#wage labourers

[monsieurenjlolras]

you've heard of "quiet quitting," now I'd like to introduce you to the next level, The French Work Ethic:

Do exactly what you're paid for and nothing more

Absolutely refuse to be available to contact when you're off the clock

Never prioritize work over your own health, wellbeing, or family because that would be insane, it's just a job.

Have a little glass of wine

Take as long as you feel like for lunch

Deeply understand that work doesn't matter

Make sure your boss knows they're always your second priority ❤️

[barrydeutsch]

Unions Have Always Done The Impossible!

A new cartoon for May Day! This has been an incredible year for unions in the USA - may next year be even better.

Transcript, comments, and supporting blah blah about this cartoon are at https://www.patreon.com/posts/103291731 .

My labor is paid for by hundreds of supporters pledging low amounts - $1-$3 - and that's just how I like it! patreon.com/barry

[spiltcandycoatedpunkblood]

thanks bro, nothing like an ultra rich racist colonialist parasite sitting on and dressed in stolen goods telling us they're gonna crack down on people trying to fucking survive and they say its because of "illicit gangs" doing this

literally sounds like when benefits fraud and food stamp fraud were cracked down on because an absolutely tiny fraction of people committing it, so now we have to punish them all instead of doing absolutely anything about the poverty and inequality created here in the first place

[anarchistin]

as a communist i do not care abstractly about questions like "will i be able to acquire this commodity at exactly the same rate in exactly the same locations" because the way they reach distribution centers is premised on exploitation, violence, and in many cases genocide

those people matter to me, the people whose lives were transformed into cogs for profit. for extraction. thats the relationship i want to change.

if that means less bananas fine. if it means more bananas fine. bananas arent the aim. emancipation is.

source

[radley-writes]

Cannot believe that 'access to quality art and writing made by other people is a luxury not a right, and artists and writers deserve to be compensated for their labour, because as much as I believe in the ethos of UBI, we live in a post-capitalist hellscape, and creators need to eat' is a controversial opinion in Leftist spaces.

[akkivee]

in the hypster magazine, when asked if there was anything he reeeeeaaaaally wanted, ichiro responded that he wants one of those robot cleaners and you know else has been asking for that exact thing lmao????

[enbycrip]

As a note, this is about calling out the hypocrisy of not valuing skills, or indeed simply another person’s time and labour, enough to fairly pay the person doing the labour, not saying “don’t pay people to do work for you”.

If you’re not familiar, “unskilled labour“ is pretty much a code phrase certain people use for “I think it should be done; I just don’t think it deserves a fair wage”. It’s most frequently used about retail workers and care workers.

You will note that disabled folk in general, who are most likely people to pay folk to undertake work we are physically incapable of doing ourselves, are incredibly pro paying carers a living wage or better. Partially in class solidarity; we are likely to be living in poverty and don’t want other people to be in the same position. Also because, frankly, many of us live in the wreckage of the broad social unwillingness to pay carers a decent wage to do a decent job and be otherwise valued.

[thoughtportal]

ALL clothes are handmade

[generalelectionmusings]

[randomingoftherandomness]

.

[anarchistin]

source

[somecunttookmyurl]

why are people taking it as some personal affront that "making a lot of money on one thing and not being able to even make minimum wage on the other" is a weird situation to be in regardless of what the things are...

because absolutely nobody on this site can read

the notes are hilarious because you have every person who does jewellery and something else being like "lol yeah it's super weird it makes no sense but here we are"

and then everyone who only does one thing aggressively pretending i'm not literally a jeweller so they can also aggressively pretend the point of the post was to shit on jewellers and not that getting £165/h at one job then going to your second job for £5/h is a fucking surreal experience

i mean i'm glad people would consider a rapid switch between lawyer wages and poverty wages to be very extremely normal not at all surreal and entirely understandable. they should take up jewellery.

[dworkinsdaughter]

After creating a 6 minute long educational video for my work unpaid and googling that the rates to get these made run anywhere from $800 per minute to $3000 per minute I might be feeling a little salty. So I made this.

[nando161mando]

A US company is accused of illegally hiring children to clean meat processing plants

[gsinfotechvispvtltd]

5 Things you should know about labour Day

Open Immersive Reader

Every year on May 1st, we observe or celebrate Labour Day, which recognizes the achievements made by workers in the 1800s to secure their and our rights in the workplace. The contributions made by these workers include rights and privileges that we enjoy today, such as a minimum wage. This is the reason we celebrate the accomplishments made by Industrial Revolution-era workers on Labour Day.

What is Labour Day?

Labour Day is also known as May Day or International Workers’ Day. It originated in the 1800s in the United States, where workers were known to work for up to 12 hours a day without weekends and in difficult and often dangerous working conditions. This was during the height of the Industrial Revolution, when workers were under tremendous pressure to keep up with the rapid changes that were transforming societies.

While there were multiple strikes by workers’ unions during this period, the most famous were the nationwide strikes on May 1st, 1886, by over 300,000 workers across the United States. The most well-known was the Haymarket protest, three days later, on May 4th, in Chicago, Illinois. With these and subsequent strikes, the government changed, leading to better working conditions for generations of men and women.

Haymarket protest on May 1 led to demand that it be declared Labour Day May 1st is an official holiday in many parts of the world when employees of governments, banks and most companies have a day off from work. Labour protests and the declaration of May 1st as Labour Day saw many changes over the years, making working conditions better worldwide.

Here, we look at 5 rights we enjoy because of the labour movement.

1. Fair working hours

Before the protests began in the US in the late 19th century, workers were known to work up to 100 hours per week (around 14 hours per day) with no weekends. The main demands of the striking workers included working no longer than 40 hours per week (8 hours per day) and a 5-day work week, which is now considered the standard. These demands were based on workers ensuring they had sufficient time for their families and personal well-being.

2. Fair pay and minimum wage

Employers became increasingly wealthy during this period due to workers’ low wages and long working hours. The protests sought to achieve fair pay for the hours worked, including payment for excess hours. These protests led to a watershed moment for workers in the United States when laws were created to ensure workers were paid their fair share by guaranteeing minimum wages and overtime pay.

3. Eradication of child labour

During this time, it was common for children as young as 5 to work in factories and mines in hazardous conditions. After the May Day protests and long struggle, legislation was passed in the United States that defined the employment of children under the age of 16 as “oppressive child labour,” which employers were no longer permitted to do. The new laws also stated that the employment of children between the ages of 16-18 was not to interfere with their schooling, health or well-being. Such laws were also implemented in many countries across Europe and other places.

4. Formation of unions

The poor working conditions in the 1800s set the stage for labour unions. These were formed to strengthen and achieve the aims of the labour movement, which focused on a better work life. Unions went on to achieve specific worker rights based on gender, ethnic group and other factors. Today, unions remain a forum for employees to express their grievances and demand improved working conditions.

5. Rights for working women

Long before women even had the right to vote, they made up a significant part of the workforce. Just like their male counterparts, they too led prominent protests as early as the 1840s against extended working hours, low wages, poor safety standards and the employment of children. Employed in garment, footwear and other factories, working women played an important role in the formation of women’s labour organizations. These have helped generations of women in the workplace.

Women played an important role and their rights were recognized as part of labour demands

The first Labour Day celebration in India

During the decades-long Independence movement, Labour Day or May Day, was first observed in India on May 1st, 1923. Led by freedom-fighter Malayapuram Singaravelu, who also established the first trade union in India, the celebration took place in Chennai and called for the passing of a resolution to declare May 1st a holiday. The famous phrase “workers of the world unite” was also proclaimed against the backdrop of the freedom struggle, which sought to unburden people, including workers from different parts of the country, and lead them to freedom.

Having an 8-hour workday and the weekends free to spend time relaxing or with the family has its origins in the American workers’ strikes during the 1800s. Many workplaces nowadays emphasize a healthy work-life balance and organize workplace wellness programs for their employees. However the basic rights expected from any employer are set in stone due to the protests that led to the Fair Labour Standards Act in 1938 in the United States. Over 100 years later, people worldwide benefit from the rights secured by those who protested unfair and unjust working conditions to create more balanced, healthy, and safe working conditions.

[fatehbaz]

In this remarkably rich account of land and profit-making in colonial Calcutta (now Kolkata), Debjani Bhattacharyya traces the transformation of marshes, bogs, and muddy riverbanks into parcels of fixed, bounded, and alienable property under British colonial rule. Framed evocatively as a “history of forgetting” (6), Bhattacharyya details the everyday enactments and contestations of imperial power undertaken by colonial officials and merchants, hydrographers, Indian property owners, urban planners, surveyors, and speculators between the 1760s and 1920. Over this period, the fluid and culturally multivalent spaces of the delta were translated and transformed into “dried urban landscapes of economic value” (12). [...] [T]he economization of space was so encompassing that earlier ways of understanding and inhabiting the delta’s shifting lands and waters were [obscured] [...].

The British thus had to produce landed property both conceptually and materially in a process that proceeded through two entangled registers of power. The first was the legal register, which translated shifting and indeterminate aqueous spaces into apparently solid landed property through modes of legal classification and arbitration. The second register of power concerned hydraulic technologies of drying and draining the landscape (10), which materialized these legal categorizations in the production of urban space. 

By the early twentieth century, these “technologies of property” (5) had produced new lines between land and water in the city and rendered its fluid ecologies, such as marshes and bogs, as valuable “land-in-waiting” (172) for property development and financial speculation. [...] 

[T]he delta’s fluid ecology emerges at times as a limit on the property-making activities of the East India Company and the British Crown [...]. Bhattacharyya’s account highlights the mobility of the delta’s fluid landscape, with water, silt, and mud taking on agentic roles and shaping historical trajectories. [...] [Bhattacharyya] provides a fascinating account of the meanings of rivers and other watery spaces in Bengali cultural life, drawing on folk songs, poetic genres such as the maṅgalkāvya, storytelling, and forms of artistic representation such as painted narrative scrolls. [...] Bhattacharyya recovers forms of relationality and claim-making in the fluid deltaic environment that exceed the representations of colonial cadastral surveys and revenue records. [...] 

[H]owever, Calcutta became increasingly disconnected from its watery past. [...] [There was an] increasing entanglement of the urban land market with infrastructural projects to dry land and control water. These included the excavation of an extensive network of canals; the construction of docks in Khidderpore and the draining of the Maidan [...]. A collective amnesia about Calcutta’s fluid ecologies set the stage for the emergence of a speculative real estate market by the beginning of the twentieth century [...]. This period saw Calcutta’s remaining wetlands and marshes rendered as “land-in-waiting for property development” (169) in a process that continues to the present day.

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All text above by: Calynn Dowler. “Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta.” Asian Ethnology Volume 80 Issue 1. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]