Bodies for Sale: The Inhuman Face of Industrialism
GUEST COLUMN
“You are worth about $5.50,” gloats the statistic-monger. “If you were cremated, the chemicals in your body wouldn’t be worth as much as a ticket to a first-class concert.”
“Four dollars an hour,” says my boss, equally pleased.
I do just enough unskilled factory work (for Manpower) to cover my room and board. The money itself doesn’t affront me, as if I had gotten a low bid at the auction block. But what does affront me is the suggestion that the money could in any way compensate me for my body, my life, my time, myself.
Raw materials went into the factory and came out ennobled and man went in and came out degraded (Pope Pius XI).
You May Also Enjoy
Dreams are for sale.
Catalogues arrive unbidden, offering raw material. The contents, chaotic like dreams,…
Socrates asks what would happen to a capitalist nation if everyone practiced the greedlessness of Jesus, or Buddha, or even Thoreau?
We cannot leave politics and economics, or war and peace, to the devil on the plea that it is too complex or too difficult to implement real reform.