According to a complaint filed with the UK government by human rights and environmental advocates this week, Standard Chartered violated international guidelines for responsible business conduct by co-financing four coal-fired power plants that have devastated local communities in the Philippines.

The complaint was filed with the UK National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct, a government office tasked with investigating breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.

Local communities have reported increased respiratory and skin disease, land dispossession, eviction and impoverishment directly resulting from the construction of the power plants.

The affected communities and NGOs are calling on Standard Chartered to contribute to the remediation process and strengthen its policy on remediation.

So that this potentiality becomes realized, there needs to be a surplus and this surplus would need to be more than a simple reserve (of food, notably): a useful surplus is necessary to liberate a member of society from the obligation of producing for themselves, thus allowing this member to produce for other members. Work is a form of human activity taken when work creates a surplus which escapes it. Work is a relation between necessary work and surplus labor : there is a separation between the expenditure of energy necessary to maintain the worker, and the expenditure of energy beyond this maintenance, which creates a surplus. Workers only exist for as long as a non-worker is making them labor for their benefit. Work, an activity whose product recurs to others, implies (and maintains) the division of groups within a society with opposed interests. Society is divided among workers and non-workers, where non-workers are reaping the production of workers. The worker may maintain some control of their means of production and organize them themselves, but the result of his labor does not belong to them. Work is a class relation.

Gilles Dauvé – Getting Rid Of Work

Also I’m gonna make a thread of every lift the bucket meme I could find:

“I won’t learn anything during the three month probationary period,” referring to the first three months of training at a factory job. Implication is you get hired, slack off for three months, then quit.

“Sooner or later, the workers on the assembly line at an evil factory will all become bucket lifters,” implying that eventually everyone will quit their jobs rather than continue working.

A proletarian poem:

“The soul chasing and life stealing assembly line,
The dark and ghostly shop floor,
The difference between life and death lies between two shifts
Run off with your bucket tomorrow.”

“I GIVE UP, I’m dying on the assembly line!”

a list of complaints:

“Rocket speed assembly lines, have to wear space suits [ie protective gear for semiconductors], shitty management, pig slop for food, whole days standing upright — I’m taking my bucket and running back to Sanhe [labor market]!”

A glossary of migrant worker slang

“Another fucking evil factory! Run away!”

黑厂, an evil or dark factory, a job that is consistently not worth the trouble

A huge list of all the things wrong with the factory: 14 hour workday, bad food, bed bugs, no air conditioning, confiscate your cell phone, etc…

Factory boss says to dying Sanhe temp worker: “Dashen, what’s wrong with you! We only have 10k units left to finish!”

Looking for work after the new year? Here are the top five WORST factories in guangdong! “Everyday they have more people picking up the bucket and running away.”

if you'd like to read a post on this topic from a few years ago

Scaling the Firewall, 1: #LiftTheBucket

A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.

[…]

The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels.

Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now.

Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air.

Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office

[…]

Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society.

Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen.

Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.

Kill The God of Work & All His Clergy

From Australia to Ontario, cities are taking up unnecessary stretches of concrete and asphalt, allowing nature to take hold in their place.

Data from Climate Reanalyzer says that daily sea surface temperatures for January 2024 are higher than they were in January 2023.

Indigenous people have always been active in labour struggles, both as part of the wider labour movement and as members of their own communities.

Prior to invasion, Native labour had already been integrated into the land itself through the management of fires, water, and food resources. This work added use-value and potential productivity to the land and natural resources – Indigenous people built irrigation systems and planted crops that nourished the soil, and they set fires to help clear brush and renew growth. Colonizers would later exploit this work for the benefit of their own businesses and governments.

Once Native people took up wage work for non-Native employers, their work was significant in building the infrastructure of Canada and the U.S. – and they fought against exploitation and racism on the job. This article presents a partial chronology of some important moments in Indigenous labour history.

On Twitter:

ALL DEMANDS MET! $84,000 in back pay and consequential damages to be given to the 9 illegally terminated Jollibee workers. 🐝✊🏽

After months of pressure, the Justice for Jollibee Workers campaign is declaring VICTORY after Jollibee finalized a settlement for reinstatement, back pay, and a public apology.

The settlement comes after the leadership of 9 workers backed by community members who came together to hold this corporation accountable.

This is a powerful first phase of a movement to organize Jollibee workers around the globe. We know that the issues of Journal Square is not an isolated case.

Workers around the world are experiencing labor issues such as wage theft, chronic understaffing and scheduling issues, misclassification of workers, and worker mistreatment.

If you are you are worker or know a Jollibee Worker who wants to fight back, contact us at justice4jollibeeworkers@gmail.com.

I need some books paywalled behind Oxford Politics Trove and they aren’t on Anna’s lib, Zlib, Libgen, Memory of the World, Aaarg, or the Internet Archive. Not sure to whom else to turn to. I hate that knowledge like this is paywalled, and I highly doubt the authors will be paid if I pay the highway robbery of a price.