David Graeber Quotes

When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.

In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.

Under neoliberal governance, workers have seen their wages stagnate and their working conditions and job security become more precarious.

It's scary to not know when your next job is coming, and that is a daily fear when you are trying to act full-time.

We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time.

It's easy for people to strike if they're not working on a regular basis.

When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing.

Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers.

Nowadays, there's no such thing as a stable job.

No one really has any job security anymore, including myself.

The kind of job where you have to hustle and hustle and where you're not sure whether you will have enough clients next month, where you have less job security, is becoming much more common.

There is a moral crisis in France and it has a name. That is the crisis of labor or work.

Misclassification means workers are denied not just minimum wage and overtime but other social safety net protections like workers' compensation and unemployment insurance.

The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point. Poor people do not shut down factories... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits.

Actors and writers and adjuncts are always looking for their next job: they find common cause with the female Uber drivers on contracts who have also been unprotected victims of sexual harassment.

The rise of franchising, contracting, and other similar employment practices has made it harder to enforce worker protections like minimum wages, overtime pay, and the right to unionize.

Ours is the most precarious work, as you are in one place today, and tomorrow you are in another.

People in the precariat find themselves in the situation where the level of their education and qualifications is almost always higher than the sort of labour that they're going to be able to obtain.

Some people welcome the flexibility of a zero-hours contract. But their growth is symptomatic of a wider issue - increasing job insecurity and falling living standards in David Cameron's Britain.

Sanctions and workfare make it easier for employers to impose insecure practices on desperate people.

If we believe in the free market, then that leads to the big corporations taking power, that leads to this competition to lower wages, and that leads to precarious work.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

The accumulation of great wealth is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it, the consequence of which is that the working people perish in old age and the employer abounds in affluence.