capitalist fatigue

Here's a scary reading to pair with the capitalism week: after you finish telling them about horrible hours and working conditions in the last Gilded Age, you can give them this on the current one: Describes how pilots are falling asleep at the wheel, police and doctors and firemen and nurses are all working such long shifts that they are losing it. And people are dying. But that's the logic of capitalism, so too bad!!

You’d think that business might understand that overly tired employees are hurting their bottom line. But times are tough, jobs are scarce, and big business is not in the business of seeing human beings as anything more than interchangeable cogs in a machine to be used and discarded at will. Worker protections hard-won by unions – minimum wages, maximum hours, health and safety on the job – have been systematically dismantled, from Reagan breaking the spirit of air traffic controllers in the 1970s to WalMart breaking the backs of workers not allowed to unionize today. So while I have the greatest sympathy for the growing number of those with no jobs, it’s possibly more critical that we recognize there’s a lethal cancer invading the vast majority of those who do have jobs, as the top 1% of the Have Mores wring more and more blood out of those Americans who actually make things and make things work. And that’s not just making us tired.

It’s making us dead tired.

("Dead Tired," C&L)