Quotes About Labor

black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call "America." This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the "mudsill" class necessary to support every society.

Cotton Is King; or, The Economical Relations of Slavery.

Given the shortage of women in California during these early years of white settlement, "a likely young girl" might cost almost double that of a boy, because, as the Marysville Appeal phrased it, girls served the double duty "of labor and of lust.

There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?

The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the notion of "emotional labor.

How can you have dignity in labor if you personally believe your job shouldn't really exist?

wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves—a

Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.

Seen one way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being.36

in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

Etant donné que la valeur du travail réside désormais moins dans ce qu'il produit ou dans les bienfaits qu'il apporte aux autres que dans sa dimension sacrificielle, tout élément susceptible de le rendre moins pénible ou plus plaisant, y compris la satisfaction de se sentir utile à ses semblables, diminue sa valeur - justifiant donc un salaire inférieur. C'est un système d'une incroyable perversité.

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides to others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one's work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.

Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive in two days as we previously were in five. But thanks to greed and some busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away for the profit of others ahead of our own nonremunerated ambitions. Whether

there are very few jobs that don't involve at least a few pointless or idiotic elements.

A wage-labor contract is, ostensibly, a free contract between equals—but an agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they won't be equals any more.

I]n most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work—they'll set the fires that burn down the forest on which they plant their fields, for example, and, if they can, relegate to women the more monotonous and time-consuming tasks, such as weeding. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen.

When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves—or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended.

This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself.