06.16.10
The Daily Parasite
Everybody’s used to dealing with daily parasites. It’s a feature of living in a country where it’s been decided that it’s proper to not make anything and instead have an economy based on services and the provision of non-essentials and s— from China.
However, every now and then you run into a daily parasite who really takes the cake.
For DD, this usually happens outside Ralphs on Lake. And I’m not pointing at the beggars. Increasing numbers of beggars are a natural product of American business and you should always be nice to people at the bottom for someday you might join them.
The standard Ralphs supermarket parasite is someone with a clipboard who wants you to sign a paper so that an initiative favorable to the wealthy or some big company and inimical to everyone else needs putting on the ballot. Like this one in which PG&E tried to schwick everyone in the state right down to the level of local government.
Yesterday’s parasite, however, was a woman with a clipboard, not asking for signatures, but allegedly conducting a ‘survey.’
The question: Do you think Americans work more or less than they did fifty years ago?
It’s a question only an organization full of assholes would sponsor in 2010.
And I was immediately suspicious it was to collect coached or cherry-picked answers for some political survey by a right wing business group, to be unleashed at some future press conference on FOX News, perhaps as incontrovertible proof the majority of Americans really think they have it a lot easier than folks did fifty years ago.
So the socialist Obama government should get off everyone’s back and stop trying to fix things, get back to fiscal austerity and not worry about mass unemployment.
Because mass unemployment naturally means many people are involuntarily working much less than their peers fifty years ago.
Coincidentally, it dovetailed with much of FOX News afternoon broadcast, which devoted itself to the books of Ayn Rand and warning that Obama better be nice to BP or the company would be forced out of business with thousands and thousands of jobs lost.
Anyway, I laughed at the woman holding the clipboard and said I thought Americans definitely had to work more now than fifty years ago.
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She did not record my answer. So I watched her from the parking lot for a couple minutes as she approached others. And she hardly did any writing at all.
I wondered what she thought about the hardness of her work outside Ralphs and its daily compensation vis-a-vis what her dad or grandpap did for a living. By the way, there was no identification of who was actually doing the poll or why.
From the New Yorker, back in 2005:
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.
Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays).
This bit, from the paper of Ted Nugent — the WaTimes, in 2009, is also a laugh riot:
American workers who still have their jobs are laboring harder than ever, keeping their companies operating profitably following the biggest rounds of job cuts since the Great Depression …
Because hourly compensation, including wages and benefits, increased by only 0.2 percent, unit labor costs dipped 5.8 percent during the second quarter. It was the biggest drop in labor costs in more than eight years. Over the past year, labor costs have declined 0.6 percent as productivity has advanced by 1.8 percent.
Soaring productivity and plunging labor costs helped to bolster second-quarter corporate profits …
Remember what DD said about an agency of assholes at the top of the post? Who would commission something like the Ralphs survey?
Lots of groups in America, one imagines. Employees of Satan’s Bank — OneWest — right across the street, I should think, if they weren’t so busy capitalizing on foreclosures.
Or people like this — from 2007:
Americans work hard for their money. Too hard, according to CNN. Even worse than even grovelling medieval peasants scratching the land to survive.
That conclusion came from reporter Polly Labarre of CNN’s “In the Money.??? In the June 9 broadcast, Labarre argued that Americans are working too much, using her “favorite comparison??? to explain “we work more than medieval peasants used to work.???
The “peasant??? claim has grown common in media outlets …
But [no organization has] provided basis for the idea that peasants worked less than Americans do now.
And don’t miss Obama vs. BP (And You).