"This week downtown Milwaukee was host to "Downtown Worker Appreciation Week," which offered a number of mildly degrading festivities to workers on their lunch breaks. The entire event was corporate sponsored through-and-through and billed as "the most fun you'll have at work all year," as though a karaoke contest and office chair races offer much of a break from the daily drudgery of work. Insulted by this crass display, some downtown workers and their friends put together the following flier and distributed several hundred copies of it over the course of the week:

While enjoying the “most fun you’ll have at work all year” during Downtown Employee Appreciation Week, does the whole concept leave you feeling a bit hollow? A “celebration” of workers, surviving paycheck to paycheck, thrown by the management who don’t hang by such a precarious thread… sounds like appeasement, not celebration. If they really appreciated the workers, wouldn’t they provide more benefits, higher wages, fewer hours, or more vacation rather than a few benign and boring activities to waste your lunch break on? Of course, those things would hurt their profit margins, so the question is “Can they really appreciate our labor at all?”

Do you live to work or work to live?

In modern society, there are no options left to the average person, if they wish to survive comfortably, that don’t include being forced in to a rat race of haves and have-nots. Have you ever been asked about yourself and answered the question by stating your occupation? That’s because the gamut of capital is sustained by a heavy encouragement of competition. One can become so absorbed by there job that it consumes their whole life, becoming a priority over recreation, family, and anything else that makes life worth living. Without this cutthroat competition in which we are forced in to a mind set where we are not only comfortable with stabbing one another in the back but encouraging it, our iron fisted, domination driven economy would crumble. Our “prosperous” economy is run on the blood and sweat of those who refuse to give in to being slave masters. There are alternatives!

Main Entry: slav·ery

1 : DRUDGERY, TOIL
2 : submission to a dominating influence
3 a : the state of a person who is a chattel of another"