The 1st May is International Workers Day. Amnesty have published a report saying:

Workers around the world are being threatened, harassed, even killed for standing up for their basic rights. According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, at least 100 trade unionists are killed every year for trying to promote better pay and working conditions for employees. Many states have signed international laws safeguarding the right of trade unionists to act freely, yet some states are consistently failing to uphold their responsibilities under these laws.

The Guardian also ran a story on Walmarts dodgy union busting tactics:

... routinely flouting its workers' human rights through a sophisticated strategy of harassing union organisers, discriminating against long-term staff and indoctrinating employees with misleading propaganda.

Two very different things made me think about work again recently. Not about actually doing any, that is – just made me think about it. Its important to be clear there.

One: the update of Battlestar Galactica, which I've recently watched compulsively, is a marvelous vindication of science fiction as a petri-dish for examining the big questions (interspersed with dreadful cliches involving fighter pilots who combine insubordination and disrespect for authority with just the right amount of cringe-worthy 'being the best goddam pilot in the fleet', but I'll not hold that against them.) I won't witter on about the whole thing but, for example, its covered every possible angle on the war on terror, often in the most grizzly, bloody, its-ok-to-torture-and-rape-em-they're-not-human kind of way. They've had occupation by a foreign power, and at what point it becomes reasonable to send people on suicide bombing missions that are likely to take out some of your own side. This either shows that the US is indeed still a great amphitheatre of noisy free speech, or that science fiction (like magic realism) disguises itself well enough behind fantasy to remain inconsequential. Dunno which.

A more recent episode saw some of the civvies in the fleet of 50,000 remaining humans getting funny ideas about class, privilege, work and caste. A fuel refinery strike, triggered by appalling and deadly working conditions, almost leads to the military executing union leaders. In the end, the compromise is fairly fluffy – but markedly less so than, say, a Blairite 'meritocracy'. There ends up being a lottery system for the shitty jobs – because any system based solely on merit, without any corrective mechanism, ends up ossifying into strata.