Ah Labor Day....so lazy. An entire day to celebrate not going to work. Thank you International Socialism (i'll accept your thanks on IS's behalf and forward them to the appropriate channels) Of course, we should celebrate this day on May 1st, but for some reason having our own labor day in September really set us apart from the communists and showed them good....or something.
In honor of doing nothing, here's an excerpt from Corinne Maier's Bonjour paresse: De l'art et de la necessite d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise
1. You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-cheque at the end of the month, full stop.
2. It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger.
3. What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes around.
4. You're not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. Speak lots of leaden jargon: people will suspect you have an inside track.
5. Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You'll only have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts.
6. Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your 'contribution to the wealth of the firm'. Avoid 'on the ground' operational roles like the plague.
7. Once you've found one of these plum jobs, never move. It is only the most exposed who get fired.
8. Learn to identify kindred spirits who, like you, believe the system is absurd through discreet signs (quirks in clothing, peculiar jokes, warm smiles).
9. Be nice to people on short-term contracts. They are the only people who do any real work.
10. Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate bullshit cannot last for ever. It will go the same way as the dialectical materialism of the communist system. The problem is knowing when...
My personal favorites are 1, 3, and 4. Every word in those sentences are true. Alain de Botton has a more nuanced take on work and labor in today's NYT. He raises some interesting points.
If happiness at work is now so hard to earn, perhaps it is because our pretensions have so substantially outstripped reality. We expect every job to deliver some of the satisfaction available to Sigmund Freud or Franklin Roosevelt. (break)
This is all sad, but not half as sad as it can be if we blind ourselves to the reality and raise our expectations of our work to extreme levels. A firm belief in the necessary misery of life was for centuries one of mankind's most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness, a defense against dashed hopes. Now it has been cruelly undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern worldview.
In other words, don't expect too much from your job. Like Samir states regarding his new job at the end of Office Space, "It's work." The scene is meant to imply a new-found acceptance, sort of like Botton's message. I think. So maybe the real lesson is: Figure out how to dance to rap songs like Samir and Michael Bolton while singing "Back up in you ass with the res-sur-ec-tion." Yeah.
props to Maxspeak for the post on Bonjour Paresse
Let's start it up with a story we can file under Y, for "Yet Another Bad Idea"
We forget that before George Bush’s foreign policy debacles, there were already several terrible ideas on the table regarding a whole host of domestic issues. The biggest of these bad ideas, in my opinion of course, was in regards to tax policy. Don’t be fooled into thinking the administration has run out of ways to screw working people by re-writing the tax code. From John Cassidy writing in The New Yorker:
To conservative Republicans who understand [Bush’s] coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.
Work on achieving this ambitious program began with the tax cuts that Congress passed in 2001, 2002, and 2003, but the conservative economists who advise Bush and the right-wing institutes that support him have more in mind than consolidating their gains. Despite a gaping budget deficit, they are pressing the President to continue down a route that will reverse almost a century of American history. Since the personal income tax was introduced, in 1913, it has been based on two principles: the burden of taxation is distributed according to the ability to pay; and capital and labor carry their fair share. The Bush Administration appears set on undermining both of these principles.
Cassidy reminds the gentle reader that before anti-taxers grafted onto Bush, Steve Forbes was the darling of economic far-right. Flat-tax proposals and those like them have one purpose: to shift the tax burden away from the leisured “investor class” and onto workers, i.e. people who earn all or the bulk of their income through wages, not investments. The Bush tax-plan was hatched in 1999 as a counter to the Forbes flat-tax pitch. Heretofore, Paul Krugman has been the only mainstream writer to have highlighted this often-forgotten fact. Cassidy does an able job picking up the slack, and the net result has been the crucial alliance between Evangelicals and anti-taxers.
The entire piece is worth reading, though before you do, I’ll make one additional point not mentioned in the article. Probably the most important force driving the Iraq war wasn't oil, it was the fact that war presents Opportunitys For Distraction (OFDs). While we’re all busy getting misty-eyed over the sight of Old Glory and debating scurrilous proposals held together by false choices manufactured in Karl Rove's basement (We need to invade Iraq or send Saddam flowers and invite him to be a celebrity judge on American Idol, those are the only two options), administration henchmen are busy making their think-tank produced wet dreams a reality. Take Stephen Moore, Michael Moore’s fatter, rightwing lunatic cousin (not really) of the noxious Club For Growth.
“That’s the hidden story of what is going on under Bush,” Stephen Moore said. “People like me have been advocating a flat tax for a decade. I helped Dick Armey put together his flat-tax proposal. Nobody could get it done politically. What Bush has done, in a hidden way, is move us in baby steps toward the flat tax.”
Don’t like the idea on ending taxation on investment income? Look over there! The U.S. is bombing Baghdad and Fox New is showing footage while playing Beethoven (That really happened). It’s amazing how people like Stephen Moore are so cavalier that they can now brag about enormous, radical changes to the tax code that are done “in a hidden way.”
Also, what’s the deal with this?
In 2002, Ernest Christian, a Republican tax lawyer, circulated a plan to create a flat tax in what he termed “five easy pieces.”
Ernest Christian? Apparently, Charles Dickens is now writing tax policy. Given the current administration’s desire to drag us all back to the nineteenth century, the name is particularly fitting.