The Right to Work Less

Brilliant editorial here by Nina Power on how Britain's Right to Work campaign has shifted from the Right to Work Less. As a member of a family wherein both parents are forced to work, the cruelty of capitalism's effects on family is becoming quickly apparent. As a country subservient to business interests, America could give a flying fuck about families and has every intention of making sure that you have as little input into how your child is raised as humanly possible. I could go into detail, but I'm trying lately not to pop too many blood vessels in my head.

Some choice cuts from Power:

"The mass entry of women into the workforce has corresponded with an overall stagnation or diminution of wages. It is as if employers have taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past – poorly paid, precarious, without benefits – and applied it to almost everyone, except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and incomprehensibly rich."

Power is that rare feminist who doesn't waste time like other feminists patting themselves on the back for assimilating into wage slave culture without demanding that the workplace adapt to the specific needs of women. The idea has always been that women are equivalent to men, so they can perform jobs just as easily as men, which completely ignores the complex social and biological dynamic of male privilege.

"The supposed opposition between the desire for motherhood and the desire for a career, for instance, obscures the reality of the situation in which many mothers work because they have to, that childcare is punitively expensive – and that this "choice" is usually no choice at all."

Reminds me also of this from Raj Patel, on how the raising children is subsidized specifically because businesses couldn't survive if they had to somehow find a way to pay for that cost:

"Marx also made another point that I think is tremendously important, which is that modern capitalism doesn’t pay for household work. Modern capitalism doesn’t pay for the business of making new workers. Bringing up kids, educating them, and building new community won’t be paid for by capitalism because that’s a subsidy that capitalism needs in order to survive. Some U.N. researchers figured out that women’s unpaid work (in 1995) would cost $17 trillion if we were to pay market value -- pretty much half the total world output. Yet women own less than 10 percent of the world’s resources in developing countries and less than 10 percent of the land. And this is not an accident, it’s integral to the way the system works."



Must say, I really feel many of the ideas of working/non-working discussed by K-Punk in posts

Here

and

Here]




"When I was unemployed, I was convinced that an absolute ontological gulf separated me from Work. Work - which, like "being in a relationship" - would automatically confer on me the status of being a Real Person. But the horrific irony was that one couldn't achieve this status. You couldn't become a Real Person by getting a job. It was the other way round: only Real People could get work. Being unemployed wasn't a cause of shame; rather the sense of shame which I carried around as if it was the core of my being was what prevented me getting a job. So my job applications and interviews had an air of total hopelessness about them. I know there's no way you would give the job to an insect like me, and we both know I couldn't do it even if by some miracle you offered it to me, but ... It took me years to realise that job interviews were a ritualized exchange where the point was to determine whether you knew what the right communicative etiqutte was, and that telling the truth made you some weirdo. Surely even those who have not been in the Castle know that one doesn't behave like that ..."


BTW, reading about this Fairy Jobmother crap makes me dread seeing the more extreme American version.