Tag: work

Perspectives on American Culture: Stigma of Government Assistance | Guest Article by Dylan Yoki

April 10, 2020

“While people who live on government assistance programs are vilified and looked down on, the wealthy who have benefited from corporate welfare are celebrated to the point of cult-like worship. Despite the similar fashion that people on government assistance programs and the wealthy owners of corporations receive government subsidies, the extreme contrast with how the two groups are viewed by society as a whole reflects the extreme contrast in power to control public opinion.” … More Perspectives on American Culture: Stigma of Government Assistance | Guest Article by Dylan Yoki

The Truth About the Conscription of Student Nurses: Let Them Eat Cake (Again! But This Time With Clapping!)

April 3, 2020

“On 19th March, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) called for student nurses in the final stage of their course to “volunteer” to assist in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic […] it is expected that thousands of final year students will begin working this month. The main focus of this article will be to highlight the atrocious wordplay bordering on an outright lie of claiming that early registration is on a voluntary basis.

[…]

I spoke to a few student nurses about their actual situations and how this crisis is affecting them […]

One student, Claire is a single mother with 2 young children […] not being able to go on placement means her income is devastated and she must defer. Considering pursuing her course has already been a financial struggle, deferring another year may mean the end of her university career and hopes of becoming a registered nurse, but this is her only real option- no choice. ” … More The Truth About the Conscription of Student Nurses: Let Them Eat Cake (Again! But This Time With Clapping!)

The Psychic Landscape of Social Class & My Cleft Habitus | Part 11: The Psychological Sanctions of Social Mobility

June 12, 2019

“The feeling of “not fitting in” is not the result of a simple clash of personalities, or some individual failing due to perhaps poor social skills, but that these social skills, perhaps the accompanying or produced anxiety, and even the emotional intensity of such feelings and thoughts is a reflection of habitus and field incongruence. […] Psychological sanctions as by-products of social mobility are not just experienced individually even social cognition is affected. Feelings of shame and guilt also become barriers between family members that have not similarly experienced social mobility. […] Those who are rapidly upwardly socially mobile it seems are doomed to inherit the dispositions of a class that will never fully accept them, and in doing so, become not just physically, but psychically separated from their class of origin.” … More The Psychic Landscape of Social Class & My Cleft Habitus | Part 11: The Psychological Sanctions of Social Mobility

“There is No Magic Money Tree”, Let Them Eat Cake | On the 70th Anniversary of the NHS

July 9, 2018

“There is no magic money tree they say, but they will put money in. They hope us plebs don’t know about how it’s probably not going to be enough in real terms to cover the massive gaps already which have been worrying executives for years. They wear their little badges in parliament to show off their pride in a service that wouldn’t exist had the decision been solely up to them. They covertly privatise services by simply contracting them out to private companies and getting the NHS to foot the bill. […] The NHS is under attack, but at least some of the workers got some cake last week…” … More “There is No Magic Money Tree”, Let Them Eat Cake | On the 70th Anniversary of the NHS

The Psychic Landscape of Social Class & My Cleft Habitus | Part 4: Some Reflexions & Notes on Habitus, Luck & Biological Capital

February 11, 2018

“Being reflexive means being conscious in a way that makes our normal practice, however much it felt like we were consciously doing it before, seem like unconscious. […] By analysing how I came to acquire the scholastic disposition and become academically successful we can look at the structures which led to this, so policy can encourage these types of results.
[…]
Biological transfer is, although stochastic and probabilistic, it is not absolutely deterministic. […] Our statistical techniques can never give us 100% certainty (if they did, we would have hard laws rather than statistical probabilities), human errors, or all the other kinds of problems associated with human research, we always face margins of errors” … More The Psychic Landscape of Social Class & My Cleft Habitus | Part 4: Some Reflexions & Notes on Habitus, Luck & Biological Capital

The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 7 of 7

October 29, 2017

“Although after years of higher education have allowed me to reflect on the experience and articulate it, these experiences were hardly unique and reflect the harsh, dull reality of millions of workers. It’s not difficult to find these types of critique throughout the world of contemplative thought. I only repeat them here as examples to highlight the point that this kind of criticism of our working life is not uncommon, however I feel that much of this critique does not offer much in the way of realistic ways out of this predicament. I think a key part of overcoming these obstacles is realising that the social position of the worker is the most important category that links these situations and imbues those subordinate to them with common interests to transcend the current system.” … More The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 7 of 7

The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 6

September 27, 2017

“Using dramaturgical analysis, we see here how the actors need to perform convincingly enough that the audience doesn’t have the illusion of the overall interaction shattered- this is called impression management. Here, positive affect is a goal of the corporation because it increases profits but this extra work, which Arlie Hochschild labels “emotional labour” isn’t considered renumerable work.
This emotional labour not only compounds the exploitation of the worker, as they produce more surplus value for their employer, but it is a more obvious example of the alienation caused by capitalism.” … More The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 6

Experiences in Corporate America: Arbitration Agreements | Guest Article by Dylan Yoki

September 5, 2017

“The use of these arbitration agreements shifts the balance of power into the firm grip of the employer and there is little that the employees can do to remedy abuses by their employer with these agreements in place. This allows these abuses to go unchecked and the employees may tolerate unethical business practices out of fear of losing their job, even in the case of outright discrimination. With the working class pacified and corporate power growing, the avenues that workers can take through the legal system are dissolving into nothing and businesses are growing bolder in trampling on the rights of their employees.” … More Experiences in Corporate America: Arbitration Agreements | Guest Article by Dylan Yoki

The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 5

September 2, 2017

“I believe that the uncritical acceptance of such methods is a result of the inculcation of values of propriety and the normalisation of examination (practices which are so generalised in modern society, they led Foucault to call it “the disciplinarian society”). Having eyes upon you, whether of the state or one’s employer (in reductionist terms, both can easily be conceived as collaborators in class domination, hence enemies/dominators of the working class and so indistinguishable in that regard) is just a part of daily proletarian life in contemporary British society.” … More The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 5

The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 4

July 7, 2017

“The pathetic value and arbitrariness of rewards at foodchain made the punishment aspect of games the main incentive for competition. Some of these punishments, as discussed in the earlier part of this series, were explicit, however, some were seemingly (and possibly) accidental side-effects. […] Beyond the unfairness of rewards and punishments, and the arbitration involved in the allocation of them, the sales game itself was rigged.” … More The indignity of service work | My experiences as a fast-food worker | Part 4