Do you ever wish you were perfect? Wish you hadn’t dotted those eyes when you meant to cross those tees? Maybe you made a critical error in judgement and it fucked with you for the rest of your life? Maybe it was something as “simple” as saying something awkward to that cashier you keep wanting…
In many parts of the United States and likely other cultures, the most authoritarian, rigid and manipulative cultural demands are found in workplace environments. It seems particularly evil and cruel to set up a competitive, (supposedly) meritocratic environment and simultaneously hold people to unhealthy standards of being polite, fake, obedient and passive. If you really…
In his work, The Meaning of Confederalism, Murray Bookchin wrote: The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking (as witness the recent tendency of radicals to espouse “market socialism” rather than deal with the failings of the market economy as well as state socialism). Doubtless we…
My school semester is finally over which means I can dedicate time to this site once more. I will be writing at least one post a week until late Summer and spoilers(?) but most of the posts will be about this book, Working. Working has been my big project for checks notes for over a…
(Minor spoiler warnings for The Umbrella Academy!) Would you love a job that took you to different locations? One where you could see not only many sights but many times? You’d get to meet fascinating people and you’d get to kill them. All in the service of a noble cause: Preserving world order and making…
At 144 pages, this little unassuming white book published by Princeton University might not seem it has a great deal of information. There’s also a bit of confusion about how much it cost, at least in my local area. While the MSRP of the book is set at 27.95, Rivier University in New Hampshire paid…
One of the biggest reasons Working as a book…um…works is because it’s so deliberately ordered by Terkel. Take this chapter for example. We went from a boss who was a pretty conventional and happy boss, to a slightly less conventional boss but one who still tried ruling and another who was tired of being a…
In 2016, management at the Conrad Miami hotel in Miami, Florida fired Marie Jean Pierre, an African-American woman, for not coming into work on Sundays. Pierre worked as a dishwasher at the hotel for several years. She requested to have Sundays off in 2009 due to her religious beliefs, saying that on those days, she…
Me and another moderator of the anti-work subreddit (come on in, the water’s not OK because of global warming!) saw an album posted a few months ago. The artist was excited to share it on the subreddit because the album (here) was full of anti-capitalist manifestos, as well as a few songs that decried work…
Although many of us would like to see the current exploitative capitalist system overturned tomorrow in favor of something more compassionate, more humane, the reality is that it’s going to take a lot of work for even the least noticeable change to occur. And then, if I’m being honest, the kind of revolutionary change that…