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#worker exploitation
emperornorton47 · 7 months
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thoughtportal · 11 months
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hussyknee · 8 months
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Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.
A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):
One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.
While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.
The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.
As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.
(Source)
Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.
Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:
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subway-tolkien · 3 months
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eelhound · 1 year
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"'Republican' theorists — as in ancient Greek and Roman republics — emphasized freedom from domination, and argued that this was a more fundamental kind of freedom than freedom from interference.
Think about the most extreme form of nonfreedom, slavery. A slave who’s whipped every day is certainly less lucky than one whose master hardly ever strikes him. His body is interfered with less. But is he more free? Proponents of republicanism would say no, because in each case the slave is at the mercy of the master and the same underlying relationship of domination persists.
Of course, ancient republican philosophers had no objection to slavery. They just wanted a class of citizens to be free from the whims of any emperor or oligarch. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, abolitionists, labor organizers, and socialists advocated a society in which everyone would be robustly free from domination. Even the elimination of extreme unfreedom through the Union’s victory in the Civil War wasn’t enough to satisfy these radicals, who saw disturbing patterns of domination in Northern industrial capitalism:
Emancipation may have eliminated chattel slavery, but, as eight-hour campaigner Ira Steward once put it, the creation of this new form of economic dependence meant 'something of slavery still remains . . . something of freedom is yet to come.'
Under capitalism, the vast majority of people who are directly involved in the economy don’t own what Marxists call 'the means of production.' They don’t own factories, for example, or book-packaging warehouses or grocery stores, and they can’t afford to buy any of these things. So they have no realistic option except to rent themselves out for eight hours a day — and it’s only eight hours due to the efforts of people like Steward — to people who do own them.
There’s a profound power imbalance in this relationship. Many workplaces are run as petty dictatorships where the boss can tell workers when they have to smile, when they are or aren’t allowed to talk to each other, and when they can and can’t go to the bathroom. In the vast majority of cases — exceptions include workers with rare and highly valued skills, and periods of especially low unemployment — it’s much easier for a company to replace a worker than for the worker to replace her livelihood. She has to fret about her boss’s opinion of her in a way that he doesn’t. Even if he is a benevolent boss, she is still subject to his whims."
- Ben Burgis, from "Socialism Is All About Expanding Freedom." Jacobin, 10 March 2023.
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haggishlyhagging · 11 months
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. . . [I]ndustry turned "the worker" into "the tool," by getting rid of the human being. Thus monastic discipline, the Christian practice and urge to "free" the spirit by subjugating the body, was institutionalized throughout the Western world. And thus it led directly to the mechanization of the body, the human being turned into an appendage of the machine, a servomechanism, at work, play, love, and war. The spirit was never "freed" in this process, needless to say; it continues to share, with the body, in what Foucault calls "a subjection that has never reached its limit." It has never reached its limit because the exercise of subjugation itself—the chronic submission of the human to the system and mechanism of such discipline—has become a function of profit, i.e., of world power.
The "Protestant spirit" added greatly to this process by rationalizing worldly profit as a function of Christian spirit. The fundamentalist-Protestant tautology that "wealth is a sign of God's favor because God wants you to be rich" is a perfect machine: While it grinds out "the profits of morality" for the many, it gathers in "the morality of profits" for the few; and thus Christian capitalism, where God becomes a kind of shrewd world banker in the sky, exchanging souls for dollars, and dollars for souls . . . at a terrible rate of exchange.
-Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth.
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workersolidarity · 8 months
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Modern Pirates of the African Coast
"Okay, what do you do with this money?"
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"The money? I use to buy ammunition and speed boats, and the rest to take care of our families. Because we do our jobs. That is why we are doing this dirty job."
"You come to exploit here and don't want to employ me. That is why, that is the major reason why we are doing this. You don't want to employ us and you are exploiting from us."
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I find this very sad. These people have ZERO prospects for their future from the moment they were born. Their country has been used, abused and had the wealth sucked out of it over the last 4 centuries, continues to be exploited to the extreme and they grow up in harder circumstances than Westerners could ever fathom. They take from this a lesson: their lives are meaningless to the powers-that-be and if they want any shot at wealth or security, then they must fight to the death to take it.
Is it really surprising then that some of these men with no future and no security turn to kidnapping, smuggling and extortion to give their lives some meaning?
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Forcing everyone to work when we have machines which can do the work of a 100 people is problematic.
These machines are used to maximize profits and not to minimize human suffering.
We need our economy to be geared toward human need and not human greed.
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creature-wizard · 6 months
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Why do new agers insist that even the physically disabled and chronically ill choose victim mentality blah blah blah blah? It's so ghoulish
While it's not unique to or even universal among New Agers, many of them have come across ideas like the Law of Attraction and the Law of Assumption, which both of which derive from New Thought, an early 19th century movement that proposed that the state of your health and wealth depend upon the state of your thinking.
But moreover - and this part is very important - shit like the Law of Assumption and the Law of Attraction are being pushed by exploitative businesses (including but not limited to multi-level marketing schemes!) to make workers feel like they're at fault when they can't succeed within a system designed to overwork them and keep the vast, vast, majority of them trapped in shitty positions.
Of course, the nature of capitalism is such that a few people do improve their situations, and these few people really do think the LoA was the reason for it; they end up thinking that they just did it better than the rest, rather than being the lucky winner in the lottery of capitalism. They tout themselves as proof that the LoA really works - failing to realizing that they're falling prey to survivorship bias.
So yeah, as it so often happens, the real enemy is capitalism here.
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mbrainspaz · 10 months
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guess who just wasted 2 hours drafting and deleting about a dozen text messages to their corporate boss who acted all sad and pitiable about being asked to pay them about $300 extra for two weeks worth of grueling overtime in the summer heat doing the full work of a barn manager while being paid like a teenage stable hand?
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ya boy
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emperornorton47 · 8 months
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lunaefall · 1 year
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As much as I love RWBY, if Roosterteeth's downfall included the show's, I'll gladly take it for all the real lives that have been hurt, abused and discriminated in this horrid company.
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hussyknee · 9 months
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Showcase example of why I am deeply skeptical of Eat The Rich types. Too many of y'all are like this fuckhead who has no clue what rich requires eating.
Also for context: Ron Perlman has been acting since 1975. Studio exec Bob Igor made $27 million last year from Disney alone, just one of his streams of annual income, which includes but is not limited to stocks, real estate and consulting.
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ladymazzy · 10 months
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‘Sold a dream’: migrant workers at children’s care chain left without pay for months
From the article:
'The affected workers were hired through agencies as part of a drive to fill 400 vacancies at Cambian children’s services – part of the CareTech group – and are mostly female nurses from India recruited for residential support worker roles.
They are understood to have spent as much as £18,000 each on relocation costs, “training” charges and other fees to take up jobs in homes that provide taxpayer-funded care for disabled and vulnerable children, including those with complex trauma and learning difficulties.
Before they left India, the nurses were promised by agents that they would receive financial support from their 11th day in the UK while inductions and background checks were completed. But after they landed earlier this year they were told this was not the case, and they would be paid only after starting shifts, according to evidence seen by the Observer.
Administrative delays and the temporary closure of several Cambian children’s homes – leaving fewer vacancies than expected – means some workers have been waiting for up to four months to start work, without any income. They are unable to find other work because their visas are tied to their employer.'
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