Have you ever been sat on the train to work at seven in the morning and been struck by the utter injustice that your two hour daily commute, although solidly part of your “working day”, is not remunerated in the slightest? Not to mention the fact you have to pay for the privilege of getting to work in order to be exploited. But what if we got paid for our travel time and expenses? What if our employers had to pay for the privilege of bringing in labour from a distance, and this cost wasn’t foisted onto the individual worker?
In our current state of declining wages and working conditions, it seems pretty absurd to be thinking about forcing our employers to pay us for time when we aren’t even in the workplace. It even seems to go against the longstanding dictum of the workers’ movement: “fair wages for fair work”. But really, this demand is not without precedent. However, for this lesson we can’t simply look back to the halcyon days of social democracy. We have to cast our gaze back to the 15th Century, an age that Marx noted to be “the golden age of the English labourer in town and country.” The population of Europe had recently been decimated by the Black Death plague – meaning that the working poeople were suddenly a scarce commodity. The proletariat and peasantry found themselves in a position of incredible bargaining power, and soon began to demand some of the highest wages, benefits and lowest work hours that workers have ever seen.
One of these many radical demands won was the viaticum: a provision of everything needed for a journey. Originiting in ancient Rome, it consisted of a mode of transport (horses or oxen), food supplies and warm clothes, to be given to Roman officials when making journeys on state business. Silvia Federici explains that in the 15th Century it came to be a pay package given to the worker, in addition to the wage, as remuneration “for coming and going from home to work, at so much per mile of distance.”
If they had to do this, you know that affordable housing starts would suddenly boom just so employees wouldn’t have to be exiled to the suburbs.
raise ur hand if you feel personally victimised by starz media llc for witholding 3 seasons’ worth of amazing soundtrack for the best damn show that was ever on tv.
Nah, because Charles Vane isn’t my dad, Charles Vane is my dumb alleycat son who can’t decide whether to stay in or go out, and has a habit of murdering pests and then leaving their carcasses as gifts for his loved ones.
*Hisses at Flint* *Saves Flint’s life* “Eleanor, look! I killed Ned Lowe. Pet me.” “Eleanor, look! I killed your Dad! Pet me.” “I’m leaving Nassau forever with Blackbeard.” *clawing on door* “Let me back into Nassau.”
Y’all please reblog because this is fucking terrifying. It’s yet another attempt to sabotage any attempt at the poor receiving any kind of health care. God forbid you ever get fired and can’t declare yourself permanently disabled.
Make no mistake: people WILL DIE from this.
Contact your reps however you can. Use Resistbot and more importantly, just spread this shit around because I KNOW there’s a bunch of you on here that are directly affected by this.
Fight back! Organize your communities and support one another! Engage in anti-capitalist direct action!
This is evil. If you wanted to kno what you would do this is your moment
Are you sure you know what you’re asking of me? Are you sure? Well, okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. This post is long and contains description of genital injury.
So as you’ll know, I worked three and a half long, hilarious years at an NHS sexual health and contraception clinic. I loved that job, and packed it in because the Tory cuts to the service meant running it became hideously untenably stressful, but that’s a story for another time.
One of my duties at the clinic was to take phone calls. Patients liked me on the phone because I have a nice voice and I’m basically completely unflappable, and they felt happy to tell me things. A vital skill in the wang biz.
One day, a man called. This was not unusual. “Hello,” he said. “I need to see one of your nurses about my, er, my chap.”
“Righty-oh sir,” I said, “are you experiencing any symptoms that you’re concerned about? It’s just a yes or no kind of question.”
“Well,” he said, and I instantly felt a dark and terrible energy pulsate down the phone. “Well… sort of. But, uh, it’s not symptoms of anything, it’s just…”
I would come to regret what I said next. “Is everything all right, sir?”
“Well.” There was a pause. I heard fidgeting. “I got a yeast infection.”
Phew, easy peasy. Yeasties are easy to fix. I sounded reassuring and buoyant. “Well that’s nothing to worry about, sir – if you don’t want to get anything over the counter from the chemist, we can-”
“No, no, that’s not the problem. Listen -” he sounded serious. “Listen, I’ll just tell you what’s the matter, and you’ll see what I mean.”
This is where, whenever I tell this story, I like to ask the listener to play a little game with me. The game is “Where Would You Tap Out?” I’d have already tapped out by going to the chemist and getting some Canestan.
“I didn’t want any chemicals on my chap, so I decided to go for a home remedy. Internet said garlic was good for yeast infections, and I’ve got a lot of garlic, so I figured that’d be all right.”
I made sympathetic noises. Home remedies for yeast infections are normal, and garlic is actually quite effective. “Oh good,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure how much to use, but I figured, I have a lot of garlic usually, so I minced a whole bulb.”
The dark energy wafting down the phone intensified.
“I packed it all over my, you know, knob, made a poultice. Packed it all over the head, like a hat. But, uh, I wasn’t sure how to keep it on..”
I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to scare him off by sounding judgemental.
“..so I just duct taped it all on. Wrapped duct tape all round it.”
Still with us? Tapped out yet?
“So er, that worked, kept it on nice and tight, and I left it on over night.”
Over night. All night with your cock mummified in garlic paste like some sort of fiendish chicken kiev.
“But, uh, when I took it off the next morning, well… garlic is…”
“Caustic,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Garlic is caustic.”
“Yeah! Yeah, it is!” he said, sounding cheerful that I, too, understood the Way of Garlic. “So I unwrapped my dick and, well, it looked kind of like… melted.”
I sat, silent, on the phone. Already I’d missed 6 other calls, watching them sail by on the other line while this saga unfolded.
“So I figured,” he continued, the terrible juggernaut barrelling unstoppably through this phallic disaster, “I should probably exfoliate it.”
“Exfoliate,” I echoed weakly.
“Yeah,” said this abject human disaster, misinterpreting my echolalic expression of horror as hearty encouragement. “So I had a look around the kitchen -” he was in the kitchen for all this “- for anything I could use and got my brillo pad-”
For anyone not in the UK, that’s what we call one of these:
I must have betrayed myself and given a gasp of horror at that point, because he quickly reassured me – “No, no, no, it’s okay – it was a new one!” before going on to describe scrubbing the affected area to remove the alkaline chemical burn that he’d inflicted on his poor, blameless cock.
“So you want to come in because of… this?” I said, assuming he would want a new dick by this point.
“Oh no, no -” he said, jovial again. “No, it’s all fine – it just, my knob’s gone all… well, it kind of looks camo print now. I was wondering if you could do anything about it looking camo print.”
No, sir. No, neither we nor anyone else can do anything about your camo print garlic cock mistake.
i’m both impressed and horrified by his continued cheerfulness in the situation
Meg's Mumbles 