Peets Coffee, Westwood Village, December 23, 2013, 2 pm
- What are you working on?
- Research.
- About what?
- Employment.
- Are you a professor at UCLA?
- Yes. Adjunct Professor.
- At the business school? You are from Japan?
- Yes.
- You don't seem to speak English well. Can you understand me? What exactly is your interest in employment?
- It's a popular subject now.
- Yes. I take it American corporations paid for you to come to the University of California. What kind of research into the business of employment are they paying for? Do you understand me? Do you speak English?
- My research is a kind of sociology.
- I see. You have come here to teach us how best to arrange our society in relation to employment. Do you know anything about what philosophy, literature, religion has produced on that subject? You don't answer. You are teaching here but don't understand English? I'll answer for you. You don't know. You have come here to teach us Americans, encumbered by our outdated ideas of philosophy and the arts and religion how to arrange business without them all, on a purely economic basis. In other words, you have come here to teach our managers how to manage slaves. A relation of employer to employee that is devoid of all human quality except economic is a relation of master to slave. A rental slavery rather than ownership slavery. You don't respond. You are here in United States. No one made you come here. There is a tradition of speaking openly here - who knows though how long it will last. You don't wish to take advantage of it while you are here? You have nothing to say to me?
- Are you a book writer?
- That's what you've been thinking, trying to determine what kind of enemy I am, determine which existing best practices cover managing my type. My own best practices tell me once the fun is over, with your type the best that can be done is turn your back. Professor of Employment!
