Refusing to work?

yeah, what Rob says makes sense, but my main incentive for refusing to work would be simply the fact that all the jobs I've had so far were absolute shit.

I don't think most people who have families to support can afford to do this though; that's why it will never really be successful as a strategy for putting serious pressure on capital.

assuming you're not just taking the piss ToJ, in the vast majority of cases throughout the world supporting a family doesn't just mean supporting kids and a spouse, it means supporting the people who conceived you as well as your siblings, which is pretty unavoidable.
And why should I or anyone else want to avoid having a family in the hopes that it might make it more difficult for companies to use job competition to undercut wages? Fuck that.

Cos "the people" have no control over how "our tax money" is spent, it's scrounging off the state, which wastes far vaster sums on far more pointless destructive shit. If you had a guarantee that not signing on would mean that someone's tax money would be spent on something useful instead, then that'd be one thing, but it's just as likely to be spent on...well, on any of the bollocks the state spends money on, take your pick.

because work only creates more work and considering the fact we are facing an ecological crisis, it's about time we said fuck off to it!

You are not only furthering the demands of the proletariat, you are sucking captain planets balls too.

You're pretty much a legend.

p.s. it also means you aren't as likely to become a raging bigot when sitting across from a black person or woman in an interview waiting room.

screw them for all you can get. the govt,bosses, shareholders do it all the time.

the only difference is that they are lauded for it and you are vilified.

as long as you are genuinely striving for a fair and equitable world i see no problem.

you could also give some if not all of the money to cash starved political/protest groups of your choice.

the system paying for it's own downfall.....

now there's a happy thought

On a serious note, I think a combination of the following arguments:
- it is taxpayers money, but not very much, certainly nothing compared to the scrounging of the idle rich, or the tax avoidance of the wealthy. And a lot of taxpayers money gets spent on stuff which is bad - handing it over to the rich by subsidising privatisation, building weapons of mass destruction, killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan...
- by refusing to work at current wage levels you help prevent general wage levels from falling, by helping to increase demand for labour

if I had a third argument I have now forgotten what it was. Hopefully this will do though.

We're in a recession, don;t really see why you need an argument right now. Loads of pretty career minded people i know are probably facing the dole, theres easily gonna be 4 million plus unemployed by the end of the year i'd reckon..
I defnitely wouldn;t try and politically justify it in terms of ''refusing to work'' with most people, coz its the equivalent of telling a starving man that your on a diet. Just tell people you can;t get a decent job, if they push further, lie and/or exaggerate about some applications and interviews you had.
Personally like most people I find being on the dole long term way worse than working. So i don;t really see refusal to work as much of an option, but i guess its a matter of personal preference.

I pointed out later on in the same thread that it was flawed, but used a different example - what if you choose to work for peanuts because of particularly strong pressures? Doesn't that make you a destroyer of wage standards?

And as JoeK points out, it's not really a strategy as such, just an economic effect when lots of people do it.

If you just don't want a job, you're still having that effect on the market regardless. It's the fact that you're withholding labour power that's important, not that you have a blindingly good understanding of how supply and demand functions. And if everyone did it, we'd have a defacto general strike .

Dear lots of zeros,
I was on the dole for years, and I used to have occasional massive fits of guilt about being a parasite on society, other people had to work to support me etc etc. Of course, I felt those things because other people (esp my grandparents) said them to me all the time.
Don´t listen to any of this crap! Most jobs I ever had contributed absolutely nothing to the wellbeing of anybody. I worked in a shop selling shampoo and makeup- well god, we´d all be done for if I wasn´t there to sell you a rose blusher for six pounds fifty on a Sunday afternoon eh? I worked in a lot of bars, well alcoholism never hurt anyone. And at least I was paying my taxes. So it´s not as if there are the working people, digging potatoes and cleaning hospitals and discovering penicilin, and the unemployed people lazing around. Most jobs are completely meaningless and you waste your life putting the shampoo bottles on the shelf with the labels facing the front. So sign on. Get lots of sun. Sign on double if you can.

he however is likely to a be a fat deadbeat loser who doesn't do any housework and prefers to mooch off his spouse's hard earned money to buy beer and sports memorabilia. I have a female friend who is precisely in this situation.
I agree with Fingers' post, and there is no sense in pretending that there is anything noble or even useful about most work done under capitalism, but some people really are lazy scumbags; that is not entirely a bourgeois myth.

lol

Didn't Karl also knock up the family maid while not working?