I'm thoroughly proud of my daughter's resilience in the jobs market.
We all know that the days of post-war Britain and the technologically white-heated 1960s, that afforded for some the sense of a 'job for life', are long gone and, consequently, my daughter has not been surprised to have worked in lots of companies in a wide range of roles. Firms have grown craftier in their dealings with employees and devious in the ways that they excuse pushing down rates of pay and eroding working conditions. Some of these arseholes recruit only to sack for a variety of illegitimate, if legal, reasons at the end of the probation period or when the invariably short-term contracts end. At that point when workers expect to receive the promised increase in pay, they let them go. This has been my daughter's experience.
Apart from deserving a good kicking, I believe these predatory bosses also need the rule of law to keep them at bay. Of course, any such legislation is not even a speck on the political horizon under the current system; due to ruinous union bureaucracies and their fraternising with the various incarnations of the Labour party and because of officials' predilections to engage in political intrigues with government lackeys, the working rights that British workers have fought for and improved over 200 or more years are now practically meaningless. Employers are increasingly wolfish in their dealings with employees and particularly those they take on to fill jobs that are not specialised (the majority of positions, today). My daughter's experience has included being subject to a succession of middle managers who tend to play the good guys in guiding her job development plans and then change tack or side-step the issue as seniors provide them with excuses to make their fellow employees redundant. Managers are unabashed in their duplicity, playing with individuals' lives, ambitions and career hopes.
My daughter starts another job on Monday and is happy and optimistic, which pleases me no end.
The imperfectly communicated reverie of a faulty autodidact. Please make his day more real by responding.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Work for all
Well, it had to get to this: tomorrow is my first day of work for 2011. The vacation is over; the holidays are long gone; everything is before us. I threw my last disposable quid at a lottery ticket on Saturday with the certain feeling that it would leave me in clover. Not for the first time my instincts failed me.
Anyway, what is a person without work? Can any of us really be alive without a purpose, without a role, an identity? While such rhetoric is for each to answer as best they might, I would ask, please, for a direct answer to why we're continually pressured to do more and more for relatively less. We turn up to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, yet Capital continues to make more demands upon us all. The excuses for its demands are rehearsed time and again through a media which persuades us that our sacrifices will help the national economy, while our political masters exact from us the same by legislation.
Yes, the state separates our elected representatives from our interests and uses them to reconcile us all to capitalism. The irony is that capitalism cannot survive without our labour, although our labour would be just as useful to the nation without capitalism.
Have a prosperous and happy new year, y'all!
Anyway, what is a person without work? Can any of us really be alive without a purpose, without a role, an identity? While such rhetoric is for each to answer as best they might, I would ask, please, for a direct answer to why we're continually pressured to do more and more for relatively less. We turn up to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, yet Capital continues to make more demands upon us all. The excuses for its demands are rehearsed time and again through a media which persuades us that our sacrifices will help the national economy, while our political masters exact from us the same by legislation.
Yes, the state separates our elected representatives from our interests and uses them to reconcile us all to capitalism. The irony is that capitalism cannot survive without our labour, although our labour would be just as useful to the nation without capitalism.
Have a prosperous and happy new year, y'all!
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
A new national socialism might be around the corner
Were we generations ago so naive to think that the global community might be where the future lay:-)?
It's becoming incredible to me, living as I do in a country where the immigrant is seen as suspect or as parasitical and as ultimately unwelcome, to believe that we might some day soon throw in our lot with foreigners. Questions of sovereignty, 'natural' bellicosity, fear of the ex-Soviets and Islam, would all suggest that we are as far away in 2011 from global union as we were in 1911. The increasingly shrill rhetoric behind individual autonomy, libertarianism and choice is discordant with the humanist project, with pejorative socialism, with efficacious charity. Self remains the foremost interest such that, under perceived fiscal pressure, the interests of community and society (global, national or parochial) fall by the wayside. Rather than enjoying the 21st century's promised widened horizons, the pressed family head now scrambles to attain a vista on best defending his or her dependants and, if this government has much to do with it, will soon be resorting to pack imperatives for survival. It is in this climate that national socialism forces its claims to relevancy.
Capitalism runs parallel with all these developments; flexing like a whore with the state, capital is generally unaffected by the convulsions that touch our little communities and with which it toys. Its own crises are resolved because we do not congregate in opposition, don't irritate its otherwise healthy organism. Indeed, our suffering is often part of the physick and its encouraging acquisitiveness and self-interest are effectively divisive to its potential enemies.
It is at this point that I play devil's advocate and ask: Is aggressive nationalism the way forward? If we are to discount communism, which is generally attacked as state capitalism (Stalinist) then how about a kind of national socialism, or Nazism as it was termed in Germany's racialist variation on Italian fascism? Let me hear the arguments because I would like to analyse their bases. The arguments might be based on how you feel about GM foods, immigration, end-of-life decisions, abortion, the Third World? The British as a whole seem full of their own self-importance and have an interesting view of their relative worth. We generally would strip our compatriots of what they've spent generations fighting for if we feel they have an advantage over ourselves. Let's face it, we refuse to believe we are working class and see no solution in a Trotskyist international workers' association that might precipitate revolution. The world is shrinking in relation to its population. Resources are depleting. We're stuck on the planet for the foreseeable future, so where do we go from here? Britain still has some clout in the world and American Tea-partyists and Zionists (in some bizarre blindness to the events of their modern history) would offer little opposition to an extreme right-wing regime here. Capital has fomented two world wars and perpetuated the conflicts of the Cold War. It loves the current aggression in Iran and AfPak. It would certainly fall behind the economy of a country that embraced the full monstrosity that is national socialism.
It's becoming incredible to me, living as I do in a country where the immigrant is seen as suspect or as parasitical and as ultimately unwelcome, to believe that we might some day soon throw in our lot with foreigners. Questions of sovereignty, 'natural' bellicosity, fear of the ex-Soviets and Islam, would all suggest that we are as far away in 2011 from global union as we were in 1911. The increasingly shrill rhetoric behind individual autonomy, libertarianism and choice is discordant with the humanist project, with pejorative socialism, with efficacious charity. Self remains the foremost interest such that, under perceived fiscal pressure, the interests of community and society (global, national or parochial) fall by the wayside. Rather than enjoying the 21st century's promised widened horizons, the pressed family head now scrambles to attain a vista on best defending his or her dependants and, if this government has much to do with it, will soon be resorting to pack imperatives for survival. It is in this climate that national socialism forces its claims to relevancy.
Capitalism runs parallel with all these developments; flexing like a whore with the state, capital is generally unaffected by the convulsions that touch our little communities and with which it toys. Its own crises are resolved because we do not congregate in opposition, don't irritate its otherwise healthy organism. Indeed, our suffering is often part of the physick and its encouraging acquisitiveness and self-interest are effectively divisive to its potential enemies.
It is at this point that I play devil's advocate and ask: Is aggressive nationalism the way forward? If we are to discount communism, which is generally attacked as state capitalism (Stalinist) then how about a kind of national socialism, or Nazism as it was termed in Germany's racialist variation on Italian fascism? Let me hear the arguments because I would like to analyse their bases. The arguments might be based on how you feel about GM foods, immigration, end-of-life decisions, abortion, the Third World? The British as a whole seem full of their own self-importance and have an interesting view of their relative worth. We generally would strip our compatriots of what they've spent generations fighting for if we feel they have an advantage over ourselves. Let's face it, we refuse to believe we are working class and see no solution in a Trotskyist international workers' association that might precipitate revolution. The world is shrinking in relation to its population. Resources are depleting. We're stuck on the planet for the foreseeable future, so where do we go from here? Britain still has some clout in the world and American Tea-partyists and Zionists (in some bizarre blindness to the events of their modern history) would offer little opposition to an extreme right-wing regime here. Capital has fomented two world wars and perpetuated the conflicts of the Cold War. It loves the current aggression in Iran and AfPak. It would certainly fall behind the economy of a country that embraced the full monstrosity that is national socialism.
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