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Quote by Steven Magee

“My girlfriend would tell me she was flying out of town to a work conference with her coworkers. She did go to the conference, but it later emerged it was an excuse to meet up with her secret lover!”

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Steven Magee

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“Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can’t explain, something that created it all at the end of the search. “And no matter how far they try to go the other way – to extend life, play around with the genes, clone this, clone that, live to one hundred and fifty – at some point, life is over. And then what happens? When the life comes to an end?” I shrugged. “You see?” He leaned back. He smiled. “When you come to the end, that’s where God begins.”

GodBelief
Book:Have a Little Faith: A True Story
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“Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“The analogy with the environment [crisis] is apt, because both forms of sustainability - human and environmental - have no market value, they cannot be bought and sold. Both fall into the category of what economists call the tragedy of the commons': in an unfettered market, they are subject to its depredations without any accounting for their true value. Just as the damage to the environment has become increasingly clear, so we will see in the coming decades a growing anxiety about the erosion of human sustainability as we witness an exponential rise in depression, stress and anxiety. It is the conditions of our working lives which are one of the main causes.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“What we have lost to a very great degree is the possibility of resistance, confrontation or reform of taking the struggle for freedom back into the workplace. Many of the private sector jobs worst hit by long hours and rising stress have a low rate of trade union membership. The number of workplaces with high union density and well-established collective bargaining fell from 47 per cent in 1980 to only 17 per cent in 1998.26 Two-thirds of all workplaces have no union presence at all.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork HardWork Life BalanceOverworkWork Ethics
Author:Madeleine Bunting
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“Work's enormous drain on time and energy is depriving relationships of care and dependence, the investment they urgently need right now. At the same time, it often adds new demands on those relationships as the stress and exhaustion spill over. Overwork erodes intimate relationships, which have never been so brittle and which, in a competitive, individualistic society, have never been so essential in supporting individual well-being, identity and security. Never have we so needed a place to call home, a place of refuge from the dictates of the market, from its crude calibration of value and its demands on us to perform. Yet at the very same moment, the time we have at home is shrinking, and the privacy we have there is fast disappearing. What is in conflict here is a labour-market ethic of individual achievement and effort, versus older ethics of the dignity of dependence and the fulfilment of selflesness.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Author:Madeleine Bunting
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“As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life. It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations – rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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