...We need to change something.
Williams and other experts propose policies like a shortened work week, social insurance to cover paid family medical leave, subsidized day care, and early learning centers for children as young as three. Even business executives and consultants agree. "You're going to have to have private-public partnerships.... That will involve employers, may involve local and state governments, even federal government, with legislative support," says business consultant Phil Mirvis.
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[Excuse me, while I vent]
Oh, something needs to be done alright, like massive, bloody, chaotic, and unforgiving revolution, now.
At the risk of sounding overly harsh, how about shooting every one of the assholes driving this insane twenty to thirty-year long totalitarian work speed-up, also referred to as productivity, the neoliberal free market economy, the new world order, globalization, or some other claptrap.
Gee, you mean the capitalist pig hegemony and its government apparatchik, are actually driving the middle class into the dirt with their crushing load of oppressive extortion and expropriation, and their ever present threat of the prison-industrial-complex? You mean the burden to buy all that consumer crap that is supposed to keep us all afloat and is currently called middle class life, is actually destroying the middle class ability to breed? Gosh, something has to be done! Or, what?
I am sure mister Mirvis is interested in enlisting government support in the form of more corporate tax breaks to build all those corporate rat warrens, aka day care centers, to house the slubbering little toddler masses while mummy and dada are killing themselves for the greater glory of capital and empire. More likely mummy is upstairs doing just that, while dada is stewing in jail (where he belongs no doubt).
I noticed in the long list of very concerned and wonderfully bright sounding solutions nobody mentioned money---as in actual raises in wages.
Wonder why? Oh, they must have just forgot. They were really busy with all those other more meaningful solutions like forging new ground to help the personal lives of their hourly employees. Poor dears.
The concerned production of Juggling Work and Family can kiss my resentful, bloody and permanently hostile ass.
I hope to find their PBS logo in the bombed out rubble someday, while nursing a cup of warm brown water, euphemistically called coffee by the people's revolutionary army. I'd like to muse on their tattered graphics while I clean my Kalashnikov and wait for the next wave of neoliberals charging through the smoking ruins.
Carl Alexandrovitch Grimkov