neural networks feel like more of a threat? one thing is that they do what the metaphorical "make an image" button that has been used countless times in arguments on digital art programs does, so if the fake button that was made up to win an argument on the validity of digital art exists, then what will become of digital art? so people panic.

but i think that we need to be realistic as to what neural net image generation does. no matter how insanely huge the data pool they pull from is, the medium is, in the simplest terms, limited as to the arrangement of pixels that are statistically likely to be together given certain keywords, and we only recognize the output as symbols because of pattern recognition. a neural net doesn't know about gestalt, visual appeal, continuity, form, composition, etc. there are whole areas of the art industry that ai art serves especially badly, like sequential arts, scientific illustration, drafting, graphic design, etc. and regardless, neural nets are tools. they need human oversight to work, and to deal with the products generated. and because of the medium's limitations and inherent jankiness, it's less work to hire a human professional to just do a full job than to try and wrangle a neural net.

as to the areas of the art industry that are at risk of losing job opportunities to ai like freelance illustration and concept art, they are seen as replaceable to an industry that already overworks, underpays, and treats them as disposable. with or without ai, artists work in precarized conditions without protections of organized labor, even moreso in case of freelancers. the fault is not of ai in itself, but in how it's yielded as a tool by capital to threaten workers. the current entertainment industry strikes are in part because of this, and if the new wga contract says anything, it's that a favorable outcome is possible. pressure capital to let go of the tools and question everyone who proposes increased copyright enforcement as the solution. intellectual property serves capital and not the working artist.

however, automation and ai implementation is not unique to the art industry. service jobs, manufacturing workers and many others are also at risk at losing out jobs to further automation due to capital's interest in maximizing profits at the cost of human lives, but you don't see as much online outrage because they are seen as unskilled and uncreative. the artist is seen as having a prestige position in society, if creativity is what makes us human, the artist symbolizes this belief - so if automation comes for the artist then people feel like all is lost. but art is an industry like any other and artists are not of more intrinsic value than any manual laborer. the prestige position of artist also makes artists act against class interest by cooperating with corporations and promoting ip law (which is a bad thing. take the shitshow of the music industry for example), and artists feel owed upward social mobility for the perceived merits of creativity and artistic genius.

as an artist and a marxist i say we need to exercise thinking about art, meaning and the role of the artist. the average prompt writer churning out big titty thomas kinkade paintings posting on twitter on how human made art will become obsolete doesnt know how to think about art. art isn't about making pretty pictures, but is about communication. the average fanartist underselling their work doesn't know that either. discussions on art and meaning may look circular and frustrating if you come in bad faith, but it's what exercises critical thinking and nuance.

[anarchistfrogposting]

I don't consider myself an anarchist but i'm pretty sympathetic, there's just some stuff i'm not sure yet would work well under anarchism as i understood it after reading the bread book.

What would incentivize people to work, for example, at oil rigs away from their communities doing dangerous work?

Would it be that they'd have a smaller expectation for how long they're suposed to work? Like, instead of you working 9-5 for 8 months instead you work 9-5 for 4 months and then can just do things you like the rest of the year?

Yes hi hello! This post re-emerged from the depths of accidental deletion!! I’m getting the bus to go get a burrito so let me talk about this one!!

Kropotkin actually talked about dangerous work; after all, some work is just inherently and unavoidably a bit more dangerous than others: so what’s the point? Why bother?

To start, resource extraction is going to be inherent to any industrial economy, but it’s worth pointing out that when you eliminate a lot of overproduction, an inefficiency inherent to capitalist economy, the demand for extraction is going to shoot down in a big way. That’s a big reason why a lot of the more hardcore environmentalist movements have been radical leftist ones; it’s features inherent to capitalism which are bringing about the downfall of the environment which sustains us.

Another big consideration to make is that a lot of the danger of these fields arises solely because the demands of the profit motive incentivise management to overwork/underpay/cut back on or wholesale eliminate critical safety measures; there’s a reason why unions and collectives in those fields are such critical players in the constant battle to keep people safe.

There are quite a few fields in the domestic/public sector, as well (think electricians, certain waste management professions etc.) which are (and were more so in the past) fairly dangerous but are not generally regarded as such because they’re regulated well in the public domain/have very strong unions/have otherwise strong safety regulation.

This stuff gets safer and safer as we improve the automation of our economy, as well.

It’s worth remembering as well that those remote professions and operations are, in a way, their own communities, as well, and for some people travelling long distances away for more lonesome work is quite an attractive prospect; I once knew a geologist who said he found the relative isolation quite peaceful. My great grandad did some remote mining and he always talked quite positively about it when I knew him (although this is very anecdotal - if anybody in the field wants to weigh in I’d be more than happy to hear what you think).

About hours as well;

If there’s no profit motive, then industrial processes are going to be driven by how to do them as safely, efficiently, and easily (among other stuff). The demand for hours is going to be a lot less tough because you’re going to be able to have more workers and source better equipment without worrying about how it will cut into your bottom line; so yes, the hours will be shorter and the shifts less demanding, with a greater support network and safety network when shit hits the fan. All of this, of course, makes this kind of work a lot more attractive.

But what about dangerous work in general? Why would anyone put themselves in danger?

You just have to look at the tremendous danger that volunteers face to understand that humans don’t really need a profit motive to put their lives on the line to better their communities and the world, or to feel part of something greater than themselves. Not everyone is going to want to do that, and that’s ok, but some people really derive a lot of happiness and fulfilment from dangerous work.

Humanity is flexible and diverse; working together to champion that is our strength, and it always has been.

[mitigatedchaos]

The online Twitter/X right are having a big intra-coalition battle right now over skilled immigration.

I'll just lay out something briefly here:

H1b immigration has a bad reputation because it's based on a lottery system in which corporations are supposed to "prove" they can't hire someone in the United States. Apparently, if they get fired, they could be deported.

It's not that hard to write a fake job listing that excludes all American applicants, and then make an "exception" for a foreigner, especially if no one is actually rigorously enforcing that the foreigners match the listings.

Corporations have incentive to juice the listings to get low-leverage employees that they can underpay and overwork. People claim that consultancy firms stack engineers in India in order to max out their lottery entries.

This is dumb. H1b seats should just be sold at auction.

There is a political legitimacy or public relations problem for this guest worker program in that Americans think it's just about suppressing wages. If every corporation pays an additional $30,000 a year in cash, that they would not have had to pay by hiring an American worker, this helps to demonstrate that the labor supply is tight in that sector, and incentivize corporations to do local talent development.

It also means that there is no need to create a fake listing to exclude Americans. Just pay the money at auction and you're set.

There is an allocation problem in that allocating a labor pool to companies by lottery is unpredictable and random, and likely to allocate labor poorly. If every corporation has to bid at auction, they'll have a good idea of what the price is from last year, which means they can be confident that they'll get the seat.

Additionally, a higher payment suggests that a company has more productive work available, so they should be the ones to get the seat, rather than the group that files more lottery entries.

[symphony-calamity]

OUATIS AU where Rose is Cinders's long distance girlfriend and Cinders works at a law firm with Snow, who set her up with Rose. King Cole is Rose's crappy boss who overworks and underpays her. Snow and Cinders gather data on his business before going to help Rose sue him mistreating his workers. They go to court and win and everyone lives happily ever after (except Cole)

[quantum27]

Ares's only purpose for existing is to be a Jared Leto vanity project. Probably just to get him to stop pestering Disney about it so they can move on to more "important" projects.

While I do think that's true to some extent it feels disingenuous to blame an entire movie existence on one guy vs... a multibillion dollar company.

Especially since there's a very visible correlation between the rollercoaster being built and the movie's announcement/leaks. I'll be honest I don't have everything but there are multiple tronblr users who probably have links on hand with it. It's 3 am in my timezone. I'm not going to do a research paper on this.

Just blaming L*to also kinda glosses over the mismanagement of the franchise ala Uprisings cancellation- the multiple scripts over time - cancellation due to Tommorowland's box office which is still weird - Disney purchasing Star Wars - Disney purchasing ....everything - The MCU literally existing -

Add that in with the Other Sequel Announcements uhhh yeah.

I don't like the guy but I don't think it's just cause Disney wanted to give the guy his fantasy so he could ?? Show off ??

Essentially Yes. But also it's way more complicated. Don't make him the big villain when the company with too much money that overworks and underpays it's cgi artists and theme park workers prioritized profit or lack there of over creativity.

[chaifootsteps]

She spent more on those dead peacocks than the workers.

She did. If it weren't for her insistence on overworking and underpaying her crew she could buy all the dead animals she wanted, but she does, which makes it gross.

[leenfiend]

welcome to my VFX industry take down post so u can all understand the inner workings of the VFX world a little better  So, big studios actually pay their employees really competitive rates for VFX work, which is why there’s almost never any talk of actually forming a union. The most densely packed places of work are all filled with people who have (kind of) job security and (usually) benefits. The mistreatment comes when those big studios outsource their work to smaller companies and those small companies pay their workers half of what they should be paid, and then the studios pay those small companies half of what they should be paid. And the reason stuff looks so bad now isn’t even because they’re overworking and underpaying us, it’s because their cutting timelines in half. All of us just kind of have to shrug our shoulders and hand the work over because there’s nothing we can do, and it is genuinely frustrating. But that’s not really something a union can fix, we can’t ask them to not make us redo work ten times if they’re paying us the correct rate for it. And that’s what’s happening now - they’re paying us the correct rate (usually) and in my experience I have always been paid for any overtime hours I am asked to work, it’s just that the art directors have an innate misunderstanding of VFX timelines and turnarounds and so things end up looking bad.  The things a union COULD genuinely help with are things like job consistency - most of us work on contracts that start and end when a production does, which means we have no health insurance when the job ends. It creates a really annoying cycle of getting on a new plan, paying out of pocket again, potentially not having insurance offered for the next contract, etc. Working contracts also means sometimes studios will ask you to hold on your next job because they want you back in a month when there’s more work, but they won’t offer to pay you for that month so instead you have to look for a new job. If holding rates were a unionized and normalized thing within the industry it would create better financial consistency for all of us. It could also help with starting rates - I was paid significantly less out of college than my male counterparts were (shock) because there is no standard. A lot of us just have to be candid with each other about how much we’re making so we know we’re not being underpaid for our skillsets. And it could also help with the exploitation of smaller studio workers. I have been on both ends - the small studio being outsourced and the big studio that is doing the outsourcing. The rates for those two jobs are significantly different in a way that they shouldn’t be, because I’m literally doing the same work. But big studios want the cheaper option and so will go to small studios full of recent college graduates and pay them half of what they’re worth - which also, as it turns out, effects the jobs of the people at the big studios! There are a lot of jobs that aren’t kept in house because they would rather underpay someone who doesn’t work for them on a short contract - which means less communication down the line about artistic choices, as well as less work for the actual in house VFX artists. So most of what is actually wrong with the way the industry functions is a long list of management issues. I can’t even tell you the number of times me and my coworkers have been so frustrated that we have no idea what notes an art director gave for a set because it happened months ago at a different studio, on a different call, with a different set of people. We need studios to start utilizing the entirety of their VFX teams for the beginning to the end of the process if we want better looking VFX instead of splitting it up piece-meal to a dozen different studios who will never be able to communicate with each other.    

[balloons-in-bold]

Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

This is a commentary on the business driven narrative that shames workers for not taking underpaying jobs while purposefully keeping those job positions vacant to more easily exploit an overworked skeleton crew. This piece started as an experiment in printing on balloons with linocuts.

[snowtel-owner-mr-p]

Mr.P how does it feel to be a more successful business owner than Griff?

Well.. Considering that one clearly underpays and overworks their workers and is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, and the other is a successful hotel business owner that cares about their employees, and takes pride in it, I think it should be clear how I feel on that matter. Ha!

Griff is nothing more than a sham and a greed fueled person. Utterly disgusting, in my own opinion.