Americans think they live in a democracy. But their workplaces are small tyrannies.
Consider some facts about how American employers control their workers. Amazon prohibits employees from exchanging casual remarks while on duty, calling this “time theft.” Apple inspects the personal belongings of its retail workers, some of whom lose up to a half-hour of unpaid time every day as they wait in line to be searched. Tyson prevents its poultry workers from using the bathroom. Some have been forced to urinate on themselves while their supervisors mock them.
About half of US employees have been subject to suspicionless drug screening by their employers. Millions are pressured by their employers to support particular political causes or candidates. Soon employers will be empowered to withhold contraception coveragefrom their employees’ health insurance. They already have the right to penalize workers for failure to exercise and diet, by charging them higher health insurance premiums.
How should we understand these sweeping powers that employers have to regulate their employees’ lives, both on and off duty? Most people don’t use the term in this context, but wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in some domain of life, that authority is a government.
We usually assume that “government” refers to state authorities. Yet the state is only one kind of government. Every organization needs some way to govern itself — to designate who has authority to make decisions concerning its affairs, what their powers are, and what consequences they may mete out to those beneath them in the organizational chart who fail to do their part in carrying out the organization’s decisions.
Managers in private firms can impose, for almost any reason, sanctions including job loss, demotion, pay cuts, worse hours, worse conditions, and harassment. The top managers of firms are therefore the heads of little governments, who rule their workers while they are at work — and often even when they are off duty.
There’s this process by which anything girls love becomes disdainful, cliched, sad, in a way that the things boys love never do. Boys can love pulp SF and westerns and comic books, and they become greater, they become epics and serious films and graphic novels. But for every girl who ever loved Sylvia Plath in high school, for every one who watched that crocus of a girl slipping away into the earth and saw herself, there is a invisible choir of derisive laughter, there is an instant satire of that love - just another one of those sad, dirty girls, another goth girl who thinks she’s special, how can anyone bear that emo poetry, how can anyone take a girl seriously who loves Morgan le Fay and Persephone and ankh-wearing Death, just like all the other girls?
My Dinner With Persephone, Catherynne Valente (via abraxasmalfoy)
“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.
The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.
Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)
I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it
A huge collection of artefacts ‘frozen in time’ which offer a unique insight into the indigenous people of Alaska will be returned to the region by the University of Aberdeen.
Archaeologists from the Scottish University have spent more than seven years painstakingly recovering and preserving everyday objects that indigenous Yup’ik people used to survive and to celebrate life – in a race against the clock before melting ice and raging winter storms reclaim the Nunalleq archaeological site.
Dating back more than four centuries, their finds include wooden ritual masks, ivory tattoo needles, and even a belt of caribou teeth, all preserved in ‘extraordinary condition’.
Dr Rick Knecht, from the University of Aberdeen, is leading the project. He said: “The unique conditions in this arctic region mean artefacts which are more than four centuries old have retained an unbelievable level of detail.
“We have uncovered grass baskets and mats made when Shakespeare walked the earth but when we take them out of the ground the grass weaving still retains a trace of its green colour and we have been amazed by the variety and intricacy of the woven patterns.”
This owl figurine has ivory eyes
Once removed from the earth, however, the artefacts begin to deteriorate quickly and it is for this reason that Dr Knecht and his team have now transported more than 50,000 items to the University of Aberdeen, where professional conservators oversee preservation treatments on the items.
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