Case Worker Quotes

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Oh God, are there so many of them in our land! Students who can’t be happy until they’ve graduated, servicemen who can’t be happy until they are discharged, single folks who can’t be happy until they’ve found a mate, workers who can’t be happy until they’ve retired, adolescents who aren’t happy until they’re grown, ill people who aren’t happy until they’re well, failures who aren’t happy until they succeed, restless who can’t wait until they get out of town, and in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin.
Tom Robbins
The problem with cell phones is that you can’t slam them down into a cradle when you hang up. Your only option is to throw them, and if you do, they just skitter across the floor and crack their case. It’s not satisfying at all. I close my eyes and bend down to pick up the pieces.
Holly Black (Black Heart (Curse Workers, #3))
I need to talk to you. I had a weird dream." "Let me guess. You got tied up by lady ninjas. With big hooters." "Uh, no." I take a sip of coffee and wince. It was ridiculously strong. My grandfather shoves a strip of bacon in his mouth with a grin. "Guess it would have been kind of weird if we'd had the same dream." I roll my eyes. "Well, you'd better not tell me anything else. Don't ruin the surprise in case I have it tonight.
Holly Black (White Cat (Curse Workers, #1))
Losing your family….it puts fear in a different perspective,” he said. “Besides, I got by all right. I stayed on the fringe around Chicago, hoped around tent cities and Red Cross camps. Worked for some people who didn’t ask questions. Avoided case-workers and foster care. And thought about you.” “Me?” I huffed, completely unsettled. In awe at how vanilla my life seemed. In awe of what he’d endured, He turned then, meeting my eyes for the first time. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, and unashamed. “You. The only thing in my life that doesn’t change. When everything went to hell, you were all I had.
Kristen Simmons (Article 5 (Article 5, #1))
I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.
Marilyn Johnson (This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All)
In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Psychopathic workers very often were identified as the source of departmental conflicts, in many cases, purposely setting people up in conflict with each other. “She tells some people one story, and then a totally different story to others.
Paul Babiak (Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work)
Mom" I say "Oh honey" she says "The doctor wants to see you to make sure you don't have the same thing that killed your brother. " She turns to Ms.Logan who looks scandalized by the whole encounter. "These things can run in famalies" she confides. "Your afraid I'm going to come down with a bad case of getting two in the chest?" I say "cause you might be right about that running in families.
Holly Black (Red Glove (Curse Workers, #2))
The Palestinians were offered two options: 1) to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder.
Noam Chomsky (Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the U.S.-Israeli War on the Palestinians)
Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk's Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with "It might come in handy," all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won't even talk to us.
Florence King (Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady)
In most cases, people don’t measure the productivity of knowledge workers and when we do, we do it in really silly ways, like how many papers do academics produce, regardless of quality.
Cal Newport (Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout)
Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology. The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That's why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd. Eighty percent of the people who call themselves Democrats don't have a clue as to political reality. What amazes me is that you could take a group of people who are hard workers and convince them that they should support social programs that were the exact opposite of their own personal convictions. Put a little fear here and there and you can get people to vote any way you want. The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic operative instead of a Republican was because there were more Democrats that didn't have a clue than there were Republicans. Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you're smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is. That's why I'm a Democrat. I can make the Democratic voters think whatever I want them to.
James Carville
Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity? Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?). [. . . And Why I'm Most Certainly Not! -- The Wall Street Journal, Commentary Column. May 5, 2005]
Christopher Hitchens
Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers’ organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance. Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution.
Rudolf Rocker (Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Working Classics))
Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
In some cases, they are already doing so. Influenced by a coalition of community groups, the New York City Council passed a historic budget in the summer of 2014 that created a $1.2 million fund for the growth of worker-owned cooperatives. Richmond, California has hired a cooperative developer and is launching a loan fund; Cleveland, Ohio has been actively involved in starting a network of cooperatives, as we’ll see in the next chapter; and Jackson, Mississippi elected a mayor (Chokwe Lumumba) in 2013 on a platform that included the use of public spending to promote co-ops. On the federal level, progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders are working to get the government more involved in supporting employee ownership.130
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
Sex workers can act as sources of sex advice only if we understand sex to be a skillset that must be learned and refined across different partners, with good sex a result not of intimacy but of good technique. In this framing, sex becomes something that one does to another person, not with another person. All of the emotion is drained away
Louise Perry (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century)
These crimes were all motivated by economic jealousy. Either the Negroes in the area were more prosperous than the Whites, or the black workers would not let themselves be exploited thoroughly. In all cases, the principal culprits were never troubled, for the simple reason that they were always incited, encouraged, spurred on, then protected, by the politicians, financiers, and authorities, and above all, by the reactionary press.
Hồ Chí Minh
The irony in any investigation was that lies were often protectors of the truth—unless they became too powerful, in which case lies were like worker bees who turn on their queen.
Jacqueline Winspear (The American Agent (Maisie Dobbs, #15))
When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP's Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once workers sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment - for life. Under the program's terms, seeking treatment from an independent physician can be grounds for losing all medical benefits. Workers who refuse to sign the IBP waiver not only risk getting no medical care from the company, but also risk being fired on the spot...Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker's signature. When Lonita Leal's right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.
Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
The problems in every country are the same. Bureaucracy is strangling innovation. Overgrown political sectors are sucking away resources that could otherwise lead to growth. Regulations and taxes are punishing innovation. Public sector services are breaking down and no longer serving people's needs. Laws and prevailing legislation control a world that no longer exists. People who go into politics to change the system end up getting co-opted by it. Workers feel trapped and fear a lack out options outside the status quo. In every case, it comes down to the great evil of our time and all times: government itself. There is no place on earth in which more liberty and less or no government would not be welcome and bring about real progress.
Jeffrey Tucker
Does God exist? Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said. At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience—and that was no small achievement—Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion. In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists. If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here. To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: “God knows the past, the present, and the future.” In that case, he had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and he would not be shocked by her actions. Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.
Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)
When he got work my father worked as a steel worker, high up on tall buildings, walking on beams like those Mohawk Indians. It was dangerous work. People were always falling to their death. He worked on the building of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia and on the few high-rise buildings they could afford to build in the Depression.
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
While doing research, I read an article from an 1884 El Paso Daily Times, which reported that a white railroad worker was on trial for the murder of an unnamed Chinese man. The case was ultimately dismissed. The judge, Roy Bean, cited that Texas law, while prohibiting the murder of human beings, defined a human only as White, African American, or Mexican. The nameless yellow body was not considered human because it did not fit in a slot on a piece of paper. Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
There are many [...] sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to rot after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It's a lot like how this culture treats people. It's certainly how we have been trained to treat our stuff - use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more. It's similar to what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal period: they are used up and then abandoned to addiction and despair. It's what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically valuable as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers.
Naomi Klein (On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal)
raw.  She stepped forward carefully, her eyes gentling as she tried to reach her brother.  “Royston, it isn’t a game.  It’s me.  Wyndi.” He glared down at the tiny woman who looked startlingly, hauntingly similar to the little sister he’d tried to protect so many years ago.  But it was impossible.  “My sister died of pneumonia,” he growled, furious that anyone would try such a horrible trick.  “The case worker told me my sister died.  You’re going to have to leave.  Now!” he almost shouted.  Wyndi shook her head.  “They lied, Royston.  I didn’t die.”  She hesitated
Elizabeth Lennox (The Tycoon's Make-Believe Fiancée)
If the government turns a blind eye to striking union members who use violence against employers or “scabs” (strike breakers), while at the same time the government stands ready to use its police power to prevent management from hiring armed personnel to disperse the picketing union members, then the union is implicitly allowed to set its own minimum wage rate for the firm being targeted. The economic effects are the same as with an explicit government-imposed minimum wage: institutional unemployment, which in such cases falls disproportionately on lower-skilled workers outside of the union.
Robert P. Murphy (Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action)
The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.
Akira Kurosawa (Something Like an Autobiography)
Pericles, he reflected, was a sad case. He'd been a postman all his life, a solid, reliable worker, until one Christmas when he had stolen all the gifts he was meant to deliver: wind-chimes, scented candles, Belgian chocolates, cowbells from the Bernese Oberland. Most of the haul had been lavished on his elderly mother; the rest he had stashed in his bedroom, which the old lady, being too frail to climb the stairs, no longer cleaned.
Alison Fell (The Element -inth in Greek)
We have compromised so admirably with the question of their divinity that I should hate to see them replaced by a dictator or a Workers’ Council and a firing squad.” I had to protest at this preposterous view, but he was quite serious. “I assure you that this is the way the left-wing tends; its object is civil war, though it does not realize it — thanks to the cunning with which the sapless puritans like Shaw and company have presented their case.
Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet)
One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation
Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
White women—feminists included—have revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers. They have rarely been involved in the Sisyphean task of ameliorating the conditions of domestic service. The convenient omission of household workers’ problems from the programs of “middle-class” feminists past and present has often turned out to be a veiled justification—at least on the part of the affluent women—of their own exploitative treatment of their maids. In 1902 the author of an article entitled “A Nine-Hour Day for Domestic Servants” described a conversation with a feminist friend who had asked her to sign a petition urging employers to furnish seats for women clerks. “The girls,” she said, “have to stand on their feet ten hours a day and it makes my heart ache to see their tired faces.” “Mrs. Jones,” said I, “how many hours a day does your maid stand upon her feet?” “Why, I don’t know,” she gasped, “five or six I suppose.” “At what time does she rise?” “At six.” “And at what hour does she finish at night?” “Oh, about eight, I think, generally.” “That makes fourteen hours …” “… (S)he can often sit down at her work.” “At what work? Washing? Ironing? Sweeping? Making beds? Cooking? Washing dishes? … Perhaps she sits for two hours at her meals and preparing vegetables, and four days in the week she has an hour in the afternoon. According to that, your maid is on her feet at least eleven hours a day with a score of stair-climbings included. It seems to me that her case is more pitiable than that of the store clerk.” My caller rose with red cheeks and flashing eyes. “My maid always has Sunday after dinner,” she said. “Yes, but the clerk has all day Sunday. Please don’t go until I have signed that petition. No one would be more thankful than I to see the clerks have a chance to sit …
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
In the conflicts between capital and labour, the army has often intervened against labour - never against capital. In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one. The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor.
Victor Serge (What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression: A Guide for Activists)
Another blatant case of regress as part of the capitalist progress is the enormous rise of precarious work. Precarious work deprives workers of a whole series of rights that, till recently, were taken as self-evident in any country which perceived itself as a welfare state: precarious workers have to take care themselves of their health insurance and retirement options; there is no paid leave; the future becomes much more uncertain. Precarious work also generates an antagonism within the working class, between permanently employed and precarious workers (trade unions tend to privilege permanent workers; it is very difficult for precarious workers even to organize themselves into a union or to establish other forms of collective self-organization). One would have expected that this increasing exploitation would also strengthen workers’ resistance, but it renders resistance even more difficult, and the main reason for this is ideological: precarious work is presented (and up to a point even effectively experienced) as a new form of freedom – I am no longer just a cog in a complex enterprise but an entrepreneur-of-the-self, I am a boss of myself who freely manages my employment, free to choose new options, to explore different aspects of my creative potential, to choose my priorities
Slavoj Žižek (The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously)
It is usually the case that somewhere in the world, yesterday's workers are today's surplus population. This process continually opens up new domains for expropriation and value generation, whether it is through moneylending or warehousing people in prisons. (p. 109)
Jackie Wang (Carceral Capitalism)
From the moment they're recruited to the time they're 'rescued' and deported, trafficked women are terrorized. Every single day they face a world stacked heavily against them. Their only friends are the dedicated women and men who form the thin front line against trafficking--an often thankless job. Those working for nongovernmental aid agencies and organizations are the real heroes in this bleak morass. Still, their work is merely a Band-Aid solution. In the vast majority of cases, NGO workers report that their funding is ad hoc and wholly inadequate to meet even basic needs. If we truly want a fair shot at saving these women, we need to open not only our minds but also our wallets. We need to focus on programs that care compassionately for the victims and we need to implement them immediately, worldwide. The most urgent priorities are safe shelters and clinics equipped and staffed to offer medical and psychological treatment. We need to understand that most of these women have been psychologically and physically ripped apart. And we need to be prepared for the fac thtat most have been infected with various sexually transmitted diseases.
Victor Malarek (The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade)
Royce’s lecture on Hegel told me why: We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and erelong, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody. I
John Kaag (American Philosophy: A Love Story)
efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain an attentional set for an extended period. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy. Related to the manager/worker distinction is that the prefrontal cortex contains circuits responsible for telling us whether we’re controlling something or someone else is. When we set up a system, this part of the brain marks it as self-generated. When we step into someone else’s system, the brain marks it that way. This may help explain why it’s easier to stick with an exercise program or diet that someone else sets up: We typically trust them as “experts” more than we trust ourselves. “My trainer told me to do three sets of ten reps at forty pounds—he’s a trainer, he must know what he’s talking about. I can’t design my own workout—what do I know?” It takes Herculean amounts of discipline to overcome the brain’s bias against self-generated motivational systems. Why? Because as with the fundamental attribution error we saw in Chapter 4, we don’t have access to others’ minds, only our own. We are painfully aware of all the fretting and indecision, all the nuances of our internal decision-making process that led us to reach a particular conclusion. (I really need to get serious about exercise.) We don’t have access to that (largely internal) process in others, so we tend to take their certainty as more compelling, in many cases, than our own. (Here’s your program. Do it every day.)
Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
There are, it must be admitted, cases of special difficulty on the theory of natural selection; and one of the most curious of these is the existence of two or three defined castes of workers or sterile females in the same community of ants; but I have attempted to show how this difficulty can be mastered.
Charles Darwin (The Origin of Species)
The short-sighted refusal to make an effort towards improving labor conditions, the refusal to adopt measures which would insure the workman in case of accidents in the factories, the refusal to forbid child labor, the refusal to consider protective measures for female workers, especially expectant mothers - all this was of assistance to the Social Democratic leaders, who were thankful for every opportunity which they could exploit for forcing the masses into their net. Our bourgeois parties can never repair the damage that resulted from the mistake they then made. For they sowed the seeds of hatred when they opposed all efforts at social reform.
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms. Everything stuck. From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child’s skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling. From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took cinnamon, figs, cumin seed and saffron, ginger, flower of gillyflower and crocus and—an afterthought—some brazil for dyeing her new wool. These were distributed between Christian and Tom. They listened to a balladmonger, paid him for all the verses of “When Tay’s Bank,” and bought a lengthy scroll containing a brand-new ballad which Tom Erskine read briefly and then discreetly lost. “No matter,” said the Dowager cheerfully, when told. “Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can’t have that.” He was never very sure whether she was laughing at him, but rather thought not. They pursued their course purposefully, and the Dowager bought a new set of playing cards, some thread, a boxful of ox feet, a quantity of silver lace and a pair of scissors. She was dissuaded from buying a channel stone, which Tom, no curling enthusiast, refused utterly to carry, and got a toothpick in its case instead. They watched acrobats, invested sixpence for an unconvincing mermaid and finally stumbled, flattened and hot, into a tavern, where Tom forcibly commandeered a private space for the two women and brought them refreshments. “Dear, dear,” said Lady Culter, seating herself among the mute sea of her parcels, like Arion among his fishes. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which are the squashy ones. Never mind. If we spread them out, they can’t take much hurt, I should think. Unless the ox feet … Oh. What a pity, Tom. But I’m sure it will clean off.
Dorothy Dunnett (The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1))
Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
David Nicholls (Us)
You’d take cabbies aside and you’d explain the benefits of being organized, and you’d ask them to sign a union card. If you got 30 percent of the workers to sign, then the labor law entitled you to an election to see if the workers wanted the union or not. But Bill taught me that you would never ask for the election until you had better than 50 percent, because with less than that you were sure to lose. Bill also explained to me that if you did get the right to hold an election, another union could come in and try to take it from you. If they got 10 percent of the cards they could intervene in the election and maybe beat your union out after you did all the work.
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'. Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just. The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.
Richard Overy (Why the Allies Won)
what we find is that the increase in wage inequality is identical in all cases, no matter what reference period we choose.38 In other words, workers at McDonald’s or in Detroit’s auto plants do not spend a year of their lives as top managers of large US firms, any more than professors at the University of Chicago or middle managers from California do.
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
Do we ever stop dreaming? I know I haven't. I must have been at least twenty-five when the Spice Girls happened, and I distinctly remember imagining my way into the group. I was going to be the sixth Spice, 'Massive Spice', who, against all the odds, would become the most popular and lusted-after Spice. The Spice who sang the vast majority of solo numbers in the up-tempo tracks. The Spice who really went the distance. And I still haven't quite given up on the Wimbledon Ladies' Singles Championship. I mean, it can't be too late, can it? I've got a lovely clean T-shirt, and I've figured out exactly how I'd respond to winning the final point (lie on floor wailing, get up, do triumphant lap of the ring slapping crowd members' box). It can't be just me who does this. I'm convinced that most adults, when travelling alone in a car, have a favourite driving CD of choice and sing along to it quite seriously, giving it as much attitude and effort as they can, due to believing – in that instant – that they're the latest rock or pop god playing to a packed Wembley stadium. And there must be at least one man, one poor beleaguered City worker, who likes to pop into a phone box then come out pretending he's Superman. Is there someone who does this? Anyone? If so, I'd like to meet you and we shall marry in the spring (unless you're really, really weird and the Superman thing is all you do, in which case BACK OFF).
Miranda Hart (Is It Just Me?)
For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH, attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise—"better," if you will; there there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not characterised by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is,—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other. 7.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil (Illustrated))
To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my own Ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur’s life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in a hotel.
George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)
Now, years later and with Carnegie’s blessing, Frick had launched his plan to further consolidate his rule over their industrial kingdom by destroying the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The labor union, formed in 1876, was one of many that emerged in the industrial age to combat the cruel and oppressive treatment of workers. In the steel mills, workers typically put in 12-hour days, six days a week, for less than a dime an hour. There were no government agencies to inspect the work sites, no forms of compensation in case of injury, and more than 35,000 workers died each year in industrial accidents. Only the unions offered some hope by fighting for higher wages, eight-hour workdays, and improved working conditions.
James McGrath Morris (Revolution By Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick (Kindle Single))
In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected their plans. They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropriate term, since the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology, beautiful but terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over the ancient battlefields choosing those who would be slain. In this case, Adolf Hitler was to be slain. Ironically enough, Admiral Canaris, before his fall, had sold the Fuehrer the idea of Valkyrie, dressing it up as a plan for the Home Army to take over the security of Berlin and the other large cities in case of a revolt of the millions of foreign laborers toiling in these centers. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven to be more “efficient” than stakeholder capitalism. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster. By this view, stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways, CEOs were too complacent, corporations were too fat—employing workers they didn’t need, and paying them too much—and they were too tied to their communities. It is a tempting argument, but in hindsight a fallacious one. Any change that allows some people to become better off without causing others to be worse off is technically a more “efficient” use of resources. But when all or most of these efficiency gains go to a few people at the top—as has been the case since the 1980s—the common good is not necessarily improved. Just look at the flat or declining wages of most Americans, their growing economic insecurity, and the abandoned communities now littering the nation. Then look at the record corporate profits, soaring CEO pay, and jaw-dropping compensation on Wall Street. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy, and most stakeholders have not done well.
Robert B. Reich (The Common Good)
Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).
Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International))
Mad Lib Elegy" There are starving children left on your plate. There are injuries without brains. Migrant workers spend 23 hours a day removing tiny seeds from mixtures they cannot afford to smoke and cannot afford not to smoke. Entire nations are ignorant of the basic facts of hair removal and therefore resent our efforts to depilate unsightly problem areas. Imprisonment increases life expectancy. Finish your children. Adopt an injury. ‘I'm going to my car. When I get back, I'm shooting everybody.' [line omitted in memory of_______] 70% of pound animals will be euthanized. 94% of pound animals would be euthanized if given the choice. The mind may be trained to relieve itself on paper. A pill for your safety, a pill for her pleasure. Neighbors are bothered by loud laughter but not by loud weeping. Massively multiplayer zombie-infection web-games are all the rage among lifers. The world is a rare case of selective asymmetry. The capitol is redolent of burnt monk. ‘I'm going to my car. When I get back I'm shooting everybody.' [line omitted in memory of _______] There are two kinds of people in the world: those that condemn parking lots as monstrosities, ‘the ruines of a broken World,' and those that respond to their majesty emotionally. 70% of the planet is covered in parking lots. 94% of a man's body is parking lot. Particles of parking lot have been discovered in the permanent shadows of the moon. There is terror in sublimity. If Americans experience sublimity the terrorists have won. ‘I'm going to my car. When I get back I'm shooting everybody.' [line omitted in memory of _______]
Ben Lerner
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
Though Black women enjoyed few of the dubious benefits of the ideology of womanhood, it is sometimes assumed that the typical female slave was a houseservant—either a cook, maid, or mammy for the children in the “big house.” Uncle Tom and Sambo have always found faithful companions in Aunt Jemima and the Black Mammy—stereotypes which presume to capture the essence of the Black woman’s role during slavery. As is so often the case, the reality is actually the diametrical opposite of the myth. Like the majority of slave men, slave women, for the most part, were field workers. While a significant proportion of border-state slaves may have been houseservants, slaves in the Deep South—the real home of the slaveocracy—were predominantly agricultural workers. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, seven out of eight slaves, men and women alike, were field workers.
Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race & Class)
Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
A mentality that treats as the same, two cases in which a worker works to avoid pain, neglecting that in the one case the pain is caused by a master and in the other, caused by nature and prevented by a capitalist. A mentality, in other words, that sees no difference between slavery and freedom, and thus can claim justification for Marxists/Socialists robbing and murdering capitalists on the grounds that the free workers of the capitalists are their slaves.
George Reisman (Marxism/Socialism, A Sociopathic Philosophy Conceived In Gross Error And Ignorance, Culminating In Economic Chaos, Enslavement, Terror, And Mass Murder: A Contribution To Its Death)
It is often difficult to admit that we have problems, particularly when we work in a field where people expect us to have healthy answers to their issues. Nevertheless, problems are part of life and they always present opportunities for growth. Denying our own problems is not healthy and further impairs our ability to be useful social service workers in the future. Address your own problems as they occur as part of a lifelong pursuit of health and wisdom. Ethical
Nancy Summers (Fundamentals of Case Management Practice: Skills for the Human Services)
But the weakness of these proposals isn't that they're unworkable, or even that they're 'traditional,' but that they're not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there's little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles—and there's no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between 'home' and 'work' that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.
Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress)
It is not for us to know who does and does not manage to accept forgiveness, but if the love really never stops, if God really does long for every lost soul, then in principle God regards as forgivable a whole load of stuff we really don’t want forgiven, thank you. People who use airliners to murder thousands of office workers, people who strut about Norwegian summer camps stealing the lives of teenagers with careful shots to the head, people who drive over their gay neighbor in their pick-up truck and then reverse and do it again, people who torture children for sexual pleasure: God is apparently ready to rush right in there and give them all a hug, the bastard. We don’t want that. We want justice, dammit, if not in this world then in the next. We want God’s extra-niceness confined to deserving cases such as, for example, us, and a reliable process of judgment put in place which will ensure that the child-murderers are ripped apart with red-hot tongs.
Francis Spufford (Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense)
One case Dietz studied tells a story of denial in its most undeniable form: A man killed one of his co-workers, served his prison time, was released, and was rehired by the same company whose employee he had murdered. While at the company the second time, he alienated people because he was always sullen and angry. He made threats that were known to supervisors and he stalked a female co-worker. After he resigned (on the verge of being fired), he continued to stalk the woman and then he killed her.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32¢ an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32¢ when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30 P.M. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched. Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met.
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
There were, however, major differences between the respective upsurges of cooperativism in the 1880s and the 1960s, centered around the fact that the earlier one was part of a broad-based labor movement, unlike the later. Thus, the skilled and semi-skilled cooperators during the 1870s and 1880s explicitly used cooperatives as a way to guarantee employment, and arguably they were more ambitious, with their revolutionary hopes for a cooperative commonwealth. Their ideology, of course, was not the educated middle-class countercultural and anti-authoritarian one of the 1960s’ youth movements but “laborist,” “producerist,” devoted to the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic of free laborers, mostly artisans and craftsmen. Some scholars have argued that this fact proves the Knights of Labor were “backward-looking” rather than truly revolutionary—that the future lay in mass production, not skilled labor or artisanry168—but this criticism seems partly off the mark. It is true that the Knights were hostile to mechanization, just as workers have been in the era of the AFL-CIO, because in both cases it threatened to put them out of a job or to result in the lowering of wages and the deskilling of work. If this aversion to the degradation and mechanization of work is reactionary, so be it. But it is also a source of such revolutionary demands as democratization of production relations, cooperative organization of the economy, public ownership of industry, destruction of the capitalist class and its frequent tool the state, and other hopes cherished by millions of workers in the late nineteenth century.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
Wars destroy wealth-generating capital, inflate away the assets of creditors, and induce the rich to put up with higher taxes, which the government redistributes into the paychecks of soldiers and munition workers, in turn increasing the demand for labor in the rest of the economy. Wars are just one kind of catastrophe that can generate equality by the logic of Igor and Boris. The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
I was not a soldier; I was a factory worker drafted to be a guard at ‘the ‘house of special purpose’. I did not have reason to kill any of the Romanovs. Most of the young guards, the other boys from the factory, felt as I did. We did not hate the Imperial family; to the contrary, we regarded them with respect. Many of the boys still held to the religious belief that the tsar was divine, an emissary of God himself. In the case of the young grand duchesses; we had never seen such beautiful girls. Even the house maids liked the girls as the sisters did not put on any airs but even assisted the maids in their housecleaning duties. The grand duchesses darned their own socks and made up their beds. All save the eldest sister, the sad looking blond one, were open and friendly. I speak for most of the boys who guarded the four grand duchesses when I say the last thing on this earth that we wished was to harm these girls. Kill them? It was unthinkable. I was 17 when I began my guard duty at the great house once known as the Ipatiev Mansion, but which the Bolsheviks renamed ‘The House of Special Purpose.
Laura Rose (The Passion of Marie Romanov)
Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b, Itziti 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organised victimisation of children and adults. Dissociation, amnesia and attachment, in particular, have been identified as important factors that compel victims to obey their abusers whilst inhibiting them from disclosing their abuse or seeking help (see Epstein et al. 2011, Sachs and Galton 2008). Therapists and social workers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by perpetrators of organised abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterised either as dissociated automatons mindlessly perpetuating the abuse that they, too, were subjected to as children, or else as cruel and manipulative criminals with expert foreknowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organised abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies of the perpetrators. Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strategies designed to terrorise children into silence and obedience, the emphasis of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organised abuse has overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and violence as social practices.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
Reagan understood that immigrants are coming here to work, not live on the dole. He also grasped that natives and immigrants don’t compete with one another for jobs in a zero-sum labor market and that our policy makers would do better to focus less on protecting U.S. workers from immigrant competition and more on expanding the economic pie. In his November 1979 speech announcing his candidacy for president, Reagan called for free labor flows throughout North America. Reagan knew that immigration, like free trade, which he also supported, benefits everyone in the long run.
Jason L. Riley (Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders)
Theoretically it is, indeed, asserted that the relation between employer and employee is based upon a contract for the accomplishment of a definite purpose. The purpose in this case is social production. But a contract has meaning only when both parties participate equally in the purpose. In reality, however, the worker has today no voice in determining production, for this is given over completely to the employer. The consequence is that the worker is debased by doing a thousand things which constantly serve only to injure the whole community for the advantage of the employer.
Rudolf Rocker (Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Working Classics))
Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.
Robert D. Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community)
Usually it is the police, or sometimes, in cases of child abuse, a social worker. These are the people who have the best chance of being able to tell from behavioral clues if someone is lying. A liar has usually had no chance to rehearse, and is most likely to be either afraid of being caught or guilty about the wrong action. While the police and social workers may be well-intentioned, most are not well trained in how to ask unbiased and non-leading questions. They have not been taught how to evaluate behavioral clues to truthfulness and lying, and they are biased in their typical presumption.9 They
Paul Ekman (Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage)
In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at the time of disclosure that the bond between them seems irreparable. In this situation, no useful purpose is served by trying to separate the mother and father and keep the daughter at home. The daughter has already been emotionally expelled from her family; removing her to protective custody is simply the concrete expression of the family reality. These are the cases which many agencies call their “tragedies.” This report of a child protective worker illustrates a case where removing the child from the home was the only reasonable course of action: Division of Family and Children’s Services received an anonymous telephone call on Sept. 14 from a man who stated that he overheard Tracy W., age 8, of [address] tell his daughter of a forced oral-genital assault, allegedly perpetrated against this child by her mother’s boyfriend, one Raymond S. Two workers visited the W. home on Sept. 17. According to their report, Mrs. W. was heavily under the influence of alcohol at the time of the visit. Mrs. W. stated immediately that she was aware why the two workers wanted to see her, because Mr. S. had “hurt her little girl.” In the course of the interview, Mrs. W. acknowledged and described how Mr. S. had forced Tracy to have relations with him. Workers then interviewed Tracy and she verified what mother had stated. According to Mrs. W., Mr. S. admitted the sexual assault, claiming that he was drunk and not accountable for his actions. Mother then stated to workers that she banished Mr. S. from her home. I had my first contact with mother and child at their home on Sept. 20 and I subsequently saw this family once a week. Mother was usually intoxicated and drinking beer when I saw her. I met Mr. S. on my second visit. Mr. S. denied having had any sexual relations with Tracy. Mother explained that she had obtained a license and planned to marry Mr. S. On my third visit, Mrs. W. was again intoxicated and drinking despite my previous request that she not drink during my visit. Mother explained that Mr. S. had taken off to another state and she never wanted to see him again. On this visit mother demanded that Tracy tell me the details of her sexual involvement with Mr. S. On my fourth visit, Mr. S. and Mrs. S. were present. Mother explained that they had been married the previous Saturday. On my fifth visit, Mr. S. was not present. During our discussion, mother commented that “Bay was not the first one who had Tracy.” After exploring this statement with mother and Tracy, it became clear that Tracy had been sexually exploited in the same manner at age six by another of Mrs. S.'s previous boyfriends. On my sixth visit, Mrs. S. stated that she could accept Tracy’s being placed with another family as long as it did not appear to Tracy that it was her mother’s decision to give her up. Mother also commented, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” It appears that Mrs. S. has had a number of other children all of whom have lived with other relatives or were in foster care for part of their lives. Tracy herself lived with a paternal aunt from birth to age five.
Judith Lewis Herman (Father-Daughter Incest (with a new Afterword))
We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
there is no stronger taboo today than talking about race. In many cases, just being accused of “racism” can get you fired. Yet, teachers in America know the races differ in school achievement; policemen know the races differ in crime rates; social workers know the races differ in rates of welfare dependency or getting infected with AIDS. And sports fans know that Blacks excel at boxing, basketball, and running. They all wonder why. Some blame poverty, White racism, and the legacy of slavery. Although many doubt that “White racism” really tells the whole story, few dare share their doubts. When it comes to race, do you really dare to say what you think?
J. Philippe Rushton
relationship with an Aryan worker; a Jewish housepainter who made jokes about Hitler was informed on by his neighbour; a chauffeur sent a letter to the authorities saying his Jewish boss had smuggled illegal publications into the country from the Netherlands. Of all the Gestapo cases against Jews, Johnson’s research showed that no less than 41 per cent started with an informant or a complaint. Only 19 per cent were uncovered by the activities of the Gestapo itself, and 8 per cent came from other Nazi organisations. (Similar research into dossiers in Würzburg showed that no fewer than 57 per cent of the Jews arrested had been turned in by German citizens.)
Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
I want to make it clear that I am not implying here that all housing issues can be solved through market solutions. Many cases of homelessness, for instance, particularly in affluent cities, stem from social welfare policies and require and immediate government action. It is important from the beginning to clearly separate emergency social welfare from housing policy. Too often, housing policy is conceived as an extension of social welfare applied to the middle class. In every large city, a small number of households - some may be one-person households - are unable to pay for their housing. They end up in the streets. These households may be permanently or temporarily disabled - physically or mentally - or may have experienced bad luck that results in long unemployment periods. It is certainly the duty of the government to provide a shelter for them as an emergency service. Once in an emergency shelter, social workers can identify those who are likely to be permanently unable to earn an income and then direct them toward a social housing shelter, where specialized staff will follow up on their case. Other homeless households may need only temporary help to find a job and a house they can afford before they rejoin the city's active population. The provision of homeless shelters is not part of housing policy, as it has little to do with supply and demand.
Alain Bertaud (Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities)
a blood-spattered Utopia, now on the fringe of German soil, where no man was rich and none poor, a shell-burst democracy where all living was a community enterprise, where all food was distributed according to need and not according to pocket, where light, heat, lodging, transportation, medical attention, and funeral benefits were at the cost of the government and available with absolute impartiality to white and black, Jew and Gentile, worker and owner, where the means of production, in this case M1s, 30 caliber machine guns, 90s, 105s, 204s, mortars, bazookas, were in the hands of the masses; that ultimate Christian socialism in which all worked for the common good and the only leisure class were the dead.
Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions)
I wonder if she’s ever encountered a Denver outreach worker with a bleach kit. Did she ever open a baggie from a clean-handed social worker and see a note under the tourniquet and sterile cooker that said, “You are loved as you are,” and did it ever break her heart? Well-meaning notes from church folks aren’t miracles and perhaps they all go unnoticed, but even if that’s the case, the truth remains: God loves Candy now. With dirty feet. Not just after she manages to start making better decisions, not after she washes them herself. God loves us now. Me, Anna, Candy, all of us, as we are. Sometimes just the simple experience of  knowing this, of  knowing that our sin is not what defines us, can finally set us free.
Nadia Bolz-Weber (Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People)
Children learn to justify their aggressive actions early: They hit a younger sibling, who starts to cry, and immediately claim, "But he started it! He deserved it!" Most parents find these childish self- justifications to be of no great consequence, and usually they aren't. But it is sobering (0 realize that the same mechanism underlies the behavior of gangs who bully weaker children, employers who mistreat workers, lovers who abuse each other, police officers who continue beating a suspect who has surrendered, tyrants who imprison and torture ethnic minorities, and soldiers who commit atrocities against civilians. In all these cases, a vicious circle is created: Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression.
Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson (Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts)
God bless her, but the child is wild. It’s not her fault. But she’ll never be normal. At least let her enjoy her childhood. You read the report, didn’t you? There was rotten food in the fridge, clothes all over the floor. She came here wearing one of her father’s T-shirts and his baseball cap. You just wanted to throw out all the things that she had in her suitcase and give her a chance to start all over again. And the child’s fingernails were long. Who ever heard of long fingernails on a twelve-year-old? And she smelled!’ ‘Is she worse than Rodney?’ ‘Rodney? No, God no. She doesn’t need psychiatric help. I’m just saying that she needs a couple extra things like a sweater or some new toys of her own.’ Later that afternoon, Isabelle came into my room with a box filled with girls’ toys. I pulled out a blue pony with long yellow hair and pink seashells on its butt. ‘Who was Rodney?’ I asked her. A little boy who lived here and used to wear swimming goggles all the time. Who’s been talking to you about Rodney?’ ‘You mentioned him to the social worker.’ ‘Lord! Don’t worry what I say to the social worker. I have to make you sound like a real sorrowful case to be able to get you more things. See, I got you a pretty pony, didn’t I?’ I guess it was worth having your self-esteem destroyed if there was a free toy involved. Isabelle told me that she was trying to get us a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say about me to get it.
Heather O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals)
Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain’s financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers, and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain’s enduring legacy. So too will Iran’s construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama’s enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.
Alan M. Dershowitz (The Case Against the Iran Deal: How Can We Now Stop Iran from Getting Nukes?)
When police arrested a New York bus driver for running down a schoolgirl in a crosswalk… the New York Daily News decried what it saw as mistreatment of one of the city’s bus drivers. The head of the transit union protested this enforcement of the city’s new Right of Way Law as “outrageous, illogical and anti-worker” while branding the head of a city street safety advocacy group “a progressive intellectual jackass.” The same union previously launched a work slowdown when another bus driver faced sanctions for killing a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a crosswalk in December 2014. All this occurred because police sought to enforce _misdemeanor_ charges in cases of pedestrians who were run over in crosswalks where they had the clear right of way.
Edward Humes (Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation)
The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left wing, often radical left wing. This is going from the poorest artist to the highest paid curators in institutions....But if this is the case—that we are all in a field where everyone is left-wing values then why are we all agreed that the art world is a giant piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits it's artists, that relies on unpaid labor? This to me is living proof that art can't change the work and we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all actually have and how power needs to be built. It doesn't come naturally and isn't a divine gift you get by being an artist. --Kerry Guinan
Sarah Jaffe (Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone)
In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
Historic burials. Every forensic anthropologist handles these cases. Old bones unearthed by dogs, construction workers, spring floods, grave diggers. The coroner’s office is the overseer of death in Quebec Province. If you die inappropriately, not under the care of a physician, not in bed, the coroner wants to know why. If your death threatens to take others along, the coroner wants to know that. The coroner demands an explanation of violent, unexpected, or untimely death, but persons long gone are of little interest. While their passings may once have cried out for justice, or heralded warning of an impending epidemic, the voices have been still for too long. Their antiquity established, these finds are turned over to the archaeologists. This promised to be such a case. Please.
Kathy Reichs (Déjà Dead (Temperance Brennan, #1))
in the case of the Coxey industrials, they appeared to want something they had not earned. Their demands implied that poverty and unemployment did not stem from laziness or even bad luck, but rather from larger, systemic problems in the economy, in society—factors that were beyond any one person’s control.59 Such a claim raised vexing questions. Self-reliance, resourcefulness, individual initiative—these traits were intrinsic to the ideal of what it meant to be American. Americans always made do. If government took greater responsibility for people’s well-being, would that not alter the very essence of the United States, seduce and possibly corrupt its character? Was that not the aim of those foreign theories spread in workers’ enclaves in the big cities—anarchism, Communism, Socialism?
Philip Dray (There is Power in a Union)
The three topics of this book - technological change, education, and inequality - are intricately related in a kind of 'race.' During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the rising supply of educated workers outstripped the increased demand caused by technological advances. Higher real incomes were accompanied by lower inequality. But during the last two decades of the century the reverse was the case, and there was sharply rising inequality. Put another way, in the first half of the century, education raced ahead of technology, but later in the century, technology raced ahead of educational gains. The skill bias of technology did not change much across the century, nor did its rate of change. Rather, the sharp rise in inequality was largely due to an educational slowdown.
Claudia Goldin (The Race between Education and Technology)
Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
The logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the fathers, feminist officials can then present themselves as the solution to the problem they themselves have created. The more child abuse—whether by mothers or foster care providers or even by social workers themselves (which is often the case)—the only option on the table is to further and endlessly expand the child abuse bureaucracy. Even when the horrors are exposed, meaningful reform is then deftly deflected with the self-serving argument that the welfare agencies are “overworked and underfunded,” thus rationalizing expansion of the very machinery creating the horrors. “State agencies . . . frequently complain that they are understaffed and overworked—even while justifying more and more intervention into families.
Stephen Baskerville
Tudom, vétkesek is, nemcsak áldozatok. Melyik volt előbb? Ezer felmentést tartalékolok, s ugyanannyi változatát tudom megcáfolni a folyékony vagy szótlan mentegetőzésnek. Nem tagadom, odatartják a szenvedésnek előbb akarnok, majd tehetetlen, végül csak emlékező arcukat. Túlságosan is odatartják? Hosszan nézik a falat egy üres képkeret közében, a látottakkal összehasonlítják életüket, és belebetegszenek. Ingerszegény kísérleti ebek, elegük van a piros lámpából meg a nyáladzásból. Ünnepelni szeretnének, és földhöz vágják a naptárt, melyből egy aluszékony nyomdász kifelejtette a piros betűket. Kibicsaklottak a jelen időből, múltjukban csupa szögesdróttal körülvett esemény, s úgy néznek a holnapi napra, mint gyanúsított a kihallgatóra. Bőrkesztyűvel takarják műkezüket, de mikor simogatni szeretnének – lehúzzák.
György Konrád (The Case Worker)
Some mental healthcare workers are aware of clients with high needs, such as dissociative disorders and personality disorders, who have histories of sexual abuse (contact offences), usually from early childhood, involving two or more adults acting together and multiple child victims (Gold et al., 1996; McClellan et al., 1995; Middleton & Butler, 1998). This has been defined as “organised abuse” (Bibby, 1996; La Fontaine, 1993). Excluded from this definition are cases where a child is sexually abused by multiple perpetrators who are unaware of one another, such as survival sex amongst homeless youths, or where abuse is limited to a single household or family and there are no extra-familial victims (La Fontaine, 1993). Organised abuse: A neglected category of sexual abuse. Journal of Mental Health, 2012; 21(5): 499–508
Michael Salter
As it turned out, Sharpe was right. Cooperation succumbed to market forces, but even more to the war waged on it by the business classes. By 1887 the latter were determined to destroy the Knights, with their incessant boycotts, their strikes (sometimes involving hundreds of thousands), their revolutionary agitation, and their labor parties organized across the country. In the two years after the infamous Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Great Upheaval of 1886, in which 200,000 trade unionists across the country went on a four-day-long strike for the eight-hour day but in most cases failed—partly because Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights, who had always disliked strikes, refused to endorse the action and encouraged the Knights not to participate—capitalist repression swept the nation. Joseph Rayback summarizes: The first of the Knights’ ventures to feel the full effect of the post-Haymarket reaction were their cooperative enterprises. In part the very nature of such enterprises worked against them. The successful ventures became joint-stock corporations, the wage-earning shareholders and managers hiring labor like any other industrial unit. In part the cooperatives were destroyed by inefficient managers, squabbles among shareholders, lack of capital, and injudicious borrowing of money at high rates of interest. Just as important was the attitude of competitors. Railroads delayed the building of tracks, refused to furnish cars, or refused to haul them. Manufacturers of machinery and producers of raw materials, pressed by private business, refused to sell their products to the cooperative workshops and paralyzed operations. By 1888 none of the Order’s cooperatives were in existence.170
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
New bureaucracy takes the form not of a specific, delimited function performed by particular workers but invades all areas of work, with the result that – as Kafka prophesied – workers become their own auditors, forced to assess their own performance. Take, for example, the ‘new system’ that OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) uses to inspect Further Education colleges. Under the old system, a college would have a ‘heavy’ inspection once every four years or so, i.e. one involving many lesson observations and a large number of inspectors present in the college. Under the new, ‘improved’ system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a ‘light’ inspection. But the downside of this ‘light’ inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirrored by in the change from the Research Assessment Exercise to the Research Excellence Framework in higher education: periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual anxiety.)
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
Even when a couple manages to establish harmonious family commitments, the stereotypes on which these commitments rest often make life outside the family even more harsh for people who do not or cannot conform to gender expectations. The more women are defined in terms of an ideal myth, for example, the more possible it is for men to ignore or actively abuse women who do not meet that ideal. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the cult of True Womanhood was perfectly compatible with the exploitation of female slaves and factory workers. In the twentieth century, a recurring theme in rape and sexual harassment cases has been the notion that if a woman has ever departed from ideal behavior in any way, she has no real 'womanhood' to be violated or offended. The wives and mothers of rapists almost invariably, and usually in good faith, defend them as the soul of chivalry -- at least toward women who conform to the prevailing myths.
Stephanie Coontz (The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap)
The New Testament writers, even while writing the texts on love and forbearance that we are trying to understand and obey, condemn false prophets, expel the man who is sleeping with his step-mother, declare that it would be better for Judas Iscariot if he had not been born, assure readers that the evil of Alexander the metal-worker will be required of him, and solemnly warn of eternal judgement to come. Sometimes, of course, churches with right-wing passions use these same texts to bully their members unto unflagging submission to the local dictator. The threat of church discipline can degenerate into a form of manipulation, of spiritual abuse. Where, then, is the line to be drawn? To a postmodern relativist, any form of confessional discipline will seem nothing more than intolerant, manipulative abuse. From a Christian perspective, what lines must be drawn and why? How does Christian love work itself out in such cases? (p. 149).
D.A. Carson (Love in Hard Places)
In any case, it is not as if the ‘light’ inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucault’s account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
[Refers to 121 children taken into care in Cleveland due to suspected abuse (1987) and later returned to their parents] Sue Richardson, the child abuse consultant at the heart of the crisis, watched as cases began to unravel: “All the focus started to fall on the medical findings; other supportive evidence, mainly which we held in the social services department, started to be screened out. A situation developed where the cases either were proven or fell on the basis of medical evidence alone. Other evidence that was available to the court, very often then, never got put. We would have had statement from the child, the social workers and the child psychologist’s evidence from interviewing. We would have evidence of prior concerns, either from social workers or teachers, about the child’s behaviour or other symptoms that they might have been showing, which were completely aside from the medical findings. (Channel 4 1997) Ten years after the Cleveland crisis, Sue Richardson was adamant that evidence relating to children’s safety was not presented to the courts which subsequently returned those children to their parents: “I am saying that very clearly. In some cases, evidence was not put in the court. In other cases, agreements were made between lawyers not to put the case to the court at all, particularly as the crisis developed. Latterly, that children were sent home subject to informal agreements or agreements between lawyers. The cases never even got as far as the court. (Channel 4, 1997)” Nor is Richardson alone. Jayne Wynne, one of the Leeds paediatricians who had pioneered the use of RAD as an indicator of sexual abuse and who subsequently had detailed knowledge of many of the Cleveland children, remains concerned by the haphazard approach of the courts to their protection. I think the implication is that the children were left unprotected. The children who were being abused unfortunately returned to homes and the abuse may well have been ongoing. (Channel 4 1997)
Heather Bacon (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
Anti-government rhetoric appears to offer a vision of greater efficiency, self-reliance, and personal freedom. (For obvious reasons, it also usually enjoys greater financial backing and better organized support.) Unfortunately, this rhetoric ignores what has historically been most valuable about our skepticism toward government—the emphasis it places on personal responsibility from all citizens. Instead, it argues against the excesses of government but not against those of the marketplace, where there is great power to disrupt the lives of workers, families, and communities. It even argues against the basic protections government extends to the well-being of individuals, families, and communities, without offering an alternative way of safeguarding them. In fact, its extreme case against government, often including intense personal attacks on government officials and political leaders, is designed not just to restrain government but to advance narrow religious, political, and economic agendas.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us)
The most groundbreaking and important work can easily be forgotten and undervalued. Just like cleaning, nursing and teaching today, some of the most important jobs that keep society functioning, are desperately underpaid. While some might argue that bankers, academics and CEOs are paid more because they contribute more to the economy, we need to remember that pay is as much about power as it is productivity. Imagine for a moment what would happen if all the hedge fund managers in the City of London decided collectively to quit their jobs. How much of an impact on our lives would this actually have? While I'm sure there is a case to be argued that the loss of these jobs would cause some damage to the economy, it is not unreasonable to ask whether the world might actually be a better place? Compare this to the alternative case where all the carers - the workers who look after children, the elderly and the sick - stopped turning up for work. The negative human impact would be undeniably immediate and devastating.
Ben Tippet (Split: Class Divides Uncovered (Outspoken by Pluto))
Business was booming and people were getting rich. Many bureaucrats enjoyed the new sense of power they had over their fellow citizens, and became known as kleine, or small, Hitlers. Hitler and members of the Nazi Party continued in their insane quest to become the leaders of a unified Europe. Never mind that this unification would be by force and that it would draw the entire world into another major catastrophe. Already Jews and others, who were considered undesirables by the Nazi régime, were fleeing the country.... That is, if they could afford the passage out. Hitler’s expansionary philosophy was apparent, but no one would risk speaking up. Even friends could not be trusted, and so it became a time of great anxiety. Fellow workers turned in colleagues if they thought it could advance their own position. In some cases, even family members could not be trusted! Hitler said “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell, or an extremely wretched life as paradise.
Hank Bracker
Like Barry before him, Diop complained that Chinese projects were negotiated with a total lack of transparency. “If we are paying for big projects we want them to include real transfer of technology and of expertise, but the Chinese bring all their own workers, and the few Guineans are reduced to the role of task boys. In one case we had here, a Chinese company was hired to build a bridge and they did most of their work at night, and they wouldn’t let anyone onto their site. Between the groundbreaking and inauguration ceremonies, they give out no information at all, nothing.” Diop said that his group and others in the civil society coalition had repeatedly tried to speak with Chinese contractors and Chinese diplomats to impress upon them the need to reconsider their approach to things in Guinea, but had been either patronized or turned away. “You go to see them and they say go see your minister, or go see your president, he’s the one who approved these arrangements.” I heard very similar language from disgruntled civil society figures virtually everywhere I traveled.
Howard W. French (China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa)
In their relentless determination to punish, the family police have little regard for the rights of children (that elsewhere they claim to champion). Long and intrusive interrogations of children, with relentless suggestions of the alleged brutality and lust of their parents against them, poison their relationships with their parents, sometimes permanently. “Long, repeated interrogations by social workers—and the outright intimidation that sometimes accompanies them—forced physical and sexual examinations in some cases to determine if they have been sexually abused, and (essentially) forced therapy by psychologists, counselors,” is described by Krason (and others), who suggests they could be “considered torture under international human rights law.” The foster care into which children are placed after being taken from their parents is a far more likely setting for serious abuse than the children’s natural family, with more than 10 times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse of children in group homes than in the general population.
Stephen Baskerville
Each one of these decisions, even when they were ultimately reversed, set recovery efforts back further. Is this all a masterful conspiracy to make sure Puerto Ricans are too desperate, distracted, and despairing to resist Wall Street’s bitter economic medicine? I don’t believe it’s anything that coordinated. Much of this is simply what happens when you bleed the public sphere for decades, laying off competent workers and neglecting basic maintenance. Run-of-the-mill corruption and cronyism are no doubt at work as well. But it’s also true that many governments have deployed a starve-then-sell strategy when it comes to public services: cut health care/transit/education to the bone until people are so disillusioned and desperate that they are willing to try anything, including selling off those services altogether. And if Rosselló and the Trump administration have seemed remarkably unconcerned about the nonstop relief and reconstruction screw-ups, the attitude may be at least partly informed by an understanding that the worse things get, the stronger the case for privatization becomes.
Naomi Klein (The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists)
You look terrible,” was Ron’s greeting as he entered the room to wake Harry. “Not for long,” said Harry, yawning. They found Hermione downstairs in the kitchen. She was being served coffee and hot rolls by Kreacher and wearing the slightly manic expression that Harry associated with exam review. “Robes,” she said under her breath, acknowledging their presence with a nervous nod and continuing to poke around in her beaded bag, “Polyjuice Potion . . . Invisbility Cloak . . . Decoy Detonators . . . You should each take a couple just in case. . . . Puking Pastilles, Nosebleed Nougat, Extendable Ears . . .” They gulped down their breakfast, then set off upstairs, Kreacher bowing them out and promising to have a steak-and-kidney pie ready for them when they returned. “Bless him,” said Ron fondly, “and when you think I used to fantasize about cutting off his head and sticking it on the wall.” They made their way onto the front step with immense caution: They could see a couple of puffy-eyed Death Eaters watching the house from across the misty square. Hermione Disapparated with Ron first, then came back for Harry. After the usual brief spell of darkness and near suffocation, Harry found himself in the tiny alleyway where the first phase of their plan was scheduled to take place. It was as yet deserted, except for a couple of large bins; the first Ministry workers did not usually appear here until at least eight o’clock. “Right then,” said Hermione, checking her watch. “She ought to be here in about five minutes. When I’ve Stunned her—” “Hermione, we know,” said Ron sternly. “And I thought we were supposed to open the door before she got here?” Hermione squealed. “I nearly forgot! Stand back—” She pointed her wand at the padlocked and heavily graffitied fire door beside them, which burst open with a crash. The dark corridor behind it led, as they knew from their careful scouting trips, into an empty theater. Hermione pulled the door back toward her, to make it look as though it was still closed. “And now,” she said, turning back to face the other two in the alleyway, “we put on the Cloak again—” “—and we wait,” Ron finished, throwing it over Hermione’s head like a blanket over a birdcage and rolling his eyes at Harry.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7))
In one case, the NSA and the UK spy agency Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, used a sophisticated method called Quantum Insert to hack the machines of Belgian telecom workers to gain access to the telecom’s network and to a router the company used for processing the traffic of mobile phone users. The elaborate attack involved using high-speed servers the NSA had set up at key internet switching points to intercept the surfing traffic of system administrators who worked for the telecom. The spy agencies first collected extensive intelligence on the workers—their e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and possible surfing habits—then the high-speed servers watched for requests from the employees’ machines for specific web pages, such as the victim’s own LinkedIn profile page. When the victim tried to access the LinkedIn page, the server would intercept the request before it reached LinkedIn and would feed a fake LinkedIn page to the victim that injected malware into his machine. Once on the system administrator’s machine, the spy agencies could then use his credentials to gain access to other parts of the telecom network to subvert the router.
Kim Zetter (Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon)
Without doubt Christian asceticism, both outwardly and in its inner meaning, contains many different things. But it has had a definitely rational character in its highest Occidental forms as early as the Middle Ages, and in several forms even in antiquity. The great historical significance of Western monasticism, as contrasted with that of the Orient, is based on this fact, not in all cases, but in its general type. In the rules of St. Benedict, still more with the monks of Cluny, again with the Cistercians, and most strongly the Jesuits, it has become emancipated from planless otherworldliness and irrational self-torture. It had developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturæ, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature. It attempted to subject man to the supremacy of a purposeful will, to bring his actions under constant self-control with a careful consideration of their ethical consequences. Thus it trained the monk, objectively, as a worker in the service of the kingdom of God, and thereby further, subjectively, assured the salvation of his soul.
Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)
The fundamental errors. – For man to feel any sort of psychical pleasure or displeasure he must be in the grip of one of these two illusions: either he believes in the identity of certain facts, certain sensations: in which case he experiences psychical pleasure or displeasure through comparing his present states with past ones and declaring them identical or not identical (as happens in all recollection); or he believes in freedom of will, for instance when he thinks ‘I did not have to do this’, ‘this could have happened differently’, and likewise gains pleasure or displeasure. Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasure a humanity would never have come into existence – whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the eternal miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history! –Vanitas vanitatum homo [man is the vanity of vanities].
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
Then one day, as he was watching one of his workers sift a shovelful of earth, something among the rocks and sand caught his eye, “a flat fragment of some brick-red substance,” which appeared briefly and then disappeared. It looked, thought Suggs, exactly like a piece of pottery. But that couldn’t be—pottery was found throughout Island Southeast Asia and much of Melanesia, but it had never been seen east of Samoa. And yet, there it was: an unmistakable potsherd from the lowest level of the dark band of sand that indicated human habitation. Almost immediately, a second, larger fragment emerged, then a third: a piece of an ancient pot rim with a grooved and rounded lip and marks on the inner and outer surfaces, “from the hand of the potter who had smoothed this vessel in the dim past.” In all, five fragments of pottery were discovered, belonging to just three vessels: a poorly fired, crumbly brown pot with a coarse temper; a well-fired reddish-brown bowl with a flared rim; and a fine-tempered fragment, also reddish brown, with marks that showed it had been polished using some kind of tool. Modest though they were, these ceramic tidbits changed “the complexion of Polynesian prehistory”—though, as was so often the case, it was not immediately clear in precisely what way.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labour was unpaid. ‘They are excluded from the realm of exchange and consequently have no value,’ wrote Delphy. Even outside the home, women were more likely than men to work as volunteers. This couldn’t be explained by the nature of the work they were doing. It wasn’t that cleaning, cooking, caring, or doing agricultural work were always unpaid. People could be hired to do these jobs, and these workers would expect to receive wages. It wasn’t the case, either, that wives were getting nothing in return. It’s just that what they were getting in return was so little. The wife’s job was to work, honour, and obey, Delphy concluded. What she got in return was upkeep. This situation was so obviously exploitative that ‘when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife’. Delphy’s argument was that, rather than her work being worthless in monetary terms, it was a wife’s relationship to production that gave her labour so little value. It was because she was a wife doing it, in the same way that if a slave were doing it, they wouldn’t be paid either. In the family, and by extension in wider society, the product of her labour was seen to belong to her husband.
Angela Saini (The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule)
There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.
Whitley Strieber (The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained)
...Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media... Given that most of the hearings took place out of sight of the press, the following examples are taken from the recollection of child protection workers present in court. In one case, during a controversy that centred fundamentally around disputes over the meaning of RAD [reflex anal dilatation], a judge refused to allow ‘any evidence about children’s bottoms’ in his courtroom. A second judge — hearing an application to have their children returned by parents about whom social services had grave worries told the assembled lawyers that, as she lived in the area, she could not help but be influenced by what she read in the press. Hardly surprising then that child protection workers soon found courts not hearing their applications, cutting them short, or loosely supervising informal deals which allowed children to be sent back to parents, even in cases where there was explicit evidence of apparent abuse to be explained and dealt with. (p21) [reflex anal dilatation (RAD): a simple clue which is suggestive of anal penetration from outside. It had been recognised as a valuable weapon in the armoury of doctors examining children for many decades and was endorsed by both the British Medical Association and the Association of Police Surgeons. (p18)]
Sue Richardson (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
The market is the first force that has led to the shriveling of citizenship. The classic case is the Wal-Mart effect. A town has a Main Street of small businesses and mom-and-pop shops. The shopkeepers and their customers have relationships that are not just about economic transactions but are set in a context of family, neighborhood, people, and place. Then Wal-Mart comes to town. It offers lower prices. It offers convenience. Because of its scale and might in the marketplace, it can compensate its workers stingily and drive out competition.   The presence of Wal-Mart leads the townspeople to think of themselves primarily as consumers, and to shed other aspects of their identities, like being neighbors or parishioners or friends. As consumers first, they gravitate to the place with the lowest prices. Wal-Mart thrives. The small businesses struggle and lay off workers. They cut back on their sponsorship of tee ball, their support of the food bank. As the mom-and-pops give way to the big box, and commutes become necessary, lives become more frenetic and stressful. People see each other less often. The sense of mutual obligation that townsfolk once shared starts to evaporate. Microhabits of caring and sociability fall away. In this tableau of libertarian citizenship, market forces triumph and everyone gets better deals—yet everyone is now in many senses poorer.
Eric Liu (The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government)
I will show that this spectacular increase in inequality largely reflects an unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes from labor, a veritable separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population. One possible explanation of this is that the skills and productivity of these top managers rose suddenly in relation to those of other workers. Another explanation, which to me seems more plausible and turns out to be much more consistent with the evidence, is that these top managers by and large have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity, which in any case is very difficult to estimate in a large organization. This phenomenon is seen mainly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Britain, and it may be possible to explain it in terms of the history of social and fiscal norms in those two countries over the past century. The tendency is less marked in other wealthy countries (such as Japan, Germany, France, and other continental European states), but the trend is in the same direction. To expect that the phenomenon will attain the same proportions elsewhere as it has done in the United States would be risky until we have subjected it to a full analysis—which unfortunately is not that simple, given the limits of the available data.
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres-involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated-though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third "massacre," the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel. The Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere. The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases-in Jaffa, Acre, and so on-are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the
Benny Morris (1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War)
The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage—not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even take into account the occasional use of bathroom tissue for unpredictable/creative purposes such as applying/removing cosmetics, beveragespill management, etc. For this reason, rather than trying to package bathroom tissue in small one-transaction packets (as is done with premoistened towelettes, for example), which can be wasteful in some cases and limiting in other cases, it has been traditional to package this product in bulk distribution units whose size exceeds the maximum amount of squares that an individual could conceivably use in a single transaction (barring force majeure). This reduces to a minimum the number of transactions in which the distribution unit is depleted (the roll runs out) during the transaction, a situation that can lead to emotional stress for the affected employee. However, it does present the manager with some challenges in that the distribution unit is rather bulky and must be repeatedly used by a number of different individuals if it is not to be wasted.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
The fact is that the individual, though its genotypic sex is fixed at fertilisation, can be profoundly affected by the environment in which it develops. In the ants, bees, and termites the larval nutrition determines whether the genotypic female individual will become a fully developed female (‘queen’) or a sexually retarded worker. In these cases the whole organism is affected; but the gonads do not play a part in establishing the sexual differences of the body, or soma. In the vertebrates, however, the hormones secreted by the gonads are the essential regulators. Numerous experiments show that by varying the hormonal (endocrine) situation, sex can be profoundly affected. Grafting and castration experiments on adult animals and man have contributed to the modern theory of sexuality, according to which the soma is in a way identical in male and female vertebrates. It may be regarded as a kind of neutral element upon which the influence of the gonad imposes the sexual characteristics. Some of the hormones secreted by the gonad act as stimulators, others as inhibitors. Even the genital tract itself is somatic, and embryological investigations show that it develops in the male or female direction from an indifferent and in some respects hermaphroditic condition under the hormonal influence. Intersexuality may result when the hormones are abnormal and hence neither one of the two sexual potentialities is exclusively realised.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
It is often said that Vietnam was the first television war. By the same token, Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media. By the summer of 1987 Cleveland had become above all, a hot media story. The Daily Mail, for example, had seven reporters, plus its northern editor, based in Middlesbrough full time. Most other news papers and television news teams followed suit. What were all the reporters looking for? Not children at risk. Not abusing adults. Aggrieved parents were the mother lode sought by these prospecting journalists. Many of these parents were only too happy to tell — and in some cases, it would appear, sell— their stories. Those stories are truly extraordinary. In many cases they bore almost no relation to the facts. Parents were allowed - encouraged to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a runaway witch-hunt and these accounts were duly fed to the public. Nowhere in any of the reporting is there any sign of counterbalancing information from child protection workers or the organisations that employed them. Throughout the summer of 1987 newspapers ‘reported’ what they termed a national scandal of innocent families torn apart. The claims were repeated in Parliament and then recycled as established ‘facts’ by the media. The result was that the courts themselves began to be paralysed by the power of this juggernaut of press reporting — ‘journalism’ which created and painstakingly fed a public mood which brooked no other version of the story. (p21)
Sue Richardson (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
Heritage dot org, May 5, 2021 Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism By Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. CRT [Critical Race Theory] theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.” 2. CRT intellectuals are trying to change the view that racism is an individual issue, and insist it is systemic, in order to get society to change the entire system. 3. The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race. Race is suddenly all the rage. Employees, students, and parents are being inundated with “anti-racism” training programs and school curricula that insist America was built on white supremacy. Anyone who raises even the slightest objection is often deemed irredeemably racist. But what if the impetus behind a particular type of race-based training programs and curricula we see spreading at the moment is not exclusively, or even primarily, about skin color? What if race is just a façade for a particular strain of thought? What if what stands behind all this is the old, color-blind utopian dream of uniting the “workers of the world,” and eradicating capitalism? … If this all sounds very Marxist, it should. All the giants in whiteness studies, from Noel Ignatiev, to David Roediger, to their ideological lodestar, W.E.B. Du Bois—who first coined the term “whiteness” to begin with—were Marxist. In the cases of Ignatiev and Du Bois, they were actual Communist Party members.
Mike Gonzalez
she feels lucky to have a job, but she is pretty blunt about what it is like to work at Walmart: she hates it. She’s worked at the local Walmart for nine years now, spending long hours on her feet waiting on customers and wrestling heavy merchandise around the store. But that’s not the part that galls her. Last year, management told the employees that they would get a significant raise. While driving to work or sorting laundry, Gina thought about how she could spend that extra money. Do some repairs around the house. Or set aside a few dollars in case of an emergency. Or help her sons, because “that’s what moms do.” And just before drifting off to sleep, she’d think about how she hadn’t had any new clothes in years. Maybe, just maybe. For weeks, she smiled at the notion. She thought about how Walmart was finally going to show some sign of respect for the work she and her coworkers did. She rolled the phrase over in her mind: “significant raise.” She imagined what that might mean. Maybe $2.00 more an hour? Or $2.50? That could add up to $80 a week, even $100. The thought was delicious. Then the day arrived when she received the letter informing her of the raise: 21 cents an hour. A whopping 21 cents. For a grand total of $1.68 a day, $8.40 a week. Gina described holding the letter and looking at it and feeling like it was “a spit in the face.” As she talked about the minuscule raise, her voice filled with anger. Anger, tinged with fear. Walmart could dump all over her, but she knew she would take it. She still needed this job. They could treat her like dirt, and she would still have to show up. And that’s exactly what they did. In 2015, Walmart made $14.69 billion in profits, and Walmart’s investors pocketed $10.4 billion from dividends and share repurchases—and Gina got 21 cents an hour more. This isn’t a story of shared sacrifice. It’s not a story about a company that is struggling to keep its doors open in tough times. This isn’t a small business that can’t afford generous raises. Just the opposite: this is a fabulously wealthy company making big bucks off the Ginas of the world. There are seven members of the Walton family, Walmart’s major shareholders, on the Forbes list of the country’s four hundred richest people, and together these seven Waltons have as much wealth as about 130 million other Americans. Seven people—not enough to fill the lineup of a softball team—and they have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together. Walmart routinely squeezes its workers, not because it has to, but because it can. The idea that when the company does well, the employees do well, too, clearly doesn’t apply to giants like this one. Walmart is the largest employer in the country. More than a million and a half Americans are working to make this corporation among the most profitable in the world. Meanwhile, Gina points out that at her store, “almost all the young people are on food stamps.” And it’s not just her store. Across the country, Walmart pays such low wages that many of its employees rely on food stamps, rent assistance, Medicaid, and a mix of other government benefits, just to stay out of poverty. The
Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
I don't respond. Instead, I chuck my shoes over the fence and start to climb. When I was twelve, I could climb fences pretty quick. Especially growing up in Tampa where we would hop fences to get to each other's yards. But I'm not even halfway up and i'm winded, my foot has slipped more than once, and I can only imagine what I look like from below. "Shit!" I yell as my toe misses the next opening. Nicole's laughter fills the air. "Stop laughing and start climbing!" "This is priceless," she laughs harder. "Wait. Let me get my camera!" "Nicole! We need to get out of here in case he comes looking for me." "Fine. Fine. Chicken shit." Her shoes fly over my head, and the entire fence shakes. "You owe me." "Stop moving!" I try not to laugh, but it's futile. This is hysterical. "I'm going to pee," tears fall from my eyes as I hold on. "I need a Go-Pro for the next time we go out." "I hate you," I say between giggles. She purposely rocks back, causing me to almost fall. "You only wish you did." "If I fall..." I warn as I sway and try to climb higher. "It'll be what you deserve for making me climb a freaking fence at one in the morning!" The amount of ways that I'm going to pay for this is unimaginable. My co-workers saw me being sung to on stage, I'm sure one of the guys from my squad caught me going backstage, I'm going to have scrapes from climbing a fence, and Nicole will never let me live this down. I reach the top, one leg swung over on one side and one still in Eli-land. And that's when I hear him. "You're just going to run out?" Eli's voice is filled with disbelief. "Just like that?
Corinne Michaels (We Own Tonight (Second Time Around, #1))
But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
The thing is, I don't really have any coming-out narratives of my own. I never felt as though anyone was entitles to a red-carpet presentation of who I am and how I identify. When I initially found myself attracted to women in college, for example, I simply showed up at the next family function with my first girlfriend in tow and introduced her as such. I didn't call each family member ahead of time and instruct them to brace themselves, nor did I write lengthy letters detailing the intricacies of my new desires. Likewise, when I'm meeting people for the first time at parties or other social engagements and they post the inevitable, "So what do you do?" I respond as routinely as possible: "Oh, I work in the sex industry. You?" I'm not trying to be provocative; rather, I've always believed that being "out" is the most powerful tool of activism available to disadvantaged minority communities, sex workers included, I find that when you approach a supposedly radical issue (queerness, nonmonogamy, atheism, gender nonconformity) with the same nonchalance as you would a less controversial topic (accounting, marriage, the weather), you give the other party permission to treat it with the same accepting ambivalence. We're pack animals, and we're constantly comparing ourselves to one another. We look for approval from our peers, and in many cases we use their reactions and opinions to help guide our own. I often observe people, who I've just disclosed to, pause to shift their eyes and gauge the receptiveness of those around them before responding. It'd be a fascinating study if it weren't so disheartening.
Andre Shakti (Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection, and Privacy)
The practice of tipping a paint brush started contaminating everybody and everything in a watch dial factory. Painters noticed that after sneezing into a handkerchief, it would glow. You could see the brush twirlers walking home after dark. Their hair showed a ghostly green excitation, and they could spell out words in the air with their luminous fingers. Some, thinking outside the box, started painting their teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, and other body parts with the luminous paint, then stealing away to the bathroom, turning out the lights, and admiring the effect in the mirror. There was no problem finding gross radium contamination in a factory. There was no need for a radiation detection instrument. All you had to do was close the blinds. Everything glowed; even the ceiling. Most workers were each swallowing about 1.75 grams of radioactive paint per day. By 1922, things started going bad in the radium dial industry. In the next two years, nine young radium painters in the West Orange factory died, and 12 were suffering from devastating illnesses. US Radium, the biggest watch-dial maker in town, strongly denied that anything in their plant could be causing this. No autopsies were performed, and the death certificates recorded anemia, syphilis, stomach ulcers, and necrosis of the jaw as causes. The dead and ailing, however, had dentists in common, and these health professionals had noticed unusual breakdowns of the jaws and teeth in all of these women. It was beginning to look like another case of an occupational hazard, following closely behind tetraethyl lead exposure at General Motors and “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus fumes in the match industry. Could it be the radium?
James Mahaffey (Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima)
One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort. The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17
Rafia Zakaria (Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption)
Though Hoover conceded that some might deem him a “fanatic,” he reacted with fury to any violations of the rules. In the spring of 1925, when White was still based in Houston, Hoover expressed outrage to him that several agents in the San Francisco field office were drinking liquor. He immediately fired these agents and ordered White—who, unlike his brother Doc and many of the other Cowboys, wasn’t much of a drinker—to inform all of his personnel that they would meet a similar fate if caught using intoxicants. He told White, “I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau.” The new policies, which were collected into a thick manual, the bible of Hoover’s bureau, went beyond codes of conduct. They dictated how agents gathered and processed information. In the past, agents had filed reports by phone or telegram, or by briefing a superior in person. As a result, critical information, including entire case files, was often lost. Before joining the Justice Department, Hoover had been a clerk at the Library of Congress—“ I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us,” a co-worker said—and Hoover had mastered how to classify reams of data using its Dewey decimal–like system. Hoover adopted a similar model, with its classifications and numbered subdivisions, to organize the bureau’s Central Files and General Indices. (Hoover’s “Personal File,” which included information that could be used to blackmail politicians, would be stored separately, in his secretary’s office.) Agents were now expected to standardize the way they filed their case reports, on single sheets of paper. This cut down not only on paperwork—another statistical measurement of efficiency—but also on the time it took for a prosecutor to assess whether a case should be pursued.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
Read the following chain of events and see whether a similar pattern might apply to other toxic products that were reported in the news during your lifetime: 1. Workers were told that the paint was nontoxic, although there was no factual basis for this declaration. The employers discounted scientists. The workers believed their superiors. 2. Health complaints were made in ever-increasing frequency. It became obvious that something was seriously wrong. 3. U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies began a campaign of disinformation and bogus medical tests - some of which involved X-rays and may even have made the condition worse. 4. Doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with U.S. Radium's and other companies' requests and refused to release their data to the public. 5. Medical professionals also aided the companies by attributing worker deaths to other causes. Syphilis was often cited as the diagnosis, which had the added benefit to management of being a smear on the victims' reputations. 6. One worker, Grace Fryer, decided to sue U.S. Radium. It took Fryer two years to find a lawyer who was willing to take on U.S. Radium. Only four other workers joined her suit; they became known as the "Radium Girls." 7. In 1928, the case was settled in the middle of the trial before it went to the jury for deliberation. The settlement for each of the five "Radium Girls" was $10,000 (the equivalent of $124,000 in 2009 dollars), plus $600 a year while the victim lived and all medical expenses. Remember the general outline of this scenario because you will see it over and over again: The company denies everything while the doctors and researchers (and even the industrial hygienists) in the company's employ support the company's distorted version of the facts. Perhaps one worker in a hundred will finally pursue justice, one lawyer out of the hundreds of thousands in the United States will finally step up to the plate, and the case will be settled for chump change.
Monona Rossol
OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY I don’t know of people who do everything from going to school, learning different skills and basically develop themselves so that they stay at home. It’s ingrained in every kid that they should study hard and excel so that they can get good jobs and live well. With that said, working is what makes us build nations and fulfill some our dreams so it’s important to ensure that the work environment is kept safe and comfortable for workers so that they can remain productive for the longest time. However as long as we are living there will SWMS always be greedy employers who will take short cuts or fail to protect their employees and this is where OSHA(occupational safety and health administration)comes in to rectify these issues. Occupational safety is ensuring that employees work in danger free environment. There are many industries of different nature and hence the possible hazards vary. For example in the textile and clothing industry, employees deal with dyes, chemicals and machines that spin , knit and weave to ensure production. In some countries there have been cases of sweatshops where people make clothes in poorly ventilated places for long hours. The tools of trade in all industries are still the ones that cause hazards e.g. machines can cut people, chemicals emit poisonous fumes or burn the skin and clothes etc. Its therefore the mandate of employers to ensure work places are safe for workers and incase the industry uses chemicals or equipments that may harm the workers in any way, they should provide protective gear. Employers can also seek the services of occupational safety specialists who can inspect their companies to ensure they adhere to the set health and safety standards. These specialists can also help formulate programs that will prevent hazards and injuries. Workers should report employers to OSHA if they fail to comply. As a worker you now know it’s partly your duty to hold your employer accountable so do not agree to work in a hazardous environment.
Peter Gabriel
the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play…. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “co-operative”, i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them…. Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements…. In normal cases, children of sufficient heredity will be admitted to the governing class from the moment of conception. I start with this moment rather than birth since it is from this moment and not merely the moment of birth that the treatment of the two classes will be different. If, however, by the time the child reaches the age of three it is fairly clear that he does not attain the required standard, he will be degraded at that point. [T]here would be a very strong tendency for the governing classes to become hereditary, and that after a few generations not many children would be moved from either class into the other. This is especially likely to be the case if embryological methods of improving the breed are applied to the governing class, but not to the others. In this way the gulf between the two classes as regards native intelligence will become continually wider and wider…. Assuming that both kinds of breeding are scientifically carried out, there will come to be an increasing divergence between the two types, making them in the end almost different species. (pp. 181–188, emphasis added)
Jasun Horsley (The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse)
Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18) The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19) Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)
Sue Richardson (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.
Thomas Frank (Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society)
There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.
Slavoj Žižek
Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.
Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the same genes. These are the three-boat septuplets in my example. Once again, competition is suppressed (because each cell can only reproduce if the organism reproduces, via its sperm or egg cells). A group of cells becomes an individual, able to divide labor among the cells (which specialize into limbs and organs). A powerful new kind of vehicle appears, and in a short span of time the world is covered with plants, animals, and fungi.37 It’s another major transition. Major transitions are rare. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry count just eight clear examples over the last 4 billion years (the last of which is human societies).38 But these transitions are among the most important events in biological history, and they are examples of multilevel selection at work. It’s the same story over and over again: Whenever a way is found to suppress free riding so that individual units can cooperate, work as a team, and divide labor, selection at the lower level becomes less important, selection at the higher level becomes more powerful, and that higher-level selection favors the most cohesive superorganisms.39 (A superorganism is an organism made out of smaller organisms.) As these superorganisms proliferate, they begin to compete with each other, and to evolve for greater success in that competition. This competition among superorganisms is one form of group selection.40 There is variation among the groups, and the fittest groups pass on their traits to future generations of groups. Major transitions may be rare, but when they happen, the Earth often changes.41 Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This trick was discovered by the early hymenoptera (members of the order that includes wasps, which gave rise to bees and ants) and it was discovered independently several dozen other times (by the ancestors of termites, naked mole rats, and some species of shrimp, aphids, beetles, and spiders).42 In each case, the free rider problem was surmounted and selfish genes began to craft relatively selfless group members who together constituted a supremely selfish group.
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?
Nick Offerman (Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside)
Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.
Joshua Foer (Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)
Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that. The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not. That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive. In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system." Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff. Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.
Noam Chomsky
doom. The fading sunlight only accentuates it. Up ahead, a tall chain-link fence surrounds the factory. A security guard clears us and motions us forward to the main building. It’s absolutely massive. It reminds me of a giant warehouse, a thousand feet wide and seemingly with no end. Workers bustle about, focused on building the new ship’s modules. I look up at the high ceiling above us. “The building provides cover?” “Yeah. There are several decoys nearby. Basically, empty buildings, but identical. We even send people to each one every day to complete the charade, just in case they attack.
A.G. Riddle (Winter World (The Long Winter, #1))
Clearly, Djugashvili did not become an ardent Leninist solely because of the persuasive force of Lenin’s political arguments. Becoming a Leninist also involved, in this case, a rebellious young man’s emotional need for psychosocial identity.[228] Not only did he derive from Lenin a community-concept that helped him to live his lonely life of an underground party worker and outlaw; he acquired at the same time a self-concept that accorded both with his need to idealize himself and with his anti-social social role as a revolutionary.
Robert C. Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929)
Western countries have been talking about pandemic preparedness since bird flu rang alarms in the early 2000s. This was especially true in the US, which was widely expected to be the country best prepared for something like this. But when Covid-19 hit the US, the plan was largely abandoned, while unexpected complications set in everywhere. Health workers didn’t have enough protective gear and ended up sick or in quarantine. Insurance rules meant people initially couldn’t afford to get tested. For weeks, they couldn’t get tests in any case because of problems with one test at the US CDC in Atlanta. Employees with no paid vacation came in to work, hoping it was just flu. The virus spread earlier and farther than surveillance systems could detect, partly due to years of cuts to public health.
Debora MacKenzie (Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity)
The university’s retreat from public benefits damaged their independence as institutions. It damaged their intellectual ability to see over the horizon to the next economy and society and not just adapt to the current one. The retreat damaged their financial solvency, as it undermined the case for public good provision on which public universities depended to offer high-quality education on a mass scale. The public university could not be heard arguing that it absolutely had to offer mass quality. What good were the educated masses in a tech age when all the valuable workers could fit onto the Google bus?
Christopher Newfield (The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them)
Best Ideas and Tips for Career Growth and Development In case you're thinking about how you will get where you need to be in your career, there are some basic advances you can take that will assist you in making your own professional development. Similarly, as with all endeavors, you should be clear about your course when you make your own career development plan. You don't take an excursion without knowing where you need to wind up. You additionally don't have to excessively confound this undertaking. For profession improvement wanting to be compelling, extend your perspective on advancement and that of your representatives. An outside instructional course isn't the best way to create workers. Worker advancement is an incredible idea yet it isn't without issues. The best plans save the duty regarding finish unequivocally on the shoulders of representatives. Something else, if a worker doesn't finish their advancement openings, the individual in question may decide to put the fault on the board, which is counter-profitable for the entirety of the included gatherings. Certain issues and articulations exist that you would need to maintain a strategic distance from as you and the workers who report to you make plans and strategies for career development. Best Ideas for Career Growth and Development 1. Analyze your skills by yourself Experience the expected set of responsibilities detail by detail and rate your present condition of aptitudes, training, or experience to what is recorded. Your rating framework can be as straightforward as 1-10, with 10 an ideal match and one being totally absent. As you rate, make notes about your manner of thinking for future reference. When you have finished this activity, distinguish the entirety of the things where there is anyplace from a decent measure to a considerable measure of improvement that is required. Search for shared characteristics and cluster those all together. You will find that there will be subjects for your holes. 2. Change Job If or Whenever You Want You may likewise need to have numerous methods of amplifying your range of abilities to add profundity to it. A model is in the event that you need to move to a venture the board position, you might need to get confirmation and furthermore request venture duties. At first, these might be little, which are fine; they will offer you a chance to develop and learn. Also, you may need to inquire about different approaches to get what it takes you have to develop in your profession. You can't anticipate to what extent or how much work you should do so as to build up the expertise at the level you need, however, you do have command over the move you make to begin. Follow along. You have to focus on your career development plan at least two times every year. This will permit you to remain concentrated on your advance and help you to remember subsequent stages. 3. Growth Takes Time: But not for Everyone Some portion of the explanation we presume development is such a high need when you search for an occupation is on the grounds that you weren't getting development and improvement at your last one. You can totally change occupations at regular intervals to fulfill your longing for development. In any case, that despite everything leaves an extensive timeframe when you're not developing once you sink into work and before you move onto the following one. Here are some of the plan and strategies for career development, if you have any doubt, let us know in the comment section. Can also check: Things which is Important for student to get success
Messar
Being terminated for any of the items listed below may constitute wrongful termination: Discrimination: The employer cannot terminate employment because the employee is a certain race, nationality, religion, sex, age, or (in some jurisdictions) sexual orientation. Retaliation: An employer cannot fire an employee because the employee filed a claim of discrimination or is participating in an investigation for discrimination. In the US, this "retaliation" is forbidden under civil rights law. Reporting a Violation of Law to Government Authorities: also known as a whistleblower law, an employee who falls under whistleblower protections may not lawfully be fired for reporting an employer's legal violation or for similar activity that is protected by the law. Employee's refusal to commit an illegal act: An employer is not permitted to fire an employee because the employee refuses to commit an act that is illegal. Employer is not following the company's own termination procedures: In some cases, an employee handbook or company policy outlines a procedure that must be followed before an employee is terminated. If the employer fires an employee without following this procedure, depending upon the laws of the jurisdiction in which the termination occurs, the employee may have a claim for wrongful termination. … In the United States, termination of employment is not legal if it is based on your membership in a group protected from discrimination by law. It is unlawful for an employer to terminate an employee based upon factors including employee's race, religion, national origin, sex, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, or age (over 40), pursuant to U.S. federal laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. … Many laws also prohibit termination, even of at-will employees. For example, whistleblower laws may protect an employee who reports a legal or safety violation by the employer to an appropriate oversight agency. Most states prohibit employers from firing employees in retaliation for filing a workers' compensation claim, or making a wage complaint over unpaid wages. [firing someone for political affiliation or activism away from work is not on the list]
Wikipedia: wrongful dismissal
I seriously wondered, for example, whether Lisa McElhaney had ever been to Leningrad, or Ulster, or North Waghi. Then again, I couldn’t even figure out what she really died of. Her seventeen-year-old body was found in a plastic bag in Columbus, Ohio, in April 1987. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother had tried to get an abortion when pregnant with Lisa, but couldn’t afford it. Lisa was raped as a child, became pregnant and miscarried at age fifteen, was thrown out by her family, became addicted to drugs, and worked in pornography and prostitution to support her habit. Each time she ran afoul of the law and was incarcerated in a home for delinquents, social workers noted on her file that she displayed an eagerness for relationships and was “‘starved for affection.”’ But the system was set up to rehabilitate, not to provide relationships or affection, so Lisa withdrew and “would sit for hours and hours, staring into space.”’ When photographs of her performing sexual acts were discovered by the police, she was subpoenaed to testify in a child-pornography case against Larry Miller, the pornographer. Although Miller was a suspect in her murder, police believed the killer was a client of hers, Rob Roy Baker, a thirty-four-year-old truck driver who had been linked to similar attacks on other prostitutes. When police came to question him, Baker shot himself to death in a house filled with pictures of nude women cut from pornographic magazines. So I would ask myself, did Lisa die of assault? Which assault? The lack of affordable abortion for her mother? The beating from her john? Did she die of the disease called "family" or the disease called "rehabilitation," of poverty or drugs or pornography, of economics or sexual slavery or a broken body? Or a broken spirit? When she stared into space for hours was it because she knew she was in here but had no way of trying to reach anyone in the neighboring cell? Perhaps she died on unknown causes.
Robin Morgan (The Demon Lover)
I have wondered a little at being told by an experienced worker, that in many cases the voice seems the last and hardest thing to yield entirely to the King; and that many who think and say they have consecrated all to the Lord and His service, ‘revolt’ when it comes to be a question of whether they shall sing ‘always, only,’ for their King. They do not mind singing a few general sacred songs, but they do not see their way to really singing always and only unto and for Him.
Frances Ridley Havergal (Kept for the Master's Use)
But, while it might sometimes be annoying to receive this request, no worker who makes coffee for their boss will expect to end up dependent on drugs or alcohol as a consequence.
Louise Perry (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century)
So how were these people judged? How will we be judged? We get up every morning thinking that if we're good, we'll make it to heaven, and if we're bad, we'll have trouble. But then we see a six-year-old girl die of cancer. We see raging waters and mud swallow innocent people in South America. And we see our neighbor, who cheats on his wife or steals from his boss, become wealthy. We see our cousin, the liar, win the lottery. What sense does this make?" A few people shake their heads. I want to know, too. "Got me," Natto says. "Got me. But I'll tell you this. I want to know. I want to find out. And I'll tell you two more things. One is, overall, we have seen a lot of times in life that what comes around goes around, haven't we?" A few people nod. "In the case of Venezuela, there's no good explanation. But we see sinners locked up every day, and brave men rewarded. And last night on the news, they showed heroes, people who saved lives in Venezuela. We saw people working together. Rescue workers. Relief workers. And that is God." He stops pacing. "That is God," he says again. He goes back to pacing. He has a strong gait. "These people do good. And if one of their planes crashed on the way back to whereever they came from? What sense would that make? I don't know. I don't claim to have all the answers. And maybe there are cases where I will never ever understand them. This is something a lot of churches don't want to admit, but I really might never have the answers. And sometimes, this might make me very angry." I like this. "But I said there were two more things I'll tell you. One is that we have seen that what comes around goes around. And here's the second thing. We judge within ourselves. Those people in Venezuela, the dying, if they led a good life, they knew it. They died at peace. They knew that they didn't deserve it, that it was just something that happened. But a guy who's been hurting people, who suddenly feels a rumble and the sky caves in, he's lying there, torn apart, and besides the physical pain, he knows in his heart, or he feels in his heart, that he's being punished. He can't lie there and say, "Please God I don't deserve to die". Because he knows he did wrong, and he has to apologize and make amends. And so in that way, judgement comes upon him. And we all know in our hearts, whether we're to be judged in the afterworld or not, that while we're on this earth, we judge ourselves.
Caren Lissner (Carrie Pilby)
There are only two core emotions: love and fear. And love is to fear as light is to darkness: in the presence of one, the other disappears. As we shift our perceptions from fear to love—sometimes in cases where it’s not so hard and ultimately in cases where it takes spiritual mastery to do so—we become miracle workers in the truest sense. For when our minds are surrendered to love, they are surrendered to a higher power. And from that, all miracles follow.
Marianne Williamson (The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for Living Your Best Life (The Marianne Williamson Series))
During Biden’s long period of flailing, I had feared that he had missed his chance to avert the worst consequence of climate change—and that another opportunity to protect the planet wouldn’t come around for years, after it was far too late. But then in the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a banally named bill that will transform American life. Its investments in alternative energy will ignite the growth of industries that will wean the economy from its dependence on fossil fuels. That achievement was of a piece with the new economics that his presidency had begun to enshrine. Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction. Through a series of bills—not just his investments in alternative energy, but also the CHIPS Act and his infrastructure bill—he erected a state that will function as an investment bank, spending money to catalyze favored industries to realize his vision, where the United States controls the commanding heights of the economy of the future. The critique of gerontocracy is that once politicians become senior citizens, they will only focus on the short term, because they will only inhabit the short term. But Biden, the oldest president in history, pushed for spending money on projects that might not come to fruition in his lifetime. His theory of the case—that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens—compelled him to push for expenditures on unglamorous but essential items such as electric vehicle charging systems, crumbling ports, and semiconductor plants, which will decarbonize the economy, employ the next generation of workers, and prevent national decline.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
To borrow a formulation from Stuart Hall, race and gender are modalities through which class is lived. In the case of the tech worker movement, they are modalities through which tech workers of the middle layers live the proletarian elements of their contradictory class location.
Ben Tarnoff (The Making of the Tech Worker Movement)
During the 1960s, senior executives in America typically made around twenty dollars for every dollar earned by a rank-and-file worker. Since then, that figure has climbed to 300-to-1 among S&P 500 companies, and in some cases it goes far higher than that. The US Chamber of Commerce managed to block all attempts to force disclosure of corporate pay ratios until 2015, when a weakened version of the rule was finally passed by the SEC in a strict party-line vote of three Democrats in favor and two Republicans opposed. In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States.
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose
Mary Johnson (Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights)
Ki vagyok én, kérdem néha magamtól, hogy kifaggatom őket, hogy kigöngyölik előttem foszladozó történeteiket, minek néznek, hogy műhelyembe hozzák azt, amire a galileai szerelő is csak legyintene? Hol kezdődött a baleseteknek ez a színtelen folytatásos regénye? Sejtrendszerük statisztikai véletleneiben? A beléjük terrorizált téves eszmék ütközéseiben? Múltjuknak hanyadízigleni állomásán? És vajon mihez képest rossz az, amit én annak gondolok? Mákszemnyi befalazott légbuborékok a tehetetlenség mészkőhegyében: íme, a szabad akarat elmulasztott lehetőségei. De akkor is, ha mindaz, amit tehetek, egyetlen ilyen légbuborék, akkor is ebben a csepp üregben kuporgok és ítélkezem. Nem való szemétvödörbe dobni az újszülöttet. Helytelen éheztetni a csecsemőt. Ha beteg, orvost kell hívni hozzá. Nem tanácsos kikötni, forró kályhára ültetni, hideg kamrába zárni, ujját konnektorba dugni, nadrágszíjjal, gyúrófával, széklábbal, porolóval, fakanállal, seprűnyéllel, szárítókötéllel, cipősarokkal fenyíteni. Tartózkodjunk a gyereklányok megerőszakolásától, kiváltképpen sajátunkétól. Szeretkezés közben ne nyomjuk a falhoz alvó gyermekünket. Ne itassuk pálinkával, ne vigyük zálogházba a télikabátját, ne etessük fel barátnőnkkel a vacsoráját, ne hagyjuk megótvarosodni, ne nevezzük kurvának az anyját, szemétládának az apját, ne fenyegessük szolgálati fegyverünkkel, ne kergessük ki csavarogni, ne idomítsuk zsebtolvajnak, ne adjuk el öreg buziknak, ne vizeljünk az iskolatáskájába, ne felejtsük a vonaton, ne csapjuk be, ne nevessük ki, ne torkoljuk le, ne ordítozzunk rá, ne szégyenítsük meg, szóval, amennyire lehet, tartsuk tiszteletben kezdődő és bűntelen életét. Hatalmaskodom, tolakszom, ítélkezem.
György Konrád (The Case Worker)
A gyerek él, ötéves, mellette vagyok. Most ismét hosszú, elnémíthatatlan rohamokban sír. Ül az ágy sarkában, arcát föltartja, szemét behunyja, feje telemegy vérrel, álla lefeszül, s üvölt ijesztő méltósággal. Erődöt épít magának a sírásból, és beül a közepébe. Ez a főműve, támadhatatlan, nem győzné jobban akkor sem, ha késsel kapargatnák a heréjét. Tetőtől talpig tele vagyok a sírásával, a keserűség főpapja, már sajnálni sem tudom, nézem, ha soká folytatja, megtérít.
György Konrád (The Case Worker)
Many women in the area complained of feeling unsafe, and local statistics supported their fears. Cases of assault, harassment, domestic violence, and rape had risen dramatically since the once-sleepy region began attracting thousands of male workers. Women spoke of carrying concealed weapons when they shopped at the grocery store and avoiding the bar scene, teeming with lonely males looking for female company. Rumors were rampant about where the next attack might occur—I frequently overheard women chatting about which areas to avoid or where a friend of so-and-so was attacked while walking to her car.
Blaire Briody (The New Wild West: Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota Boomtown)
Would it be possible to use a courtroom to get everyone involved in a case - the accused, judges, lawyer's, clerks, social workers, community members, to help improve behavior instead of merely punish it? We take a problem solving approach to the cases that come before us, said Amanda Berman, the Justice Center's project director and a former public defender in the Bronx. When we're presented with a case... the question we are asking at the endo f the day is, what is the problem and how can we come together to come to a solution. This new purpose required the design of a new kind of courtroom.
Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters)
In business studies, value is understood as being created inside the company by bringing together managerial expertise, strategic thinking and a dynamic (changing with circumstances) division of labour between workers.3 All this ignores the massive role of government in creating value, and taking risk in the process. In The Entrepreneurial State I argued that Silicon Valley itself is an outcome of such high-risk investments by the state, willing to take risks in the early stages of development of high-risk technologies which the private sector usually shies away from.4 This is the case with the investments that led to the internet, where a critical role was played by DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the US Department of Defense – and also by CERN in Europe with its invention of the World Wide Web. Indeed, not only the internet but nearly every other technology that makes our smart products smart was funded by public actors, such as GPS (funded by the US Navy), Siri (also funded by DARPA) and touch-screen display (funded initially by the CIA). It is also true of the high-risk, early-stage investments made in the pharmaceutical industry by public actors like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – without which most blockbuster drugs would not have been developed. And the renewable energy industry has been greatly aided by investments made by public banks like the European Investment Bank or the KfW in Germany, with private finance often too risk-averse and focused on short-term returns.
Mariana Mazzucato (Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism)
Lisa Clampitt, the matchmaker in New York who used to be a social worker, told me that often what seems like "chemistry" might be emotional baggage from childhood. That's why if she sees a client repeatedly going after men who aren't working out, she looks at the psychological roots of the attraction.
Lori Gottlieb (Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough)
On the most basic level, Toy Story 2 was a wakeup call. Going forward, the needs of a movie could never again outweigh the needs of our people. We needed to do more to keep them healthy. As soon as we wrapped the film, we set about addressing the needs of our injured, stressed-out employees and coming up with strategies to prevent future deadline pressures from hurting our workers again. These strategies went beyond ergonomically designed workstations, yoga classes, and physical therapy. Toy Story 2 was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus—a motivated, workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline—could destroy itself if left unchecked. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed that we would never make a film that way again. It was management’s job to take the long view, to intervene and protect our people from their willingness to pursue excellence at all costs. Not to do so would be irresponsible.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
The Charlotte NC Work Comp Lawyers Group represents those people who have been injured on the job. We represent those workers in Charlotte North Carolina and the surrounding areas. Our work comp attorneys also represent those injured workers in all cities in North Carolina, including Greensboro, Raleigh, Wilmington and Asheville to name just a few. We are available for consultation and free case evaluation of your worker's compensation claim by appointment over the phone. We work with all insurance companies as wells as the medical community to provide the very best service to those who have been injured on the job.
Charlotte NC Work Comp Lawyers Group
This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.
Becoming
Valujet flight 592 crashed after takeoff from Miami airport because oxygen generators in its cargo hold caught fire. The generators had been loaded onto the airplane by employees of a maintenance contractor, who were subsequently prosecuted. The editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology “strongly believed the failure of SabreTech employees to put caps on oxygen generators constituted willful negligence that led to the killing of 110 passengers and crew. Prosecutors were right to bring charges. There has to be some fear that not doing one’s job correctly could lead to prosecution.”13 But holding individuals accountable by prosecuting them misses the point. It shortcuts the need to learn fundamental lessons, if it acknowledges that fundamental lessons are there to be learned in the first place. In the SabreTech case, maintenance employees inhabited a world of boss-men and sudden firings, and that did not supply safety caps for expired oxygen generators. The airline may have been as inexperienced and under as much financial pressure as people in the maintenance organization supporting it. It was also a world of language difficulties—not only because many were Spanish speakers in an environment of English engineering language: “Here is what really happened. Nearly 600 people logged work time against the three Valujet airplanes in SabreTech’s Miami hangar; of them 72 workers logged 910 hours across several weeks against the job of replacing the ‘expired’ oxygen generators—those at the end of their approved lives. According to the supplied Valujet work card 0069, the second step of the seven-step process was: ‘If the generator has not been expended install shipping cap on the firing pin.’ This required a gang of hard-pressed mechanics to draw a distinction between canisters that were ‘expired’, meaning the ones they were removing, and canisters that were not ‘expended’, meaning the same ones, loaded and ready to fire, on which they were now expected to put nonexistent caps. Also involved were canisters which were expired and expended, and others which were not expired but were expended. And then, of course, there was the simpler thing—a set of new replacement canisters, which were both unexpended and unexpired.”14 These were conditions that existed long before the Valujet accident, and that exist in many places today. Fear of prosecution stifles the flow of information about such conditions. And information is the prime asset that makes a safety culture work. A flow of information earlier could in fact have told the bad news. It could have revealed these features of people’s tasks and tools; these longstanding vulnerabilities that form the stuff that accidents are made of. It would have shown how ‘human error’ is inextricably connected to how the work is done, with what resources, and under what circumstances and pressures.
Sidney Dekker (The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error)
However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on construction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
The first is the democratisation of information. For decades, the commodity trading houses enjoyed a tremendous information advantage over the rest of the market. Their vast networks of offices around the world provided them with up-to-the-minute intelligence about economic activity, commodity supply and demand, and a multitude of other data. If workers at a key copper mine in Chile went on strike or if a new oilfield started producing in Nigeria, the traders would be the first to know. In many cases, they built their own telecommunications networks at a time when long-distance phone calls had to be booked well in advance
Javier Blas (The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources)
Pandemrix caused more than 980 cases of severe neurological injuries, paralysis from Guil-lain-Barré syndrome, debilitating narcolepsy, and cataplexy, including in more than 500 children. The Glaxo vaccine killed and injured so many children and health workers with various forms of brain damage that it forced Glaxo to withdraw the vaccine.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Volunteer Services Title: Improving Worker Administrations: A Statistical surveying Approach Presentation: Volunteer Services assume a vital part in supporting networks, non-benefit associations, and different causes around the world. In any case, to actually use volunteer assets, it's basic to grasp market elements, patterns, and inclinations. Statistical surveying gives priceless bits of knowledge to upgrading volunteer projects, improving commitment, and augmenting influence. In this complete examination, we dive into the domain of volunteer administrations, investigating market patterns, challenges, and imaginative procedures for development. Understanding the Worker Administrations Market: The worker administrations market incorporates a wide cluster of areas, including social administrations, ecological preservation, medical care, instruction, and fiasco help. As indicated by late examinations, the worldwide volunteerism rate has been consistently expanding, mirroring a developing consciousness of social obligation and local area inclusion. In any case, notwithstanding this vertical pattern, certain difficulties persevere, preventing the maximum capacity of Volunteer Services. Key Difficulties in Volunteer Administrations: Enrollment and Maintenance: One of the essential difficulties looked by associations is the enlistment and maintenance of workers. With occupied plans and contending responsibilities, people frequently battle to commit time to chipping in. Additionally, holding volunteers over the long haul requires supported commitment and significant encounters. Ability Coordinating: Compelling usage of volunteer abilities is fundamental for augmenting influence. Nonetheless, numerous associations battle to coordinate workers with jobs that line up with their
Volunteer Services
Unmanaged” deconstructs the discipline of management and makes the compelling case that knowledge workers perform much more effectively for “Humble Gardeners” than “Angry Ranchers.” With decades of experience working with hundreds of professional service firms, Jack Skeels presents a convincing case for how the chronically misunderstood agile framework can produce transformational results.
Tim Williams
The social worker A.V.Thakkar now wrote to Gandhi that ‘a humble and honest untouchable family is desirous of joining your Ashram. Will you accept them?’ This letter, recalled Gandhi in his autobiography, ‘perturbed’ him. He had taken a public stance against the practice of untouchability. However, in matters of caste the Hindus of Ahmedabad were cautious and conservative. So soon after he had moved to their city, should he challenge their prejudices in so open a manner? A.V. Thakkar’s letter to him had now placed Gandhi in a quandary. Should he accept the ‘untouchable’ family recommended by Thakkar, or would that imperil the future of the ashram? Gandhi decided to accept Thakkar’s suggestion. The family consisted of Dudhabhai, his wife, Danibehn, and their baby daughter, Lakshmi. When they arrived at the Satyagraha Ashram on 11 September, there was much grumbling, not least from Gandhi’s own family members. Kasturba was not happy with this decision to defy the orthodox. Danibehn was prevented from drawing water fromthe common well until Gandhi said in that case he would not use the well either. On 23 September, Gandhi wrote to Srinivasa Sastri about the turmoil caused by the admission of the ‘untouchable’ family. ‘There was quite a flutter in the Ashram,’ he remarked. ‘There is a flutter even in Ahmedabad. I have told Mrs.Gandhi she could leave me and we should part good friends.
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
The role of money power in elections can be traced to a very fundamental axiom of Indian politics that when people go to cast their vote, they want to vote for a candidate belonging to a party they feel has a realistic chance of actually forming the government and not necessarily their favourite candidate. As a result, many excellent and meritorious candidates lose out because they are either running as independents or are affiliated to smaller political parties. For parties to have a ‘winning’ perception in the public, they must have great visibility and this visibility is usually purchased by money in the form of advertising, holding large election rallies (which cost a fortune and very often people are brought there by monetary inducement) or in the form of having a large number of paid workers on the ground who are visible.
Prashant Bhushan (The Case that Shook India: The Verdict That Led to the Emergency)
CHRISTMAS FUSS IN BARBADOS IN THE 70’S 1.BUY A BOTTLE OF FALERNUM 2.PUT DOWN CONGOLEUM IN THE SHEDROOF, AFTER SCRUBBING/VARNISHING THE FLOOR 3.WASH DOWN THE HOUSE AND CLEANED THE WINDOWS 4.BAKE GREAT CAKE AND PUDDING 5.GRATE COCONUTS TO MAKE SWEETBREAD 6.HUNG UP CURTAIN RODS/ NEW CURTAINS ON CHRISTMAS EVE 7.TRUST CREAM SACHETS IN FANCY BOTTLES/BIG WHEEL COLOGNE, SKIN SOFTENERS FROM AVON LADY 8.BUY ENGLISH APPLES AND A SHADDOCK FROM THE MARKET 9.WEED AROUND THE HOUSE 10. A CASE OF SOFT DRINKS-JU-C, FRUTEE, BIM, BBC GINGER, COKES 11.GO TO ELLIS QUARRY AND GET SOME MARL 12.PICK GREEN PEAS 13.STEEP SORREL 14.CHANGE THE CUSHION COVERS 15.SANDPAPER THE MAHOGANY CHAIRS 16.CLEAN THE CABINET AND WASHED ALL THE FINE CHINA 17.BUY HAM IN WHITE BURLAP BAG 18.DECANTER OF PORT WINE 19.PICK UP CLOTHES FROM THE NEEDLE WORKER 20.WASH AND PRESS HAIR 21.BUY PIECE OF FRESH PORK 2016
Charmaine J. Forde
Stanley Laurel throws a pie which hits Oliver Hardy in the face. In the physicist's model or reality-tunnel (the two overlap in this case) the best description of what has happened is Newton's F equals ma (Force equals mass times acceleration). In the anthropological reality-tunnel, what has happened is a continuation of the Feast of Fools or Saturnalia or the tradition of the royal fool who is immune from the tabu against rebellion in comic form. To some Freudians, the best reality-tunnel is that the Son's rage against the Father is being expressed symbolically. To some Marxists, it is the worker's rage against the boss. Etc.
Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
I was asked to do a lot of things by the Weather Underground leadership over the years and, toward the end, asked to do many things I didn’t even believe at the time were right, but I did them anyway. I let my friends talk me into doing them. Those acts mainly amounted to lying to people, rather than potentially injuring them. When I finally quit it was not just because I realized that the vision was unconnected to reality. Even then, as ever, I was acting more from emotion than ideology. Mostly I was angry at having been manipulated, and humiliated for allowing myself to be manipulated, and mortified at then manipulating others in turn. But no one ever asked me to carry out a bombing. Grown-up me wants to think that even if they had, as late in the process, say, as the moment when dressed in the bland costume of an office worker I had been handed the attaché case containing the ticking device, I would have hesitated, considered the implications, and declined to go through with it. But I was still a child during those years, who needed to tag along after the big boys, take their dare, win their approval. Yes, almost certainly, I would have done it.
Jonathan Lerner (Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary)
A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is ‘the struggle of the Workers against Capital’. ‘In that case,’ replies the policeman, ‘you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other.
Anna Reid (Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine)
It may also be useful to point out here that the war waged on hydroxychloroquine by CNN, the FDA, and a lot of anti-Trump journalists in between was about as pure a case of racial discrimination as you can get. Here was a medicine we could have quickly dispensed in the hot-zone days of March and April to the low-income, primarily Black and Brown communities being hammered in our largest cities. This medicine would not only have reduced the death rates in those communities, it would have prevented hospital overloading, reduced the need for ventilators, and reduced the need for extra health care workers.
Peter Navarro (In Trump Time: A Journal of America's Plague Year)
resisted the temptation to cut corners, and they paid dearly for it when they closed their doors. Illegals are paid in cash, and they often earn far less than the minimum wage. There is a lot of anger out there directed at people like Bobby Escobar.” “But Waverly Creek is the finest golf course around. Why would they hire undocumented workers?” “To save money, and lots of it. Plus, Theo, they don’t always know. There’s a lot of fake paperwork around. Some employers don’t ask questions. Often, the guy who owns the business will hire a smaller company to do the dirty work and look the other way. In Bobby’s case, there’s a good chance he works for some small-time landscape company that has a contract with the golf course. It’s a murky world and evidence is hard to find. It’s easy to just ignore things and save money.” Theo, who hadn’t touched his sandwich, asked, “Okay, what happens to an employer who gets caught using undocumented workers?
John Grisham (Theodore Boone: The Fugitive)
The larger picture is that the socialist camp wants high, even confiscatory, income tax rates, complemented by additional levies on wealth and, in some cases, even compulsory worker control of large industries—which gets us closer to the classic, never-before-achieved Marxian conception of socialism.
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
The question that confronts revolutionaries is never simply whether the workers (or peasants) are capable of taking control of the means of production, and reorganizing production on democratic and libertarian lines (like the workers and peasants collectives in Spain). Nor is it even whether they are capable of establishing within cities and villages organs of self-government (as in the many cases of workers councils). From the Paris Commune to the Zapatista rebellion we know that these things can be done. The question is almost always whether they can do these things over a prolonged period of time under conditions of war and general social breakdown. These are the conditions under which revolutionary opportunities are most likely to occur. It is precisely under these conditions that the limits of the revolutionary movement as a whole have revealed themselves.
Christopher Day (The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project (Kasama Essays for Discussion))
In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned the racial zoning ordinance of Louisville, Kentucky, where many neighborhoods included both races before twentieth-century segregation. The case, Buchanan v. Warley, involved an African American’s attempt to purchase property on an integrated block where there were already two black and eight white households. The Court majority was enamored of the idea that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was not to protect the rights of freed slaves but a business rule: “freedom of contract.” Relying on this interpretation, the Court had struck down minimum wage and workplace safety laws on the grounds that they interfered with the right of workers and business owners to negotiate individual employment conditions without government interference. Similarly, the Court ruled that racial zoning ordinances interfered with the right of a property owner to sell to whomever he pleased.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
On the other hand, you probably have experienced a friend or co-worker who struggled to make a change happen, only to find out that no one noticed. In this case, the absence of reinforcement becomes a barrier to sustaining the change.
Jeffrey M. Hiatt (ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community)
The following journal articles and books helped me to understand different aspects of traditional Chinese medicine, with an emphasis on women: “Dispersing the Foetal Toxin of the Body: Conceptions of Smallpox Aetiology in Pre-modern China” and “Variolation” by Chia-feng Chang; A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 by Charlotte Furth; Thinking with Cases edited by Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung; The Web That Has No Weaver by Ted J. Kaptchuk; The Expressiveness of Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine by Shigehisa Kuriyama; “Women Practicing Medicine in Premodern China” by Angela Ki Che Leung, who also served as editor of Medicine for Women in Imperial China; Oriental Materia Medica by Hong-yen Hsu et al.; “Between Passion and Repression: Medical Views of Demon Dreams, Demonic Fetuses, and Female Sexual Madness in Late Imperial China” by Hsiu-fen Chen; “The Leisure Life of Women in the Ming Dynasty” by Zhao Cuili; and “Female Medical Workers in Ancient China” by Jin-sheng Zheng.
Lisa See (Lady Tan's Circle of Women)
Sweden, workers who are not ready to choose their own pension investments can have the money placed automatically into a “default” fund, a low-cost index portfolio that blends stocks and bonds. In recent years, roughly 97% of eligible workers have left their money in the default fund, even though they were free to switch at any time to any of more than four hundred other funds. (Luckily, in this case, that’s not a bad choice.)
Jason Zweig (Your Money and Your Brain)
It is undoubtedly true that disagreeable and perhaps even potentially disastrous decisions have sometimes to be taken, because there is absolutely no alternative—because any conceivable alternative is manifestly worse. This was not the case here. As the Diaries indicate the decision was the outcome of a doctrinaire conviction that overseas commitments are always both wrong and unprofitable, that money spent on defence is bread taken from the workers’ mouths and of a process of crude bargaining between Ministers in which the probable consequences of staying in, or leaving Aden and the Gulf, were the last thing to be considered
Elie Kedourie (The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion)
Catholics are worried about Communism: and they have a right to be, because the Communist revolution aims, among other things, at wiping out the Church. But few Catholics stop to think that Communism would make very little progress in the world, or none at all, if Catholics really lived up to their obligations, and really did the things Christ came on earth to teach them to do: that is, if they really loved one another, and saw Christ in one another, and lived as saints, and did something to win justice for the poor. For, she said, if Catholics were able to see Harlem, as they ought to see it, with the eyes of faith, they would not be able to stay away from such a place. Hundreds of priests and lay-people would give up everything to go there and try to do something to relieve the tremendous misery, the poverty, sickness, degradation, and dereliction of a race that was being crushed and perverted, morally and physically, under the burden of a colossal economic injustice. Instead of seeing Christ suffering in His members, and instead of going to help Him, Who said: “Whatsoever you did to the least of these my brethren, you did it to Me,” we preferred our own comfort: we averted our eyes from such a spectacle, because it made us feel uneasy: the thought of so much dirt nauseated us—and we never stopped to think that we, perhaps, might be partly responsible for it. And so people continued to die of starvation and disease in those evil tenements full of vice and cruelty, while those who did condescend to consider their problems, held banquets in the big hotels downtown to discuss the “Race situation” in a big rosy cloud of hot air. If Catholics, she said, were able to see Harlem as they should see it, with the eyes of faith, as a challenge to their love of Christ, as a test of their Christianity, the Communists would be able to do nothing there. But, on the contrary, in Harlem the Communists were strong. They were bound to be strong. They were doing some of the things, performing some of the works of mercy that Christians should be expected to do. If some Negro workers lose their jobs, and are in danger of starving, the Communists are there to divide their own food with them, and to take up the defence of their case.
Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)
In the case a bricklayer working for a subcontractor on the Perth Stadium construction project suffered serious injuries when he single-handedly began to remove two overhead steel purlins that were in the way when he was building a wall. One of the discussions in the case was the extent to which the principal should have provided training to the subcontractor about workplace health and safety hazards associated with the work. In that context, the court observed: Pursuant to its contract, NeoWest had autonomy in how it was to complete the works and it was the appropriate body to provide the training and induction within its specialised area and to specify the methods to be used in performing the tasks required of its workers. It would not have been reasonably practicable, or indeed wise, for the first defendant to impinge on NeoWest's training and induction of its own employees as to the proper and safe method of completing the works within its scope of works and area of expertise and specialised knowledge, possibly to override or even contradict that training and induction. Each individual trade's expertise and specialist knowledge was the very reason why the first defendant engaged subcontractors to perform the various works in the first place, rather than complete them itself.60 This limited (although still very onerous) obligation is consistent with a social approach to managing wicked problems. As I argue later in the book, you cannot solve wicked problems – we cannot solve safety. All we can do is “tame” the problem of safety – do the best we can.
Greg Smith (Proving Safety: wicked problems, legal risk management and the tyranny of metrics)
In 2020, almost a third of full-time workers between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree made less than the national median ($59,371). Roughly half of Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have earned a bachelor’s degree or more, which is also the case in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and several other rich democracies with far less poverty. In Germany, only 35 percent of people in that age range have graduated from college, yet the child poverty rate there is half what it is here.
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
The only policy covering the musicians was one the Blacks and White Star took out jointly from the recently established (1907) Legal Insurance Company, but it soon transpired that the insurers were quibbling over the scope of the word dependent. Wives and children were obviously dependents, but could working fathers, such as Andrew Hume and Ronald Brailey, honestly describe themselves as such? This meant that neither of the two main parties—White Star and the Black brothers—was making immediate contributions to the families. Outraged by this, three of the fathers—Leon Bricoux, Andrew Hume, and Ronald Brailey—mounted a legal case against C. W. & F. N. Black in June 1912, arguing that as workers who had lost their lives while carrying out their duties and through no fault of their own, their sons should be covered by the strictures of the Workmen’s Compensation Act. There had never been any suggestion that they’d brought about their fate through negligence or misbehavior.
Steve Turner (The Band That Played On: The Extraordinary Story of the 8 Musicians Who Went Down with the Titanic)
When Karl Marx elaborated upon the savage exploitation of workers by the capitalists, he described that due to extensive mechanization and division of labour, the work of the proletarians lost its exclusive character and became dull and monotonous increasing the repulsiveness of work while decreasing the wages. However, in the case of dowry extortion, the women are oppressed in multiple ways. The authoritative Brahminic ideology that propagates the dowry, forcibly extorts wealth from a woman and her family, mercilessly exploits her labour, and simultaneously deprives of her any wages or any monetary compensation for her extensive contribution behind the veil of labour of love and the rhetoric of sacrifices for the sake of family.
Shalu Nigam
Just a few days earlier half a dozen Chinese railroad workers had been gunned down by a group of drunken cowboys. The sheriff arrested the killers and brought them before Sweetwater’s brand-new judge, who had also opened a saloon. The judge considered the case, pursed his lips, opened a couple of law books just to make sure his first bone-deep feelings about the case were correct, then issued his judgment: “Gentlemen,” he ruled, “I have examined the laws of the United States carefully and I do not find any law which says that a white man shall be punished for killing a Chinaman.” The judge, named Roy Bean, let the killers go. Isaac
Erik Larson (Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History)
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Finding the Best Immigration Lawyer in Sydney: Services offered Navigating the complex landscape of immigration law can be daunting, especially in a city as diverse and bustling as Sydney. The right immigration lawyer can be an invaluable asset by providing essential advice and support. Here is a closer look at the services offered by the best immigration lawyers in Sydney and how they can help you during your immigration journey. Help with visa application One of the primary services provided by immigration attorneys is assistance with visa applications. There are different visa categories in Australia, including: Skilled Worker Visa: For individuals with specific skills that are in demand in Australia. Family visas: For reunification of family members, including partner, child and parent visas. Student visa: For those who want to study in Australia. Visitor visas: For short-term visits for tourism or business. The best immigration lawyers will help clients determine the most appropriate visa category, prepare the necessary documentation, and ensure correct and timely submission of applications. Legal advice and representation Immigration law can be complex, with ever-changing rules and regulations. An experienced immigration attorney provides legal advice customized to your situation. They can clarify complex legal jargon, outline your rights and responsibilities, and discuss the potential risks and benefits of different immigration options. If your application is refused or if you face visa cancellation, an experienced lawyer will represent you in appeals or judicial reviews. Their experience in handling such cases can greatly increase your chances of a favorable outcome. Preparation for interviews Many visa applications require interviews with immigration authorities. The best immigration attorneys will prepare you for these interviews by conducting mock interviews and advising you on how to effectively present your case. They will help you understand the types of questions that may come up and how to confidently answer them, ensuring that you are well prepared for the day. Compliance and Legal Obligations Once you have obtained a visa, it is essential to meet its conditions. Immigration attorneys provide advice on your responsibilities as a visa holder and help you understand what it takes to avoid violations that could jeopardize your immigration status. This includes understanding employment rights, study requirements and reporting obligations. Applications for permanent residence and citizenship For many immigrants, the ultimate goal is to achieve permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Immigration attorneys can help you with permanent residency applications, guide you through the points test and ensure that you meet all the necessary requirements. In addition, if you want to apply for Australian citizenship, an immigration lawyer can help you understand the eligibility criteria, prepare your application and deal with any issues. They can also help you prepare for your citizenship test and ensure you are ready to demonstrate your knowledge of Australian history, culture and values. Help with special cases Some immigration situations are more complicated than others. The best immigration lawyers are equipped to handle special cases, including: Refugee and Humanitarian Visas: For those seeking asylum in Australia due to persecution or significant risk in their home country. Employer-sponsored visas: We help businesses sponsor foreign workers and ensure compliance with labor laws. Health and Character Issues: Addressing issues that may arise from health screenings or character evaluations, helps clients prepare necessary documentation and appeals. Consulting services for businesses If you are a business looking to hire talent from overseas, an immigration attorney can provide essential services. They can h
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Students preparing for their exams think, If I pass, life will be rosy. Company workers think, If I get transferred, everything will go well. But even when those wishes are fulfilled, in many cases nothing about their situations changes at all.
Ichiro Kishimi (The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness)
I don’t really care about being sweet to people who don’t look out for their employees interests. You know things like that get you loyal workers, but in your case you wouldn’t know a good employee from your ass any day of the week.
Sai Marie Johnson (The Softer Side of Texas)
The relevant social barriers of first-century Palestine may not have been that strong in any case: rabbis were expected to gain a skilled trade apart from their study (thus Paul was a leather-worker), so that the stratification that divided the teacher from the manual labourer in Stoic and other circles of the hellenistic world was not a significant factor in much of Palestine.
D.A. Carson (The Gospel according to John (The Pillar New Testament Commentary (PNTC)))
The case of the intoxicated government worker who flew a drone onto the White House lawn launched a million jokes. Although none was actually better than the straight-faced headline in The New York Times: “White House Drone Crash Described as a U.S. Worker’s Drunken Lark.
Anonymous
Notice, too, how often the standard of help - rehabilitation, as it is usually called - is not just made up of the common morality of middle class society, but specifically in how far the client or patient or case imitates and becomes like the case worker or probation person or professional - that is, in how far the one who is being helped becomes like the one who is helping him.
William Stringfellow (A Private and Public Faith)
As they finished eating, Christy glanced at him with indecision. “Thank you for the food. It’s getting pretty late. Maybe I should go.” He strode to her and bracketed her body with his arms. “Do you want to go?” “I don’t know. You tell me. What does the sex workers’ union say about clients staying over?” He laughed softly. “I’d have to check the man-whore union labor agreement because I’m not familiar with it. Although I’d say in this case, it’s up to the client.” “Last time I was exhausted and accidentally fell asleep in your bed,” she hurried to explain. “I don’t want you to think—
Elle Aycart (Heavy Issues (Bowen Boys, #2))