Ken Burch
3 min readJun 2, 2021

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Well, we need to MAKE the country rethink work- because we, the workers- or those who would like to work but are blocked from it by unavoidable circumstances- ARE most of the country. The wealthy-those who lively solely by OUR efforts or by the complete LACK of effort involved in collecting rent- are actualy just a tiny few, and contrary to their egotistical delusions, we have never depended on them or owed our survival to them.

Here are a few things we can do to change work:

1) ABOLISH(or mostly abolish) THE OFFICE- that is, abolish the requirement that everyone(other than the bosses, who are always exempt from this requirement anytime they find an excuse to be) that they actually have to go to a specific physical workplace everyday and have a supervisor or manager watching them like a hawk the whole time. We now know that, with virtually all office work, there is no longer any need for this. Let everyone in an office-type job work from home, electronically.. If it worked during the pandemic it can keep working after the pandemic.

2 ABOLISH TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT. Virtually any workplace can be run democratically and effeciently by its employees, working as equals and working with equal respect and support for each other..

As with office work, we don't need managers or supervisors standing over, riding roughshod over, imposing pointless and honorous workplace rules and restrictions on us- such as Amazon's inexcusable ban on bathroom breaks- or treating us as if it simply goes without saying that NONE of us could ever be expectedf to do a decent day's work unless we lived in constant fear of termination.

With worker management and ownership, we can create a vibrant, creative, and TRULY efficient workplace- nobody knows better how to truly make production and service provision speedy and efficient than those who spend their days producing good and providing services- they are the ones who DO the work, management and ownership, by contrast, do little but seek to reduce short-term costs for the SAKE of reducing short-term costs and, really, for no other purpose other than to artificially boost rate of return on investment for the shareholders- something that is a useless metric to measure any enterprise by, given that cost-reduction for cost-reduction's sake very often results in long-term increases in costs and the eventual demise of the enterprises that focus on short-term cost-reduction and high rate-of-return on investment over everything else, including customer satisfaction or maintaining/increasing the quality of the goods or services offered by the enterprise.

3) DEPROGRAM THE MANAGERS AND GIVE THEM SOMETHING NON-INTIMIDATING/NON-EXPLOITATIVE TO DO.

This is more challenging, but necessary. Since we no longer need- and probably never needed- coercive, intimidating management of the sort all working people were traditionally taught was simply the natural order of things- we are going to look at essentially pensioning off and retraining managers/supervisors/owners to do something else with their lives, something that doesn't involve obsessing on cost-reduction(and preservation of low labor costs over and above all things. We need to retrain these people, instead, to do something positive, nurturing, and not soul-destroying with their lives, something NOT dependent on devaluing and discarding others or treating the planet as if it exists for no other reason than to make them money.

I'm open to a lot of suggestions on that part, possibly with the Trump family being used as test subjects as community service and restorative justice for all that they have done to the world and the rest of us.

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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