moleshow

[moleshow]

33さん (@33) / Twitter

[moleshow]

[moleshow]

I'm taking a walk right now.🌿♪🐌♪🌿 散歩中だよ🌿♪🐌♪🌿

[moleshow]

very much considering going to every single branch of the nypl to conduct a thorough investigation in to their individual forms of insanity.

to start:

wouldn’t this little thingy in the bench be a perfect spot for an outlet or something else useful?

well….

too bad it’s a hole go fuck yourself

[moleshow]

#curious about japanese almond cake. why blue

[moleshow]

I feel like we, as a society, really need to step up and get our insult game back up to Victorian levels.

“You big boiled-egg, you - What do you mean by calling me a “swill-pail”? Haven’t you got any better manner, you conglomerate mass of Adipose Tissue?”

(Letter to Jack from his friend ‘Osa’, dated October 24, 1900.)

[moleshow]

Hehe :)

[moleshow]

[moleshow]

[moleshow]

@thirdpartofthenight so there's a few things going on here that i think are worth getting into but i'll put it under this readmore.

in short, no, it's not. but your reading is not unreasonable, i can see how you got there.

re: itinerant/temp/gig worker distinction and geography despite sharing a degree of informality in the employment contract, i think these three categories are fairly different, and that those differences are meaningful. in the US, i'd go so far as to say that itinerant laborers, in the sense of "worker whose location changes according to the availability temporary employment" are not "a thing" anymore. i will elaborate on that here in a moment temp workers are employed through an agency which generally operates within a particular area. while gig workers--in the sense of "independent contractors working through an app" aren't tied to any place per se, in practice it seems like they do live where they work.

re: structural differences in the employment relationships another difference lies in the reason for the particular shape of the employment relationship. itinerant laborers were doing temporary unskilled work, where the employment relationship lasted only as long as it took to finish the job. (like, for example, digging a canal or working on a farm harvesting fruit.) so the instability was an outgrowth of the jobs being irregular/temporary. temp workers are sort of similarly situated, but from my vantage point their position is more about employers reducing costs by not employing workers directly, since that comes with certain obligations. there's also a distinction between actual temp workers (e.g. short-term data entry job) and temp workers who are de facto employees gig workers, in my view, are just misclassified. for the workers employed via an app, those apps are actually their employers (as evinced by the fact that they couldn't really go and offer their services directly). using uber/lyft drivers as an example, they are pretty clearly misclassified cab drivers, whose "independent contractor" status allows the apps to circumvent labor laws, thereby reducing costs.

re: why i don't really feel that itinerant laborers are "a thing" in the US anymore in essence i don't think they *can* really exist in the US, because not only is the labor market different, but the housing market is, too. itinerant laborers can only really exist if there are suitable housing options available wherever they're going. these were generally variations upon the bedsit/SRO, essentially hotel rooms which had daily, weekly, and/or monthly rates which itinerant laborers could afford. these were a feature of most american cities really until about 30 years ago, approximately. (a good book on this is Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States by Paul Groth. you can also consult sanborn fire insurance maps of most american cities prior to 1945 to see how much of the housing stock consisted of apartment hotels.) today, you can obviously still sublet or rent a room, but these are largely informal arrangements rather than an actual segment of the housing market. renting a room is generally a matter of one's income level, not the duration of employment. generally, though, apartments operate on the basis of 12-month leases. that's the default.

why this matters it's worth noting that the IWW formed at a time when cyclical mass unemployment (be it national or regional) was far more common than it is today. so you couldn't really organize itinerant workers at the level of a particular workplace because they weren't going to be there for very long. in fact (especially during periods of economic depression) you couldn't organize them on the basis of their employment, because many of them were unemployed. that's to say that the economy itself was wildly unstable. i think the situation today is different, insofar as the instability/dislocation of the working class is driven by profit extraction. it has very little to do with the work itself. where the instability of work for the itinerant laborer arose from exogenous economic forces, the instability experienced by temp or gig workers is really the result of endogenous economic forces (i.e. it's how profit is extracted.)

not sure people on the conputer grasp that the IWW's structure was a reflection of the labor market when it was formed. allowing all workers to be dues-paying members makes a lot of sense if there are a substantial number of itinerant laborers not tied to any particular workplace or location. note also that the IWW itself by and large did not achieve very much at the time. in trying to draw upon the past for insights into the present, might i suggest another organization--a particular congress, industrial in character?

[moleshow]

Source details and larger version.

My favorite (and weirdest) equine images are collected in my horse gallery.

[moleshow]

[moleshow]

False click beetle, Galbites sp.?, Eucnemidae

Photographed in Singapore

Photo 1 by budak and 2-3 by flyww

[moleshow]

Window Dresser Striking a Pose

Manhattan, 1960's

PHOTO: Jonathan Brand

[moleshow]

[moleshow]

Hands down one of my favorite images

[moleshow]