A Direct Production Workers’ Support Group
Jane, an RC teacher in New South Wales, Australia, has an ongoing support group for Direct Production Workers that includes workers from across Australia. I led one of her support group meetings. It included a childcare worker (female); disability caretaker (female); concrete driver (male); bus driver, cafe worker, and cleaner (female); school maintenance worker (male); self-employed food service worker (female); and Jane, a former crane operator and union activist now working customer service for the postal service.
We began with introductions: Name? What do you do for work? (Often people have more than one job.) What are you pleased with in your life? (This is a better question for such a group than asking for a “new and good”—it is good for us to be pleased with ourselves.) What has been challenging? (Most of our jobs come with challenges for our bodies; that was true for everyone in this group.)
The risks we must take are not obvious to people who do not do these jobs. Production workers risk their health doing things that an ordinary person may do once a day but that they may do thousands of times a day.
OUR EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH THE MEDICAL SYSTEM
We need to discharge hurts from the classism we experienced as young people when we interacted with doctors and the medical system and hurts from how classism affected those who raised us.
Often our first direct contact with middle-class people was when our parents took us to the doctor. That’s where we learned about class. For me it started with my birth, when my mother was targeted with both sexism and classism.
When our parents saw a doctor, they typically became “small,” quiet, intimidated, submissive—very different from what we knew them to be—and we learned how to be small and submissive.
Because of the oppressor patterns, our parents avoided going to health care providers. Or they sought medical attention when it was too late, sometimes resulting in serious illness or death.
THE PHYSICAL CHALLENGES OF OUR WORK
Our physical challenges are not something we work on in the larger RC Community, as most people do not have attention for them. It’s much easier for us to work on them in a group of Direct Production Workers. They understand the stress of repetitive motions and the other health risks not obvious to the ordinary person.
Some of us have to change our jobs due to the damage done to us by our work. We may find a slightly gentler type of work, for instance in the service sector, but still the production aspect of it almost always comes with health challenges.
I suggested we think of ourselves as professional athletes. We can prepare ourselves as professional athletes do—with exercise, stretching, and strength building. We can seek medical attention before injuries become permanent disabilities. Discipline of this type is necessary for us to continue doing our jobs.
Advocating for ourselves in the workplace is our biggest struggle. There is nothing more isolating than being an injured Direct Production Worker. If you don’t have a union, which most of us don’t, things get very hard.
It’s good for everyone to put attention on the physical challenges of our work and to look at the early distresses that get in our way of caring for ourselves. A great way to be an ally to a Direct Production Worker is to ask them to talk in detail about the physical aspects of their work. Ask them, “What hurts?” Ask them what it is like to be an injured worker. Then have Co-Counseling sessions on what you hear.
Counseling on many work-related injuries has helped me keep thinking about how I do my work and how to do it differently.
Freeport, Maine, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of working-class people
(Present Time 209, October 2022)