It’s not just in prisons that private corporations enslave people and make them work for pennies.

Private Prisons Turn Inmates into Commodities

We think those Chinese factories exploit their workers? Check out what’s happening here at home as “temp jobs” intersect with corporate profit-mongering. For example, with adjunct professors in corporatized universities.

It’s time to talk seriously about wage-slave university adjuncts

And, also all across this land, what happens inside those gigantic “distribution centers” for all that stuff that we buy on-line? I have recently shopped for five or six “things” on the internet. One more book due to arrive any day. From now on, unless I truly need something (and really, how often is that?), and unless there is no other way to obtain it — there usually is, even if it costs more; so what? Is money really the bottom line? — I will never again buy online. Never. This is another really good reason to stay local, buy local.

Warning: This article is long. To get yourself to the point where you will refuse to buy on-line, do make yourself read this well articulated painful piece all the way through. (And remember, unlike the other workers, this reporter knew she would be quitting soon, that she didn’t have to suffer this job.)

P.S. Those who are in survival mode cannot be expected to rise up and take control of their lives in the same manner that we privileged ones who are not (yet) in survival mode can. Let us we wake up to the ramifications of our unconscious, culturally encouraged behavior, and change that behavior accordingly.

Mother Jones, via alternet

What Happened When I Got a Job at a Soul-Crushing, Abusive Warehouse

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.