McJob

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pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

So franchise owners cut costs by squeezing workers.5 That’s how we got “McJobs,” says Bleu Rainer. A “McJob” is defined by Webster’s and The Oxford English Dictionary as low-paid work that offers little satisfaction and few prospects for advancement. Living-wage activists say we don’t need dictionary definitions. People around the world have worked in McJobs. Many remain stuck in McJobs for their entire working lives. An estimated one in eight Americans has worked for McDonald’s itself, and with little to show for it. “I was even promoted to manager,” says Rainer, “but I never made more than $9.15 an hour or had a schedule I could depend on. That’s a McJob.” Stretch Sanders also knows about McJobs.

“We really had nothing to lose.”6 Between 2012 and 2015, fast-food workers staged hundreds of one-day flash strikes, every few months in an ever-growing number of cities. And they took advantage of social media to maximize the impact of their actions. Images of shamefaced or weeping Ronald McDonalds went viral. So did the word “McJobs,” denoting dead-end work without benefits. They called on McDonald’s to “Supersize My Wages” and asked customers if they wanted “poverty fries.” These actions spread around the globe. In 2013, the National Guestworker Alliance asked Massimo Frattini and the IUF to support foreign student workers protesting horrific labor conditions at US fast-food restaurants.

Singing and cheering, they said their names aloud.5 Bleu Rainer and hundreds of fast-food workers marched wearing “Black Lives Matter: I Can’t Breathe” sweatshirts, tying the movement for higher wages to the struggle against police violence—highlighting the last words uttered by Staten Island street vendor Eric Garner as he was choked to death by police a year earlier. “It’s the same struggle,” says Rainer. “We are the same people. We all want the same thing. We deserve dignity and a decent life.” Some marchers carried Ronald McDonald puppets. They waved the corporate clown high. In some versions, he wept in shame. “McJobs Cost Us All,” said a popular shirt. The McDonald’s logo appeared on banners, covered by the words “Poverty Wages: Not Lovin’ It.” High school students mugged for the cameras. Wheelchair-bound veterans in neon-green OUR Walmart shirts wheeled with the marchers. Kids ran and laughed under signs that said: “Everybody Deserves Respect.”


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

Realizing it had to protest or risk admitting its culpability in the trend, McDonald’s executives lashed out at Merriam-Webster, calling the inclusion a “slap in the face” to the nation’s service workers and claiming that “a more appropriate definition of a ‘McJob’ might be ‘teaches responsibility.’ ” (In the 1991 novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland quipped that a McJob is “frequently considered a satisfying career choice by those who have never held one.”) The editors, apparently convinced that the companies that created the McJobs were the ones doing the face slapping, kept the word. While the Starbucks baristas of times past needed considerable coffee expertise to perform their work, today’s company baristas must carry out a series of tasks that are as simple and deskilled as possible; the chain emphasizes speed and efficiency above all else.

McBaristas In 2003, the editors at Merriam-Webster triggered a minor controversy when they decided to add one simple word to the eleventh edition of their popular collegiate dictionary. That word was McJob. Defined as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement,” the slang term had been in common use for more than a decade. But by the time the Merriam-Webster editors elected to legitimize the term, the proliferation of McJobs had become a national issue, bemoaned in bestsellers like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation; the general contention was that they were dehumanizing, tedious, dead-end posts that did no favors to the tens of millions of people who worked them.

While the Starbucks baristas of times past needed considerable coffee expertise to perform their work, today’s company baristas must carry out a series of tasks that are as simple and deskilled as possible; the chain emphasizes speed and efficiency above all else. “It is absolutely mindless labor,” one former Starbucks employee told me. “They’ve made it so that anyone can do it.” In other words, the position is now a textbook McJob. As if to underline this point, one source recently overheard a disgruntled barista at a Manhattan Starbucks complaining to a coworker, “You know, we’re just glorified McDonald’s employees.” Calling the post a McJob in no way implies that Starbucks baristas ought to resign themselves to feeling ill-treated and disposable or that they don’t deserve union protection. But one unavoidable fact makes unions at Starbucks all but impossible: as long as the work remains so unfulfilling, very few people will want to keep the job for long, no matter what Schultz says to keep them inspired.


pages: 169 words: 55,866

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland

gravity well, McJob, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme

While the two of us were walking home, he ditched me right in the middle of a conversation we were having and darted across the road, where he then scraped a boulder across the front hood and windshield of a Cutlass Supreme. This is not the first time he has impulsively vandalized like this. The car was the color of butter and bore a bumper sticker saying WE'RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN'S INHERITANCE, a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his Mcjob ("Low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low future"). I wish I understood this destructive tendency in Dag; otherwise he is such a considerate guy —to the point where once he wouldn't bathe for a week when a spider spun a web in his bathtub. "I don't know, Andy," he said as he slammed my screen door, doggies in tow, resembling the lapsed half of a Mormon pamphleting duo with a white shirt, askew tie, armpits hinged with sweat, 48-hour stubble, gray slacks ("not pants, slacks") and butting his head like a rutting elk almost immediately into the vegetable crisper of my Frigidaire, from which he pulled wilted romaine leaves off the dewy surface of a bottle of cheap vodka, "whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I'm just upset that the world has gotten too big—way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers."

Dag was on a vandal's high, and the two of us were sitting on couches in my living room looking at the fire burning in the fireplace, when shortly Claire stormed in (no knock), her mink-black-bob-cut aflutter, and looking imposing in spite of her shortness, the effect carried off by chic garnered from working the Chanel counter at the local I. Magnin store. "Date from hell," she announced, causing Dag and I to exchange meaningful glances. She grabbed a glass of mystery drink in the kitchen MCJOB: A low -pay, low prestige, low -dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one. POVERTY JET SET: A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of longterm job stability or a permanent residence.

"And it was this thought of loving that sustained me for a long while when, after quitting, I turned into a Basement Person and never went in to work in an office again." OVERBOARDING: Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous life interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs. . . . EARTH TONES: A youthful subgroup interested in vegetarianism, tie-dyed outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good stereo equipment. Earnest, frequently lacking in humor. ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: "You wouldn't understand it there, mother— they hug where I live now."


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

If it is successful, so much the better. But in case of doubt, a badly paid service job may also be accepted as a meaningful part of an individual's history of paid work. Such a history would then, in the nature of things, be full of breaks and contradictions; education would be interrupted and resumed, McJobs would often rank equally with starting up in a business of one's own, and everything would be woven together into a quite individual web of activities and employ-ment situations. One thing, however, is common to all these life-constructions: they lie outside the classical employee's biography, outside union agreements and statutory salary scales, outside collective bargaining and home mortgage contracts.32 And they are the basis for a precarious new culture of independence: ‘business men and women in their own affairs’.

A very ill person is a terrorist and a menace to jobs. A very very ill person abuses the social safety-net and the employer's goodwill. To continue paying wages during sickness leads to socialism. It has to stop! … Since we became younger, we have been more productive. Hardly a single one of us does not have the strength for five McJobs! Everyone delivers five newspapers at five in the morning, then takes five dogs for a walk, then fries burgers for half the day, then helps out for the other half in a health-food shop or a dry-cleaner's, and finally goes to work in a bar for the evening. The service society does indeed keep us all youthful.

Initially conceived as a temporary measure, this provides the legal basis for deregulation of the labour market (fixed-term contracts, job-sharing, labour available on call, casual labour), and hence for the individualization of paid work. The downsizing of both skilled and unskilled labour also takes place on the basis of the ‘50/50’ rule in the contemporary US economy, according to which people over 50 years of age and earning less than $50,000 a year are the first to be hit when jobs are divided or eliminated. McJobs What does it actually mean when someone earns so little that two or more jobs are needed to make a living? Ursula Münch has a long day ahead of her: two jobs (one for eight hours, one for two); four bus journeys, involving twelve transfers and a total of three hours' travel; plus shopping, cleaning and cooking for the children.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

When I was hired last week, I was handed three plastic-wrapped dark gray T-shirts with a subtle white M over the heart and one black visor with a less subtle embroidered white M smack in the center of my forehead. I was instructed to keep these clean and to wear them with my own appropriate black pants and nonslip shoes. At a franchise in another city, I might have been charged for the shirts and visor. Here, I’m not. In many ways, a McJob in San Francisco is about as good a McJob as you can get anywhere because of the city’s worker-protection legislation. At $14 an hour, I’m paid almost twice as much as the average McDonald’s crew member—in November of 2014, voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure that would gradually raise San Francisco’s minimum wage to $15.

It’s an attempt to disincentivize common practices like (A) employing a large staff of part-timers or temps instead of a smaller staff of full-timers to avoid paying for benefits and (B) scheduling in a way that’s nice and flexible for the company but leaves workers unable to plan their lives more than a couple of days in advance. But despite having one of the best entry-level McJobs in the country, I sometimes feel that by going with the very first place that called about my application, I’ve picked a uniquely exhausting place to work. Like how I have to constantly hold my last three or four orders in my head because Candela keeps wiping the goddamn order queue. I assumed this was an accident the first time it happened, but then I saw her do it, clearly on purpose.

“So when I was scooping ice cream as a teenager, the manager actually put the schedule together on paper—was it like that for you?” I asked. Radhika, who’d had an after-school job at Jamba Juice, nodded. Suresh just shrugged. He’s been pushed to study, study, study his whole life. He ended up with a freakishly masochistic work ethic and tenure at Columbia, but he never experienced a traditional McJob. “So a couple decades ago, technology got good enough at analyzing the hour-by-hour sales data from stores for patterns, so it could make better and better forecasts about what times next week were going to be busy or slow,” I said. “At the same time, scheduling switched over from being written out on paper to being done by computers.


Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland

gentrification, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, microapartment, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

I smell the pilot light on the stove, hear the hum of the fridge and the rattle of the hallway fan. Now that I feel settled in, I can call Daisy up in Lancaster. The promised month has passed. Seems like a year. Over in the corner I see my camera, which I have yet to even take out of its case, having been steered away from fashion photography and bullied into a rent-paying McJob by Stephanie. The job? I man the hellish bubbling wing computer at WingWorld, a franchise that vends those parts of the chicken that remain after the white meat has been used in nuggets and the scary bits have been ground into KittyWhip(r). I am saved from utter job-despair hell, however, by the possibility of a job bussing tables at the Hard Rock Cafe, the acme of franchise-food-chain glamour, sometime later this month.

There is a reason I am walking down Hollywood Boulevard today. I quit my job at WingWorld yesterday. I decided I will not burn wings every day merely to give myself enough sustenance to be able to continue working at WingWorld to make enough sustenance to continue working at WingWorld to ... The loop of evil. Who invented these McJobs, anyway? They're work, but they're not a living. The undead working at unlabor. But WingWorld is my past, now. This afternoon here on the Boulevard I am experimenting with a seriously scorching entrepreneurial idea I flashed onto last week--the idea that gave me the confidence to quit. I figure, even if I have to live inside a rolled-up carpet in the alley behind the house of the Heroin Family, I would rather be a loser on my own terms than spend one more nanosecond behind goopy vats of Cajun Crocodile, Barbecue Blitz, and Mister Mustard sauce listening to Jesus lie (as truth turns out) about mythical nightclub jobs.


pages: 454 words: 122,612

In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, British Empire, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Golden arches theory, Haight Ashbury, Maui Hawaii, McJob, McMansion, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

In the case of In-N-Out Burger, its managers maintained an average tenure of fourteen years, while its part-time associates remained, on average, two years. The result was a corporate culture operating in stark contrast to the competition’s systems of burger flippers and vat fryers, floor moppers and cashiers who put on their paper hats and grease-stained aprons in what society calls McJobs and economists refer to as the requisite churn of capitalism. It was a place where people genuinely enjoyed getting up in the morning and going to work. Rich explained it this way: “We try and maintain the highest quality level possible, and to do that you need good training and good people. That’s why we pay the highest wages in the industry.”

America Eats Out: An Illustrated History of Restaurants, Taverns, Coffee Shops, Speakeasies, and Other Establishments that Have Fed Us for 350 Years. New York: Morrow, 1991. Moon, Youngme, et al. “In-N-Out Burger,” Case Study 9–503–096. Harvard Business Review, June 30, 2003. Newman, Jerry. My Secret Life on the McJob: Lessons from Behind the Counter Guaranteed to Supersize Any Management Style. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Pinheiro, Aileen, comp. The Heritage of Baldwin Park, 2 vols. Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Publishing Co., 1981; Covina, Ca.: Nielson Press Inc., 1999. Roderick, Kevin. The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb.

See drag racing Hot Rod magazine, 77 hot rods, Guy and Rich’s love of, 50, 122 Howard, Margaret, memories of In-N-Out, 43 How to Win Friends and Influence People, 81 Hungerford, Analisa, memories of Johnie’s Broiler, 50-51 Igloo Drive-In, 40 implosion, small companies and, 285–86 In & Go, 253–54 Initial Public Offering (IPO), 245, 285 denying rumor of, 128–29, 189 for fast-food giants, 99 wish list, 7 In-N-Out Burger All Stars and, 4 corporate culture v. McJobs, 140 cost-effectiveness and high volume, 47 as cultural institution, 13–14 fortieth anniversary, 165, 166 mystique of, 92, 146–48, 168–69, 287 In-N-Out Burger Foundation, 205 In-N-Out Burger logo, 2, 13, 121, 288 as advertising, 149 on store in Westwood, 224–25 In-N-Out Burger University, 133–36, 172 In-N-Out Urge, 150 innovation, 40–42 double drive-through, 62–63 open kitchen, 45 Insta-Burger-King.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

The characters that populate their books and songs bear a strong family resemblance to Generation X – a term popularised by Douglas Coupland in the 1990s, in his novel of the same name (Coupland, 1991). Generation X depicted a group of young adults who were grappling with their disillusionment around the trappings of the yuppie lifestyle. Coupland’s novel was witty, fiercely critical, and even featured a glossary of new phrases for the Gen-Xer’s arsenal: terms like McJob (a ‘low-pay, low- prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector’), Veal-Fattening Pen (‘small cramped office workstations built of fabric covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members’) and Rebellion Postponement (‘the tendency in one’s youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience.

., 97 Marx, Karl, 26, 30, 46, 85, 106, 116, 125, 142, 143, 147, 148; Capital, 32, 47, 114; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 47–8; views on technology, 32, 33; views on work, 17–18, 32 material objects, connection to, 183 material wealth, desire for, 27 Matthew, a former office worker, 13, 58, 134–8, 141, 142–4, 146–7, 159, 169, 174, 177, 183, 186, 194, 201, 202, 205–6 maturity, definition of, 198 McDonald’s, 167, 213 ‘McJobs’, 114 McKenna, S., 109 McShit T-shirt, 213 Mead, George Herbert, 203 mealtimes see eating together meaningfulness in work, 63 meaningless work, 12–13, 22, 40 medication, rejection of, 150–1 Merton, Robert, 146 Mike, an interviewee, 124, 130, 165 Mills, C. Wright, 206; White Collar, 52 mindlessness of work, 163 mini utopia, 142–7 minimum-wage jobs, 135 mobile phones, 72, 168, 170 Moir, Jan, 101–2 monasteries, 25 monotony, of everyday life, 210–11 moral principles, alternative, 122 moralisation of work, 16, 25, 103, 105, 191 morality: of work, 26; of non-workers, 207, 234 More, Thomas, 30; Utopia, 31–2 Morris, William, 30, 31, 32 multi-activity society, 143, 220, 222 music, popular, decline of, 173–4 mystery customers, 54 N National Insurance Act (1911), 28 necessary labour, distribution of, 95 need to work, 14, 111 needs: fulfilled by work, questioning of, 64; growth of, 91 ‘neo-proletariat’, 115–16 neoliberalism, 73, 219; moral fortification of work, 16 New Economics Foundation, 99, 116, 223 New Labour, 16, 103 non-compliance, acts of, 212 non-violent action, practice of, 1–23 non-work: as extension of work, 75, 82; experience of, 112; stigmatisation of, 197 see also shame, of non-work non-workers: audits and penalties for, 16; demonisation of, 97, 98–105; viewed with sense of pity, 201 see also stigmatisation, of non-workers not doing anything really, 194 O Offe, Claus, 16 Office, The, 212 Olin Wright, Erik, 30, 223 O’Mahoney, Hannah, 181 Operation Zissou, 144 Osborne, George, 99 outsourcing of domestic work, 67, 184–5 P Packard, Vance, The Hidden Persuaders, 85–6 paid employment: as sign of maturity and independence, 186; as symbol of adulthood, 198; established as norm, 191; fulfils psychological needs, 107; promotion of, 105; viewed as fundamental human need, 96–7; viewed as healthy state of being, 98, 106, 108, 109 panopticon, electronic, 60 part-time working, 123 payment, tied to working hours, 28 people with disabilities, 16, 104 personal costs of intensive work, 58 Petri, Elio, La classe operaia va in paradiso, 1, 164–5 philosophy, talking about, 143 piano tuning, as artistic exercise, 12 Pilhelm, Mats, 224 Pirsig, Robert M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 183 play, in work, 75 pleasures: alternative, 157–88; productive, 177–88; savoured, 172–7; troubled, 164–72 pointlessness in work, 129 political discussion on work, initiation of, 237 politics, against work, 8 polyvalent workers, 142 poor, the: new, 159–60; seen as unworthy of leisure, 96 poor-quality jobs, effects of, 108 post-industrial economy, 49–50 potentiality, endless, sense of, 77 poverty, 159; culturalisation of, 100; self-management of, 205; viewed as deserved result, 100 see also poor, the prefigurative politics, 208 presents, buying of, 186–7 Primark, 167 productive forces, development of, 36 productivity, 36, 39; defines status of persons, 191; growth of, 40, 84, 94; obsession with, 195 professionalism, expected of employees, 58 professions, age of, 186 profit, 44, 63 prostitution, 55–6; emotional, 55 Protestant ethic, 24–9 pro-work propaganda, 96 public amenities, withdrawal of, 92 public sector workers, strike action by, 102 Pullberg, Stanley, 130, 144 Puritanism, 27 Q quality of life, 108 R Rachel, a human resources officer, 127, 130, 171 reading see books, reading of ‘Rebellion Postponement’, 114 recuperation of workers, 69–70, 147 reduction of work, 28, 32, 66, 84, 93, 94; a source of uneasiness, 97 redundancy, as cause of distress, 109–10 refrains, 211–12, 214 refusal of work, 8 reification, concept of, 125 see also de-reification Reilly, Cait, 101–3 rent, 101 repairing things, 182, 228 resistance: battle over language of, 232; culture of, 209 resistance to work, 5, 7, 13, 29, 55, 97, 112–17, 118, 156, 210, 215, 216, 217; a matter of imagination and will, 158, 159; as collective project, 217; as self-preservation, 154; material limits to, 159; motives for, 122; necessity of, 147; obstacles to, 10; potentiality of, 227; risks of, 159; routes into, 131 ‘resources’, term used for people, 139 restlessness, experiences of, 175 Rhys, husband of Ffion, 177–8, 181, 183, 209 right to be lazy, 21, 23 rituals of society, commercialised, 186 role, use of term, 65 role-distancing, 212 routine work, 18 rubbish jobs, 131–42 Russell, Bertrand, 75, 78–9, 80, 111, 225; ‘In Praise of Idleness’, 11, 95–6 Ryle, Martin, 113 S Salecl, Renata, 65, 169 Samantha, a former attorney turned waitress, 120, 138–41, 161, 177, 187, 197–8, 199 sanctity of paid work, 16, 63, 65, 96, 233 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 3–4 satisfaction at second remove, 185 satisfying work, 5, 12, 30, 132 scarcity, problem of, 33 Schor, Juliet, 165 scroungers, 199, 202 self-care, 149, 150, 151 self-defined activities, 70 self-improvement, 219 self-production, 91, 92, 228; enjoyment of, 181-4 self-reliance, 182 sellable self, 77 Sennett, Richard, 51, 73 sense of self of workers, compromised, 54 service industries, 40, 50 Severe and Enduring Mental Health Problems, label, 152 sexuality, enjoyment of, 175–6 shame: as main tool of advertising, 171; associated with resistance to work, 10; of non-workers, 192, 202 Shipman, Tim, 102 shirkers, stereotype of, 154 see also skivers shopping: a troubled pleasure, 167; avoidance of, 170; compulsive, 171; mental calculations involved in, 165; patriotic, 89; pleasure of, short-lived, 170 sickness see illness simplification of life, 218 singing, 118 single parents, 16, 104, 108 skivers, 99, 101, 189 slavery, 24 sleep, 148; needed by workers, 147 slow food movement, 118, 176 smiling, 118 sociability, 137 social protection, 74 social work, as bureaucratic machine, 132 socialisation, 15, 126, 129 sociality of workers, capture of, 60 sociological imagination, 206 Soper, Kate, 89, 113, 116, 162–3, 168, 176, 187 Southwood, Ivor, 45, 104 spending, reduction of, 179 Spicer, André, 212–13 Stallings, Phil, 45–6 standardisation of labour processes, 133 stigma: definition of, 192; insulating oneself against, 216 stigmatisation, 203–4; of non-workers, 9, 105, 121, 199 stress, 131, 148, 236; coping with, 218 ‘strivers versus skivers’, 99, 101 Sturdy, Andrew, 59–61, 64 subordination, in work relations, 91 Sunray company, 59–60 supermarket, visits to, 167–8 surplus-labour, 147 surveillance cameras, 54 sweatshops, exploitation in, 61 Sweden, shorter working day in, 224 symptoms, 148 T taxation, corporate evasion of, 101 Taylor, Frederick, 48 Taylor, Laurie, 126, 127, 129, 210 Taylorism, 48, 61; emotional, 54 team, idea of, at work, 56–7, 58 technology, 33 see also Marx, views on technology television, 87; viewers, alleged suggestibility of, 86 Terkel, Studs, 13, 15; Working, 11–12, 45 Tesco, commodity varieties in, 169 Thatcher, Margaret, 181 Theroux, Louis, 55 thirty-five hour week, 68, 223–4 Thompson, E.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

Europeans visiting Canada or the States: remember that restaurant memories are a great conversation starter; almost everyone you encounter will have tales of psychotic bosses, Christmas morning shifts and après-work partying excesses. Working in a restaurant when you’re young doesn’t necessarily mean minimum wage (though it usually does). For many people, minimum wage is a stage-of-life thing that we all work through and gaze back on with rose-tinted glasses. When I put the word McJob in my 1991 novel Generation X, I wanted a word to describe a “low-paying, low-prestige dead-end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of intracompany advancement.” It made sense then and it makes sense now. Back in the early 1990s, I began to see the start of a process that’s currently in full swing: the defunding or elimination of the mechanisms by which we once created and maintained a healthy middle class.

The point in doing so was to foreground the fact that a minimum-wage job is simply not a way to live life fully, and to be earning such a wage past a certain age casts a spell of doom upon your days, sort of like those middle-class Argentineans who lost their jobs in the crash fifteen years ago and never went back to being middle-class again. McDonald’s campaigned for years and ultimately failed to get the word McJob struck from the Oxford English Dictionary, even renting a big screen in Piccadilly Circus in 2006 to put forth their viewpoint. The saga of this campaign is a fun read on Wikipedia, but given the accelerating shrinkage of the middle class, the McLawsuit seems like a frivolous corporate bonbon from a nearly vanished era.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The shift towards purchasing goods and services online continues, and there is growing automation within shops. In some supermarkets, shoppers no longer have to unload and re-load their trolleys: the goods are scanned while still inside their baskets. Fewer attendants are required in the checkout area. In fast food outlets, so-called “McJobs” are disappearing as burgers and sandwiches are assembled and presented to customers without being handled by a human. 5. Construction. Although some developers are experimenting with pre-fabricated units, most of the cost of a construction project is generated by the variability of conditions on-site, including the foundations.


pages: 244 words: 70,369

Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith

do what you love, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, McJob, Saturday Night Live, short selling, zero-sum game

I entered the dream factory in 1994, and by Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001, I was making movies about making movies. I was eating my own tail. There’s a lot of tail-eating going on in Zack and Miri Make a Porno, since it’s really just the story of how we made Clerks, projected through a wet-dream prism, with Scott Mosier conveniently recast as a girl I fuck on camera in the back room of a McJob and fall in love with by the final reel. I tried to capitalize on someone else’s success and forgot what got me invited to the party in the first place: the fact that my shit used to be different. Suddenly, I felt dirty, realizing I’d gone into career-management mode, just treading water, not saying anything new.


pages: 312 words: 78,053

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

This allowed him to isolate and separate specific proteins within. It was a job that needed much skill and decades of education but was about as fun as stocking cardboard boxes at a Body Shop. The scientist wondered if his entire youth had been wasted in attaining what was essentially an ultra-high-tech McJob. And, to go back to what was stated earlier, he was worried that his girlfriend was cheating on him simply because she could, and because her take-him-or-leave-him attitude kept his own brain’s neuroproteins on constant nuclear alert. “Wait,” Zack said. “You’re talking about yourself here, right?”


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Almost one in three young people (between ages 18 and 34) has put off getting married or having a baby because of the weak economy and wages that have been dropping even for college graduates. Perhaps more worrisome still, some, such as Aaron Renn, suggest that many millennials avoid work that they consider “McJobs” and may remain outside the labor force for a prolonged period. Rather than work in a fast food restaurant, many prefer simply to stay unattached to the labor force. By 2013, the labor participation rate among workers 16 to 19 had dropped to 35 percent from over 50 percent in 2000; those aged 20 to 24 saw their rate drop from 80 to 70 percent at the same time.5 What the new generation faces, at least in the immediate future, is not greatness, or even great relevance.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Switzerland 10. Japan 11. Canada 12. South Korea The bottom ten, counting down to number 168, are all in sub-Saharan Africa: 159. Burundi 160. Guinea 161. Central African Republic 162. Eritrea 163. Mali 164. Burkina Faso 165. Chad 166. Mozambique 167. Democratic Republic of Congo 168. Niger McJobs Low-pay, low-status, low-security, low-prospects jobs of the sort done by workers in McDonald’s—hence the name. mean and median The mean is the average: for any group, you add whatever it is you’re measuring together, divide it by the number of people in the group, and that’s the mean. The median is the person in the middle, with 50 percent above and 50 percent below.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

The vast majority of the new jobs were full time, it said. And, taking aim at that joke, the report said the share of workers holding multiple jobs had remained roughly constant. Joseph Stiglitz, the economist then in charge of the CEA, drew two conclusions. One, that it was a myth that most of the new jobs the economy was creating were so-called ‘McJobs’ — that is, typical of hamburger-flipping jobs in security, conditions and pay. Two, that the government needs to equip people with ‘security of employability’ rather than security of employment. In other words, they needed the kind of education, training and attitudes that would allow them to find other work quickly if unemployment befell.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

In December 2013, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked “combined food preparation and serving workers,” a category that excludes waiters and waitresses in full-service restaurants, as one of the top employment sectors in terms of the number of job openings projected over the course of the decade leading up to 2022—with nearly half a million new jobs and another million openings to replace workers who leave the industry.16 In the wake of the Great Recession, however, the rules that used to apply to fast food employment are changing rapidly. In 2011, McDonald’s launched a high-profile initiative to hire 50,000 new workers in a single day and received over a million applications—a ratio that made landing a McJob more of a statistical long shot than getting accepted at Harvard. While fast food employment was once dominated by young people looking for a part-time income while in school, the industry now employs far more mature workers who rely on the jobs as their primary income. Nearly 90 percent of fast food workers are twenty or older, and the average age is thirty-five.17 Many of these older workers have to support families—a nearly impossible task at a median wage of just $8.69 per hour.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

So why did people move from the hunter/nomad model to the farmer? Simple: the farmer model could sustain a larger population, though at a lower standard of living. Unlike the hunter/nomad model, which produced high-skilled “hunter” jobs but not enough of them, the agrarian model produced a lot of low-skilled jobs, jobs, jobs, or what some would now call “McJobs.” In a sense, while the higher-skilled hunter model led to a better way of life, the farmer model was better at—well, giving people work to do but not with very high rewards. That seemed to echo the U.S./Europe debate. The European model, like the hunter model, may produce better types of jobs, but the U.S. model, like the farmer model, could produce far more jobs.


pages: 513 words: 141,963

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Bruce realizes that in all his months and years interviewing addicts about their lives, they had been telling him the answer all along. “People explained over and over before I got it,” Bruce tells me. Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs?


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2005), whose cover is decorated with a mortar board affixed with a “sold” label; Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). Aronowitz worries that universities have become education factories for vocational training and McJobs rather than places of critical learning. 53. Andrew Hacker, “The Truth About the Colleges,” New York Review of Books, November 3, 3005. If evidence for the corporatization of the university is needed, Hacker observes that “employees who are not teachers make up 71 percent of Stanford’s total payroll…and 83 percent at Harvard.” 54.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Employees with flexible roles are organised in teams, and each worker is encouraged to stop production when a fault is discovered. The result is that workers are happier, quality is improved, and the management gains from the workers’ insights. 25 But lean manufacturing has not stopped the decline in industrial employment. The worry is that well-paid factory work has been replaced with “McJobs” (after the McDonalds burger chain) in the services sector, with lower pay and poorer conditions. In turn, this may have contributed to the rise of inequality in the developed world. But one study has concluded that “on average, only about one-tenth of the overall increase in inequality between the 1980s and the 2000s can be attributed to the decline in the share of manufacturing jobs”.26 More than half of all global workers now have a job in services, up from just 33.7% in 1991.27 People who work in offices or shops have jobs that are just as “real” as those who work in factories.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Room to Move as a Fry Cook—or a Tech Millionaire Traits: Good Incomes Despite the Slacker Image Crime was not the only problem Gen X’ers faced in the early 1990s: Gen X’ers regularly lamented that they got the short end of the economic stick compared to Boomers. The early 1990s were full of dire predictions about how Gen X’ers would never amount to anything and would never do as well as their parents. Generation X (1991) coined the term McJob (“a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector”) and generally gave the impression Gen X’ers weren’t living up to their potential (an idea egged on by movies like Slacker). Gen X authors like Geoffrey Holtz (b. 1966) marshaled statistics and charts to show Gen X’s piss-poor economic state; his 1995 book, Welcome to the Jungle, featured a section titled “The Impoverished Generation.”