Caption: Hand these out right before a vote to unionize

Description: A black baseball cap with a white star and white lettering beneath. There is a line of Chinese, followed by the translation "Whole day I'm fucking busy only get few money".

So that this potentiality becomes realized, there needs to be a surplus and this surplus would need to be more than a simple reserve (of food, notably): a useful surplus is necessary to liberate a member of society from the obligation of producing for themselves, thus allowing this member to produce for other members. Work is a form of human activity taken when work creates a surplus which escapes it. Work is a relation between necessary work and surplus labor : there is a separation between the expenditure of energy necessary to maintain the worker, and the expenditure of energy beyond this maintenance, which creates a surplus. Workers only exist for as long as a non-worker is making them labor for their benefit. Work, an activity whose product recurs to others, implies (and maintains) the division of groups within a society with opposed interests. Society is divided among workers and non-workers, where non-workers are reaping the production of workers. The worker may maintain some control of their means of production and organize them themselves, but the result of his labor does not belong to them. Work is a class relation.

Gilles Dauvé – Getting Rid Of Work

Also I’m gonna make a thread of every lift the bucket meme I could find:

“I won’t learn anything during the three month probationary period,” referring to the first three months of training at a factory job. Implication is you get hired, slack off for three months, then quit.

“Sooner or later, the workers on the assembly line at an evil factory will all become bucket lifters,” implying that eventually everyone will quit their jobs rather than continue working.

A proletarian poem:

“The soul chasing and life stealing assembly line,
The dark and ghostly shop floor,
The difference between life and death lies between two shifts
Run off with your bucket tomorrow.”

“I GIVE UP, I’m dying on the assembly line!”

a list of complaints:

“Rocket speed assembly lines, have to wear space suits [ie protective gear for semiconductors], shitty management, pig slop for food, whole days standing upright — I’m taking my bucket and running back to Sanhe [labor market]!”

A glossary of migrant worker slang

“Another fucking evil factory! Run away!”

黑厂, an evil or dark factory, a job that is consistently not worth the trouble

A huge list of all the things wrong with the factory: 14 hour workday, bad food, bed bugs, no air conditioning, confiscate your cell phone, etc…

Factory boss says to dying Sanhe temp worker: “Dashen, what’s wrong with you! We only have 10k units left to finish!”

Looking for work after the new year? Here are the top five WORST factories in guangdong! “Everyday they have more people picking up the bucket and running away.”

if you'd like to read a post on this topic from a few years ago

Scaling the Firewall, 1: #LiftTheBucket

A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.

[…]

The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels.

Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now.

Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air.

Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office

[…]

Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society.

Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen.

Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.

Kill The God of Work & All His Clergy

Indigenous people have always been active in labour struggles, both as part of the wider labour movement and as members of their own communities.

Prior to invasion, Native labour had already been integrated into the land itself through the management of fires, water, and food resources. This work added use-value and potential productivity to the land and natural resources – Indigenous people built irrigation systems and planted crops that nourished the soil, and they set fires to help clear brush and renew growth. Colonizers would later exploit this work for the benefit of their own businesses and governments.

Once Native people took up wage work for non-Native employers, their work was significant in building the infrastructure of Canada and the U.S. – and they fought against exploitation and racism on the job. This article presents a partial chronology of some important moments in Indigenous labour history.

On Twitter:

ALL DEMANDS MET! $84,000 in back pay and consequential damages to be given to the 9 illegally terminated Jollibee workers. 🐝✊🏽

After months of pressure, the Justice for Jollibee Workers campaign is declaring VICTORY after Jollibee finalized a settlement for reinstatement, back pay, and a public apology.

The settlement comes after the leadership of 9 workers backed by community members who came together to hold this corporation accountable.

This is a powerful first phase of a movement to organize Jollibee workers around the globe. We know that the issues of Journal Square is not an isolated case.

Workers around the world are experiencing labor issues such as wage theft, chronic understaffing and scheduling issues, misclassification of workers, and worker mistreatment.

If you are you are worker or know a Jollibee Worker who wants to fight back, contact us at justice4jollibeeworkers@gmail.com.

Other sources :

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-31/bangladesh-garment-workers-clash-with-police-over-wage-demands#xj4y7vzkg, 31 octobre 2023 at 12:53 UTC+1

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231103-bangladesh-protests-halt-production-for-top-fashion-brands-union-1 Issued on: 03/11/2023 - 16:13Modified: 03/11/2023 - 17:54

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/bangladesh-garment-workers-clash-police-factories-reopen-3897031, 04 Nov 2023 09:18PM

https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/bangladesh-garment-workers-clash-with-police-as-factories-reopen/article67498634.ece,November 04, 2023 09:33 pm | Updated 09:33 pm IST - Dhaka

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/anarchism/t/36133

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1334427

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/1110691

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1334348

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1392374

One of the most erudite anti-work texts that describes what work is and how it takes part in social reproduction.

What’s your time worth to you? What importance do you place on your physical and mental health? And how many hours a week do you work? How much is that in a year? How much in a lifetime? Is it worth it? Do you feel like that’s a life well spent?

You probably don’t and you shouldn’t.

Archived Version

During my years as a marketing translator I've probably translated the phrase 'in today's fast-paced business environment' or some variations thereof hundreds of times. These words raise my heart rate when I read them, and I eventually had to give up marketing translation as I wasn't capable of normalizing living in a fast-paced environment.

I'm not even sure who created this fast-paced environment, and is now expecting me, a tiny human, to keep up with it. Forces me to rush my children into it too, prepared to get prepared for the modern life, clad in ever freshly-washed garments and with their faces washed, and shoes tied well, early in the morning. Become a productive citizen, now!

And it gets worse - to keep up with the rush I'm offered products. Machines, more machines, so I can do everything fast enough for the fast-paced environment. All while the real, actual, living environment goes down the drain, also ever more quickly. Nobody gets to rest in this fast-paced environment, we are all constantly running. From what?

In the same vein I'm encouraged to make my free time worthwhile - why not monetize it somehow? Do what I always wanted: become a writer, a video artist! So I pull my brains, quickly. Put something out there, make it bright, make a lot (with the convenient tools offered us so we can keep up with the rush) because otherwise it will drown in all the other content out there.

Then the tiredness creeps in, endless content scrolling by, and we all get more tired by consuming/producing/consuming/producing mile by mile of this ludicrous mixture of bright content and dystopian news, and the fast-paced environment getting faster. Who are we anymore? For some reason, we cannot exist in the fast-paced environment. It must be us, maybe it's a mental illness?

If we forced an animal to run in a fast-paced threadmill all day, what would happen? What if we forced the animal to run a little more, by withholding food or threatening to do so? How many hours more could the animal run, for how long, before breakdown? Or would someone step in and stop whoever does shit like this to an animal?

The tiredness is telling us to rest, like the tired animals we are, and slow down the consuming, and producing, of things without substance and nutritious value.

Vice — In depressingly relatable news, the phrase "I am tired" is at its most googled point in the history of Google Trends.

The search term's chart looks like a wildly successful stock, climbing steadily since Google Trends data began in 2004, and peaking in late August, with inhabitants of South Dakota and Utah searching for the phrase more than anyone else.

So: why all the interest? Let's speculate. First suggestion: the change in season can make some people feel a bit sleepy. Shorter days disrupt sleep cycles, and lower levels of sunlight can affect your serotonin levels.

But on a more existential level: a Gallup poll published last year found that the world was sadder and more stressed than ever before, thanks – of course – to the pandemic, but also economic uncertainty and the fact that bad news is more available than at any point in history, because of devices like the one you’re reading this on right now. To make matters worse, last year, a poll by Future Forum found that burnout from workplace stress is at an all-time high.