Low Paying Job? Cnn Says Get Used To It.
Low paying jobs, production of useless commodities – the new economy offers workers an opportunity to walk away from their low-paying, unfulfilling jobs to live free as entrepreneurs. It is virtually a condition of the economic depression, as increasing workers find themselves out of work or not making enough. Why work for meager wages when you can, with tools like the internet, begin making similar amounts of money as you were before, on your own. With ad revenue, for example, you can be making the same as before – what, $8 an hour – with less work. By producing for ourselves, we no longer sacrifice our own self-improvement for the enrichment of other people. I am not saying there is something wrong with working for others, although I view the hourly wage as degrading and reserved for slaves. What I am however saying is that, as news of a poor labor market grows increasing acute over time, employers will use this condition to justify not paying there workers. You might hear refrains, such as “where else would you make this kind of money?” When, in reality, you are living paycheck to paycheck. The amount of raises workers can expect in the long-term are set to decline as well, as a condition of the current depression paradigm.
Just like we have the opportunity to drain the global banking complex of capital via old world money like precious metals and new world money like digital currencies, we can starve employers of their capital, our labor. Yes, things still need to be produced. Yes, the current infrastructure is likely to be needed in order to produce. But, why not assert the laborers power not with a boycott, asking for higher wages and our old jobs, but by a pro-active immersion into a parallel economy in which we ourselves become the producers of whatever we want/need.
The U.S. economy’s move towards a service based economy has meant the outsourcing of skill labor jobs while U.S. citizens – straddled by debt – have been forced to take on low paying jobs in retail and restaurants. Anyone knows this. The great majority of the population, moreover, knows also that this trend is unlikely to end in the coming months, years and decades. So, we must begin adapting now to the new paradigm or risk being stuck inside an intense daily life of rationed food and slavish wages which work for nothing but to service debt. We are entering into a soviet type situation. The difference being that, while people will have cash flow, this money will immediately go to servicing student debt, credit card debt, mortgages, etc. Whereas perhaps the net worth of soviet citizens was more times than not zero, in the U.S. and the western Social Democracies our net worth will be more times than not in the red, negative.
The official unemployment rate currently is around 22%, and it has been that way for numerous years. No matter what obfuscations and adjustments officials dream up about the official 8.254%, the reality of the situation points towards many years ahead of joblessness and months that last longer than do our wallets. As CNN Money recently wrote, “Stuck in a job with lousy pay? Better get used to it.” But, the propaganda systems are not working, and that is why we have seen a continuing militarization of everyday life in the United States and the west. If our belief systems are not colored by the official story given to us by fatherly governments looking to doll out the perfect balance of concern and discipline, then we are becoming free. And when we begin to become free in our own minds, the system is at risk. Violence has been used to stop such a trend.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, which implies that the economy will not have gotten better. The assumptions of the Institute rest on government data, signaling that things are and will be much worse than the study implies. Over the year ending in the first quarter of 2011, lower wage occupations grew by 3.2%, says the National Employment Law Project. That means that more retail salespeople, office clerks, cashiers, food prep workers and store clerks, whose median hourly wages ranged from $7.51 go $13.52. Four of the five occupations with the highest concentration of low-salary jobs are set to grow by 2020, including farming, personal care, building and grounds maintenance and health care support. All have at least 45% of their employees earning at or below so-called poverty wages. That means we are talking about a huge percentage of the U.S. population living below the poverty line. These poor paying jobs are only paying poorer over time, as the economy worsens and a deeply-embedded social darwinism rears its ugliness. Between early 2008 and 2011, low-wage workers’ median pay fell 2.3%, more than double the contraction of mid-wage employees.
All of this is okay for those with the motivation and confidence to pursue their own lives, for the more we work for other people – producing things for their enrichment – the more we devalues ourselves. We are objects, good for nothing but producing for multi-national corporations who care little about our well-being or upward mobility. The realization of working is really the loss of our own reality, our own lives. We lose life and we starve our souls and spirits. In very little time we are shadows of what we once were, beaten down by the system. But, now we have nothing to lose, and when people have nothing to do lose crazy things happen. This can either be for the worse – in the form of state-led violence against a population – or by a social awakening in which the power of the individual reinforces the power of the collective, instead of the power of the collective usurping the power of the individual.
The more stuff we produce for others, the fewer of them we can own, as our stagnated wages decrease through weapons of object inflation. Our dollars might not be getting cheaper, but our labor is. What the hours spent at our sanity-trying jobs are, we are not. We are taking outside of our own lives by working for the multi-nationals. Our lives then become outside us and we live an external existence working for others. The better shapen the stuff we make on the payroll of others, the more mis-shapen we become.
And, now, as unemployment and low-waging jobs threaten the entire U.S. population with stealthy austerity, we have the opportunity to start our own projects. Generally speaking, it is impractical to just up and quite ones job, which means more work than usual for the individual who is looking to start his or her own income. One of the quickest ways to open up the opportunity for more income is via the internet. Start a website, and think low-overhead. What sort of products can you see on a site? What do you have access to? What do you know? What do other people want? In the meantime, as you search for products, content is money, and becoming a freelance writer and blogger for your own site can give one their first taste of self-reliance. As revolution’s happen, a people must begin to understand. So, for those of us sick and tired of being wages slaves, we must begin on our path of self-reliance to gain the experience and knowledge to make our own ways.