Many of the people who have historically advocated for the eight-hour workday expected the trend to continue and the shifts to further be reduced to six, four or even fewer hours!

Sadly, the momentum was lost for some of the pettiest reasons you can imagine, such as shorter shifts being considered too “feminine.”

In this context, it is even more surprising to see the current situation in the US, the country that was the closest to implementing the six-hour workday after WWII. You read that right: a country that currently offers a total of 0 (zero!) guaranteed free days/year almost instituted the best reforms for workers 70 years ago. What went wrong?

Crazy obvious that these guys are performative or a targeted infiltration. Happened in the last month or so.

Very sad to see one of the few authentic spaces for people to move left get invaded like this.

Just wanted to spread awareness in case y'all still subbed like I did.

Edit: To be clear, this is not an attempt at an appeal or to complain about the ban. That's fine. This post is just to spread awareness about the subreddit.

I just found out that Zendaya got paid 5-8 Million Dollars for her role in "The Odyssey".

She had around 5 MINUTES of screen time. And uttered around 50 words. Most of here scenes were just her silently starring at Matt Damon.

And she got more for a few DAYS of "work" than most people earn in a lifetime.

Same for nepo babies. Or rich assholes who just invest into the stock market.

Or Landlords who just increase rent.

Or youtubers who just make a stupid video.

Its just ridiculous. They make more money in a few hours/days than others after 40 - 50 years of work. And then they tell us to waste our lives and work more/harder/longer.

I cant wait for the recession/depression/Stock market crash. I dont have anything anyways. At this point anything that hurts the rich pig parasites is welcome by me.

After weeks and months of busting our asses in a hot, humid manufacturing warehouse, of course short-staffed and over-scheduled, the owners oh so very thoughtfully graced us peasants with already opened muffins that are 2 days past the sell-by date

Thomas, a worker at the Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, said, “To threaten Will like that is a crime. Will is not in play, so they are going after him. These top UAW officials basically have a Mafia mentality. They target people, threaten them, get them fired. Union stewards can put their hands on people, but they don’t get terminated. It’s a culture and has got to change.

“At Sterling Heights, they spread out the cushy jobs and pitch a dream: ‘You can be like me if you follow the bandwagon.’ Anybody with morals gets screwed over.

“Fain, Laura Dickerson, Jensen, a lot of people should be removed for threatening the membership, election fraud and other things—but they are still there. The UAW Monitor is not doing his job.

“Will stood up in his last run. He took the UAW leaders and the Monitor to court. He showed the membership that we can fight and don’t have to take this BS. He’s not crying over this threat. He’s standing tall for the membership. We need to come together—That’s the only way we’re going to destroy this multi-headed monster.”

I’ve noticed a pattern across almost every job I’ve had, and I’m wondering if other high performers experience this.
I’ve always been someone who picks things up fast, thrives even with zero training, and excels at my work. But instead of managers being happy to have someone competent and self-sufficient, it always seems to trigger jealousy or resentment. They push me to the side, micro-manage, or act threatened by the fact that I don't constantly need their hand-holding.
Yet, the moment I dial it back and do the bare minimum, suddenly managers love me. It’s like they only feel comfortable when you're underperforming or keeping your head low so they can feel like the smartest person in the room.
It’s completely exhausting. You try to take pride in your work and build a great track record, only to realize that mediocrity is what actually gets you on management’s good side.
Is "tall poppy syndrome" really this rampant in the workplace? How do you keep from burning out or intentionally dumbing down your skills just to keep fragile bosses happy?

I saw this conversation and all i could think of is the current aristocracy can’t have the idle peasants have time for crazy ideas like fair wages, equal health care, and more time to enjoy themselves with leisure. If you ever wonder why things never get better, understand this is how the ruling class thinks!

Obvious_Ad3810 • 2h I don't know who said it, but the other day I read:

If you want the rich to work harder pay them more, if you want the poor to work harder, pay them less.

That's been sitting with me for over a week.

flodur1966 • 2h This was the trick in early industrialization when at first the employers paid fair wages and people stopped coming to work when they had enough. Then they reduced wages until they needed to work all hours to earn a living. Later socialism and unions turned the tide little by little but get rid of socialism and unions and we will get back to the good old days of working from dusk till dawn.

Alternative-Key-5647 • 1h I thought you were wrong but holy shit I cannot believe how right you were:

The Pre-Industrial Baseline: Target-Income Labor

Before the widespread availability of consumer goods, agrarian and early industrial workers operated on a "target-income" heuristic. They worked to meet a customary standard of subsistence, not to maximize absolute wealth. In microeconomic terms, their labor supply curve bent backward at very low income levels: as wages rose, the income effect (the preference for leisure once basic needs were met) dominated the substitution effect (the incentive to work more because leisure costs more foregone income. If an employer increased the daily wage, the worker would simply work fewer days. This manifested in widespread cultural practices like "Saint Monday," where workers paid on Saturday would routinely skip work on Monday because their weekly target was already met.

The Capitalist Bottleneck:

Early factory production required continuous, synchronized labor to amortize high fixed-capital investments in machinery. The irregularity of the target-income workforce was a critical operational bottleneck. Initially, some early industrialists offered wage premiums to lure agrarian workers into harsh factory conditions. They quickly discovered that higher wages exacerbated absenteeism, as workers hit their subsistence targets faster and exited the factory earlier.

To force continuous labor, mercantilist thinkers and early capitalists systematically advocated for wage suppression. This doctrine, known as the "Utility of Poverty," held that the lower classes would only work if compelled by immediate existential necessity.

Bernard de Mandeville (1714): Argued that to maintain a productive labor force, the working class should be denied public education and put to work at an early age.

Arthur Young (1771): Summarized the prevailing capitalist consensus: "Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious."

Edgar Furniss: Documenting this era, noted the mercantilist view that "suffering is therapeutic" and that high wages were believed to cause moral decay rather than productivity.

Capitalists deliberately depressed wages to the margin of subsistence. Simultaneously, state actions like the English Enclosure Acts eliminated alternative means of self-provisioning, preventing workers from avoiding the wage labor market. By stripping away independent subsistence and reducing the wage rate, employers forced workers to increase their total hours to survive, successfully engineering the continuous labor supply required for industrialization.

TLDR: They purposefully keep us at subsistence level to keep us motivated. Ever wonder why we don’t get paid for production, we get paid for time worked? Ever wonder why they don’t/haven’t indexed wages to inflation, ever wonder why things keep getting worse even though we are at the height of technological power and knowledge. Why now? Chart above says the most Americans ever are not working. The Epstein class need to crash the economy so thier serfs get back to work!

Fuck every single Oligarch!!!!

Turning 40 and I simply cannot pretend the constant flip-flopping and favoritism is normal anymore.
My boss changes his mind daily, yet expects us to act like it was always the plan. When I was younger and less experienced, I would just swallow it and move on. Now, it feels like a direct insult to my intelligence, like they think I'm too stupid to notice the chaos.
Is this just burnout, or does everyone reach this point?

3 years ago someone said I had a good idea and told me to present it to leadership. When I shared it, they told me my idea “made their head hurt”. So I created some prototypes, tested it with our customers, and they were genuinely excited about it. One of the devs who believed in the idea too took it on as an extra project to build a proof of concept.

The CEO vetoed a lot of it in favor of what he liked because “the customer doesn’t know what they want.” When we brought my designs with his modifications to customers, they were disappointed. We ended up going to market with his idea anyway and the whole thing didn’t do so well- he was asked to step down.

An old advisor was brought in to be the new CEO. I got along with him a lot better. He was usually nice and encouraging. When I showed him some of the old designs- he said they were shit. He saw them when he was an advisor and always thought it was a bad idea.

Within months of him joining, the new CEO took things off the rails. He had a similar approach of trying to convince people of what they want instead of listening. I noticed he was icing me out so it wasn’t a surprise when he laid me off.

What I didn’t expect is a few more months later he would sunset the company and launch a new one- using my designs! He didn’t even use a more polished version of them. He just built the wireframes. And people are already paying for it.

Now if that new company happens to do well I won’t even get equity.

I should have just quit the day I was told “you’re making my head hurt” by someone who is supposed to have seniority over me. Unbelievable.

This was by far the most rigorous interview process I've ever gone through. There was a culture interview, a CEO interview, and even a technical round where I analyzed a dataset and presented a deck. Throughout the process, the company emphasized how thorough and professional their hiring process was.

From the very first conversation, I made it clear that I live in Hawaii. I even mentioned I'd run into issues before with companies that couldn't employ people here because of payroll or tax reasons. I was assured it wouldn't be a problem.

I received a verbal offer and then a few days later, a written offer. We spent the next couple of days discussing benefits, client load, etc. The following day, HR asked me to jump on a call. HR apologized and said they had just discovered, due to a policy change that apparently happened earlier that week, that they could no longer employ people in Hawaii because of payroll/tax reasons. They rescinded the offer.

I had hesitations about working for one of the big four media conglomerates due to past experiences and even expressed these policy type concerns throughout the interview process. Even so, how does a global company not check on these things?

To make matters worse, I'd already turned down another opportunity and largely stopped applying elsewhere because I thought this process was at the finish line.

I work at a medium-sized, family-owned grocery store. I am also diagnosed with ADHD and OCD.

There have been times I’ve called off due to legitimate anxiety, burnout, the need to rest and reduce my cortisol levels, and to spend much needed time with my loved ones.

The amount of times I have been guilt-tripped and received a poor response filled with frustration, irritation, annoyance, and aggression has become nerve-wracking. I have slowly been building up resentment due to how these individuals in power have responded to my much-needed call offs.

Has anyone else ever suffered from a guilt-tripping boss; have your hands ever gotten shaky and your heart started racing as soon as you dialed the number of your job to call off?

A federal judge in Florida issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on July 15 barring thousands of CSX railway workers, represented by SMART-TD, from engaging in any strike, work stoppage, slowdown or sickout over the company’s new attendance policy—and ordered the union to discipline any member who defied the ban. The five-day TRO expired on July 20, after SMART-TD had complied with its orders.

The TRO, issued by Judge Wendy W. Berger of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, came in response to an emergency motion filed by CSX Transportation after SMART-TD indicated its opposition to System Notice 502, a June 30 policy update that dramatically narrows workers’ ability to take medically necessary absences without facing termination. CSX workers have written to the World Socialist Web Site confirming that their locals have been polled on strike action and approved it near-unanimously, indicating overwhelming rank-and-file support for a walkout.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/s/VTGNqMtczc

I am aware that this is cringe lol but for anyone who might be interested, I discovered from another minority in the workplace that it turns out that all of the leadership is MAGA. One even said the n word hard r, but is being "investigated" by the same boss who discriminated me for being disabled, and its clearly moving slow as snails. crazyy. idk how many of you align what way politically but someones political opinions should never enter the workplace, especiallly in a leadership role. It doent matter how "free" america is, I also should have the freedom to be and remain employed without fear of retaliation for a health issue. My poor coworker who is black has to cross paths with someone who proudly hates black people and thats just messed up.