Submitted by Daniel Drew of Dark Bid
The End of Meaningful Work: A World of Machines and Social Alienation
Many activists are clamoring for a higher minimum wage. That's an admirable goal, but is that where the worst problem is? Even at the abysmally low wages of the present moment, we still have 938,000 people being turned away from McDonald's because there aren't enoughMcJobs. The real problem is the lack of meaningful work. In a world of machines and social alienation, meaningful work is as scarce as water in the drought-stricken California Central Valley.
One cause of the employment crisis is relentless outsourcing to foreign countries. However, even more insidious has been the replacement of human workers by machines. For hundreds of years, the Protestant work ethic lauded hard work and efficiency as ideals to strive for. It's not easy to object to those principles. But what happens when efficiency means eliminating humans? It's doubtful the early Protestants ever imagined that could be a possibility.
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