āTheyāre not smarter or faster theyāre buying up othersā lifetimes to do their choresā
āTheyāre not smarter or faster theyāre buying up othersā lifetimes to do their choresā
āTheyāre not smarter or faster theyāre buying up othersā lifetimes to do their choresā
[images: series of tweets from @realavocadofact. tweets read,Ā ātheyāre not elite theyāre richā,Ā ātheyāre not better theyāre better suppliedā,Ā ātheyāre not smarter or faster theyāre buying up othersā lifetimes to do their choresā,Ā āthere is nothing wrong with you; youāre doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you thatā]
I see this reaction a lot, and I gotta say, it always makes me a little sad. Whenever the conversation of exploitation of labor comes up, inevitably someone finds themselves struggling with the guilt of āIt is so important to me not to contribute to exploitation but I cannot do this thing myself and need someone else to do it for me, so how do I even approach that?ā
Exploitation isnāt in the hiring of a service worker. Exploitation is in the respect you show them for their ability to perform the service you need from them.
I have been on a cleaning service staff before, and also been someone who hired a cleaning service, and I can tell you for sure that a lot of cleaning crews (especially worker owned ones) absolutely LOVE their clients and are genuinely happy to be able to make their lives better. The clients they donāt like? Those are the ones who disrespect the workers.
When I was involved with a cleaning service, we had everything from little old ladies living alone to McMasions with five cars as clients, and I can assure you that whenever there was someone who clearly hired us because they were overwhelmed or unable to keep their space clean, those were the households where you put a little more elbow grease in and did a deep clean even when it wasnāt paid for, because you could see how much these people were trying and struggling, and they were always so kind and generous and often embarrassed when talking to you about the job.
I only hired a service a couple if times in my life, but whenever I did, I worked with the same people as often as I could, tipped as well as I could afford, and tried to be the kind of client I would want to have, and thatās how I often ended up with my baseboards cleaned too, or my fridge scrubbed and organized or a restorative clean done in a high use room even when that wasnāt what I had scheduled or paid for.
Iāve heard the same thing from all manner of service workers over the years. Many of us like our jobs! We enjoy the work. Itās the customers that can do a number on you.
I think a lot of people are afraid that by needing a service they are inherently exploiting or harming the people who perform that service, and they really arenāt. But it does benefit a capitalist system for us to all be burnt out and overwhelmed because weāre too afraid to hire the help we need. Be upfront and honest with service workers about what you need and why you need it, and treat them with dognity and kindness while they perform your service, and I promise you they will always be happy to answer your call.
HIRING A PROFESSIONAL TO CLEAN YOUR HOUSE ISNāT MORE EXPLOITATIVE THAN GOING TO A DENTIST OR ORDERING A PIZZA
We all fucking depend on each other, itās about respect and treating one another as fellow humans instead of seeing them as below us
I find this thread facinating, because all the weight of the first statement "they're not elite they're very rich" ends up with all the emphasis on this middle statement "They're not smarter or faster they're buying up other's lifetimes to do their chores" into talking about disability and cleaning services, while "there is nothing wrong with you; youāre doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you thatā doesn't end up being the anchor statement of the whole thread.
Mainly because I read it and thought, "Ah, OP is talking about how we are in a new Gilded Age" where graduated taxation on the .001% has eased and the political influence of the .001% has grown enough that the (economically speaking) middle class and lower class are being squeezed while the .001% revel in the kind of stuff Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al get up to. Making islands. Rockets. Yachts that fit inside other yachts. WTF level of stuff.
It's not quite that Bezos is buying lifetimes to do his chores. He's creating a situation where people urinate in bottles in body damaging work to create wealth that allows him to have multiple immense homes / yachts / rockets whatever that he buys the lifetimes of multiple staff to maintain them. Possibly even unoccupied.
This is very different than having people come into a residence, ones own home, to clean it better than a body would/can. Same with yardwork. Same (as post above says) with having your teeth cleaned or your pizza delivered. It's just work. All work is selling your lifetime. Office job, service worker, sex worker, whatever. It is selling your time on this earth that you can't get back for the thing you need to live, money. Sometimes it's exploitative, sometimes it's not. Sometimes you can control that. Sometimes, you, an individual, you can't.
Now, in true Tumblr fashion going to go on a complete tangent and talk about the end of the Gilded Age and early progressive era.
For some context, I am currently working on writing a book set in San Francisco 1900ish that spends a lot of time shifting between folks in the poorer districts South of the Slot (the rail for the cable car) and Nob Hill. Many of the characters are in service industries: housekeeper, maids, building labor into union labor, sex workers, owner of laundry/laundryman, etc.
In my research I came across a simply amazing series of articles / interviews with a sex worker in 1913, and formed a lot of my thinking for thinking about labor for the last several years since I came across it. Let's let the woman speak for herself,
āWell, I wondered, was there anybody in the world, according to that, who didnāt sell herself or himself for money? Didnāt everybody supply some demand, in some more or less disagreeable way?ā
A number of the characters are "elite" and own 20, 30, 50 room mansions that occupy full city blocks. During my research I came across this great Ambrose Bierce line, which encapsulates things,
Governor Stanford of the Central and Southern Pacific is a pirate and a pig, but Governor Stanford of California Street is a gentleman and a philanthropist. In his dual character of malefactor and benefactor he somewhat resembles the ideal highwayman dear to the hearts of the novel writers, who sometimes bestows in charity as much as one half of 1% of its plunder.
But I suppose the best symbol of the era, and this kind of reality distortion was Charles "Bull" Crocker's Spite Fence. He was the task master of the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. The guy who brought in labor from China to build the inter continental railroad, and a lot of them died in the mountains and the desert. The guy who witheld food from the work camp when labor wanted safer conditions and more pay. That guy. This was exploitative.
When the Big Four started moving up California Hill (hereafter Nob Hill) after the cable cars were put in, they wanted to own those city blocks I was talking about so they could build big houses with stables lined with marble out back (an actual thing). But there were already people living up there. For the most part, they bought them out.
In Crocker's case, he bought out everyone on his block except an undertaker, Mr Young, who was solidly middle class. Young had a nice house up on the hill for his family to live away from factories and ironworks down by the harbor, and didn't want to sell.
As an aside, all the books I'm reading (out of print books woo-who) soldily frame what happened next as Young's fault, but, I give these long dead authors the side eye.
Anyway, Crocker built a 40 foot Spite Fence around the three sides of Young's house that he owned. So now, instead of having a nice house with a view of the City, Young and his family lived in a well. Paraphrasing Young here, he was all, "I'm flying a pirate flag, and I am not selling to this asshole." He also threatened to put a giant coffin on top of his house, which I'm not clear if he ever did.
Now the fence did have to be reduced to 25 feet because high winds, but the fence stood.
For 26 years.
It was a tourist attraction. Folks would go up to see it.
It was a lightning rod for political groups. Both the Workingman's Party of California (separate from the Workingman's Party) and the Union Labor Party (hyper local political parties) would march up to the fence, rile up the crowd, and demand that...waits dramatically...no, more drama needed...the Chinese be expelled because they thought immigrants from China were taking jobs out of the largely Irish-Italian-French population of the city.
Given there were riots in which people died in Chinatown, but the fence didn't come down, and no one every did diddly to Crocker's mansion, says what their real priorities were.
Which as I was reading about all this, and trying to think how to incorporate this element into the childhood of one of the characters, it made me think about the populism of Trump, MAGA, and America Firsters.
I mean, here are these incredibly rich people up on this hill in these mansions that cumulatively represent a level of wealth it's hard to comprehend, and incredibly poor people doing their best to survive.
But the energy of working labor was redirected at a specific group of immigrants. Rather than the real problem, the rich guy who was maintaining a spite fence, and got/maintained his wealth through extremely exploitative practices.
Time passed. Charles Crocker died, and his children maintained the fence.
The undertaker literally had his house moved out of the lot (it was easier when there was no plumbing involved), but refused to sell.
The Spite Fence was by then around an empty lot with a hole in it. That's what the "elite" are like.
The undertaker died, widow refused to sell.
The Crocker's actively maintained the Spite Fence. Even mumblity 20 years on during gale force winds that scoured San Francisco in 1901, knocking down fences (spite or not), early electrical poles, etc.
It was only in 1904, two years after the Mrs. Young died that her children sold the land to the Crockers, and the fence came down.
Sadly, it did not burn in the 1906 fire that incinerated all the mansions on the top of Nob Hill (+ 80% of the city of San Francisco, and leaving 250k people homeless).
Obviously, I am writing a fictional novel in which there is magical realism, so I say fuck it. That Spite Fence shall go like it was meant to go. As kindling for the Crocker mansion.
What I'm trying to get across here is, I've spent a long time doing a lot of time thinking about the Gilded Age, and the new "Gilded for Certain Folks" age that we are in. There are so-called populists who want to distract working people for power.
But the 1900s were also the dawn of an era of real populist change. Spite Fences like Crocker's Spite Fence were made illegal. It wasn't the 1% of the wealth of the uber rich were willing to donate that made things better for people, it was legislative and collaborative action. It was advocacy, and quite frankly taxing the rich to pay their fair share. It was changing systems so they were fairer. e.g., back then State Senators were appointed by the State Represenatatives, not elected, so graft was rampant.
Not completely fair. Obviously. The work is never done. It is on-going.
The new spite fences are digital. They are AI. They are not physical.
In a post telling you that
āthere is nothing wrong with you; youāre doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you thatā
don't decide it's about how you are exploitative if you pay someone to help you do a task. Listen to the sex worker from 1913. That's everyone who works.
āthere is nothing wrong with you; youāre doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you thatā]
But I'll write a whole lot of words to emphasize that final point.
