Women in Service Jobs
The term “Direct Production of Goods and Services” gets us thinking about the people who do that work and the essential and invisible role they play in our economy. (The term does not replace the term “Working Class.” “Working-Class” workshops, support groups, and leaders’ groups continue as they always have. We are not eliminating anything that has worked in the past.)
Most of the people coming to Direct Production Workers’ workshops and support groups are women service workers. (I am male.) The following is a short list of the service jobs held by the women who attend these workshops: childcare worker, beautician, health care worker, secretary (now called “administrative assistant” or “admin”), domestic worker, food service worker, retail worker, customer service worker, phone representative, flight attendant, bank teller, flagger, crosswalk guard, bus driver.
I started working in a non-union manufacturing plant in 1979. My coworkers were eighty percent men. At one point I moved to another division of the company—to part of the customer service branch that handled Returns. I worked with four hundred workers, about eighty percent of whom were women. Moving there meant a two-dollar-an-hour cut in pay. Lower pay is typical of female production work. There were physical hazards: split and bleeding fingers from contact dermatitis; foot, back, knee, hip, and neck injuries from working long hours on a cement floor; carpal tunnel syndrome; tendonitis. I would see women limping back to their bench after lunch hour to a job that was supposed to be easier than the production of goods.
My three-way Co-Counseling relationship for decades included a self-employed house cleaner who said she would work until she died. She worked to within six months of her death, at age eighty-four. At our last three-way, on her death bed as we held her hands, her last words to me (referring to my work on behalf of workers) were, “This is a good thing you have done.” I try to remember those words when I get confused.
The other person in our three-way was a florist who destroyed her hands, hips, and knees working on cement floors in cold rooms. She did fourteen- to sixteen-hour shifts on holidays—production work. I met her at an injured workers’ meeting with our state legislator. We were trying to stop the destruction of the Injured Workers’ Compensation System. (The Republican Party had been going state by state, trying to make it almost impossible for a worker to claim injury unless their arm had been cut off, or something like that.) We failed in that effort, but we became great counselors for each other for thirty-eight years. She is in her eighties now and a strong leader of a large extended family, saving lives with her use of RC.
It is good that we are thinking about this.
USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 209, October 2022)