Reply #117: "We need work that makes sense and work that sustains us"

[bread_and_roses]

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Published on Monday, September 5, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Labor Pains: ­What Obama Won't Say In His Jobs Speech
by Lucinda Marshall

... It is that sort of thinking that has led us to a place where too many people have no job or have dead-end, low paying jobs doing things and making things that make absolutely no sense while at the same time, hunger is at epic levels in this country and elsewhere. If you’re a woman, so sorry, but you will not be achieving pay equity until 2109. Too many people have lost their homes and now the government owns most of the Monopoly mortgages and there is no one to buy them. It is expensive if not impossible to insure our own health and our children do not have the resources they need to learn and when they cannot find jobs, the only option for many is to join the military which is bleeding our coffers dry while sending our children off to bleed to death for faux reasons that make no sense at all. The education system is so desperate, that moms can be convicted of the heinous crime of trying to send their child to a better school. Our air is barely breathable. Our roads are falling apart, our water system is barely functional, we power all the things that we buy with filthy, dangerous forms of energy. This isn’t an economy–it is what the death throes of human society looks like.

We do not need more jobs so we can spend more. We need work that makes sense and work that sustains us, not work that just feeds the cycle that is sucking us dry and de facto enslaving us.

... This Labor Day we need to re-focus our goals to include not only just jobs, but also just work that values what sustains and enables us, and moves us away from work for the sake of economic ‘growth’ (which has become a hollow euphemism for lining corporate coffers) and that merely perpetuates the hamster wheel of what ails us.