"Downtown Worker Appreciation Week" countered with anti-work message

some local anarchists, 03.08.2007 18:43

This week downtown Milwaukee was host to "Downtown Worker Appreciation Week," which offered a number of mildly degrading festivities to workers on their lunch breaks. The entire event was corporate sponsored through-and-through and billed as "the most fun you'll have at work all year," as though a karaoke contest and office chair races offer much of a break from the daily drudgery of work. Insulted by this crass display, some downtown workers and their friends put together the following flier and distributed several hundred copies of it over the course of the week:

While enjoying the “most fun you’ll have at work all year” during Downtown Employee Appreciation Week, does the whole concept leave you feeling a bit hollow? A “celebration” of workers, surviving paycheck to paycheck, thrown by the management who don’t hang by such a precarious thread… sounds like appeasement, not celebration. If they really appreciated the workers, wouldn’t they provide more benefits, higher wages, fewer hours, or more vacation rather than a few benign and boring activities to waste your lunch break on? Of course, those things would hurt their profit margins, so the question is “Can they really appreciate our labor at all?”

Do you live to work or work to live?

In modern society, there are no options left to the average person, if they wish to survive comfortably, that don’t include being forced in to a rat race of haves and have-nots. Have you ever been asked about yourself and answered the question by stating your occupation? That’s because the gamut of capital is sustained by a heavy encouragement of competition. One can become so absorbed by there job that it consumes their whole life, becoming a priority over recreation, family, and anything else that makes life worth living. Without this cutthroat competition in which we are forced in to a mind set where we are not only comfortable with stabbing one another in the back but encouraging it, our iron fisted, domination driven economy would crumble. Our “prosperous” economy is run on the blood and sweat of those who refuse to give in to being slave masters. There are alternatives!

Main Entry: slav·ery

1 : DRUDGERY, TOIL
2 : submission to a dominating influence
3 a : the state of a person who is a chattel of another

Amen! 04.08.2007 - 04:18 This is a long overdue message. Unfortunately, union organizers over the past 50 years have completely and negligently ignored the trend from manufacturing jobs to white collar and so-called "service industry" jobs, and now they're all scratching their stupid heads wondering where all their workers went. The only union-represented office workers in our city, for example, are a small group of mostly female workers at Miller Brewery -- a tough bunch, but a small bunch. Of course, this should come as no surprise, seeing as the AFL-CIO has glued itself to the GOP's Siamese twin, the so-called Democratic Party. Meanwhile, unions like the SEIU who have separated from the AFL-CIO, rather than taking a decisive course of action, have completely disengaged themselves from electoral politics. I love what our unions have done for us over the years, but it breaks my heart seeing them behaving like a bunch of pussies. Fragger> Homepage:: http://www.thelaborparty.org/ unions? I'm suspicious 04.08.2007 - 16:33 Unions, while winning some gains, have also played an important role as mediators between the anger of the exploited and the bosses, diffusing situations with great potential for minimal gains and eagerly selling out comrades when there is personal or organizational gain in doing so. Autonomous worker (or non-worker) organizations interested in total self-management instead of appeasement would, I think, be a better method for organizing. Unions are generally backstabbers in waiting, despite the best intentions of many members. ultra> on unions 06.08.2007 - 14:26 A union has to work within established and state sanctioned means, making them dependent on the establisment. They are forced to compromise the motivations for its creation in leaps and bounds until finally the intentions mirror the social order's (to maintain this miserable situation at any cost). Can a union truely be anti-heirarchical? Can anything (ideologies included) or anyone truely represent the interests of workers other than themselves? mario buda> "Can a union truly be anti-hierarchical?" 06.08.2007 - 22:20 Our forebears in Spain thought so:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_del_Trabajo At no other time and at no other place in history has anarchism been realized as well as it was in Spain before Franco -- until, perhaps, modern Argentina:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaSinPat But that would never work in Milwaukee -- would it? Fragger> Homepage:: http://www.thelaborparty.org/ unions and hierarchy 07.08.2007 - 11:20 It would never work anywhere, because unions are hierarchical, so you can't work toward anti-authoritarian ends with means which depend on authority to legitimize their struggle. mario buda> Spain 07.08.2007 - 17:59 The CNT in Spain did exactly what one would expect of a union- take a place in the government and weaken the position of the rank and file- those on the front, with the most radical demands- for the benefit of the bureaucrats. ultra> I.W.W. 'Nuff said...... 08.08.2007 - 03:21 . Come to the CCC, first Tues, monthly at 6:30 pm. Direct action. The Industrial Workers of the World. Joseph Hillström> Homepage:: http://www.iww.org West Bend 11.08.2007 - 03:05 Of course, never having actually having to work for a living, the majority of you kids reading these posts wouldn't understand any of it. So, oh, well, never mind! You suburban anarchists are just way too radical for reality. I hope you like the Republicans who represent you. And they do. Fragger> hey fragger, think up an intelligent argument 11.08.2007 - 15:43 Hey Fragger, That was a sweeping, broad, poorly constructed generalization and it really makes you come off looking either ignorant or stupid. Maybe both! Many people who identify as anarchists, punks or (urban anything for that matter) work very hard at multiple jobs, many of which pay poorly, or don't pay at all. It's really frustrating to be standing alongside a bunch of fellow workers standing up for something and have someone drive by yelling "get a job." You know why? I look quickly to the left and right of me and do a quick tally of the people I know. One might make 40K a year as say, a teacher or some such, another lives on 15k or so a year doing something they really hate just so they can keep healthcare for themselves, and the majority are feeding an entire family kids included on like 13K a year combined income with no benefits, etc. get a job? I don't need any additional jobs, my friend. I need social justice!!! Then maybe one of the many jobs will pay a living wage and I could either quit all the other ones or just show up volunteering when I feel like it instead! marco> I'm Just Sayin' 15.08.2007 - 23:25 Well, hello, Marco! I apologize for anything offensive in my last comment. I wrote it in, shall we say, a very agitated state. I never meant to suggest that none of you have a job. Heavens, no! Having come from a lower middle class background myself, I know what kind of stigma that carries. I was unemployed for several months last year, and it took me a while to forgive myself. What I meant to convey was, that I perceive that the majority of the area's self-styled "anarchists" come from mostly white, privileged, suburban backgrounds. I noticed that you did not refute this assertion -- perhaps because, in my agitated state, I had not made this assertion clear. Having been to the "radical" Riverwest, I've seen the privileged "anarchists" completely oblivious of the blacks and Latinos who live there -- people who live there not because Mommy and Daddy sent them to UWM, but because it's one of the few places left where they won't get evicted or shot -- if they're lucky. I haven't noticed much mixture between the two populations. Forgive me for making these observations. I'm just sayin'. 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