I don’t want to be the LBO overpost poster-boy and will commit to cyber silence for the rest of the day. But let me cite some background on Auschwitz's whistle-while-you-work advisory: "'Arbeit Macht Frei' (Work Brings Freedom) was the sign over the gates of Auschwitz. It was placed there by Major Rudolf Hoss, commandant of the camp. He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom." <http://www.spectacle.org/695/arbeit.html>
The totalitarian notion that "endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom" pervades the American workplace today. Trapped in pointless or destructive paper-shuffling tasks, executives, professionals and other lofty types seem to think that if they mimic the strenuousness of old-time manual labor via crazy stunts like working around the clock, over the weekend and during "vacations," it somehow ennobles their busywork and justifies their having a pay premium over the minimum-wage crowd. Wrong.
Carl