Are you a good bitch or a bad bitch?

I show up and am given a list of cognitively engaging but achievable tasks

I complete the list

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

- they’re Opawz pet specific dyes. Non toxic made specifically for dogs. Once they’re set and rinsed they can groom themselves normally, they pose no danger to her in any way, no fumes, there’s no bleach involved

- my dog is trained with cooperative care skills, the process is not stressful for her, she gets paid heavily for her cooperation and looks forwards to the opportunity to earn extra snacks with the grooming

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.