labor | ZETEO

Downton Abbey and the End of a Way of Life

February 8, 2016 by Walter Cummins

Downton Abbey, now in its sixth and final season, has been a TV phenomenon, with audiences in more than 200 countries, including 160 million viewers in China. In the US it is the most popular PBS program ever, and, during the 2014-15 viewing year, it came out twentieth in popularity among all network and cable programming, just behind Monday Night Football. Why has it had such broad appeal? It’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to generalize for the planet, for viewers in places as […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Downton Abbey, economic crisis, labor, televison, United Kingdom, work, working class

Will Robots Displace Human Workers?

September 7, 2015 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Third in a series Arobot killed a young contractor in a German Volkswagen production plant recently. While the worker was installing the stationary robot in its protective cage, the device suddenly struck out with a fatal blow. Apparently, this robot killing was the first of its kind in German manufacturing, with the greatest use of robots in Europe. In the United Kingdom, however, in 2007, 77 robot accidents were reported, with people crushed, hit on the […]

Categories: Article • Tags: AI, jobs, labor, robots, Stephen Hawking, technology, The Singularity

Hard Times: Scott Walker

May 8, 2015 by Walter Cummins

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another, and the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation. — John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) For many years after immersion in Victorian novels during grad school, as much as I enjoyed them, I believed the world and the people they depicted […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Charles Dickens, education, J.S. Mill, labor, Repubican Party

Children as Labor and “Parent Tax”

September 1, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Last weekend a teacher friend of mine paraphrased, half jokingly and while laying on a deck by a lake, the idea of having children as a strategy to produce free labor. This is not a new idea, but it reminded me of an article that Zeteo published last spring. In “Parenting: Infinite Responsibility,” William Eaton describes different scenarios of this same idea: There have been and there remain economic and political reasons to have children—for their labor and loyalty and for the alliances that can […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: child labor, childhood, children, labor, parenting