When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.
There was a big push to eliminate “degrading jobs” but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn’t have dishwashers, but we’d have people who washed dishes that weren’t eligible to be in the union.
I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn’t “degrading”, it’s fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?
There were enough of us to be like “Absolutely the fuck not,” and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.
I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor… and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.
The first time someone told me that busing tables was “degrading”, I was like “Oh, uhh, yeah, like it’s very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?” and they responded “No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting.”
But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.
Those people sound like a guy I’d make up to be mad at.
I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn’t been in-person interactions, I’d think I was getting trolled.
Just to put a bow on it:
In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn’t like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn’t in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I’ve talked about how said that “as a prison abolitionist” we just needed to execute most criminals.)
When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied “wasn’t in the spirit of the union”. When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn’t be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we’d just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)
I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that “after the revolution” we wouldn’t have cleaners.
It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?
Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.
I’ve talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.
I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren’t.
Yeah, that really sums it up. There’s stuff that needs to get done, so I’ll never be of the opinion that it’s degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be “above” washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.
And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you’re like “Holy shit, you’re good at this.”
People doing a job most people don’t want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That’s how it would work if we weren’t mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who “can’t do better” and “deserve” poverty because they have less value as people.
The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they’ve killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.
Thanks to whoever tried, but I knew they’d never allow it.
Let’s do it the old fashioned way. Spread it far and wide.
Reminder: you can’t be the whole wall against stopping fascism by yourself. Nobody can. But you damn sure can be a brick.
There’s a lot of good comments and tags in the notes, but this one is very important, I feel like it deserves some emphasis.
Part of how authoritarianism works is telling you that you can’t stop it. And you can’t stop it by yourself. But it wants to stop the train of thought there and let you fall into despair.
You need to remember the next part: you don’t have to stop it by yourself.
You’re not alone. Take care of your community and let your community take care of you. Supporting each other is so vital.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that over 60,000 votes cast in last year’s closely contested state Supreme Court race must be verified and recounted. The ruling comes after Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who lost the race, challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of 2024 voters. Those voters will now have 15 days to verify their eligibility, potentially changing the outcome of the election. Check your name here: https://thegriffinlist.com
Altogether, I really like the way americans say “can I help you?” as a polite general one-size-fits-all stand-in for “who the fuck are you/what the fuck are you doing here/how the fuck did you get in here/what the fuck are you staring at/what is your fucking problem.” Such a polite way of going “bitch what the fuck.”
Just a reminder, that generative AI has no place in Solarpunk 🥰
None 🥰
I will reblog this again and again as long as I have to witness the AI slob shared as “solarpunk”. It’s not. generative AI is not, and never will be solarpunk.
every single article, post or mention of a Muslim or Latino person on a Visa or Green Card getting dragged off the street by masked men in broad daylight has the same exact comments: “wow, they’re gonna start doing this to citizens soon.” some of these people have lived here since they were 8 months old and have lived here for over 30 years. it’s very telling that Americans are still are managing to separate them in their head from a “citizen” and that their outrage will be far greater when it’s someone who “actually lives here” as if 3 decades in the same country shouldn’t qualify you for the same rights as everyone else.
