What did Argentine filmmaker Santiago Grasso have in mind when he created the prize-winning animation El Empleo (The Employment) five years ago? Was it something about the dehumanizing quality of many jobs in the modern service economy? Or the grim shift towards menial labor after the great recession of 2007-08? Or, nowadays in 2016, could you see a commentary on the work that will be left once automation finishes displacing living, breathing employees–everyone from burger flippers to hedge fund managers? Robots will do the work, people will be the doormats, and maybe (as Elon Musk suggests) the government can pay us all a bare minimum wage?
The Employment will be added to our collection of Free Animations, a subset of our larger meta list, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Related Content:
Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More
Charles Bukowski Rails Against 9-to-5 Jobs in a Brutally Honest Letter (1986)
William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924)
Read Franz Kafka’s Metamorphis.
This is a must listen interview from a must listen podcast:
https://21stcenturytheater.wordpress.com/2017/01/14/fuck-work-the-case-against-full-employment-and-for-guaranteed-income-from-thisishellradio-podcast/
“Historian James Livingston examines the deep problem with employment in the 21st century – the broken relationship between work and income, and explains why we must look beyond capitalism’s intellectual decrepitude, and to the rising rate of transfer payments, if we are to reclaim our labor, our happiness and our time from the demands of capitalism.
James is the author of the new book No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea from UNC Press and the Aeon essay Fuck Work.”