What in the hell …

If I made a laundry list of the influences that shaped my gut level impulses about intellectual and cultural stuff, punk rock and marxism would be really close to the top. (more…)

Some notes, didn’t want to forget this so I typed it up, it follows on from the stuff on employment discrimination. Need to get to bed now.

In sum: Injuries increased workers’ need for money while lowering their ability to get money in the form of wages. Workers used legal means as one way to deal with this situation - specifically, to get money. The legal environment changed, which changed workers’ abilities to get money, but this basic dynamic still played out across the legal context regardless of changes in that context. Recourse to law was at best a coping mechanism.

1. Workers sold their time and their bodies and their abilities to employers temporarily. Injuries took parts of their bodies permanently.
2. Injuries may have taken some of their abilities permanently, and took their status as able-bodied.
3. Injuries rendered workers temporarily unable to work, because of the need to convalesce. Lack of work cut off one source of money, namely wages.
4. Injuries also increased workers’ need for money, because of the need to purchase medical care and perhaps orthopedic equipment.
5. Injuries often made workers less able to work and less employable, perhaps unemployable, due to a limited degree to their bodies and abilities and to a large degree to employers’ hiring practices.

Look into each, especially 2-4, look at 5 in relation to workmen’s comp and second injury funds. Map onto legal change, state administrative and policy/legislative change. Part of what I’ve been saying, said in the post on employment discrimination stuff, is that attempts to alleviate some of 3 and 4 increased the labor market dynamic within 5 (with effects as well on workers who were disabled for reasons other than workplace injury).

By ‘anything’ I mean ‘my work,’ actually. I’m halfway through the Steinfeld. It’s gotten better but is still pretty slow going. It feels very much like a pretty far remove from a lot of what I’m doing. It’s in the same ballpark I guess but not a work that speaks directly to my project. (more…)

I just started Robert Steinfeld’s book The Invention of Free Labor. It’s good so far. Here’s what I take from it at this point. (more…)

Angela’s got a post that raises some interesting question about contracts, and ties those issues to ones about contracts of all sorts - social, wage, others. This resonates with something else I’ve been reading lately - Staughton Lynd’s book Solidarity Unionism, which some folk from my IWW branch are going to discuss soon in part because Lynd’s the main speaker at Midwest Wobfest which our branch is hosting. (more…)

Here’s what I thought it was: when you work at your job and management makes you do work off the clock, uncompensated. (more…)