I got news for you buddy: our “fake email job” Tier One and Senior Technical Support agents were still sending emails and taking calls on Labor Day.
Someone had to because I work for an ISP and some of our customers rely on our service to call 911.
You can come back here and tell me their job is “fake” when you can explain how that’s unimportant and when you’ve sat on a phone trying to help a 60 year old Boomer troubleshoot their internet when all they wanna do is chew you out.
And and I know it’s “just a meme” but it’s a shitty meme that’s reinforcing all this “white collar; blue collar” bullshit to divide the Working Class while billionaires work to get rid of Labor Day altogether. Shame on you for perpetuating that.
“Fake email job” meaning “unionised labour” - the whole point of labour day?
Lol “working class jobs”
You mean service industry jobs.
An even lower caste.
Are you really going to gatekeep Labor Day, op?
The warehouse I work at gets Labor Day off every year.
Then the week after they basically have the grill going for 5 days straight for Employee Appreciation Week.
It’s pretty nice.
Sometimes.
Don’t put workers against workers.
Agreed. Unify, don’t divide, everyone who can have the day off should. There’s certain positions they have to keep operating but for them they should get time and a half for so.
The slaughterhouse I work at had Labor Day off and then today they told us we’re now gonna be working 6 days a week.
Sounds like time for a union.
If you punch a clock to pay your bills, you’re working class. Don’t let them turn us against each other.
So I’m a salaried engineer and can’t be part of the movement?
while the comment stated A => B, you assumed the reciprocal B => A, thus making you wrong : you absolutely can be a salaried engineer and be working class
If you work in order to actually be able to to live, eat, and have shelter, you are working class.
The double-edged sword of western labor. Your options are:
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Work hourly and get some middle manager rolling dice to see which hours/days you’re scheduled for every week, the day before the timesheet goes out.
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Work salary and get sucked into late night deployments, lunch meetings, and assorted overtime projects you don’t receive pay for.
They catch ya comin’ and they catch ya goin’
Is this an US-specific problem?
Monthly salaries with hourly compensation for overtime is a thing too
I’ve never heard of a job that paid on those terms. Historically, you’ve had hourly contracts on a fixed schedule, so you were functionally guaranteed a minimum number of hours. But modern service workers operate under Zero Hours contracts that don’t guarantee any kind of minimum.
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I think their point is we should be part of the movement. Although, IMO we should also recognize that there are definitely chose who have it worse
(I say “we” since I’m also a salaried engineer)
Yeah, as an hourly engineer that’s how I feel. When I was salary I still needed my ass in a seat if I wanted to eat, even if not being nickel and dimed on time in theory was nice (they eventually did switch to having us punch a clock though)
I’m bourgeoisie, can I still be part of the movement or do I have to divest first?
Look to what Engels did. There are plenty of class traitors throughout history.
Do you make enough from those investments to live off of them? If not, you’re not bourgeoisie.
It’s more a family business which I work at and get shareholder value from.
Thats petit bourgoise, thats different
No, by the very definition you are cosplaying as a poor. That might be worse.
Ignoring factory and warehouse workers as per usual
Healthcare as well.
Which, I, personally, would say that have it the worst.
This has to be the dumbest shit I’ve seen in a minute.
Idk the factory shut down for the holiday, just like every factory I’ve ever worked in. Yeah I’m an intellectual laborer, but the folks on the floor doing manufacturing also got the day off
Back in the day I worked in a plastic molding factory, on the workshop floor. Offices would get free days for everything and different stuff like food days, gifts for Christmas and other things while we got absolutely jack shit.
Yeah that’s bullshit of them. I’ve seen a lot of favoritism towards office workers in manufacturing, but never differing days off
It is, that was Schneider Electric which actually was one of the best treating factories around in that area. Nonetheless, few years later got out of that and opened my own business, moved from the workshop to web dev, but I can attest that being on the workshop floor was humiliating to say at least. If it weren’t for it to be so shite, I wouldn’t have pushed for my dream job.
I wish it were like Christmas Day, where almost every business is ACTUALLY closed.
I don’t celebrate, so this isn’t nostalgia for Christmas magic or whatever.
I just like that it’s a day that no matter what, for the most part, you’re on your own. Forgot to buy groceries? Scrounge the cupboard. Forgot to fill the gas tank? You’re staying home. Faucet leaking? Turn off the water, wash your hands in a different sink, call the plumber(or go to the hardware store) tomorrow. Ain’t NOTHING getting done today.
It’s the only day where the majority of people in areas where the holiday is celebrated, all agree that ain’t nobody doing anything that day.
Granted there’s lots of caveats. Some businesses are open by choice, some by necessity. I used to work at a nursing home, that’s gotta stay open, me and a few coworkers would volunteer to take the holiday shifts.
These days I’m still blue collar, but I do have most big holidays off.
But if you thought some random gas station or grocery store was gonna be open so you can pop in on Christmas? No dice.
Why isn’t labour Day that way?
In Germany it is thanks to labor unions
Used to be that way in the US. The. We let them dismantle the unions :(
And that’s coming from a proud IBEW member. Remember folks unionize. It’s the only way to get your fair share of the profits.
Where I grew up if your pipe bursts on Christmas you better hope you can find a Jewish or otherwise non-Christian (cultural or religious) plumber that’s only charging mild holiday markups, because the Christian plumbers ain’t gonna be so charitable (but you can probably get one to come out).
It’s emergency workers only. So yeah you’ve got medical professionals in the ER, folks keeping the water running, and some tradespeople will leave their phone on just in case they get the opportunity to make a very high hourly wage, as well as owner operated businesses that don’t feel like taking the day off (hence the old stereotypes of Jewish people getting Chinese food and watching a movie on Christmas). If it’s not an emergency you’re better off not even checking if anyone’s working.
And I agree that that’s what labor day should be like. In fact, we should have a handful of holidays like that.
I wish it were like Christmas Day, where almost every business is ACTUALLY closed
Idk about where you live, but a bunch of businesses in Houston will close a little earlier on Christmas Eve and open up at around noon on Christmas Day. Nobody wants to Not Work anymore. Everything has to be open all the time.
Northeast US. But that’s a shame about Texas.
Just because our cage is slightly nicer and we get fed slightly better slop doesn’t mean we’re not in this together.
Most of us are sticking with you … the real problem is the 1%
I mean y’all could stick it to the one percent by forgoing going to the store or eating out on labor day
Americans will attack other workers for minor differences in lifestyle rather than attack their boss for failing to provide basic quality of life in exchange for full time work.
Just like the ruling class wants…
Office jobs are still jobs. If a business genuinely was wasting vast amounts of money on fake work, then these jobs would be eliminated already. They are gradually being automated away, same as physical labor, but they still exist because they are still important for production.
The target of your ire should not be this or that subsection of the working class, but instead the capitalist class.
A lot of jobs are pure bullshit jobs that only exist because the corporation needed to hire inorder to appear growing. They then do mass firings to appear like they’re cutting costs. It’s all smoke and mirrors for the shareholders.
That doesn’t make the people filling those roles not working class, in fact it highlights how disposable the working class is to the capitalist class, and further reinforces my point: capitalists are the enemy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs which cause psychological harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive (when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth) because workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be.
The word meaningless is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it meaningless to sort and file reports? In the grand scheme of things, and to society, maybe. But not to the company that’s paying you. They have value from it.
I’m not saying the companies are hyper efficient with only purposeful work. I’m saying that companies aren’t intentionally throwing out money on work that they know is useless. They’re too greedy for that.
Once a company reaches a certain size, being able to micro manage individual workloads to max efficiency become impossible and individual middle managers have an incentive to appear like their whole workforce is necessary.
They’re not intentionally throwing money away because to them, the appearance of growth has to come before actually growth. They consider useless hires the cost of doing business. And when it fails, “they can just make the though decisions” and do the layoff the shareholders want. Otherwise, how to do explain the waves of mass hirings and mass firings?
Right. But back to the context of this thread: they’re all given work and they’re all real workers, even if their work isn’t ultimately providing dollars to the balance sheet. They still have a value to the company.
And all workers should have labor day off.
The original comic is being needlessly divisive.
I’m aware of Graeber’s work. I don’t really agree with much of his conclusions or analysis, as he is an anarchist and I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but we would agree that much of office work is indeed socially unproductive, if we were to pivot to a socialist economy. That being said, we exist in capitalism, and thus office workers are working class, regardless of how necessary the work they do is beyond helping generate profit.
Yeah, I’m an anarchist who generally does agree with Graeber, but I do think that it’s vital to understand that he did see office workers, including ones in bullshit jobs, as working class. He resented the bureaucracy not the bureacrat. And it’s important to note that plenty of office work isn’t inherently within his definition of bullshit jobs. Hell, I’d argue there’s a fair chance that the largest portion of people working bullshit jobs are in the category of “industry does more harm than good and the worker knows it”.
when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth
This was an important part that shouldn’t be discounted since it was still at the core of the argument.
I doubt that. You could do the same thing with fake job postings if you really wanted, and it’s cheaper.
But let’s say you’re right. Those people would still be given lots of work and be busy, because if they were allowed to be not busy everyone else would see and not want to work.
They do do that with fake job listings.
