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## Wage Slaving

joshua glenn, mark kingwell and seth

From The Wageslave’s Glossary, published by Biblioasis in 2011. Joshua Glenn is a writer, editor and cultural semiotics analyst. He lives in Boston. Mark Kingwell is the author of Better Living, The World We Want, Concrete Reveries and Glenn Gould. Seth is a cartoonist and designer. His books include George Sprott, Palookaville and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. The three of them previously collaborated on The Idler’s Glossary.

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brainstorming

In the 1920s, the Surrealists invented various parlor games to challenge bourgeois certainties; one of these, a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution of a problem, was dubbed brainstorming. The bourgeoisie weren’t slow to discover a profitable application for the game: in the ’40s and ’50s, Alex Osborn, cofounder of the now-huge ad agency BBDO, published bestsellers like Your Creative Power and Applied Imagination, which showed how groups could increase their creative output via brainstorming. NB: Researchers have found no evidence of the technique’s effectiveness for enhancing either quantity or quality of ideas generated.

devil

Archaic slang verb meaning “perform routine work for another.” Mostly encountered in the form of a noun, as in printer’s devil, an apprentice in a printing establishment who mixed tubs of ink, fetched type, and did other grunt work. (Benjamin Franklin disliked being a printer’s devil so much that he ran away from Boston to Philadelphia at 17, where a few years later he set up his own printing house.) Why “devil”? It’s a mystery, though some suggest that it’s because printing ink stained the apprentices’ skin as dark as the devil’s supposedly is.

downtime

By the 1980s, this midcentury term, which originally meant “time when a machine is out of action or unavailable for use,” had been adopted by managers describing the unavailability of “human capital,” i.e., workers. Which suggests that human beings who aren’t working are best compared to machines being serviced or robots being recharged. Worse, many of us now blithely use downtime to describe our own weekends, vacations, and other moments of leisure.

mcjob

Popularized by Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, this mid-1980s neologism describes an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, particularly one created by the expansion of the service sector. (Want fries with that?) A song by the Replacements from the same era expresses frustration with McJobbers who actually seem to think they’ve got it pretty good: “‘Sanitation expert’ and a ‘maintenance engineer’/ Garbage man, a janitor and you, my dear/ A real union ‘flight attendant,’ my oh my/ You ain’t nothin’ but a waitress in the sky. ”

unemployment

A permanent level of unemployment, such as exists in every western society, presupposes a population which is to a large extent dependent on a wage or salary for a living; and it presupposes the right of businesses to hire and fire employees in accordance with commercial or economic conditions. Prior to the capitalist era, except in the case of natural disasters and wars, unemployment on a large scale rarely existed.