'Careers Are Dead. Welcome To Your Low-Wage, Temp Work Future'

[Popular Front of Judea]

I wondered where to put this: worker struggles or politics? I have to say for the ranks of precariat a rise in the minimum wage and possibly a basic income will do them more immediate good than attempting to organize at their workplace. (Has anyone ever tried to organize temp agencies? Is that as doomed as it sounds?) So politics it is.

Finally, some statistics to prove the stereotypes right. According to a recent survey from Millennial Branding and Payscale, Millenials really are most likely to be employed in service industry jobs. So, all those jokes about post-graduation latte pouring and t-shirt folding haven’t been in vain. And while it might be comforting to think of these jobs as necessary way stations on the path to an upwardly mobile future – especially if you’re someone who holds one – there’s mounting evidence that the American labor market may never return to its pre-recession composition. The future is already here and it brings with it low-wage temporary or contract work as a way of life.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 30% of American workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs – defined as earnings at or below the poverty line to support a family of four – in 2020. This number will remain virtually unchanged from 2010. Given that roughly 50% of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed and those who do work are much more likely to hold these types of jobs, this is a particular grim prospect for young workers hoping to leave these positions behind for greener career pastures.

And even if Millennial workers do manage to move from retail to the corporate world, there’s no guarantee that their office job will be on the career track. The number of temporary or contract positions was up 6% over last year’s numbers in the first quarter of 2012 according to the American Staffing Association. In fact, the number of temporary or contract jobs added to the economy has been increasing for nine consecutive quarters since the recession officially ended. Over 40% more people hold temp jobs now than in 2009. This growth starts to become something to worry about when temp jobs aren’t being converted to permanent ones and when contract work replaces full-time positions.

Careers Are Dead. Welcome To Your Low-Wage, Temp Work Future | Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2012/08/30/careers-are-dead-welcome-to-your-low-wage-temp-work-future/)

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Pushin' thirty and still haven't done anything else.
Black/grey market excluded.

[argeiphontes]

Companies are squeezing. Good jobs have gone to China and India. My last job would've been a sweatshop except they were too cheap to heat in the winter ;-) Capitalism sucks.

People need to start organizing their own worker cooperatives whenever possible. That's going to be the only way to change anything and create decent, sustainable jobs. Thanks for the article post.

[MarxSchmarx]

People need to start organizing their own worker cooperatives

Doing what, exactly?

[Thirsty Crow]

Doing what, exactly?
Competing on the market, obviously.

[lautréamont]

Here's my take on the current state of work and being a worker.



WORK IS CASTRATION





Prostitution is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker.


– Karl Marx

1. THE SPECTACULAR AMERICAN WORKER OF THE 21st CENTURY

THE NECESSITY OF THE UNNECESSARY: modern man needs work to survive under capitalism. Almost all existing production is entirely unnecessary to human life.
THE CAFÉ is the graveyard of the graduate student. They were already dead but here you find them in their graves. Getting a job at a café, you meet the over-educated manager looking for over-educated workers. Graduate students: you, too, can collect them all, he seems to think as he hires you. What is a Liberal Arts degree but a performance fit for selling the mystique of intellectualism? What is a Liberal Arts degree but proof that you can be complacent enough to complete assigned tasks and routines?
THE WAITRESS is the fate of the young woman. The grocery-store cashier is the fate of the aging waitress. The waitress is the paradigmatic example of the world of representation—she is at once a performer and an image; she is a moving image, as in a film, who is reduced to a representation of desire. It is her job to be universally acceptable. It is her job to fulfill the desires of the infinite flow of customers. It is her job to serve. In recent years, the words “waiter” and “waitress” were changed to “server.” While the position remains gendered despite the androgynous verbiage, the term “server” implies a more active servitude. Instead of waiting to attend to orders and prepared foods, the server provides active “customer service” as a personality open to all conversations, hecklings, and demands.
THE INTERN is the fate of the bourgeois child. The child who can afford to not be paid. The only people between 18 and 25 who can afford to not be paid are people who have parents who are willing to provide food, housing, and transportation costs to their child. Interns are getting progressively older, and, therefore, progressively more bourgeois. They are told that their internship will provide them with the experience to land an entry-level position. However, the entry-level position no longer exists. Even secretaries (Administrative Assistants) need years of secretarial work experience and a salary history in order to be applicable for a secretary position. Modern applicability is based on circular logic which disallows even wealthy interns from entry into work. Work is the domination of the past over the present. The only people who are qualified to work are the people who are already working.
TWENTY-FIVE is the new age of childhood. Thirty is the age of washed-up failure. Experience is always demanded but never had. Resumés and tests form the 21st Century definition of humanity; people are quantifiable, filterable, and most of them are nothing but spam. The filter quantifies experience through quantifying the times wasted, working, doing menial tasks which are in fact anti-experiences. Careers are circles of hell: some are better than others, but they are all redundant, menial, and painful. As in The Inferno, the final circle of hell, where people freeze, is reserved for dissidents. Placated desire and selfishness admit people into higher circles, but radicalism, dissidence, and distaste for the current political and spectacular situation receives nothing but a “fuck you” from even the most dismal places of employment. “Do you respect authority?” asks the AMC personality test. As a result, the conscious spectacular worker is inherently forced to be a liar, a sell-out, a fake, a hack, and therefore castrated, and therefore, essentially, a prostitute.
2. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WORK
IMMERSION creates the worker. The state of being a worker is a state of being removed from selfhood, removed from existence—alienated. Immersion is created through the proliferation of tasks, the tightened schedule, and the reliance on others to complete similar tasks. This fabricated environment produces drama through interaction, stress through scheduling, and a necessity for the acceptance of the fate of continually working in the same manner through the proliferation of repetitive tasks into the indefinite future. Hatred and boredom that would have been directed at work, itself, is instead directed at fellow workers and customers. Radical thinking, and, more generally, thinking about the world outside of the work environment, is erased by the demand for constant attentiveness to tasks, to interactions; to the biosphere of the workplace. This biosphere is in fact also a panopticon. Workers are constantly watched and evaluated for their performance not only by their bosses but also by their customers and their fellow workers. They are therefore inherently friendless in an atmosphere of constant suspicion. Furthermore, undercover health inspectors, undercover corporate evaluators who can fire a worker simply for not asking a customer if they would like to participate in the latest coupon or deal, and undercover cops evaluating the serving of alcohol provide a constant threat which creates not merely an atmosphere of suspicion, but a sense of moral duty behind the accurate performance of what are in fact unimportant tasks.
COMPETITION provides a sense of self-justification to the worker. The alcoholic pities the drug-addict. The worker has risen above the state of unemployment, putting them in a state of gratitude and, for a short period, giving them a sense of superiority to their previous state or to their peers. They now know how to ‘succeed’ in an interview. In fact, they are an authority on the subject. They are in a position to give advice. But the luster of work soon fades as the period of ‘learning’ and newness at work undermines the worker to a period of self-hatred, fatigue, stress, and a sense of being a lesser product or producer than the surrounding workers. However, with time comes confidence and meagerly-given responsibility; with confidence and responsibility come security and the fear of losing confidence and responsibility in a period of unemployment or in beginning a new line of work. Hours are lengthened, the number of tasks is greatened; the expectations are higher. To lose concentration would be to lose respect. The fatigue grows greater, yet the worker becomes accustomed to perpetual fatigue. More work becomes a respite instead of a curse—it is a distraction from boredom. Speed, endurance, and concentration become the only virtues. These are the same virtues demanded by a video game. Immersion is the synthesis of the worker and the work to the point that the worker becomes the work. However, with a sense of competition with others, with oneself/one’s limits, and with other workspaces, the worker is not only immersed, but enchanted into a state of desire to work toward something. These somethings are often even vocalized by the boss-figures; criticisms and goals are given; the perpetual amount of work becomes an aspiration rather than simply a task. Individual aspirations are replaced by company aspirations. Individual desires, stories, and complaints become homogeneous with those of the workplace. Experience becomes homogeneous. And so the animal comes to love the cage.