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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how people expect workers to "earn" their salaries through suffering. It's almost religious. At the same time, lots of businesses charge their clients a percentage of their earnings and it's ok.

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David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, says people have been conditioned to insist that you can't be productive without suffering in the process, and he goes on to makes a case for Universal Income (because modern society is productive enough to feed and house everyone). I think it misses the point. People want a job where they grow as human beings, and you can't grow without suffering/trial. Pointless jobs are depressing. If you figure out how to get paid without doing anymore work, that's cool, but then what are you going to do? If you want to grow and make society a better place, it's better to find something else to do, either with the same company or somewhere better that isn't so dysfunctional.

I think your observation can coexist with Graeber's take. If you implemented a UBI, it seems reasonable to expect that most people would take the opportunity to take on some kind of "work" or self-development that is not tied to how they meet their basic needs.

Funny, I've always seen it the opposite way.

The employer earns my work by giving me a salary. My work has a value and the employer pays for it.

The minute they stop paying me, my offer cease and they lose any future value I might have brought them.

Maybe it's because I did a lot of freelance and agency work before working a full time contract.

Unless they got you on that non-compete for 2-3+ years on that 6 month contract, at that point you are their value and everything you brought was theirs, nevermind they might not have had the value if you hadn't brought/created it.

You shouldn't sign something like this.

Over here (Montréal) there's right to work laws and precedents that makes it so that those clauses are pretty much null if they keep you from working.

Non-compete pretty much only protects the employers from having a direct competitor recruiting their employees.

in French "travail" is the word describing a paid work, and it has the same Latin root as "torture".

I read an interesting book (somewhere in my library if you're interested) that took a different view on work ; one of the preliminary discussions was about the famed ethymology of the word "travail". The author made it go back to the immobilization of a horse in a cage when changing its horseshoes, or the immobilization of a woman in her "travail" of giving birth. It's the fact that we are taken by a task, preventing us to do anything else on a whim. In that much more neutral sense, you can view work as anything you choose to be busy with.

It's almost as if profits are nothing but exploitation and that you're nothing but a tool for the governing class.

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