Dear Potential Employer,

I was recently made aware of an opening for XXXXX position at your company. I want you to know that I am exceedingly passionate (to the point of sexual arousal) about the opportunity to work for you, especially as the systematic destruction of the wild buffalo and fish stocks and the enclosure of once-communal land by White colonizers of this great country has made my preferred hunter-gatherer lifestyle untenable, and left me with wage slavery as the only option. But believe me, I am damn passionate and driven when it comes to this, my only option for subsistence.

A glance at my resume will reveal my eminent qualification for this position; you will see I possess the necessary skill-set. But most importantly, many years of mind-numbing, individuality-suffocating industrial education have shaped me into the subservient, unquestioning sycophant your company desires. I will perform services for you that I wouldn’t perform for even my most intimate lover, and with all the conspicuous enthusiasm I can muster. I will produce my best ideas for you to steal, and watch without complaint as the sweat of my labor is transformed into your BoTox treatments and a Mercedes for your sixteen-year-old. I am a perfect model of what The System is designed to produce, and as such, my obsequiousness knows no bounds.

Thank you for your consideration. I mean, please please please hire me. Did I mention how incredibly @&%$-ing passionate I am?

Sincerely,

Your name here
Etc. etc.

Having a large pool of free/cheap labor is an inherent part of this corrupt, not for human consumption economic system. It is simply another aspect of this neanderthal society that we have normalized…the system for the wealthy…by the wealthy…defined by the wealthy and influential!…very medieval. Time has been overdue for change.

i see in Poland now that workers get something like 4 zloty an hour…thats about two bucks or so. And then they are taxed. Its slave labor but people are happy to get these gigs because without them they starve.

No health care to speak of…and no unemployment insurance.

But we live in a waste economy. Many jobs are pointless….so the alienation is palpable. I recall working as a security guard….and I got fired because I couldn’t bring myself to evict sleeping homeless guys from the construction site. They weren’t hurting anything, and werent at all dirty….but the boss refused to let them stay there. I wouldnt, couldnt, make them leave…..(this was a cold weather job).

I see in europe the endless temp jobs people clutch at….no security, and no benifits. Just long hours.

The Wobblies used to say, there are two kinds of people in the world, those who work and those who dont.

A lot of people make their career choices based not on love of the profession or even a particular aptitude for it, but strictly for its earning potential. I see no reason why those people deserve the label “successful” more than someone who takes a job out of a love for the work, or even out of economic necessity. I do believe I will be successful on my own terms, thank you very much, and screw anyone else’s fascist standards for what constitutes success.

I’ve worked in a lot of different jobs, some physical, some using my head from the age of 12. The last fifteen years I have been on welfare, supplemented with various odd jobs I can get by dint of my education. At first it got me through a nervous breakdown, and later I decided that I didn’t want to work full-time mainly to pay for someone else to look after my child.

The welfare also gave me the time to organise with my community (an inner-city UK council estate with a lot of other welfare moms as well as people working long hours in jobs) to improve our immediate physical and social environment. It also has given me a great deal of independence from men, and meant that I didn’t have to poison my relationship with my ex-partner with demands for money, so that he could go out and get an education, and ultimately a fairly satisfying and well-paid job. Yet both socially outside my immediate community, and when I do go begging for regular work as I have been doing for the last couple years, I still have to cover over the fact that I’ve been on welfare, and many of the skills acquired in that time.

The government wants it both ways – on the one hand they want to push us out to jobs to save on the welfare bill (not counting of course the huge industries like oil and agribusiness run by their cronies whose ‘profits’ are entirely dependent on vastly larger hand-outs of corporate welfare, because actually their business is about real wealth destruction). On the other the whole system would break down if there weren’t ‘unemployed’ women like myself around to pick up the slack looking after ‘employed’ people’s kids during the times when paid-for childcare isn’t available, or after people made ill by their jobs and the degradation of the environment wrought by those so-called ‘wealth creators’.

In my experience job satisfaction has more to do with how much control you have over when and how you work than it does with the size of the paycheck, or the social status of the job.

A note on gardening: one of the reasons I live in a city is that I grew up having to do it in the suburbs and hating every minute. Now that our courtyard is a community garden instead of a parking lot, it has been interesting watching how people deal with it. A Bangladeshi woman has appropriated bits to grow potatoes, gourd vegetables and corriander; a Malaysian family grows tomatoes and carrots; Turkish, German, Afro-Caribbean and Portugese households grow flowers; a Libyan guy grows cooking herbs and geraniums. The English mainly use it for sunbathing, and do some watering every now and again. Various people make stabs at maintaining the mainly decorative plants originally put in by the local council. It’s been hopeless trying to co-ordinate the people who are into gardening into following an overall plan, or even times to work together, but somehow it doesn’t seem to matter.

Thanks for a great thread, and good luck with the wage-slavery -

I go to school full time and work at a high end grocery store. While I make more than is common for the area, my wage is not a living wage. But, I shop there anyway and get a (low) discount as well as benefits. It’s not ideal, but it helps to pay the bills.

A few days ago, I was rining up a couple and asked, “What kind of work do you do?” This is a common question that I use as a conversation point. I was informed that the lady was in sales and the gentlemen (I use the term loosely) informed me that he was a stock broker. I nodded and was about to ask another question when he said, “We know what you do. You’re just the clerk at the XXXXX.”

I admit that for a split second, I calculated how long it would take me to stab him in the carotid artery with my pen and get to my car. After deciding that i would get aprehended first, I quipped, “You know, sir, without guys like me you would starve.” After that we had a pretty good conversation and he was unaware of the classist and patronizing nature of what he said. Yet, I oftren feel that my customers do not regard me or see me as worth less. Yet, ther are no unskilled jobs.

The beauty we’ve found down here (in Buras, LA, still recovering from Katrina) is not manicured beauty. It’s a misspelled poem painted on the side of a crumbling cement wall, or a flowering vine growing over a boot stuck in the mud that none of us wants to tug on, because it’s next to the graveyard where bodies were floating up.

Not sure where I’m going with this, except that how you’ve been spending your days, Stan, parallels what I’m doing this week exactly – except that things here are self-organizing instead of controlled by money from above. Anna came in to get food from distribution, I ended up sitting with her at dinner, it came out that she couldn’t get a lawnmower through her yard. Luke tells us at the evening meeting, “Find work.” Talk to people, find out what they need, and do it. If they offer to pay, don’t do the job. Find a local who needs the money and pass it to them.

(No specific point in all that, but it makes a nice prelude to what’s important here at the moment: If anyone knows how to move a houseboat on pontoons across soft soil into the water a hundred or so yards away, without heavy equipment, please let me know.)