Quotes About Labor

points the way toward thinking about how "gender and class intertwine in capitalist production."7

in capitalist societies the majority of people subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labor to maintain themselves . . . [hence] this version of social reproduction analyzes the ways in which both labors are part of the same socio-economic process.

If workers' labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?

The fundamental insight of SRT is, simply put, that human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole. The notion of labor is conceived here in the original sense in which Karl Marx meant it, as "the first premise of all human history

Capitalism, however, acknowledges productive labor for the market as the sole form of legitimate "work," while the tremendous amount of familial as well as communitarian work that goes on to sustain and reproduce the worker, or more specifically her labor power, is naturalized into nonexistence.

The framework thus seeks to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical economists and politically denied by policy makers.

our understanding of capitalism is incomplete if we treat it as simply an economic system involving workers and owners, and fail to examine the ways in which wider social reproduction of the system—that is the daily and generational reproductive labor that occurs in households, schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on—sustains the drive for accumulation.

unlike all other commodities under capitalism, the "unique" commodity labor power is singular in the sense that it is not produced capitalistically.

Ma mi chiedo se questo non sia il primo passo verso la modernizzazione che inevitabilmente nel giro di pochi anni, cura il tracoma ma porta anche un industriale di Hong Kong a installare quattro o cinque macchine da cucire in un androne de lMustang e a mettere quelle sorridenti donne, che adesso vanno al mercato, o lavano nel fiune, a cucire per otto ore al giorno le sue scarpe o le sue t.shirt

Minimum wages tends to elicit minimum attention.

Low-wage jobs have gone offshore. We need to innovate to stay competitive.

It might have been offset for us if the revenue from our own oil and natural gas that was just developing had been available to the Labor Government, but the oil revenues were just coming in when Labor fell in '79.

Back in the old days, you had to work. If you didn't work, you didn't get paid.

Will he get a place for his oldest boy? He can not. His girl? Why, the Chinaman is in her place too!

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. 

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it

Every day, hands are creating the world -from In Praise of Ironing

So there was a clear economic rationale for an ancestral division of labor, where individuals of each sex contributed more of what was comparatively advantageous to them. Women of course (and sometimes do) hunt, but men are on average more productive hunters; men can (and often do) gather and process foods, but they are not any more productive than women at the task.

The shame of it—the cost of leisure being someone else's hard labor and broken body.

I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

money is the consequence of working, not the goal.