List 1. Study into the Division of Labour

This began on 15/02/2010 and after a lot of newbie-blogger faffing I deleted, tried it in a new format and re-posted on 21/02. Rather than produce different blog posts I'm using one blog post and updating it all the time. Just like memory I'll keep modifying it - even the old posts - because who rights lists upside down like a blog?

15/02/2010

Bristol City Centre Christian Street Preachers &

interaction with Photographer, shot 13/02/2010

Shonagen wasn't solely concerned with lists that quicken the heart. Lists can often be (necessarily) tragic too. The first list I want to begin compiling studies the Division of Labour. This list does not want to refer to the Division of Labour in order to reify solidarity or class consciousness but it does want to investigate the disconnections between labourers (in the broadest possible conception of labour) that seems so utterly tragic. Can the concept of the Division of Labour help?

20/02/2010

We went to Clifton in Bristol, first stop Clifton "Village". We wanted to get a place up there because of the gorge but the cost was a joke.

Maybe there's another way of getting around the cost.

21/02/2010

Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2001: 335

In geographical regions such as the Southern cone of Latin America or Southeast Asia, all levels of production can exist simultaneously and side by side, from the highest levels of technology, productivity and accumulation to the lowest, with a complex social mechanism maintaining their differentiation and interaction. In the metropolises, too, labor spans the continuum from the heights to the depths of capitalist production: the sweatshops of New York and Paris can rival those of Hong Kong and Manila. If the First World and the Third World, center and periphery, North and South were ever really separated along national lines, today they clearly infuse one another, distributing inequalities and barriers along multiple and fractured lines. This is not to say that the United States and Brazil, Britain and India are now identical territories in terms of capitalist production and circulation, but rather that between them are no differences of nature, only differences of degree. The various nations and regions contain different proportions of what was thought of as First World and Third, center and periphery, North and South.

21/02/2010

Where does the division of labour come into force in this "article"? Is it where tax payers want to tell public sector workers how to work and get paid? Is it when they say they should feel grateful for any wage in a recession? Is it when they think that we are only given work by some governmental, entrepreneurial deity?

I don't agree with a lot of what Chairman Mao said, did and how he has been worshipped for destraction - I've never been able to bring myself to wearing that Mao shirt I bought in Guangdong after I was told about the Great leap Forward the very same day. But mass famine, a population explosion and a single-child policy aside, surely there's some value to the idea in some context that many hands make light work, afterall who gets to define how many hands?

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/media/2009/01/kent-messengertry-living-in-the-real-world-your-say-on-possible-kcc-strike-action.html

by Chris Price Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Taxpayers in Kent are venting their anger at county council staff poised to ballot for strike action over a one per cent pay offer.

There are calls for council staff to "live in the real world" as many private sector workers fear for their jobs.

Our users feel council staff should be glad to have jobs during the economic downturn and be grateful for any pay rise offered.

Someone who left their name as Disgruntled Tax Payer from Kent said: "I must be in the wrong job. We are in a recession.

"Like most people I don’t know when my employer will be cutting back on staff. Who in their right mind asks for a pay rise when they are lucky to have a job?"

Ian from Maidstone said: "Public sector salaries are more than those for comparable jobs in the private sector and the private sector does not even have the benefit of copper-bottomed pensions.

"They should try living in the real world where liquidations occur all the time. When was the last time a public sector employee lost their job through insolvency?"

But Allan Macdonald, a KCC employee from Whitstable, wrote: "I am on below the average wage and expected to work my 7.4 hours between 7am and 10pm seven days a week as the need arises.

"I get no overtime payment for any extra hours I do, just time in lieu, which I am not allowed to build up.

"But on a good note, our KCC bosses and executives are helping the cause by forgoing their bonuses this year. Wow."

The news of the potential strike action has provoked resentment from the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Its campaign manager Susie Squire said: "Many ordinary taxpayers who work in the private sector are facing redundancy and pay cuts.

"It is unfair for them to be shouldered with an ever heavier financial burden to sustain a bloated public sector."