another union, gone

Forty-eight years after one of its members actually got paid to do the job, the American Domestic Rice Cooker’s Union (ADRCU) finally disbanded. Founded in 1895 by a group of house-maids from San Francisco, the Union had seen its number drop dramatically since the introduction of low-cost, automated devices. “We just can’t compete with computerized, electric rice cookers that do the job perfectly, every time,” said Yolanda T. Ching, a spokesperson for the ADRCU. “That, and a drastic reduction in the number of people wealthy enough to hire cooks and maids, sounded the death-knell for our lovely group.”

Former members are slated to receive training as taxi drivers, foundry workers, and call-center operators, jobs that the Union’s leadership thinks will soon return to the United States. Also at risk of extinction are labor organizations representing American retail workers, cotton pickers, and coal shovelers.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

local inventor steamrolled

Facing intense and sustained pressure from the XYZ Corporation out of Wilmington, DE, local Maryland inventor Mr. D. caved to demands. (As per the request of the involved parties, all names have been changed in or removed from this piece.) Instead of continuing to promote and distribute the ingenious device he came up with to efficiently tackle something every American male faces every day, namely (omitted), Mr. D.’s invention is now the property of XYZ. The corporation manufactures and distributes a number of devices men use to (omitted) their (omitted). Their devices, however, have a higher cost and are less efficient than that of Mr. D.

Rumors indicate that Mr. D. received a one-time payout in the high six-figure range to sell the patent and production rights to his device. XYZ claimed that it would start redistributing Mr. D.’s invention as soon as its various overseas manufacturing streams had had time to adjust, and the appropriate number of domestic workers had been fired to recoup the payout costs. Mr. D. promptly set about renovating his parents’ dilapidated row-house.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

free things made

Working well into the night, and long past their usual quitting-time of Right About Now, a group of human beings working at a factory in a Vietnamese free-economic-zone bent to the task of making free shirts. “Remember,” their foreman had told them at the beginning of their long shift, the unpleasant man screaming at the top of his lungs so as to be heard over the cacophony made by the running looms. “These #7 through #16 upper-body garments will be given out free-of-charge to persons attending the Global Summit of Capitalistic Inequality in Dubai, next month, so they must be made well, and quickly!” The workers – mostly women belonging to an underprivileged ethnic group who were working for mere pennies an-hour – shared secret and contemptuous looks with one another before hurrying to their posts within the cavernous production-hall, some of them risking health and safety to access hard-to-reach portions of their respective machines. In an attempt to live up to the quality-control demands of their corporate slave-masters, the women produced the required quantities of shirts in just under the amount of time allotted for their task, which prompted further screaming and abuse from the foreman, who accused them of trying to pad their paychecks by lolly-gagging, and dragging their feet.

After walking in single file out of the factory under the watchful gaze of a pair of security guards who executed random searches of their persons and lunch containers, the women all but ran to the gates leading to the road outside. Waiting dejectedly in the rain for a shuttle to take them back to the outskirts of the slum where they lived (unaccompanied workers are prohibited from walking through, or existing in, the free-economic-zone), the women sang songs and told stories of their tribes' long-lost glory days as behind them a different group of underpaid workers loaded the free shirts into trucks for transport to a nearby seaport. “Someone mentioned that these were free garments,” said Humei Hong, a local truck-driver, as he was doing a voluntary inspection-walk around his leased rig. “I don't know for whom they are free, though, since they're not free for us – the last time I asked if I could have one for free, I couldn't find work for six months.”

Later that year, at the Inequality in Capitalism summit in Dubai, the shirts were indeed given out free-of-charge, mostly to corpulent rich people with lightly-toned skin arriving on tax-payer-funded corporate jets, who wore them for but a single day before tossing them in the trash.

(p.s. TANSTAAFL – There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit