Why We're Really Being Worked to Death

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/156166/why_we%27re_really_being_worked_to_death_/

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A column by Tim Kreider in The Sunday Times, “The ‘Busy’ Trap“, which addressed the modern scurry of work seems to have struck a chord with people. I’ve seen it passed around the web constantly over the last few days, almost always with an approving nod. It seems everyone can identify with the constant pull of work, which for most of us has extended its tentacles beyond 5pm and now dictates much of our lives. I check my email in bed on my phone the moment I wake up. Kreider is a colleague in that he used to draw a great alt-weekly political strip and now mostly writes. When I first started reading the column, I wanted to be on board – balancing work and life is such a huge struggle for me. But there are omissions in Kredier’s diagnosis that are screaming to be addressed.

I could identify some of myself in the essay. I routinely work over 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year (I am self-employed with no health insurance or vacation time) and commonly blow off friends for work. A few romantic relationships have been thrown under the bus as I’ve pursued a career in the dying field of editorial cartooning, with only the smallest pang of regret. It’s a chosen path, you could say, but working less isn’t; I simply don’t make enough money to do anything but.

To land in a fulfilling career in America, let alone a creative one, takes an incredible amount of work. Even then, the mythical promise of bootstrapped payoff may be nowhere in sight. I’ve seen numerous friends, colleagues, and family members downsize their life as the recession kneecapped their careers and student loan debt buried them in bills.

What Kreider glosses over is how it is he able to maintain a living in New York City while working a maximum of 20 hours a week devoted to freelance writing. He alludes to a retreat in the essay, from which he writes, a home in Chesapeake Bay where he spends some of his time. Kreider is either extremely well-compensated for his time or he has another source of income, a privilege he doesn’t acknowledge in the article, that allows for his leisurely lifestyle.

[KG]

1. we live in a nation of sheep. we do and believe whatever we're told.

[Sherman A1]

2. Precisely

The 1% have done a marvelous job of hoarding the gains of our productivity increases and thereby pitting us against each other for the remaining scraps, so we do more and more with less and less, just to try to get by.

[RKP5637]

3. Yep, raised from birth to be sheep! And many to vote to maintain their

sheep status, such good little lemmings are many Americans, bred like farm animals to be part of the herd.

[chervilant]

7. Uh-oh...

Be careful! You're likely to be accused of being "another individual who is Tea Party level ignorant and loud" just because you've said something 'derogatory' about our species!

(And, don't bother alerting on such a blatant violation of community standards--you'll be told "the guy was not calling you a Tea Partier--he was simply slamming your POV with a bit of personal invective.&quot

[Locrian]

4. not just sheep

But sheep that defend their masters and believe they are part of the upper class all the while they are bent over.

[SammyWinstonJack]

44. Which is the worst part of this all......

And what I most can not understand for the life of me............why??????

[SHRED]

8. Our parents, church, and school...

...all train us to obey authority figures or else we are punished.
We are brainwashed to "fit in".

Our parents treat us not as people but as property when we are young.

Church threatens us with Hell.

I worked at an elementary school and witnessed a kindergarten teacher drag a kid outside and berate him by saying, "All the other kids are behaving so why aren't you". In other words ingraining into this child that he must succumb to peer pressure yet, in a few years, he was taught "just say no" to peer pressure.

[Ikonoklast]

31. Welcome To The Machine.

[liberalmuse]

20. Well that's depressing.

Because it's true.

[hifiguy]

39. And so many sheeple will shout down those

who point out the obvious.

[HiPointDem]

5. "Kreider is either extremely well-compensated for his time or he has another source of income"

exactly; and so do most of the people offering similar prescriptions.

[pschoeb]

10. I doubt it, the authour of this piece is being dishonest

Krieder only owns a very rustic A frame cabin on the Chesapeake Bay, he lives there during the summer, because it's not suitable for the winter, He is from Baltimore originally. He rents an apt in New York during the times he can't live in the cabin. You can probably guess that he is perfectly fine living in very lackluster accommodations, he also has no interest in marriage or children, this means he doesn't have the same goals as a lot of people who want that.

Not saying his 20 hours of working is doable for most people, but it doesn't really seem like he has any other income source, and lives extremely modestly.

[dionysus]

42. i love Tim's work but i always wondered how he lived off of doing one cartoon a week, which

he's alluded to as being paid very little for. he's got to have some other source of income, because you can't afford a crackerbox in NY working 20 hours a week plus be able to have a cabin, anywhere...

[HiPointDem]

49. i'd bet the cabin a/o apartment belong to the family. his resume isn't indicative of income

sufficient to finance two households, however modest.

[KurtNYC]

6. Electrician, MRI technician, auto mechanic, etc.

There are many positions that pay by the hour and very well at that. Many of them require no college or the debt that comes with it and you can't outsource plumbing to China.

We increasingly herd our children into the out-dated college to salaried position tunnel. Americans are working 50+ hours a week because they gave their employer an all-you-can-eat price: salary with no OT.

[exboyfil]

12. One of my daughters is

considering Electrical Engineering, and the other is working towards being a doctor. I have already told them that you have to follow your heart, but it would be to your benefit to marry someone with a more vocational skill set such as you describe. Preferably nice New Zealand boys (they want to move to New Zealand).

[KurtNYC]

17. Nice. Good luck to both of them

and NZ is beautiful (as we all saw in Lord of the Rings).

I think one of the best things for teens to do is shadow someone, in the profession(s) they are considering, for a day. So much of so many jobs is NOT in the job description, especially the tougher stuff.

[liberalmuse]

22. That is paradise on earth.

When I visited, I couldn't help but think that this is where all the people with incredible karma end up. It's like a large Mayberry.

[HiPointDem]

52. NZ was a neoliberal test case. Incomes of 96% of the population were lower in 1996 than in 1981.

[hifiguy]

40. NZ is stupefyingly beautiful

and the pace of life there is about what it was in the US when JFK was president. Not once in the two weeks I was there find anyone who didn't say "Don't worry mate, it'll get done. Always time for a pint and a bite." I wasn't in Auckland but spent my time in Palmerston North, a gorgeous, mellow college town, and Wellington, which is one of the most visually stunning cities in the world, cut into terraces above the bay. The food and wine is overwhelmingly local and of superb quality and the people are just the best.

If I were 20 years younger I'd be in NZ in a heartbeat.

[Flatulo]

14. Well, sir, you have nailed it on the head.

I worked a professional position for over 35 years (engineer) and starting in the early 80s we were told by management that if we didn't work harder the Japanese would take our jobs. So we cranked up the work week from 45 to 50 hours. Alas, the jobs went to Japan anyway.

In the 90s we were told that if we didn't work harder, our jobs would be sent to Singapore and Malaysia, so everybody hustled and the work week went to 55 hours, including Saturdays, Sunday's and holidays. I can still hear my wife pleading with me as I left the house on Thanksgiving or Christmas morning to put in a few hours at the office. But sure as shit the jobs still went to Singapore and Malaysia.

In the '00s we were told that if we didn't work harder the jobs would go to China and thus the 60 hour work week was born. Of course the jobs went to China anyway. My last job didn't even offer a lunchroom or do much as a single table for the workers to eat their lunch at, so everyone just ate a cold meal or sandwich at their desk as they worked through their lunch break.

Through all this, if there was any push back on the long hours, that troublemaker was disappeared and the message was received.

In their defense, our managers worked longer hours than we engineers, presumably to 1) set an example and 2) to 'take attendance'.

So here I am 35 years later with a broken back (from sitting motionless at my computer for 12 hours per day) and three layoffs under my belt. I will tell this tale to anyone who will listen in the hopes that I can have some small impact on this terrible abuse of office and professional workers.

Professional workers need to organize, or legislation is needed to correct this bullshit. People are ruining their backs and killing themselves with stress to try to keep a job that will eventually go overseas anyway. I saw four colleagues succumb to heart attack at their desks, all in their forties or early fifties, as well as countless divorces. Of course, no one was paid a nickel for the extra years (yes, years) worked as a salaried hack.

I stepped off of that treadmill last year and will not (actually, cannot) get on it again. I'm burning through my savings as wait for SSDI to come through for me.

[tpsbmam]

24. I had a friend who was a consultant.....

It was a highly specialized consultancy......I can't really tell you what it was.......it involved special computer programs mostly these consultants knew how to operate for businesses, universities, etc -- it wasn't the kind of thing that would be done by a regular staffer, I think partially because once they got the programs up and running smoothly, regular staff could be trained on it and take over. She made an excellent living doing this and was always busy. It wasn't the kind of thing that could be outsourced, either.

Then her specialty and computer jobs in general started to be flooded with H-1B workers. Having worked nonstop for 10+ years doing this, she was finding it increasingly difficult to find jobs, as were so many of her American colleagues. Things got really bad.

And she committed suicide.

[Flatulo]

25. Good grief, so sorry for your friend and her loved ones.

But yes, it can come to that. I only knew one suicide, but that was one too many, of course. This was a really, really delightful guy whom everyone loved. He got so overcommitted on a project that the managers began haranguing and publically berating him. He was working 20 hour days and just totally broke under the pressure.

One of the coping mechanisms we invoked was black humor. When someone would drop dead from stress and overwork, word would go out that there was 'an open req'. Everyone knew exactly what that meant.

Did you know that working to death is so common in Japan that they have a word for it? It's 'karoshi'. Also, there is a public park in Tokyo where so many salarymen go to kill themselves that they have to frequently dredge the pond there for bodies. And to think, we taught those poor souls to work like this, then, over time, used them as our own role models.

[Egalitarian Thug]

50. I'm so sorry both for you & your friend, and for the fact that I know of several

other people that took the same path. There is so much blood on their hands, and most of us pretend that it will work out fine.

[waddirum]

34. I'm also an Engineer

I will accept nothing less than an hours work equals and hours pay (even if it is just straight time and not time and a half).

I refuse to work for a fixed "salary" with flexible hours.

[Flatulo]

37. You're lucky to be in a job that will allow that.

I worked in high-tech my whole career, and if you didn't get with the program, you'd be thrown out the door pretty quickly.

Edited to add: if the workers would stick together and work a 40 hour week, the company would have no choice but to accept it. But as soon as one or two engineers start working long hours with no compensation, everyone else has to fall in line.

[Flatulo]

46. I think the worst thing about working free

overtime is the implied insult that your time, and more importantly, your time away from your family, has no value whatsoever. They'd say 'Dude, you're a professional, so deal with it.' Yeah, we'll my doctor and lawyer are professionals too, and they charge by the fucking minute.

They (management) used to also play this game where anyone who didn't work themselves to death was a 'fucking wimp' or some other less-than-manly loser. Most people bought into it.

[nashville_brook]

53. + fucking 1

I work almost 60 hours a week, salary. I work through lunch. I have 30+ internal clients with needs that are not filtered by managment, that I have to fill, or else they complain to HR and I get one of those "make Mr. Jackass happy in the next 30 days or you're fired talks." and Making Mr. Jackass happy always means pushing the limit yet further of "above and beyond."

more uncompensated shit: I bring my computers to work. I use my own software, b/c the company shit is so old/cheap/underpowered that it won't run the programs i need to do work. I have to travel to get photography, and spend my own damn time doing it -- uncompensated (it's how I spent my 4th of July afternoon).

[Flatulo]

58. Oh yeah, I know that trick too. Why get you a faster processor when

it doesn't cost anything to have you sitting there staring at the hourglass into the evening.

The fuckers tried that on me - they had us running Pro/engineer on Pentium Pro/200s when the recommended hardware was a 10x faster 2Ghz machine. I built my own AMD Athlon64 machine and brought it into work. It drove the managers batshit crazy, because when the other engineers saw how I was flying through tasks, they all started bitching for faster boxes as well.

Another classic: when there is a lot of pre-production building going on, they'd always call the engineers in to work on weekends rather than pay the technicians, who were hourly, to do it. I can't tell you how good I got at building cables and soldering PCBs.

[nashville_brook]

59. omg...that's what they do here w/off hours shit

i'm in marketing/pr. whenver they need ppl for trade shows, events, dinners, whathaveyou, they ask me, the only salary person ( without children), when these tasks make much more sense to assign to admins or coordinators more closely aligned to the work. fuck, that pisses me off.

the whole company has an IT crisis right now bc they fired the whole national IT team that actually came to our office to do desktop/network support and outsourced to work to Romania. i shit you not. we literally had a fire in our server room bc the system was so old and overloaded.

as far as my machine goes, i can't even open outlook, much less photoshop or indesign which are the main programs i need to do my work . hell, we're still on IE 6 so i can't even do web-based work bc most apps don't suuport it.

god, i need a new job.

[TahitiNut]

19. "the out-dated college to salaried position tunnel."

It is a BIG error to regard college as the same as a trade school. Universities have both colleges and schools. The schools are for the 'professions' -- high-end trade schools. The Law School, the School of Nursing, the School of Education, the Engineering School ... are schools. The College of Liberal Arts, in which the sciences are taught, prepare the mind -- life-long learning and a depth of understanding and comprehension that serves any choice of vocation. Where a graduate degree is sought, an undergraduate degree from a college is (imho) highly desirable. When that graduate degree is obtained from a school, the mental preparation obtained in a college is invaluable.

In my view, the worst possible post-secondary "education" is business administration. It's a 'school' that fails to educate and succeeds only in training and indoctrination. Graduates, if otherwise bereft of any skill or trade, become a fraternity of predators and exploiters, feeding upon work performed by folks with actual skills.

If I could attribute the ruination of our economic system to any single factor over the last 30 years, it's in the 'production' of the cloud of locusts from (so-called) Business Administration schools beginning in the 70s. The worst thing we ever did to Russia was send a horde of Bus Ad types over to 'assist' them in the early 90s. They would have been better off if we'd carpet-bombed them.

The old maxim: Those who can do, do; those who can't, teach; those who can do neither go into Bus Ad.

[Warpy]

54. Most of those lower level managerial positions liberal arts grads

were shuffled into were jobs that were done by high school graduates 60 years ago and by smart grammar school graduates 100 years ago. There is no earthly reason to require a four year degree for any of them except the schools have been so badly dumbed down. People have the illusion that they're being educated if they stay in classrooms longer.

Liberal arts in the good old days of the eighth grade education being worth something were what gentlemen who would never have to sully their hands with actual work did at university, parked there until they were old enough to marry off. They were training for a lifelong hobby. To their credit, the best of these gentlemen did some scholarly work that lives on today. However, liberal arts then and now prepared no one for earning a living.

I agree wholeheartedly about the BusAdmin grads being the most useless of all the disciplines. Their whole focus is to shave costs and maximize profits on a quarterly basis, their blinders on too tight to notice things like social cost and long term disaster building.

I've been telling smart kids for years to go into trades and then get that 2 year associate's degree in accounting so they'll have the knowledge it takes to open and run their own shops. That's where the money is these days, not lower management. The hours are better, too, and as was said upthread, they can't outsource the plumbing.

[lumberjack_jeff]

27. Exactly right.

Son #1 is a truck driver. Son #2 is a diesel mechanic.

I don't worry about them except from the standpoint of safety.

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. First vocational schools can also run

high debts

Second, they do not pay as well as you think.

Third, we rarely speak of THAT student debt... time we start...

And herd our children... in MOST OF THE WORLD, a college education is still valued... but in the US, with the anti intellectual tradition, of course it is not.

[KurtNYC]

41. MRI Technician -- Pay (per AMA) Low: $48,371 medium: $62K High: $83K

That IS as well as I thought so you may need to recalibrate your mind reading machine.

[nadinbrzezinski]

48. Yes and there are debts incurred going to school

as well, that is what I am telling you.

As to getting it outsourced. wait, MRI tech can easily be done by tele means in ten years.

[KurtNYC]

55. An MRI tech will position you inside the machine,

calibrate the equipment and work with your physician to produce the images needed. The tech needs to be in the same place as the machine and the machine needs to be accessible to the patient. Not even Mitt Romney could outsource that job.

To become an electrician there is at minimum a long apprenticeship of on the job training, a tool kit and 144 hours of classroom. Often the apprenticeship pays 50% of full wages. And like the MRI tech, the electrician needs to be in the building where the electrical work is being done.

[nadinbrzezinski]

57. You wait, we are already outsoourcing X-Ray and other image interpretation

telemedicine is a great idea, but it has a dark cloud

[Garion_55]

9. im pretty lucky

ive probably had 30 different jobs in my life and hated most of them till i finally ended up at my current one which is basically my dream job.

My job is seasonal so 3 months in the winter i get laid off and collect unemployment. thats when i travel or buy toys or whatever. being single and no kids its all me time.

having three months off every year though gives me lots of time to recharge. and im a lot less stressful the rest of the year knowing that theres an end point.

[Flatulo]

26. Three months off per year should be mandatory. nt

[DaveJ]

11. Tim Kreider's "leisurely lifestyle"

I guess someone's gotta stand up for those who work, because few have the time to write and complain about it, and if they do they are called whiners. Fact is, we are working to pay off the debt of those before us.

It's also a prison cell of our own making. This much work should be unnecessary with the amount of automation that exists now. People are complaining about not getting jobs because there isn't enough work to do, so why are those who do have jobs working so much? Oh, I guess, same answers as always, greed... once an employer own you they'll seep every drop out of you.

[Omaha Steve]

13. K&R!

[marmar]

15. k/r

nt

[flamingdem]

16. baaaa

[TheMastersNemesis]

18. Modern Times

For anyone who is interested look up or rent Charlie Chaplain's movie "Modern Times". It is a kick. He was prescient. He was a pro labor socialist. His reward was being banned from the US. He lived out the rest of his life in Europe forbidden come back to the US.
His movie is just as pertinent today. And I bet you can find clips of it on Youtube.

[KansDem]

35. A classic!

[The Wizard]

21. The slaves were indoctrinated

with Christianity so as to keep them in line. An obedient slave believed in a life after death that would be paradise if only they did their masters bidding without question. They bought the pie in the sky, and paid for it with their freedom and dignity.
Slavery is one of those traditional American values Republicans want restored. That's the country teabaggers want back.

[raouldukelives]

23. And so many knowingly work to continue the trend.

To pass it on to the next generation. By acquiescence, by supporting corporations over human rights and the unashamed willingness to propagate & profit from the travesties they perform.
I can understand the ones asleep at the wheel not getting it, its the ones who do get it I worry about.

[Flatulo]

28. It was the ascendence of the MBA in American corporations that

started the downward spiral. When I worked for Data General and then later DEC, those companies were run by engineers and were 100% product focused. They actually gave a shit about their employees, and only wanted to build the best products possible.

In the early eighties, we started seeing a lot of 'suits' walking around and then taking over. They immediately started canceling projects and outsourcing work to the Far East.

Thanks to their tireless efforts, all but one of the six firms I've worked for have been busted into little pieces and sold off, along with all the jobs.

Data General, acquired by EMC - 25,000 jobs lost
Digital Equipment Corporation, acquired by Compaq, later acquired by HP - 125,000 jobs lost
Quantum Corp, acquired by Maxtor - 8,000 jobs lost
Maxtor Corp, acquired by Seagate Technology - 10,000 jobs lost
Seagate Technology, downsized by outsourcing - 70,000 jobs lost
Evergreen Solar, technology, patent portfolio and all capital assets sold to China, 800 jobs lost

[xchrom]

30. i remember it well -- along with the introduction of the phrase 'wage inflation'. nt

[Flatulo]

33. Oh yeah, I heard that one right before a 5 year stretch w/o an increase.

That was right about the time that a VP suddenly became worth $2m to $20m per year.

[DBoon]

32. A 19th century political economist had an interesting theory about this

He's not too fashionable today, but I think he had some very profound insights, especially about the tendency for the working day to lengthen:

http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/MARXECON.htm

[Nuclear Unicorn]

36. He wouldn't have to work so hard at being a cartoonist if more people wanted to buy his stuff.

He's creating a product and selling it. If he sets a price that is too high his consumers won't buy it. Either he has to create a product people will pay a premium for or he has to sell in volume.

The guy that works 60-hour weeks in a fiberglass factory with no ventilator for only $8/hour because that's the only job within a hundred miles; that's the guy I'm worried about.

[Starry Messenger]

38. k&r

[Democrats_win]

43. Nobel Peace Prize to Tim Kreider!

If people re-thought their destructive lifestyles, maybe the earth would be a place where people can live in peace.

[mike_c]

45. I had an insight about work some years ago that utterly changed my life....

When I was about 30 or so years old I realized that in a market economy where EVERYTHING is for sale and everything has a price tag, individuals succeed or fail based on the market demand for whatever they have to sell. For most workers, that's time. Might be skilled time that's particularly valuable, might be unskilled time lifting and toting, but nonetheless the hours of our lives are often the most valuable asset we workers have to offer for sale. And once sold, we can never get them back.

That is the nature of most work in this world if people do it for wages. I'm not talking about work that people do because they are passionate about the work itself. When people speak of there being "nothing wrong with a good day's work" that's the work they're really talking about, and they're right-- doing work that one is passionate about is satisfying and ennobling. That was the main effect of my epiphany-- I decided to do only work that I like and might choose to do on my own under other circumstances. But that's a digression.

Worse still, most employers treat that single asset-- the hours of our lives-- like it's disposable, offering the lowest possible payment for it. They treat the most valuable asset that most workers own as though it has little or no value at all. We have created an economic system which seeks to reduce the value of lives lived to the lowest possible level. That is shockingly awful.

This all works, of course, because greed and ignorance keep it working. The greed of the owner classes, and their managers, who have gamed the system to their own advantage and rigged the rules so that they get to appropriate most of the value of peoples' lives for themselves, and the ignorance of workers who believe that having the hours sucked from their lives by soul killing labor to benefit someone else's greed is the natural order of things.

It's the new feudalism, based not on control of land but rather upon creating and controlling an obligatory market for workers' time stolen from satisfying, enjoyable, and personally productive pursuits.

[drokhole]

47. Article from 1884 that's incredibly relevant - Useful Work vs. Useless Toil

Have posted this before, but I think it fits well in here:

Useful Work versus Useless Toil
by William Morris

"The above title may strike some of my readers as strange. It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do people that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it - he is "employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of labour. In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others. But as to those on whom they live, I recommend them not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.

Let us grant, first, that the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort of degree. Let us see, then, if she does not give us some compensation for this compulsion to labour, since certainly in other matters she takes care to make the acts necessary to the continuance of life in the individual and the race not only endurable, but even pleasurable.
...
Now, the first thing as to the work done in civilization and the easiest to notice is that it is portioned out very unequally amongst the different classes of society. First, there are people - not a few - who do no work, and make no pretence of doing any. Next, there are people, and very many of them, who work fairly hard, though with abundant easements and holidays, claimed and allowed; and lastly, there are people who work so hard that they may be said to do nothing else than work, and are accordingly called "the working classes," as distinguished from the middle classes and the rich, or aristocracy, whom I have mentioned above.
...
Next there is the mass of people employed in making all those articles of folly and luxury, the demand for which is the outcome of the existence of the rich non-producing classes; things which people leading a manly and uncorrupted life would not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth, but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful - all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth. Nor can I think of anything worth having which does not come under one or other of these heads. But think, I beseech you, of the product of England, the workshop of the world, and will you not be bewildered, as I am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire, but which our useless toil makes - and sells?"

I also enjoyed this excerpt in particular:

"Socialists are often asked how work of the rougher and more repulsive kind could be carried out in the new condition of things. To attempt to answer such questions fully or authoritatively would be attempting the impossibility of constructing a scheme of a new society out of the materials of the old, before we knew which of those materials would disappear and which endure through the evolution which is leading us to the great change. Yet it is not difficult to conceive of some arrangement whereby those who did the roughest work should work for the shortest spells. And again, what is said above of the variety of work applies specially here. Once more I say, that for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society. Lastly, if this rougher work were of any special kind, we may suppose that special volunteers would be called on to perform it, who would surely be forthcoming, unless men in a state of freedom should lose the sparks of manliness which they possessed as slaves.

And yet if there be any work which cannot be made other than repulsive, either by the shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness (and therefore honour) in the mind of the man who performs it freely - if there be any work which cannot be but a torment to the worker, what then? Well, then, let us see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it undone, for it were better that they should. The produce of such work cannot be worth the price of it."

And this:

"Civilization therefore wastes its own resources, and will do so as long as the present system lasts. These are cold words with which to describe the tyranny under which we suffer; try then to consider what they mean."

[Deep13]

51. marking for future reference. nt

[prole_for_peace]

56. So my boss can have a HUGE house, fancy car and beach house?

And take vacations all over the world?