Word Nerd

Fingon and Maedhros on the way to Doriath from The Once and Future King by @batsintheshadows

can you imagine?

“I’ve never seen you eat are you insecure” “no…”

“here let me lift that for you” “I got it, thanks” *uses inhuman strength to lift bags*

“I’ve never seen you go to the beach, do you have trouble shopping for a bathing suit” “haha… yeah”

“There’s no way that girl can catch me… she’s huge!” “Hello, dinner.” *running with super fast vampire speed*

“She can’t fit in here! I’m safe!” *turns into a gas and slips under the door*

“How come you never go out?” “Well, I never get invited to parties…”

“Come to the gym with me! We should lose weight” “Not in a thousand years.” (incidentally, that’s when she was last alive.)

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?

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."

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.)

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.

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.