A Hat Full of Words

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Behold, Dorothea

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

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Today I was terminated from my job as a Health Assistant at a low income health clinic and refused my full paycheck upon dismissal, offered yesterday only an incomplete paycheck for my paid leave. This union-busting, retaliatory dismissal comes on the heels of us demanding an end to the Call Center move for the clinics! I was the only union steward of color at the Old Town Clinic and the only Health Assistant union steward. I had no escalatory disciplinary history and was abruptly terminated for private discussions with union members I counseled against our employer.

I was refused a steward at my initial hearing and had to fight bitterly to be allowed a rep at all.

Who I am: A mother, a Salvadoran refugee, a long-term resident of Portland, a queer woman married to a trans woman, a union steward (the only steward of color at the clinic), an elected member of my union local’s executive board, an organizer, the last standing connection between our local and the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants since my wife (and author of our local’s anti-deportation resolution to be considered at our union’s international convention in August) was terminated in March for antiracism and is awaiting to hear back if the union will take her case towards arbitration or not. She has struggled to find openings even for low wage entry level work. Now are both unemployed while raising an infant baby during the worst economic downturn we’ve ever seen.

We both worked to provide services to the homeless but our organization is committing to waves of mass layoffs at the exact moment homelessness and adult+childhood poverty are at an all time historic high. Now we face the prospect of homelessness ourselves.

If you want your healthcare managed by AI and call centers, look away. If you hate union-busting and want to know who is speaking to you about your private health information, share and sign.

Please share, even if you are not in Portland. If you care about immigrants, if you care about mothers, if you care about workers rights, if you care about boots on the ground stopping AI and ending racism in the workplace, please sign and bring attention to this and let people know what we need.

Portland and our homeless, houseless, and impoverished communities deserve real healthcare, not robotic, dissociated garbage. My family will be homeless and other workers will be next.

If you want to donate to our struggle, we are at:

$writeswrongs on Cash App and Venmo

Let this employer know their retaliatory actions against a union steward of color is not acceptable to the public!

Olivia represented an employee and person of color who was retaliated against in a recorded meeting the employee had requested. The meeting was supposed to address racist comments about Asians including mocking accents made by a coworker of that employee. Instead HR retaliated against him for making the reports and attempted to violate his union rights by transforming that meeting he had called into an investigation of him for discriminating against his coworker by calling them racist but without any prior notice of an investigatory meeting. It was by chance he had a steward present. From Olivia’s statement she added to the petition:

The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.

The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.