Our Goals and Mission

CLAWS is a nonprofit support group, as well as a resource clearinghouse providing access to books and other thought-provoking and inspirational materials. Our main purpose is to encourage people to value leisure, re-think the Puritan work ethic and its derivatives, and critically examine other work-related legacies of industrial capitalism.

Our group combines our energies and talents to encourage the spread of viable alternatives to wage slavery. If you absolutely adore your job and don't know what a wage slave is, congratulations - you're a rare bird, and this organization probably isn't for you. We seek to transform the way people think about jobs, work, and money in everyday life. We envision a new way of viewing "work". For some of us, it connotes struggle, drudgery, obligation. For others, it simply connotes use of energy toward a goal, whether financially remunerated or not.

Though we are focused on ideas and inspiration, our mission also involves fostering the development of practical ways - both individual and social/political - to create a satisfying, rich, and sustainable life outside of the capitalist, corporate-dominated, profit-driven, 40-hours-a-week job norm.

Topics on our e-mail discussion list include simple living, sustainable and self-sufficient living, office politics, part-time work, attitudes toward money, plans for financial independence, homesteading, resource sharing, cultural factors, feminism, social prejudice toward the unemployed, class and race issues, and so forth. Sometimes you'll find us ranting about the system here and there, but we want to focus on solutions rather than problems.

Our goals are:

1. To help create and promote alternatives to the wage slavery mindset that makes many people feel trapped in jobs they dislike "because they need the money"
2. To function as a support group for people whose attitudes about jobs, work, and money make them feel alienated or marginalized
3. To be a resource clearinghouse for information about alternatives to full-time, remunerative corporate employment
4. To spread the message that liberation from the wage slavery mindset is within everyone's reach, and that it is an "inside job"; social and political solutions are definitely important, but ultimately are not enough
5. To provide a space for discussion, rants, support, ideas, and brainstorming, through our discussion list and Web site
6. To create a sense of community and join in the efforts of others with similar missions

"Work goes better when money is a by-product OF work and not the principal motivation TO work."
- Arlene Modica Matthews

"I notice that you use work and job interchangeably. Oughten to do that. A job's what you force yourself to pay attention to for money. With work, you don't have to force yourself.
- William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

"There is only one solution to the problem of unemployment, and it is that once production is geared to the needs of the community, and once the community can satisfy its needs, the term unemployment will disappear from our vocabulary.

Today, unemployment, shortages, and surpluses, are artificial, man-made situations which have meaning only in relation to an artificial economy which penalises the producers and favours a minority of parasites."
- unsigned editorial featured in Freedom(UK zine)