Chinese factory workers accept bricks in place of unpaid wages was an interesting post I read today as part of my daily flipboard curation over on flipboard, it’s a great app I’ve used on my iPad and now the iPhone for well over five years at least, every morning or night I dig into the news of the day, it’s become my daily newspaper without the waste of paper and ink, less trees more direct, an aggregator for news I wanna read.
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions insists it has helped at least five million migrant workers claim outstanding wages totalling 30 billion yuan (£3.36 billion) in the last five years.
the building blocks of life, money equals resource
I’m presuming that in the future it won’t just stop at migrant workers, these poor workers from the mountain regions in the nations far southwest, probably hired because they were cheap, unlisted, without blockchain evidence and tracking of their work. Over the years I’ve really started to really understand how this planet operates, how someone buys and imports, marks something up regardless of the expensive of a human life on the other side of a planet in the supposed pursuit of progress.
This story really stood out to me because of the sheer abstraction of not getting paid but then being offered the very things the company had — bricks, they were making them, the company had the equipment but not enough income, orders, clients, whatever to actually pay the people to make them — sound familiar?
Maybe we will start to see a slow down of the mass produced bullshit ridden poundshop stack it high, sell it cheap, keep on cranking that stuff out machine that believes that we need rows and rows of this stuff, that just keep producing is the correct method, after all, someone somewhere will buy it passed it sell by date right?
if not stated some of my photos are from unsplash a free site for images, also you can grab some cool images from nomad.pictures a site i run with @dayleeo to get pictures out of the camera roll and onto the web — Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash.
But it really hit me because they agreed to receive 290,000 bricks in lieu of payment. Did they have an alternative place to sell them, did they decide to rebuild some houses in the mountains, are they using their very much earned sweat equity of time to make the product to then use that product to build out a stable home from which their families could live from?
It just felt very much like the steemit blockchain in some regards, acting on and adding too, never subtracting, standing at the front of the coal face, producing, writing, curating and sharing stories of progress or hinderance, how we creatively solved a problem, how we revisited it and came to a junction point as to what was ‘content’ and what was just ‘life’ and telling our story to others that could relate.
no money, but able to build
These migrant workers came from the mountains poor but willing to work, found that they places they worked out couldn’t pay but a deal with struck with a union to be paid in other ways, I guess you could say that our witnesses of the steemit blockchain are our union men and women of the world, the one’s maintaining the steady flow of information and knowledge between worker bees (bloggers) and the very technology the transport is build on (steem blockchain) — end to end, open and public and everyone can consume it from any corner of the world — always available.
social blockchains at job centre level
these days every time I see a mention about unions and jobs, how jobs are drastically changing, how many hats we are wearing in our lives now, that jobs for life are no longer a thing, that we are having to adapt and change at break neck speed to keep up I’m constantly looking at solutions that blockchains provide — it’s not like some radically different process that did not exist before but it does change a few very important attributes.
The main one for me is the ‘open nature’ of a blockchain, what it suggests to be, a decentralised, unfuckable with ledger of blocks back to back, spread out across the globe as a permanent marker of activity, where other data silos can prod and poke and decipher at will. Not some locked away silo of data that can be altered or changed at will, it’s available to me mashed up, remixed and used in a multitude of ways, at root level it’s a big phat fucking digital key to a better unified human experience.
I’m happy to report that on my recent visit to a nearby city I wasted three years of my life in that I saw that the job centre, right next to the train station had been shut down. I was super happy, it was like that scene in ‘sneakers’ where he goes back to the building to find that their is no ‘agency’ in the building and in fact the building was busy being teared down with the same homeless man protesting outside that they had pulled down his home, all of these things eventually dovetail into each other if you truly pull back the curtain to see who’s at the controls.
/ thegravity is my newspaper
//thegravity on Flipboard has over 12,237 viewers and 61 dedicated followers that read my suggestions on a daily basis and I’ve spun out over 5k+ of stories that I’m interested in, grab the Flipboard: The one place for all your interests app and add me up so you can get to some of the stuff I don’t post on a daily basis here.
Just a thought while I was making a hot beverage ;)
