monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Sudden Visibility Of Labour

In Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the servants are always out of focus.

They populate the frame – regularly – consistently. They’re always there; tidying up after the party, wiping the wet chicken goo from a fresh egg, pouring fresh milk from a bucket into a luminous porcelain urn. Often their heads are out of frame. Sometimes all you can see are their hands. You never really see their faces.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The invisibility of labor.

Because of this pandemic, we are all suddenly acquainted with the notion that Grocery Store Clerks are Necessary. And that their job is terrifying and hard and gross. And that we literally need them to live.

SURPRISE!

The value of a thing is NOT what ‘the market’ declares. Evi-*******-dently. As laborers, we know this. If society paid based on top-down necessities, people who did elder care would be making surgeon’s wages.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

One of the most egregious examples of the invisibility of labor I’ve ever seen in my entire life has to do with the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Ohhh man, you better believe I followed that story like a ******* hawk. As you may know I worked for Princess for over a decade. Well, I worked for Scrappy Second-Tier Cruise Line Holland-America for most of that decade, until we were absorbed by Princess, whose parent company is Carnival. This corporation encompasses much of the cruising that happens in the world.

In that decade of employment (entirely land-based), I went on one single cruise. Fifteen days to Hawaii aboard the Emerald Princess. I can see why people take cruises – I enjoyed it both far more and far less than I anticipated. It was an extremely interesting experience. And as an employee, an ex-houskeeper, an ex-laundress… I saw the system… quite a bit differently than I imagine many of the guests do. (Side Note: I have never been so sick so often as the summer I worked full time in the hotel laundry. Every day I was exposed to the still-warm pillow cases and wet towells of nearly 400 retirees. I was sick every two weeks. I mean, you try shoving 38 sets of bed linens into a huge industrial washing machine without letting any of that fabric clip the side of your face, or worse, whap you in the mouth. It’s just not possible.)

So when the Diamond Princess got quarantined off the coast of Japan and the Covid cases kept spreading, I read. I read everything I could get my hands on. And I kept waiting. And Waiting. And WAITING. For someone to mention the ******* STAFF.

Ok, so the passengers are quarantined in their rooms. But they’re not being left to just DIE IN THERE so that means that the Staff are still… what, just working? These thousands of people need to be fed, which means not one but a series of kitchens are still open below-decks somewhere. The boat is being sterilized – does this mean the housekeepers have been redirected to mopping decks? Because they aren’t cleaning those state rooms fifteen times a day like they used to (Seriously every single time I left my cabin somebody came in and made the bed it was a legitimately shocking amount of labor on display). So where are the hundreds of housekeepers? Penned up in staff common areas? What are all the bartenders doing now that the guests aren’t wandering from the smoke-filled casino deck to the excessively gilt four story rotunda filled with gift shops? And the staff, they need to be fed, so there’s a staff kitchen and a staff mess hall somewhere down there.

I’m guessing on a boat with three thousand guests there’s probably something like twelve hundred staff.

We had story after story declaring “What it’s Like On Diamond Princess”, guest after guest reporting in. Reporting on food quality, even – and not a single printed word I could find referenced where that food was coming from.

The servants moved in and out of frame. Out of focus. Disembodied hands, or perhaps a torso. You never saw their faces.

Story after story said something along the lines of “but cases appear to be still spreading even though the guests are confined to their rooms”

RIGHT BECAUSE WHAT ABOUT THE ******* STAFF my brain screamed over and over as I read.

Finally, about a week ago, I found an article on Washington Post. The Diamond Princess is in all our rear-views. Things have gone so far now. No longer front page news since the whole world changed. So it was just a little thing, maybe a hundred, two hundred words. The spread, it said, was being traced back to a crew mess hall. Where employees mingled, and food was prepared, and a kitchen was staffed with sick people, and those sick people fed the staff, who fed the guests.

WELL, DUH

The sheer skull-******* obviousness of this is HAUNTING ME. Of course the staff were also infected, of course we didn’t quarantine THEM, of course they just kept doing their ******* jobs, and of course – OF COURSE – nobody ******* noticed.

I used to work at a hat store. You could tell the quality of a Panama straw hat by holding it up to the light. The fewer pinpricks of light that came through, the better the weave.

Kids, our Panama Hat has holes I could put my fist through.

The labor that supports Western Civilization is downright invisible to far too many people. It’s what’s allowed us to pay grocery workers minimum wage and deride them for their poor cashiering skills. We value prestige, and the Nuts and Bolts that hold together the machine? Pfft, there’s no prestige there, my friends.

But look where we are now.

Look what happens when you remove the laborers – the servers, the bartenders, the makeup clerks, the busboys, the dishwashers. The economy is collapsing globally. We’re on the brink of a worldwide Depression. No amount of money injected into the stock market can possibly make up for the fact that the entire service sector in the United States has been shut down. 30,000 Oregonians lost their jobs in a week, in such a way as to necessitate our not retrieving them. We cannot “look for more serving jobs” – we are ethically and morally and soon legally mandated to stay home. And as a person who was almost certainly exposed to Covid at my last job – which I was working at just 7 days ago, and laid off from within 5 – how ethical do you think it would be for me to go apply at a ******* grocery store?

The economy is in shambles. Society has shut down. There is no nightlife, no dinner rush, no lineups for tacos, no transit fares being paid as the buses run empty, day and night, past my windows.

So tell me:

Can you see my face now?

As a tool to leverage a better deal for citizens, this is the stupidest idea anybody might come up with.

"Let's go to work. Our country wasn't built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down"

We’re trying to convince them and grocery store workers (essential workers) to join us if trump is successful in sending the country back to work in the midst of the greatest growth of the virus.

Consider the alternative.

McGentrix wrote:

hightor wrote:

If you represent a threat to others. What's wrong with that?

I don't. That's what is wrong with that.

Then you're not in danger of losing your firearm.

Nobody, at this point in time, is going to engage in a general strike because it will kill people. Lots of people. Not to mention how such a thing would turn the whole country against unions and any future use of general strikes.

As a tool to leverage a better deal for citizens, this is the stupidest idea anybody might come up with.

Quote:

As a tool to leverage a better deal for citizens, this is the stupidest idea anybody might come up with.

Maybe she was inspired by this post from last Wednesday. That character is always coming up with stupid ideas.

Lash wrote:

We’re trying to convince them and grocery store workers (essential workers) to join us if trump is successful in sending the country back to work in the midst of the greatest growth of the virus.

Consider the alternative.

I've not understood everything in Sander's program, might well be 'you' (plural) have better ideas.

We've got an alternative here, since 1910: many businesses are closed, employers put their shops, or whatever on "short-time" (not for grocery shops [here called supermarkets] in the moment since they stay open and are hiring), and the (Federal) Employment Agency replaces for employees some of the lost income (generally the basic is 70%, it's during this corona crises upgraded to 90%+)

The bill raises the age of gun ownership to age 21. There are plenty of 19-year-olds who are not a threat.