Is Stealing From Work a Viable Form of Resistance?
“Just remember, if you’re not stealing from work, you’re stealing from your family,” a young woman declares in a video promoting Steal Something From Work Day. The April 15th event encourages stealing from work as a protest against capitalism as a system that derives profit from unpaid labor, which itself is “stolen” from workers.
Whether or not it represents a comprehensive anti-capitalist strategy, history has shown theft to be tactic widely utilized by workers and consumers during economic crisis. In the 1970s, radical economics professor Harry Cleaver noted that workers in the US practiced widespread “self-reduction” of rising prices by refusing to pay for food, gas and utilities.Read more.
NY Times: "Workers of the World, Incorporate"
New York Times | On Oct. 27, the United Steelworkers announced an agreement with Mondragon International to move toward establishment of manufacturing cooperatives in the United States and Canada.
Maybe this agreement represents a symbolic gesture that will not generate any significant economic benefits. Maybe it represents a step in the evolution of a new institutional form for the modern manufacturing firm.Read more.
Open Left: "Employer Theft"
From today's Open Left:
"Is your boss stealing from you? Probably.
"Paul Rosenberg wrote recently about how wage theft against the bottom 15 percent of the workforce is 'so widespread that workers in just three cities-Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City (total population about 15 million)-had roughly $2.9 billion in wages stolen from them in 2008.' The workers surveyed had lost an average of 15 percent of their legal wages. Now that kind of theft is in outright violation of the law, not that anyone who can do something about it cares."Read more.
NY Times: Low-Wage Workers Are Often Cheated, Study Says
"Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago."
Young Workers Hardest Hit By Recession
We know that public employees, retirees, and recently hired-and-then-fired workers have been hit hard by the recession. Radio, TV and newspapers discuss it every day. It's old news. But why has the media ignored all of the young people who have been smacked by this downturn?Read more.
