- Wageslaving drains the vitality from life, reducing and making it indistinguishable from mere survival.
- Workers constantly complain about wages, hours, conditions, and exploitation, anything but the work itself.
- Non-working hours are not freedom or leisure; they are merely time spent recovering from work and trying to forget about it. This leaves you with little time to maintain/create meaningful friendships, making you a poor friend.
- For those who toil for forty hours a week without any say in how their work is done, work becomes a burden. Workers have no input on task distribution or workload management, resulting in a degraded sense of autonomy. They are subjected to totalitarian controls at the workplace: constant surveillance, repetitive monotonous tasks, imposed tempos, production quotas, punching in and out. This mirrors a prison.
- Work fundamentally contradicts freedom. You must obey orders, no matter how arbitrary, and are constantly under surveillance, with supervisors acting as snitches. Failure to comply results in ‘misconduct’ charges and disciplinary procedures, treating adults like children. While disciplining children is expected due to their immaturity, treating adults this way is a humiliating form of domination by office fascists.
- I often wonder how much life expectancy is cut short by the stress of work and work-related injuries. Some key figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 2021:
- Fatal Work Injuries: In 2021, there were 5,190 fatal work injuries in the United States, an 8.9% increase from 2020.
- Nonfatal Work Injuries: In 2021, there were approximately 2.7 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses reported by private industry employers.
- Injury Rate: The rate of nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry was 2.7 cases per 100 full-time equivalent workers in 2021.
