#this is a pretty old article

[beeseverywhen]

White collar workers

When I started work as a civil servant at the London Passport Office 22 years ago I made the terrible mistake of believing I was going up in the world. I arrived at work wearing my best suit (in fact it was my only suit). I got the shock of my life: everyone else was wearing jeans. I ended up being assigned to a huge office, where half the people opened letters all day and the others stuffed envelopes. My job was to stamp the passports with a huge brass embossing machine all day long. I was part of a clerical production line.

The nature of white collar jobs has changed massively over the last 100 years. Clerical workers in the 19th century were regarded as middle class. Their pay, status and even dress made them more akin to managers. A clerical post was seen as a prized job and was usually a lifetime post. It was also a job that required a high level of skill. Very few clerical workers see themselves as that today.

The growth of white collar jobs throughout the last century has been accompanied by a huge growth in the number of women workers. Over the last 40 years office work has become increasingly deskilled and dependent on machinery. Work has become boring and repetitive. The introduction of costly technology (computers, faxes and photocopiers) has changed the pattern of work inside the office. A similar process has gone on in education, banking and local government.

One council housing worker described the drudgery of his work.

"We don’t have to clock in and out like my dad did when he worked in a factory. We now have a computer—I call it the hidden foreman. It is used by management to record and monitor how much work we do. It knows what time I start work, what time I finish, how long it takes me to have a piss. It monitors the number of telephone calls I answer and at a flick of a switch a supervisor can increase the pace of our work."

Investment in machines means that white collar jobs are no longer nine to five. White collar workers are expected to do shift work. Many offices are now open 24 hours a day. Certainly, in terms of pay, a routine clerical worker is part of the working class. A low-grade civil servant earns around £17,000 a year—no more than a manual car worker at Fords does. The growth of a large layer of middle management has accompanied this growth in white collar jobs.

Today the myth that white collar workers are not part of the working class remains as strong as ever. Yet unionisation levels and strikes in this sector refute this myth. The drive to attack the working conditions, skills levels and pay of white collar workers over the last 30 to 40 years has been accompanied by a growth of trade unions in the public sector. Figure 3 below shows the gross weekly pay scales of public sector workers. It demonstrates that the majority of white collar workers’ wages are comparable to manual workers’ wages. It also demonstrates that women workers are predominantly found in the lower paid jobs.

White collar workers such as office workers, many council workers and teachers make up a large section of Britain’s workforce. Today, they are some of the best-organised workers in the country (see Figure 2 above). Just as with their forefathers and mothers in the cotton mills, the mines and car plants, the growth of trade unionism in the white collar sector came about over a relatively long period and as a result of a number of disputes, strikes and campaigns.

Over the past 20 years Britain has witnessed a huge growth in call centres, there are approximately 850,000 workers currently employed in them. Some studies describe the workers in these centres as white collar workers and others as part of the service economy. But they are also commonly described as the new coal miners of the 21st century. If you read most reports in the media you would assume that these workers are completely atomised, have no power and face the constant fear of having their work outsourced to India or Romania. But again that is not a true picture. A series of recent studies shows that most of the companies which run these operations expect the number to keep on growing over the next few years, though not at quite the rate of a few years back. For every story about outsourcing to India, there is one about a new call centre being built in Britain, mostly ignored by the press. In fact a recent report in the Guardian notes that companies like Kwik-Fit Insurance and Powergen, who had outsourced their work to India, are now relocating back to the UK because they can’t find enough staff with the right level of technical skills and knowledge. Ironically, ICICI OneSource, a Mumbai-based outsourcing company, said it was building a new 1,000 person call centre in Belfast because of ‘its highly skilled workforce and relatively cheap property prices’.

Again expanding job opportunities and skills shortages in the industry are giving call centre workers the confidence to demand higher wages and better conditions. Last year I spoke to a call worker from Newcastle. He told me:

"There are five call centres on our industrial park. All of them are constantly advertising for trained staff. You end up meeting workers from other call centres in your lunch break in local cafes and pubs. Of course you find out who has the best hours and who gets the best rates of pay. All you have to do is ask your supervisor for a pay rise or a change in conditions. If they say no you just move to the next call centre across the road. There is a natural levelling up. It’s good old fashioned economics of supply and demand."

It’s also become clear that unions like the CWU, Amicus and Unison are now organising in some of these centres.

[ivyithink]

don’t worry, they make up by smoking danny’s book and bitching about armand together

[cutob]

teleneo met in canon!!

@deathinagarden and I read the russian Wikipedia and learned that Neoptolemus came to Ithaca to judge Odysseus for killing the suitors. Unfortunately, we didn't find anything about this in the english Wikipedia, but we found sources confirming this

This is what Apollodorus says

Plutarch also talks about this

so guys we can confidently say that teleneo met in canon bcs Neo couldn't help but meet the entire royal family before the trial

[dingodad]

Honestly my main issue with the homestuck wiki is just how informal it is? Like I know we are talking about homestuck we are talking about here but people shoving their troll biology headcanons into an article to make a joke doesn't seem like the best idea for a wiki. On Kanayas article we have such a line as "She proceeds to run up to Gamzee and kick him in the groin bone bulge."

When in the text we have no idea what these trols organs actually are (probably they are just jokes) allowing text like this just further cements community head canons instead of presenting what is formally in the text (or at the very least it should have something like "presumably bone bulge"). When the homestuck fandom is as filled with misinformation as it is, a wiki allowing such edits just seems odd. This isn't the only example of this phenenom either.

Yes I know anyone can edit it and I could prolly go in and fix up all the offending examples but allowing such edits in the first place is more what I have an issue with.

you are arguing with ghosts here man those character biographies have been there since 2010 they're older than some homestuck readers are. you need to take your own advice and make the edit yourself

[post-punk-revival]

Whatever that means to you, totally subjective, and not necessary to say what it is (obviously)

[batz]

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[bitchthefuck1]

In case anyone else has the brain worm that makes them want exact details anytime people talk numbers, in Too Much Birthday the offer to buy Kendall out says that he has 12,904,663 shares of Waystar (worth ~2bil at $156/share), so assuming he didn't sell any stock after that and also that Shiv and Roman all had an equal stake, which the show implies, that means that when they sell the company at $192/share in the finale, each of the siblings gets just under $2.5 billion, half of it in Gojo stock, not counting whatever they inherit from Logan.

[roundaboutnow]

This is one of the funniest articles I've ever read.

[cruyffista]

i found this academic article about xabi alonso/steven gerrard fanfiction and aksjklsdkl

[shewhoeatssand]

This is what perfect looks like

[aspectpriority]

its so funny watching myself get caught up on stupid lil issues. like i am watching myself exhaust myself on something relatively inconsequential instead of just moving on, maybe coming back to it later, or whatever. and i Know i'm doing it. but i do it Anyway lmao

anyway if anyone knows how to make textedit nodes in godot expand to fit the text a user inputs please. tell me. i feel like i've been fighting for my life for like an hour now.

[solitarelee]

The bidet ban in italy is, presumably, Vatican City. Obvious theological implications aside, it could

Anon you can't leave me like this. What obvious theological implications??? I was raised catholic and I am dumbfounded by what theological implications could come from this. The Pope Specifically Must Have A Dirty Asshole??? Does he have a guy that wipes it for him and the bidet was seen as taking away an important historical job???

ALSO IT COULD WHAT??? IT COULD W H A T

[codgod-archive]

i keep thinking abt this . so many people think english is a romance language but it’s Not it’s west germanic. it’s more closely related to nordic languages like norwegian and danish [that’s why danish kinda looks like Silly English sometimes] than it is to french or spanish etc. we’ve just borrowed so many words from french and latin + modern english barely resembles german at all so it sounds like it Should be a romance language. old english is pretty similar to modern german though, all things considered, even down to how we did grammatical gender [which was already phasing out by the time the language had evolved to what’s considered middle english]

[seonghwasblr-moved]

Sometimes I get sad and annoyed about things that literally don't matter at all lol

[regimage]

FDA For Kids, Pet care graphics - 2001