Double Taxation Issues for US Citizens in Canada

 The robot-like vibes echoing through Wayman’s head remind me of the voice of the "Newtonian Clock" in W.H. New's epic poem Along a Snake Fence Riding, which goes like: But like, Wayman's poetic speaker is like, totally broke in terms of time, but that doesn't mean he can't like, be aware of time, you know? He's like, super obsessed with it, which actually makes him even more aware of time because he's always under this crazy time pressure, man. His options for flexin'By like, showing the human employee as, like, this reluctant cyborg who's totally losing it because they're, like, obsessed with the clock, Wayman is totally making fun of how our whole society is, like, built around this inhuman idea of being super efficient. 

 OMG, the employee has legit turned into a time factory, like "typing out" the time stuff that's like super fragile in meaning when it's taken out of the workplace context. 

The vibe in the poem is like, sooo mind-numbing and pointless, you know? It's all about that never-ending grind and doing the same boring stuff over and over again, without any recognition. The factory itself is like, legit hell, trapping wretched souls forever and acting as a clock that's always chiming with strict break whistles all day long. It's like a whole crusade for a shorter workday back in January 1872, ya know? The workingman, they argued, needs more time for fam, chillin', learnin', and bein' part of the community. OMG the Nine-Hour Movement had branches all over central Canada, like, so lit! "The whole shorter hours thing," Levine writes, "was, like, a major deal for the labor movement from the get-go [...]. 'Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for whatever we want,' was the vibe of the unionists back in the day" (141). OMG in the US in 1930, W. K. Kellogg, the breakfast cereal legend, was like so lit for bringing in a six-hour workday at his plant. #goals But like, while the vibe towards having more chill time has stayed pretty steady in Europe, the North American postwar consumer boom was like a total flip: people were all about working more hours, ya know? (Levine 141-43). 

We ain't even told what goods this factory be actually producing, 'cause it's obvious that its main goal from the employee's perspective is to straight up manufacture time, like, measuring out hours and minutes with mad precision.

This desire, like, is like so conflicted; in the late twentieth century Levine like notes that two-thirds of Americans, if given the choice, would totally go for salary cuts in exchange for more time off work (103). In Canada, like in the US, the regular work week is like 40 hours over 5 days, and even though both countries celebrate Labo(u)r Day in September to honor the unionist movements that ended the 60-hour week, the craving for more chill time clashes with the craving for lit consumer experiences. OMG, Stats Canada be like measuring how many hours Canadians over 15 be grindin' each day - like work, chores, and school, all added up over a whole week. In 1998, it was 7.8 hours, and in 2005 it went up to 7.9 hours. And guess what? The ladies be the ones mostly responsible for that increase, ya know? (Overview of the Time Use of Canadians, Table 1). These responses be different depending on the region, ya know? In 2005, Quebec be like "I only work 7.6 hours, fam" while Alberta be like "I hustle for 8.5 hours, yo" (Tables 1.6, 1.10). They also be hella different depending on age, with the work grind. OMG, the hours spent goes from 7.3 for peeps aged 15-24, peaking at 9.6 for the 35-44 squad, then dropping to just 4.5 hours for the 65+ crew (Table 2). 

The Canadian Index of Wellbeing is like, "Yo, in 2005, 16.6% of dudes and 22.7% of girls were feeling major time crunch, you know? 

The CBC was all like, "More Canadians Pressed for Time," and they were talking about how peeps want services 24/7, cities are getting bigger, and work tech like email and smartphones are making us always available." Like, bruh, internet connectivity be like totally raising expectations instead of giving us more free time. It's like a vacuum cleaner, but for our minds, you know? OMG, like the CBC report totally ignores the fact that the stats actually show a lil' decrease in time pressure since '98. They're acting like time pressure always goes up, but that's not the tea.

OMG, like obvi, these measurements only give a basic idea of the socioecon temporal vibes. Yann Martel's unnamed narrator in his novel Self gives a vibe of how the stats on paid work, unpaid work, and free time can actually be for a person. The narrator, who is writing a novel, spends mad time with her lover Tito, and hustles as a waitress, which she calls Slave Work: "I got a whole schedule in my life now, time imperatives that I gotta deal with. There was Slave-Work Time, Novel-Work Time, Miscellaneous-Things Time and Tito Time” (266). In her mind, the moments that make up her life are like, totally split into categories of must-haves or fun times omg, like if we wanna talk about being all obsessed with like, time and stuff, we gotta check out Tom Wayman's sarcastic poem "Factory Time" (1977):