Next time you go to buy something from Amazon, you might want to remember this article. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html#slide0
What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,”
Then we've got the news story about the graduate doing voluntary work in a museum, told to work for nothing in a Poundland for 3 weeks to continue to get her unemployment benefits. That one's extremely hard to talk about but is also quite clearly just wrong in lots of different ways. This isn't apprentice or internships, this is very cheap labour for the employer (run by friends of friends) that both fails to train the unemployed but also replaces an actual job.
And then we all know graduate kids and friends of kids that are having to compete for the right to work for free in "internships" so they can get something on their CV. Except these "internships" are again just unpaid employment that somehow gets round the minimum wage regs.
This is all apparently now the norm in this age of austerity, or is it the unacceptable face of capitalism as it falls apart, or the tinder for revolution, or what?
It could be worse. This could be Spain.
The slightly scary thing about Amazon is that we're back to mid industrialisation where people are cheaper than machines. This should all be fully automated shouldn't it? But then if you want to follow that argument in political theory, you have to explain or answer the problem of what to do with the 50% of the populace who don't invent/manage or work in high touch service industries. It's all very well saying that machines will do all the work for us giving us unlimited leisure time, but then how do we feed, clothe and shelter ourselves?
Last year there was no bread but we did have circuses. This year there's no bread, or circuses. Then, what?