/labor/ - Labor

/finesse/ general

Tips of stretching the dollar, getting one over on the small business owner, etc

Tips for working to rule/stealing time, finessing free food, side hustles and quick cash, etc without fucking over your fellow worker

Seeking good contract language protecting political activity and speech to reduce the risk of getting fired over being a communist or anti-zionist. My workplace is majority anti-zionist Jewish people with a plurality of reds. A handful of zionist and rightoid pricks really hate that fact and keep trying to wield management against us and call in outside zionist orgs for backup because our existence fucks with their messaging that all Jewish people support Israel.
We're in the US and I expect the attempts at purging leftists to get worse in the future. Any good examples of protections we could copy? Also, general suggestions on things to definitely fight to have in our contract are welcome.

Im a man and I DO consider myself, really, very manly. But I genuinely suffer daily, or extended angst, because my "material conditions of existence" don't allow me to ,not even TRY OUT FOR, extreme manly lifestyles….
Special unit active-War soldier, SWAT team member\SORT member, or even mma\bluhurt\rugby amateur player. non-violent yet extreme jobs like Underwater Welder, altitude rescue\medicine missions. etc
WTF Am I supposed to do? i changed and suited my whole lifestyle to be manlier: diet, sleep pattern, exercise type, so on.
>inb4 being a rEAl Man is about being a (((householder)))
No. Im Celibate.

Do you consider certain jobs off-limits, for youself or in general from the perspective of a leftist or for personal reasons, such as military, the defense industry, banks, maybe even the meat industry or the work in capitalist governments?

Do you think that there is a point in entryism into those spaces?

Do you judge people based on the profession they chose, independent of their personal circumstances or do you take that into account even if it's probably? Is there a difference if you are talking to someone who 'should know better' i.e. is a self-styled class- or otherwise politically conscious person?

Should a leftist who can't afford or sustain to be a 'professional revolutionary' seek out professions that seek to 'ameliorate' the worst effects of capitalism, like social work, teaching etc.?

Or is just obsessing over the ethics of one's job just moralist lifestylism, akin to 'ethical consumerism' and basically 'anything goes' since the profanition is considered absolute?


What are your thoughts on these points?

I work at a shitty grocery store in an even shittier area. People come in who are completely illiterate and need to be walked through each step of paying. Basically everyone uses foodstamp payment and we get robbed every single day whether it's the carts and baskets getting carried off or someone running out the front with food.

Is it anti-Marxist to prevent shoplifting? Should I just ignore people blatantly stealing when I am working the self checkout machines?

I'm so fucking tired of my job, it's so boring and soulless. All I do is stare at a computer all day and contemplate my life decisions.
Worse of all? I have to work another 40 fucking years or so until I retire, which at that point I'll be an old fart sitting in some shitty nursing home watching the window and praying that someone dares to visit me.

Work all year round just for two rest days where I have to do other life shit. The reward? Living with the basics and a two week vacation. Fuck this man, I can't stand living like this anymore.

If you're not organised with wage labourers in any meaningful and consequential way you're not a communist, just a sympathiser who knows plenty. It's akin to calling oneself a physicist because they watch PBS Space Time & read Feynman sometimes.

why you're WRONG about the PMC

The professional managerial class is just the most advanced section of wage workers and the primary reason Porky is shafting them is because they RESENT the fact that a subsection of workers, due to the their advanced skill or education, have an increased level of independence.

In the recent debate with the far right over the h1b issue on twitter/x, musk said:

>“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk said on X on Christmas Day. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk said in another post.

Now, it seems to me that what he means by "super motivated" is complying with his unreasonable work demands, and visa holders are much more likely to do so out of fear (of being fired and thus DEPORTED). Musk and his fellow tech titans seem to really resent the relatively high level of bargaining power and independence that skilled professionals have due to their high level of skill and education.

Its no accident that tech-porkies, who rely on these types of workers the most, are the most reactionary and you can see that they have significant government influence (the "tech bro" right). They are waging a brutal class war.

When Musk says "super motivated," he really means "willing to work 80+ hours a week without complaining." And H-1B holders, by design, have no real leverage to push back. H-1B workers are tied to their employers. If they get fired, they have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. That means long hours, no complaints, and low risk of quitting. Musk and other execs hate worker autonomy. If you’re a highly skilled engineer who can walk away and get another six-figure job easily, you won’t put up with unreasonable demands. H-1Bs function as a corporate leash, they allow companies to keep a portion of their workforce permanently dependent. That’s why firms like Google, Meta, and Amazon push so hard for H-1B expansions-not just for talent, but to erode the bargaining power of the wider workforce.

What we’re seeing is a class struggle between professionals and the Capitalist Class—the engineers, developers, and other skilled professionals who actually build and maintain technology versus the executives and investors who extPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

This is a thread about teaching for teachers.

What teaching theories do you like?
Do you have any good tips?
How is your teachers union?

Vent your stories about the dogshit waste of resources on fad educational theories. Or the technologically illiterate boomers who for some fucking reason introduced ipad learning to the school ecosystem because their grandkids got one at christmas.

How do we teach kids the critical philosophical skills to be able to even be able to conceive of the leftist theory we hope later they'll pick up when they bump into it later in life?

Everything teaching. Talk bout it

Strategically speaking, cork production is a ripe target for unionization efforts, and once the unions take power in the cork industry, after making basic demands for health care, benefits, etc, they should demand seats on the board of directors at their company for every full time employee. I say this because such a demand effectively has the ability to transform a capitalist owned company into a worker owned cooperative.

Now, why do I say this? Because cork production, despite being very old, is quite resistant to automation for the reasons elaborated upon in this video. The work is also very manual, and labor intensive. It employs a lot more variable capital than constant capital. These are the sorts of industries where profit rates are consistently high. As Cockshott never tires of pointing out, empirical evidence since the 1800s consistently shows that profit rates decrease with a decrease of variable capital or an increase of constant capital. This industry has a high rate of exploitation despite being very old. Which is rare. This is due to the aforementioned resistance to automation. This is a natural resistance rather than a resistance on the part of the workers. Cork trees are all shaped different, and the trees can't just be chopped down for their bark. The trees have to be kept alive so they can be stripped over and over. And they have to be stripped carefully or they die. And you can't let a robot due it due to the unique shape of each tree. So for the foreseeable future this industry will require human workers. And the whole world drinks wine. And the vast majority of wine bottles, billions of them, are stopped with corks from the bark of the cork tree. Nearly all cork is produced in Portugal. That's a single point of failure. Organize the Portuguese cork industry and there's almost nowhere else to turn for good cork. Demand that it be made into a cooperative, and boom, you have a worker owned monopoly because almost nobody else produces this product

People say cooperatives are "petty bourgeois socialism" but I insist that certain industries have unique characteristics which make the strategy of unionize -> demand worker ownership possible. And the cork industry is one of them.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Naysayers, rev up your keyboards.