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#Post#: 10671--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: guest55 Date: January 19, 2022, 12:08 am
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These Western corporations sure do have a lot of chutzpah!
#Post#: 10694--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: guest55 Date: January 19, 2022, 7:30 pm
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[quote]Bungie, Sony, Obsidian & WB Devs Boycott! Rockstar
REJECTS Red Dead Hope & EA Slams BF2042 Criticism[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWJlJybTKFg
This type of stuff seems to be happening across the entire
video-gaming industry at this moment:
[quote]Battlefield 2042 Is So Deserted & Busted Even Cheat
Makers & Sellers Are Abandoning The Game[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3a_JIr1Awc
Video-gamers also seem to be the biggest part of the anti-NFT
and CryptoLand demographic, which is interesting in itself....
Star Wars Battlefront 2 Is So Broken Players Can't Kill Each
Other, EA & Dice Respond Months Later
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghnxRfywe0
#Post#: 10809--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: Zea_mays Date: January 25, 2022, 1:20 am
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Why don't people want to work at terrible chain businesses?
Because it's not worth being murdered by irate customers for
minimum wage.
[quote]Argument over BBQ sauce leads to teenage Wendy's employee
being shot in head[/quote]
HTML https://cbsaustin.com/amp/news/nation-world/argument-over-bbq-sauce-leads-to-teenage-wendys-employee-being-shot-in-head-restaurant-shooting-investigation-police-phoenix-suspect-violence-handgun
[quote]Police: McDonald's employee shot in argument over
discount over french fries[/quote]
HTML https://krcgtv.com/news/local/police-mcdonalds-employee-shot-in-argument-over-discount
(See also, all the articles about employees being murdered for
telling sub-humans to wear masks, etc.)
#Post#: 11056--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: guest55 Date: February 4, 2022, 1:42 pm
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Secretary Of Labor Reacts To Shocking Jobs Report
[quote]United States Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh joined Chris
Jansing to discuss the White House’ response to January’s
surprising jobs number that showed 467,000 jobs were added, and
how these positive results will impact the government’s strategy
for tackling lingering inflation and supply chain issues. “This
is a good report, it’s another sign of positive gain, but it’s
saying that there’s a ‘but’,” says Walsh. “We still have a lot
of work to do … the president has a plan to work and ease
inflation across the country.”[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xtoiN3u58Y
How does adding jobs help the economy if no one wants to work
the jobs you added? This is how ridiculous Western economics
are. It's just all about numbers to these people....
#Post#: 11989--------------------------------------------------
The Age of the Influencer Has Peaked. It’s Time For the Slacker
to Rise Again
By: guest55 Date: March 13, 2022, 8:22 pm
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The Age of the Influencer Has Peaked. It’s Time For the Slacker
to Rise Again
[quote]There are signs that our individualist culture of
achievement and brand alignment has jumped the shark.[/quote]
[img width=1280
height=721]
HTML https://pocket-image-cache.com/direct?resize=w2000&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcms.qz.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F04%2FNirvana-.jpg%3Fquality%3D75%26strip%3Dall%26w%3D2200%26h%3D1240[/img]
[quote]Nirvana, patron saints of nineties slacker-dom. Photo by
Getty Images/Mark and Colleen Haywar[/quote]
[quote]It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through
Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience.
Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets,
it’s now a parade of strategically-crafted life updates, career
achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually
made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with
the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is
striving, so very hard.
And great for them, I guess. But sometimes one might pine for a
less aspirational time, when the cool kids were smoking weed,
eating junk food, and… you know, just chillin’.
Back in the 1990s, our heroes were slackers: the dudes and the
clerks, the stick-it-to-the-man, stay-true-to-yourself burnouts
we saw in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Slacker, and Reality
Bites. In the latter, Winona Ryder’s character, Leilana, chooses
the disillusioned musician (Ethan Hawke) over the TV exec (Ben
Stiller), and it’s presented as an excellent choice. Nobody cool
was trying to monetize their lifestyle back then, or rake in the
brand endorsements. Selling out (remember that?) was
whack.[/quote]
HTML https://pocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com/60a3454ab8021.png
[quote]The cast of ‘Reality Bites,’ a celebration of
slacker-dom. Photo by Universal Pictures[/quote]
[quote]But somewhere in the early 2000s, the slacker of popular
culture lost ground to the striver. I am not immune to this
thoroughly aspirational mindset, and you probably aren’t either.
Whether we have side hustles, personal brands, gig economy jobs,
or entrepreneurial leanings (I’ve had all four), to survive in
the modern economy is to aspire to something much greater than
what we are.[/quote]
9/11 ended the counter-culture, as it was intended to.
[quote]The internet influencer is the apotheosis of all this
striving, this modern set of values taken to its grotesque
extreme: Nothing is sacred, art has been replaced by “content,”
and everything is for sale. This is true even when the message
is swathed in the language of counter-culture: Eco-conscious
influencers see no issue in flying long-haul on free trips from
brands. Yoga gurus who traffic in anti-consumerist spirituality
promote tea brands owned by Unilever. [/quote]
The devil\Yahweh is a much better "influencer" than any clown on
social media could ever hope to be. This is why most
'influencers' are influenced fools themselves, and make choices
they would never even have come up with by themselves. If they
ever truly took the time to know themselves of course....
Perhaps a better title for this article would have been: The Age
of the Westerner Has Peaked. It's Time For the Slacker to Rise
Again ?
[quote]But as anyone who has lived a few decades knows, youth
culture swings like a pendulum. The buttoned-up post-World War
II period gave way to the countercultural Free Love generation
(arguably the original slackers, as they were the first to have
middle class comfort to rebel against). Similarly, the 1980s
excess of Gordon Gecko’s Wall Street set the stage for the
slackers amid the economic recession of the 1990s, with their
flannel shirts, skater culture, Beastie Boys and Nirvana
records.[/quote]
HTML https://pocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com/60a345829a360.png
[quote]Skater culture doesn’t strive. Photo by Reuters/Lucy
Nicholson[/quote]
[quote]Of course, it’s reductive to lump the experience of the
billions of people living through those ages into one mostly
American cultural trope. But there’s always something to glean
from the dominant youth culture of an era. What was cool—what
the kids were into—tells us something fundamental about what we
valued. And seen through that lens, there’s a marked difference
between today’s striving and the slacking of the 1990s.
And, in a modern aspirational marketplace so saturated that fake
influencers are now posting advertising-like content that nobody
even paid them for, there are signs that our individualist
culture of achievement and brand alignment has jumped the shark.
If the cycle of history is any guide, once our culture of
striving flames out, it may well be time for the slacker to rise
again.[/quote]
[quote]
The Neoliberal Self
For the internet influencer, everything from their morning sun
salutation to their coffee enema (really) is a potential
money-making opportunity. Forget paying your dues, or working
your way up—in fact, forget jobs. Work is life, and getting paid
to live your best life is the ultimate aspiration.
This existence is perfectly aligned with what Will Storr, in his
2017 book Selfie: How the West became self-obsessed, described
as the defining person of our age, the neoliberal self: “an
extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic,
hard-working, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global
citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.” And
while the generation most associated with this
archetype—millennials—gets flack for their entitlement and
unwillingness to work toward a typical middle class life, there
are plenty of reasons millennials have so thoroughly embraced
and innovated upon this neoliberal ideal.
“You can see why that happens in terms of the shrinking of
middle class industries and the economy,” says Laurence Scott,
author of Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality, an
exploration of the nature of reality in the digital age, and a
lecturer at NYU’s London campus. “Neoliberalism has hollowed out
so many ways of [making a] stable income that it’s not
surprising that the influencer economy has risen up in this
really precarious economic climate for millennials.”
That neoliberal sensibility—emphasizing the importance of
markets above the intervention of the state, and typified by the
attitude that the tide of growth and globalization will lift all
boats—has also given rise to the thoroughly modern affliction
that we now call “millennial burnout.” A coinage by Anne Helen
Petersen in her memorable piece for BuzzFeed, the idea is that
all this self-optimization in the digital age is taking a toll,
and leaving us with multiple afflictions, including “errand
paralysis.”
Petersen argues that we’re obsessed with self-optimization
because—post-financial crisis, saddled with student debt, with
little hope of a pension—we simply have to be: “We couldn’t just
show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that
would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the
generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to
be the very best workers possible.”
The result is an economy where it’s more possible than ever to
be your own boss, and a lot less possible to buy your own home.
And one where it’s literally unimaginable that we’ll ever be
able to stop working—at the end of the workday, or in the later
years of our lives.
It’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and admit
defeat, if only for a moment of respite. And it’s easy to see
how this exhaustion could precipitate the next cycle of
slackerdom.
Scott first raised that idea in an interview on Russell Brand’s
podcast. “The generation after [this one] may just look and
think, ‘I cant believe there was that kind of economy and that’s
how people were presenting themselves,'” he said. “There may be
a slight distaste to it and reemergence of a slacker 1990s
pendulum swing, rather than this quite needy
attention-seeking.”[/quote]
Entire article:
HTML https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-age-of-the-influencer-has-peaked-it-s-time-for-the-slacker-to-rise-again?utm_source=pocket-newtab
I already feel this way. I believe the current culture is
extremely sick and all "influencers" really do is spread the
sickness around, at the cost of their own spirit obviously.
25 Years After Kurt Cobain: Where Is the Counterculture?
[quote]What happens to the art isn't important. What's important
is that it was being made. I remember that raw feeling of
someone standing up for what they believe, and not caring what
anyone thinks. I haven't felt that feeling in a while.[/quote]
[quote]In 1991, Kurt Cobain was the definition of cool.
The Billboard charts that year were overrun by mainstream hits
by Paula Abdul, Vanilla Ice, and Boyz II Men. Music was about
looking good. And lip singing.
And then in September of 1991, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana came out
with Nevermind, and it felt like the biggest **** you to
mainstream culture.
I remember Kurt wearing a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck"
t-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. And I remember
thinking of all the other celebrities on the magazine that year,
and how they must of worked so hard to project an image of
"looking good."
I remember the band open-mouth kissing during the SNL credits
just to "**** off the redneck homophobes" and how it probably
did.
I remember that raw feeling of someone standing up for what they
believe and not caring what anyone thinks.
I haven't felt that feeling in a while.[/quote]
Entire article:
HTML https://www.huffpost.com/entry/25-years-after-kurt-cobain_b_9619740
How I too long for days were people stop caring what everyone
else thinks of them....
[img width=1280
height=853]
HTML https://www.highsnobiety.com/static-assets/thumbor/X8h8ZdsnmMUXY2ez7KmsTQMgSfo=/1600x1067/www.highsnobiety.com/static-assets/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/14174625/kurt-c-main.jpg[/img]
#Post#: 11995--------------------------------------------------
Re: American Empire Collapse: It's About To Get Much Worse(?)
By: guest55 Date: March 13, 2022, 10:00 pm
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A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel
Lost’
[quote]The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges
has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening
education gap across the U.S. [/quote]
HTML https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233?st=8il0uebem3xdam8&mod=ffoct22
#Post#: 11998--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: Zea_mays Date: March 14, 2022, 12:54 am
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The question is, will this trend lead to permanent lifestyle
changes after the pandemic is over?
[quote]Focus on money lessened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic
A series of three studies examined the effect of the COVID-19
pandemic on materialism, finding an overall decrease in the
importance people place on money. This research was published in
the journal Psychology & Marketing.
Materialism refers to “beliefs that link wealth and consumption
with personal achievement and happiness.” Various studies have
found negative associations between materialism and well-being.
Higher media consumption enhances the advocacy of materialistic
values. As well, in consumer-oriented societies, reminders about
one’s mortality enhance materialism. Lockdown restrictions
throughout the COVID-19 pandemic increased media consumption by
up to 27%. News stories shared narratives about illness, death,
and survival, increasing reminders of mortality. Thus, it could
be possible that the societal and behavioral changes that
emerged with the pandemic enhanced materialistic values.[/quote]
HTML https://www.psypost.org/2022/03/focus-on-money-lessened-throughout-the-covid-19-pandemic-62711
Regarding that last point, I've seen studies claiming that in
non-consumerist societies throughout history, reminders of
mortality and low materialist desire is correlated with
religiosity.
#Post#: 12006--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: Zea_mays Date: March 14, 2022, 1:32 am
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More solidarity:
[quote]Americans quit their jobs this summer at rate never seen
before. Gen Z led the charge. The children of Occupy Wall Street
— footsoldiers of the Third Force — went full Johnny Paycheck on
their crappy minimum-wage employment.
“This is a fight response,” a career coach told The New York
Times. When people are triggered, they go reptilian: fight or
flight. And flight’s not an option when you’re cornered. Across
a scorched-earth economic landscape employees looked their
bosses in the eye, and their bosses blinked. Because the power
dynamic was reversed and everyone knew it. For once it was the
workers who had the leverage.
[...]
The way people were quitting — trumpeting their departures on
social media — should have been a clue that this wasn’t about
laziness. It’s the opposite of lazy to quit out loud. That is
fury talking. It’s a statement that this is not about me.
[...]
The Mandarin word for it is “tang ping” — literally “lying
flat.” Young Chinese, beaten down by an authoritarian system and
yearning to live a more relaxed life, spread themselves against
the earth like a measuring tape, becoming “the metric of all
things,” as one protester put it in a social media post that was
quickly deleted by the state. Clearly, the pushback against
degrading overwork is not just a Western thing. Rather, it’s a
sign, as one tang ping enthusiast put it, of a “global
unraveling.”[/quote]
Note: these anti-consumerist countercultures are fundamentally
anti-Western, regardless of where they are taking place
globally. Which civilization invented the commercial and
industrial system that now exists in China? Which civilization
is being rebelled against by both the Antiwork and Lying Flat
countercultures? Hint: Western civilization.
[quote]“I opt out.” Those are powerful words. Consider the
mighty, status-quo-toppling impact of this passive gesture if
everybody did it. The new activists have found magic in
inverting the old mantra of the capitalist hustle.
Don’t just do something: stand there.
To do nothing, even for a short while, is an active rebuke of
the creation of capitalist value.
[...]
And this has been the one upside of the otherwise grim blight on
the world that is this pandemic: the disruption gave everyone
time to reflect on their workaday routine. And a lot of people
came to the same conclusion: Why the fuck should I take the
prime of my life and simply hand it over?
[...]
To be crystal clear here, this is not about not wanting to work.
We humans are working dogs. We prefer to work than not to work,
studies show.
[...]
And the average employee comes to understand: You do not own me,
day and night. I give my service to you, on my terms.
So celebrate this moment of opportunity born of crisis. Maybe
these are the first growing-pain heaves along the road to what a
new definition of a successful life actually looks like.[/quote]
HTML https://www.adbusters.org/article/gen-z-will-you-whack-capitalism-into-a-new-orbit
Opting out of Western civilization isn't enough. To end it, you
need to get to work for something to counter it.
#Post#: 14309--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: guest78 Date: June 24, 2022, 11:49 am
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Even your boss wants to quit
[quote]The Great Resignation is seeping into the corner office,
with 70% of C-level executives telling Deloitte pollsters that
they seriously might resign for a job that better supports their
well-being.
Why it matters: If the boss who sets the rules is feeling burned
out, it's no surprise that many of the rank and file are also
restive.
57% of employees in the Deloitte survey said they were fed
up enough to quit too.
Driving the news: A report released today by Deloitte and market
research firm Workplace Intelligence found that C-suite
executives feel as frazzled and depressed as the workers who
report to them. In a poll conducted in February...
76% of higher-ups said the pandemic has negatively affected
their overall health.
81% said improving their own equilibrium is more important
than advancing their career right now.
Some execs are pushing for changes. 83% said they'll expand
their company's well-being benefits over the next 1-2 years,
while 77% said companies should be required to publicly report
"workforce well-being metrics."
Asked if they'd taken any steps to help staffers mellow out, 20%
of C-suiters said they'd banned after-hours emailing, and 35%
said they make employees take breaks during the day.
35% send notes coaxing employees to take time off and
disconnect — and 29% say they're trying to set an example by
doing this themselves.
Yes, but: There's a big disconnect between how the higher-ups
perceive their efforts and what workers say.
84% of C-suite execs said they thought their workers were
thriving from a mental health perspective — but only 59% of
employees rated their own mental health as "excellent" or
"good."
91% of the honchos said they saw themselves as caring
leaders — but just 56% of workers thought their bosses cared
about their well-being.
"What we found was that the majority [of C-suite executives]
want to do something about it, but they just haven't done
something about it," Dan Schawbel, the founder of Workplace
Intelligence, told Axios. "So it's been more talk and less
action."
The answer isn't just to tack on more mental health benefits
but to reassess everything about how the workplace operates —
including child care and remote work options, Schawbel said.
Between the lines: The Deloitte findings ring true to executive
recruiters. "What we see is that people are resigning to try to
find a better place, a better work-life balance, a better
culture," Shawn Cole, founder of Cowen Partners, tells Axios.
"That's the 'great reshuffle,' as we see it."
Women executives have been hit particularly hard with job
overload during the pandemic, and a disproportionate number are
job-hunting — or stepping aside.
A recent LinkedIn survey found that mid-level managers and
directors want a four-day workweek even more than their reports.
But the "C-suite is an island" where corporate wellness policies
— like unplugging and ignoring email — don't necessarily apply,
Cole said.
"To some extent, that's what they're paid for," he noted.
"They really need to set boundaries for themselves" to stay
happy and focused, Cole said.
Finding a new job isn't always the answer: "The grass is not
greener," particularly for a CEO.
What's next: C-suite burnout could potentially translate to more
enlightened workplace benefits and policies — or not, as an
economic downturn puts more focus on the bottom line.
Methodology: The Deloitte survey, conducted by email from Feb.
8-21, involved 1,050 C-suite executives in the U.S., U.K.,
Canada and Australia and an equal number of staff employees.
Respondents were "provided with a small monetary incentive" for
participating.[/quote]
HTML https://www.axios.com/2022/06/22/ceo-csuite-burnout-pandemic-great-resignation?utm_source=pocket-newtab
#Post#: 15469--------------------------------------------------
Re: "Great Resignation" labor movement and strikes
By: guest78 Date: September 4, 2022, 1:56 pm
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How 'Quiet Quitting' Became The Next Phase Of The Great
Resignation
[quote]"Quiet quitting" is having a moment. The trend of
employees choosing to not go above and beyond their jobs in ways
that include refusing to answer emails during evenings or
weekends, or skipping extra assignments that fall outside their
core duties, is catching on, especially among Gen Zers.
Zaid Khan, 24, an engineer from New York, popularized this trend
with his viral Tiktok video in July.
"You are still performing your duties, but you are no longer
subscribing to the hustle culture mentally that work has to be
our life," Khan says in his video. "The reality is, it's not,
and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."
In the U.S., quiet quitting could also be a backlash to
so-called hustle culture — the 24/7 startup grind popularized by
figures like Gary Vaynerchuk and others.
"Quiet quitting is an antidote to hustle culture," said Nadia De
Ala, founder of Real You Leadership, who "quietly quit" her job
about five years ago. "It is almost direct resistance and
disruption of hustle culture. And I think it's exciting that
more people are doing it."
Last year, the Great Resignation dominated the economic news
cycle. Now, during the second half of 2022, it's the quiet
quitting trend that's gaining momentum at a time when the rate
of U.S. productivity is raising some concern. Data on U.S.
worker productivity posted its biggest annual drop in the second
quarter.
So, why is this trend on the rise? Watch the video above to
learn whether quiet quitting is hurting the U.S. economy and how
it's being seen as part of the Great Resignation
narrative.[/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVLiRWD3gAM
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