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[–] 6 points 3 months ago (6 children)

So basically you feel that there are jobs which must be filled coercively?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    I know there is labor that won't be done voluntarily, yes.

    For instance, cleaning shit smeared over the walls of a restaurant bathroom, or sorting through garbage to separate recyclables, or changing catheter bags and diapers for adult patients.

    Sure, somewhere in the world you might find a few people who are happy to do that kind of work. Are there enough of those people spread throughout every community to actually complete the volume of work that needs them?

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  • So, I have cleaned shit-and-blood smeared walls on an unpaid volunteer basis for that inic I volunteered at. Literally that. I didn't have to be there, and the benefit that I got was a cleaned bathroom for a place that really needed a clean bathroom, even if someone occasionally fucked up an IV injection or had extreme poop issues or mental health stuff.

    I wasn't even the person most willing to to that work. I was just the one willing enough with few enough other responsibilities.

    I've also done extremely gross hospice care where qualified medical people weren't available. Especially for people I loved, back when I used to do that.

    I should point out that this was how those needs were filled under your coercive regime with fewer/none of the community motivations that would be present in a more humane system.

    It turns out your precious coercive power doesn't solve this problem either, because the people with those sorts of needs don't generally have much ability to coerce, and when the strong bully the weak, they don't get much into the habbit of nurturing them.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    Cleaning isn't an inherently undignified job, it's just that we associate it with poor working conditions, inadequate compensation, and low status. None of those are inherent to the work. Both you and I would do fine in a job like that, if we were respected and got what we needed from society. For work that is genuinely unpleasant, there's no reason I know of there can't be non-monetary perks that would make it worthwhile.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Cleaning isn't an inherently undignified job

    So what? It is still a job that most people don't want to do. It is a job that people do when they can't find other work. And typically the working conditions are poor.

    The point isn't whether anyone would "do fine in a job like that". The point is that very few people are signing up for those jobs voluntarily.

    For work that is genuinely unpleasant, there's no reason I know of there can't be non-monetary perks that would make it worthwhile.

    This I agree with. As a society we should be rewarding people who fill these very necessary roles. Janitors, especially those who work in medical facilities and have to regularly deal with biological waste, should be getting a lot more compensation.

    Regardless of whether that compensation is in the form of money or not, I don't think that's an example of anarchy. Providing such compensation would require some form of organized group that distributes it to the people doing the work, which means that group would have to collect whatever resources are necessary in order to distribute them, and then we've just reinvented taxes.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    A quick few searches tell me that less than one percent (0.7%) of the population have janitorial jobs, at least in the US (easiest data to grab quickly here). It seems not at all insurmountable to find one in a hundred people who don't mind bad smells and just want a simple job where they can listen to stuff and not think too hard. I've worked those jobs myself, and even without good pay it is pretty nice to just listen to books or music and not have to think too hard at work. If I could thrive on a job like that, I actually wouldn't mind. It just seems like a bad example of why anarchism wouldn't work, at least to me.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    So what? It is still a job that most people don’t want to do. It is a job that people do when they can’t find other work. And typically the working conditions are poor.

    Rotate cleaning jobs. This turns keeping the surroundings clean into a collective responsibilty

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