draft of our Bill of Rights

Inspired by the Domestic Workers Union Bill of Rights...
I hope in the next few months to be able to study the organizing of DWU and its strengths/weaknesses. Folks on Paid in Smiles and Caring Labor are sharing some useful resources. Thank you!

This is a draft of our Bill of Rights that we brainstormed. It's all about our working conditions. Why, and the limitations of that...will write about soon.

Nursing Assistants

Bill of Rights

Many of us will grow old, or have grown old with this job.

Our job is about caring for the elderly, it is important that as we care for others, we also care for ourselves.

Our health, safety and self-respect are important.  

We have…

1.      The Right to be spoken to respectfully and clearly by our supervisors

2.      The Right to not be rushed at work

3.      The Right to 1:8 staffing ratios

4.      The Right to provide consistent care for assigned residents

5.      The Right to take Sick Leave without fear of retaliation

6.      The Right to consistent job descriptions that cannot be changed without our consultation

7.      The Right to convey our knowledge of resident care in meetings

8.      The Right to be updated on daily reviews of resident care plans

9.      The Right to take our state-mandated breaks

10.  The Right to abide by state safety laws without consequences

11.  The Right to a 40 hour work week (???)

words from G

i am writing this down cos i wanna remember this for myself. as things get nasty at work with management clamping down on us trying to break down our collaboration and resistance, i have been getting into a lot of political conversations with folks about how to move forward -- all while we are changing diapers, cleaning and lifting. i like this combination of activities.

but G. shared a really deep insight with me today. i believe it struck him the same time he expressed it and there is something sad about this observation, even as it is sharp.

management has been loading us with a lot of work and practising discrimination -- giving those they favor (like the damn bz who volunteered to be a snitch AND shower aide to kiss management's ass *snitch bitch*) less tasks, easier tasks, while loading me and other coworkers with heavier, more burdensome shit. my coworkers know i am hella pissed and they tell me that i need to keep a smile on my face when i interact w the bosses cos right now the shitheads are looking for every reason to fire me. in light of this increased workload, we have created a very collaborative and solidarity culture amongst ourselves, recognizing that they are doing this because we fought back. we know we havent won, but the effort scared the shit out of management and this is their retaliation. i appreciate the words of caution from these coworkers whom i trust.

G said 2 things today which struck me.

First, was like compliment and it made me happy. he said that the charge nurse was probably pissed and confused cos they couldnt understand why me, an asian person, would be so close to the ethiopians at work. he pinpointed how management hires asians, africans, african-americans and white folks -- to make it hard for us to unite, so we would racialize our differences. but they are probably really confused now because the bosses wouldnt expect that asians and africans would come together, but here and now, my coworkers and my solidarity is an expression of that and they are pissed.

for me, the ethiopians in the workplace are the fighters. i am a fighter too. so, to the extent that we are fighting together, these colorlines can be broken down in a deep way.

As we were trying to get through the massive workload -- cramming in many patient transfers into the last 30 min of our workday, G suddenly stopped and observed the temporality of our solidarity and the challenges/material pressures that it faces. he said something to the effect of:

who knows, with all this work they are loading on us, we might also fight amongst ourselves.
who knows, if they put so much work on us for a long time and we get used to it, one day one of us might go to the boss to say the other person isnt helping out enough.

this was really deep for me. my response immediately was: G, if we had issues, i would kick you and punch you and fight it out w you before i went to the boss on you.

but this is a reflection of how much pressure our solidarity faces. the bosses shape our material reality at work. and unless we change that material reality together, consciousness that our strength comes in our unity, can be very vulnerable

Where do all the old queers go?

R and i have been talking about wanting to meet queers in the city who 1) aren't so deeply entrenched in the non-profit scene, and who 2) are, like us, a little less hot and fantabulous :) no, we are not demeaning ourselves (actually R is super hot and everyone knows it) and neither are we trying to say that attractive hot queers arent attractive, hot and fucking desirable! but the intention behind it for me at least, is to think about queerness and our lives as everyday lives, regular lives, not only super tragic, or out-of-life, or super dramatic, or super politicized, super out-of-the-world but also at times, are just like the lives of everyone else queer or non-queer-- just goddamn fucking real and hard like all lives in this world are.


and then all this talk about my job and the elderly, and thinking about how come folks rarely talk about elderly queer folks -- what happens to queers when everyone else has settled down to the nuclear family, when everyone gets kids and age into being grandparents always in anticipation of their cute bubbly grandkids coming to visit to bring joy and warmth to the hearth of the home. (not that this is ever real anyway, but that for many nuclear families, this is the idyllic vision/direction of aging; a map that is non-existent for many queers). when queers grow old, which non-blood families stay, which ones diminish, and, which nursing homes play the role of substitute family, or not?


it is a coincidence that R sent me this article about the an abandoned Stonewall militant, Storme DeLaverie. Back when Stonewall set streets on fire in NYC, Storme was a hardcore lesbian who socked NYPD in the face when they taunted her. She was known then as the "Stonewall Lesbian." Storme was also a drag king, genderqueer and mixed woman from the South who imaginably survive helllllaaa both as a mixed woman as well as a queer woman. Today, she is a nursing home, ward of the state, aging woman with dementia, with no blood family. Close friends want to claim her but find legal challenges. A Stonewall veteran, she was unable to attend the 2010 Pride cos the nursing home did not allow her to leave the home. Even the New York Times missed her.


Family.


Been thinking about family, especially after reading this piece that my friend sent me: "'It's like Family': Race and Gender in Nursing Homes." This piece is by 2 researchers/anthropologists who do a series of interviews with CNAs in Massachussets (predominantly Haitian immigrants), and analyze the rhetoric of the family that these nursing home employers utilize as they extract the caring labor from these CNAs and immigrants, some of whom, far from their own families, substitute the elderly residents they care for, for their elderly moms. Yet, as exploitation goes, the humane relations that emerge from this kind of labor is unreciprocated -- the wages are only one layer; the others: including not having the time to mourn for the elderly whom you have cared for because at the end o the day, your productivity matters more than the family values extracted out of you; is also only another dimension. Where does this contradiction go? In my life, it gets swallowed, it gets internalized, it gets pent up and absorbed into our person, not expressed as class struggle, not expressed as tough love breaking down obstacles in way of reciprocity.


When I first finished the piece, I started crying. Yes, super dramatic I know, but it's just cos I saw how other CNAs in this piece described exactly my workplace experience. I wrote an equally super dramatic post about this a few days ago but got embarrassed and deleted it. But why this piece hit me so hard is because it resonated completely with what I experience, and also because I am reminded again and again, how working class women, women of color, take up caring work and are seldom compensated or reciprocated. Caring work sounds abstract but what it is, is love, is vulnerability, is trust, is emotional reliance -- and in this patriarchal, capitalist world that seeks to exploit human sensitivity, these expressions hit a wall, a dead-end and are instead betrayed.


In the nursing home industrial complex, as the paper describes, expects CNAs to treat their residents like family, are expected to go over the top to treat the residents like their own parents, yet, are never reciprocated for their care and love by the nursing home corporation/institution -- workers are still not treated as fully human but as machines. The only humanity is the humanity of the workers toward the elderly and vice versa (when the latter dont break out into racist dementia, as the piece also documents).


So thinking about the ways that the notion of the "family" under capitalism has been exploited and manipulated to extract even more labor from women of color and working class women, to extract our compassion and humanity unreciprocally, and then this talk about queer elderly who dont have chosen families when they grow old, even when once upon a time Stonewall created a momentary family of resistance. What happened? Where did all the younger queers go? The persistence of capitalist notions of the "family," contrasted with the obstacles/temporality/forgetfulness of families that are born out of struggle, desire, choice, and love -- chosen families, queer families --  is a bit of a mind fuck.

In the NY Times piece on Storme DeLarverie, her friend says:

“I feel like the gay community could have really rallied, but they didn’t,” said Lisa Cannistraci, a longtime friend of Ms. DeLarverie’s who is the owner of the lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, where Ms. DeLarverie worked as a bouncer. 

“The young gays and lesbians today have never heard of her,” Ms. Cannistraci said, “and most of our activists are young. They’re in their 20s and early 30s. The community that’s familiar with her is dwindling.”

If queers fought for the rights of our elderly in nursing homes, regenerating a sense of the chosen queer family, AND the rights of queer/non-queer workers being forced to conform to a capitalist/exploitative model of the hierarchical nuclear family at the workplace, freeing ALL WORKERS from the unreciprocal dynamics of extracted, commodified family values, that would be a fucking amazing queer liberation, disabilities class struggle!!!

Models of from-below healthcare: Lincoln Hospital Takeover

A slow work-in-progress of surveying/understanding various models of healthcare. Not enough time to go in depth now. Hope is that in a few months I can see this as part of a broader picture.

Thanks cg for forwarding some of these links. Anyone else, send me what you got!:)

For now, are some links on the Lincoln Hospital Takeover by the Young Lords in NYC back in the day. 

- The Lincoln Hospital Offensive in 1970 

- excerpt from The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora (see chapter by Iris Morales) here

- The Young Lords Ten Point Program
-The Health Initiatives of the Young Lords Party: How a group of 1960s radicals made healthcare a revolutionary concern [16 pages]

This is the same organization that my favorite queer revolutionary, Sylvia Rivera, was a part of. She was a transwoman activist with strong class and race politics, forefronting transliberation struggles at a time when it was invisibilized by the anti-trans gay and lesbian, as well as 2nd wave feminist politics.

Some things that stand out from the 10-point program (posted below)

* Community control over health services

* Community control over hiring and firing at hospital

* Collaboration with medical students (see excerpt description)

* Employment in hospitals

* Free healthcare

* door-to-door health services: bringing healthcare to the people

* Education

* alliance b/w unions/employed people and unemployed through agreement to provision of services and community control

The Lincoln offensive was triggered by the death of a young Puerto Rican woman who had a botched abortion procedure in the hospital. This had great impact on the way the Young Lords took up reproductive rights with the leadership (through struggle!) of women leaders.

3 major ways to reclaim healthcare for community; seeing healthcare as working class issue:

Lead Offensive
TB Offensive
Lincoln Offensive

Organization that was set up: Health Revolutionary Union Movement (HRUM) was influenced by DRUMS in Detroit -- League of Revolutionary Black Workers; HRUM set up by hospital workers of color who saw their labor struggles and struggles in healthcare as part of broader working class struggles (amazing!!)

Conducted direct action to make city more responsive to healthcare needs of poor; community control of such services

Young Lords 
Ten-Point Health Program

1. We want total self-determination of all health services through an incorporated Community-Staff Governing Board for the Hospital. (Staff is anyone and everyone working at the hospital.) 

2. We want immediate replacement of all government administrators by community and staff appointed people whose practice has demonstrated their commitment to serve our poor community. 

3. We demand an immediate end to construction of the new emergency room until the Hospital Community-Staff Governing Board inspects and approves them or authorizes new plans. 

4. We want employment for our people. All jobs must be filled by community residents first, using on-the-job training and other educational opportunities as basis for service and promotion. 

5. We want free publicly supported health care for treatment and prevention. We want an end to all fees. 

6. We want total decentralization--block health officers responsible to the community-staff board should be instituted. 

7. We want "door-to-door" preventive health services emphasizing environment and sanitation control, nutrition, drug addiction, maternal and child care, and senior citizen services. 

8. We want education programs for all the people to expose health problems --sanitation, rats, poor housing, malnutrition, police brutality, pollution, and other forms of oppression. 

9. We want total control by the community-staff governing board of the budget allocations, medical policy along the above points, hiring, firing, and salaries of employees, construction and health code enforcement. 

10. Any community, union, or workers organization must support all the points of this program and work and fight for that or be shown as what they are--enemies of poor people.

What are the foundations of labor organizing?

In all my previous organizing efforts, I have had a sense that foundation-building is key. I have had a sense of how to talk about our politics -- seeing the community of poc as broader than the self-appointed gatekeepers aka "rainbow coalition" in our lingo; militancy and offensive, breaking rules of civility and legitimize anger of everyday people as opposed to following codes of conduct that are meant to prop up academia and administration; everyone able and willing to flyer and talk to new folks about the organizing; everyone understanding the points of unity etc.

Now that I am thrown into workplace organizing where the management is kicking our butt every second, where the opponent is a vibrant, active, dynamic force [as opposed to a large university administration which has inertia, bureaucracy etc that a small workplace does not have] I find myself at some sort of a loss for what to PRIORITIZE as my foundations, what to GUIDE my tactics and strategy.

Right now this is what's causing me alot of apprehension. I am not looking for a formulaic kind of thing, but more so a set of important things I have to think about and guide my actions with!

Looking forward to updating this!!!! Thanks N.H!

It's a declaration of WAR: Confessions of a Union Buster

I have been starting many posts in the past week and unable to finish them because my mind simply darts to another place. It's where I am at right now, I am swarmed with many many details of the daily organizing and many apprehensions. The retaliation came down full-force in a way I (naively) did not expect. It's a humbling experience -- I have a whooooole lot to learn about labor organizing on the job.

I have an amazing community of activists around me who have taken up our struggle and supported my coworkers and I in strategizing and anticipating what comes next. I thank everyone who is putting their time and resources out there to help us. I dont know if this round of organizing is going to succeed and it is very hard for me to accept that. One way to look at it is just, learn from the mistakes and move forward. The system was made for us to fail it so any victory needs to be built on many past lessons. The support from comrades around me definitely doesnt make the organizing less fearful and intimidating, but it makes it feel more purposeful. We have to remember that management is being such a jack-ass now because they thought we were stupid, dumb immigrants and could do no better than SUCK IT UP. Until now: they see that we are capable of a "slow-down", of organizing on the job, of coordinating among ourselves, of solidarity.

This is a video clip recommended to me by some labor organizers, a series of speeches drawn from the book, "Confessions of a Union Buster." "It's the same playbook that they will use." Right now those fuckers think I am a union organizer, even though I truly am not --- in the bigger picture yes, but not right now and definitely not for the business unions which they think I am a part of!!

Check it out:
Confessions of a Union Buster
Fear
Role of the Supervisor
How to beat the Union Buster [Fighting Back!]

Watching this is super-depressing. It is the most concrete ways in which capitalism and the bosses try to defeat the working class. Add the cops and the state to this -- it's an all-round warfare: MIND BODY SPIRIT HEART everything, they wish to grind up and destroy, and they will! To stop solidarity from fluorishing, to divide and conquer explicitly...

There is no false consciousness. There is no deluded worker. If workers believe the bosses it is because the bosses have managed to shape reality to reflect their material and ideological interests. Our glimpses of solidarity and teamwork feel like exceptions to a hard, cruel, brutal world that looks at $, that looks at rising food prices, rising educational costs and healthcare. What can solidarity buy you?

Yet it is exactly that kind of thinking we need to smash. We need to begin to show GLIMPSES of how material reality is also shaped by solidarity, love, support, teamwork etc and we need to imagine how things can change for all of us if these values thrived at the workplace and in society. We need to overcome the divisions they so deliberately, so wealthily, so forcefully, so brutally, enforce.

It's war time. Are we ready for it?
I am taken by shock into this and I don't feel prepared. I need to know my coworkers are on board for me to feel more confident about this.

Some things I have to do next:
-Innoculation: innoculate against the bosses' offensives
"when innoculation is put in force by the union, it translates into rage and solidarity: how can the company do this? solidarity instigated by rage is impossible to penetrate"

- Exposure: the most effective weapon is EXPOSURE to the point of over-exposure -- find out how much they are paying the union busters [re: LM 20 and LM10]

- Careful of the Supervisors and the language of race divisions they will use: Filippinos vs. Ethiopians

security

Fellas,
I removed the copy of the flyer on this blog.
I heard from a coworker who went into the interrogation session that a huge, blown up copy of the flyer was posted on the office wall.

Human Resources is relishing it. It will give them many sleepless nights and exhausting nightmares.

Which makes me think the internet is not the safest place for said flyer to be lurking around.

Email me if you want a copy of it!

the ways they poke us to stab us

Management are such fuckers.
I have so many thoughts about this blog post that friends at the Recomposition blog put up recently.
I feel this at my work too -- how they try to break our solidarity piecemeal style and the issue is too small to form a campaign around, and big enough to break your confidence.

Well, take that back. Nothing;s too small to agitate around. Just that in this climate when the economic crisis booms: BE LUCKY YOU HAVE A JOB everyday, it's hard to get people to put their job on the line period. Especially not for "small" changes where what you give up is a sense of solidarity and connection with your coworkers.
This is how capitalist society stabs and kills all the instincts toward community and then points to the isolated individuals that are a product of this assault and say: I told you so.

Anyways, here's the piece
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses’ Offensive Look Like?

invading socialist society of caring work?

So much going on in my head, hoping this will come out clearly! I have been thinking about these questions but most recently, was directed by a friend to a conversation on What in the hell blog about caring work and the dynamics of workers mobilization, self activity and creation of new values, which helped me clarify my thoughts around this.

I have been very influenced by a book called "The American Worker" by the Johnson Forrest Tendency (JFT). The book was written in the 1950s, from the perspective of an autoworker. It was an observation and diary of the work process that him and his coworkers underwent, as well as the social dynamics, expressions against the top-down control of their labor by the foremen and management.

I have had some problems with the book, but for the most part, have been inspired by it because it lays out how workers who are at the point of production, that is, workers who are doing the everyday work of producing, creating value in the capitalist process, are the ones who know best how to work those machines and run the work process, more so than the bosses who yell at them to do shit from their office on-high, more so than those who claim to be more intelligent/qualified because they manage.

(For all The Office fans, Boys and Girls, Episode 15 Season 2 shows exactly this!)

There is a sense that workers do not need management to run their workplace. They know how to collaborate to do it together. This is not out of any special knowledge or skill particularly, but because of the "definite relations, which are independent of their will" that workers are thrown into in the course of production. The experience of being stuck at a machine, surrounded by pungent smells and oily layers that coat your skin, the jarring noises of pounding machinery etc, as one sits along an assembly line with his coworkers, working on the same objects/machines, churning out day after day of boredom, frustration and production, creates a kind of collective solidarity and teamwork. What is also unique about JFT is the emphasis on how everyday people and workers also have an inclination to express their creativity, intelligence and mastery of tools. These ingredients combine to create workers who have the potential and ability to run their shit without management, support and accommodate one another's strengths and weaknesses on the shopfloor, to have the potential to overcome racial and gender oppression on the shopfloor, etc and basically, become a proto-formation of the new society, or the "invading socialist society."

So here we have this dynamic relationship between two of Marx's quotes here and here. On the one hand, that "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness," ie. humans are products of our society and socialized as such. On the other hand, that "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." That is, that revolutionary practice involves not just a changing of external circumstances, but also active human transformation, and self-changing -- which means people gotta WANT to be better human beings, requires WILL POWER, and AGENCY!

Here is how I am engaging with these ideas based on my experiences and observations:

These dynamics are specific to the nursing home industrial complex and my conversations with CNAs in other nursing homes; I dont know much about the division of labor in hospitals to be able to comment on that. Please chime in if you do!

1) Based on the current division of labor, we can't manage the workplace on our own. We need other expertise that we dont currently have, and those who have it are our immediate supervisors. Their monopoly of this knowledge is also their justification for our subordination.

Many of my co-workers who hate the working conditions of the nursing home get out by applying to hospitals (unionized workplace) or try to become Registered Nurses (RN) or LPNs.

We always say that the RNs who have never been CNAs before are the nastiest cos they have no idea how the work is done and it is a bunch of numbers to them.

Then there are also those RNs who have been CNAs before and then forget all about it and become the nastiest assholes on the floor cos they think they been there, done that and can now play boss to those who are left behind.

In many nursing programs now, we are expected to get CNA licensing, and for some schools, concrete CNA experience/volunteering experience, to stand a better chance to enrol in the program.

This requirement however, is different from having a holistic view of nursing. It is to weed people out, to make it more competitive, to create more loopholes for people to BECOME RNs cos of the funding shortage for RN programs, even though this country fucking NEEDS nurses

This is yet another dimension of how the reproductive labor of society, ie. caring for the ill, elderly, and disabled, is now placed on the individual to compete and jump through major hoops, and not on society through state funding for such programs.

A training program that values caring work would combine dimensions of RN and CNA work together so there isn't such a clear division of labor b.w mental and manual labor.

Read more here! 

flyer!

Distributing Sunday!
We now have a semi-formal grouping with a name! We are currently anonymous/underground. The past week, I feel like we have been running the effing workplace!
*fingers crossed!*

[Flyer removed for security purposes. 

Please email effcommodifiedcare@gmail.com for a copy. Thanks!]

Some areas I want to work on with the flyer/future flyers (if I dont get fired on Monday...)!

- "Safety" is a pretty bland and overused language in that it's been overused to justify some really bad things in the history of PWD as well as the prison industrial complex. I hope we can work toward expanding what "safety" means in light of disabilities and anti-racist struggles in an accessible way

- The elderly feel like "objects" -- ie. equating their physical well being with the totality of them as human beings. I would like to work toward introducing more language of the multi-dimensions of humanizing and dignifying care work. I feel this personally in my job that I care for human beings, not objects, and hope to be able to convey that in future agitational flyers

- We had a training session yesterday that talked a lot about grief of residents passing on, how to relate with those who live on when they see their roommates pass on, as well as our own grief being surrounded by death and aging. I felt the need for such a space, but definitely not in a management-mandated training space -- which told us we should approach management for support when grieving -- when in reality the work process denies me time to process emotionally with people cos all I can see is the clock ticking and work not getting done; The work process tries to objectify the elderly into receptors of commodified care when in reality there is so much more going on that is forced to be repressed

- In general I think that the flyer lacks a sense that our struggle is an re/envisioning of new values. I am going to keep talking to people around me, and being able to recognize, as well as push these re/envisioning in my conversations with co-workers and then, also experimenting with putting these things to paper and conversations. The familiarity comes from practice and then it feels more 'natural' to integrate them in a flyer.

WISH ME LUCK I DONT GET FIRED ON MONDAY!

POC meditation

Every Tues, I try to go with my friend R, to a POC meditation circle.I need the space for my mind to quiet, to meditate on survival and its trials. This summer/fall has been very strange. I have had very emotionally exhausting drama with people whom I thought were my good friends, and feeling betrayed by them. I suppose all relationships go through these kinds of tribulations, and you just have to grow from it. 

R. and I talked alot about how in today's world, as the world seems to be increasingly collapsing in front of our eyes -- perhaps not in a dramatic apocalyptic manner, but in a manner of disintegration, chunks dropping off, increasing fire, increasing hazards, food riots, race war, future nuclear wars, etc -- it all seems very plausible. Everyone I know is feeling lost. We utilize, urgently, Marxist theory to try to explain the world, to try to intervene, to build organization, but the objective conditions are that the world is crumbling before us and we dont know really, what to do.

I think that the sense of helplessness I feel from the spate of publicized queer suicides and anti-queer violence, is exactly going to be the kind of emotions I increasingly feel -- extreme anger at the system but also a forboding sense that the problem is too big, too massive, and not knowing WHERE or HOW to start.

As more and more of us get unemployed, as more of us get shut out from school, as more of us who thought we could get a decent job w a BA degree find ourselves doing menial, undesirable work or worse still, be unemployed AND strapped w mountains of student loan debt -- we will feel the same: Helpless and massive demoralization cos what's pushing us down feels really really big and heavy and all-around. It is the State, it is Wall Street, it is the fucking WORLD ECONOMY.

We need to strategize and build organizations to resist, to articulate the problems, to start from somewhere. But more than ever I think, we need to create communal spaces for people to process pain, confusion and sorrow. This is increasingly where we are going to be headed: an emotional vacuum.

That's why I love going to POC meditation with R, and E and be in the presence of folks whom I dont organize with, but whom I respect deeply for the calming and honest vibe they bring to my life. I know I need this quiet space to share survival stories and boost up my emotional strength to face the ugliness of the world everyday, to organize with people who might not show me the same respect that I deserve, to face the bosses. To do that, I need emotional resilience and strength.

Witches, Midwives and Nurses

Read online version here

I hope to develop through this blog, a holistic understanding of health, our bodies, labor, gender and disabilities struggles. I feel like this pamphlet is exactly the kind of foundational texts that need to be made more accessible in our time. Non-institutionalized, accessible, community run healthcare is not the terrain of new age-y, white, middle class hippies. It is the terrain of women of color, of class struggle, of gender struggle that had been severely attacked historically. I feel like it's time to reclaim, normalize and integrate it into my life and politics.

Commodified care expresses how caring work (which involves love, support, skilled labor etc) has been turned into capitalist properties for the purpose of $$ and not for the purpose of furthering and expanding humanity. It takes the form of disableism, racism and patriarchy in that some bodies are more commodified than others, both as bodies which are seen as useless and therefore suitable only as OBJECTS that can gain profits, or as bodies that are not flesh and blood, but rather machines that can be sped up endlessly. 

The foundation of commodified care is that it separates our physical bodies from our mental and emotional health. Like so many things, it is a product of extreme rationalism, Enlightenment philosophy gone sour, which institutionalizes the mind-body split. This mind-body split is also expressed in classed, gendered and bodily ways -- the elite, the male and the able-bodied cisgendered male is seen as the pedestal of rationalism while the poor, women and gender non-conforming folks, disabled bodies are lacking and more controlled by our primitive, bodily needs. Fixing is what we need, in bodily and mental forms -- thus invasive medical procedures and indoctrinating education that devalue us in our own eyes. On a more everyday level, it is how at my workplace, CNAs are expected to do the servant-like menial labor, do the daily grooming and dressing, but not be trained in medical skills or be given time/space in our workday to BUILD relationships with our residents. This is not to say that relationships dont form between us and our residents, but that they form because of the resilience of relationships and love, not because they had been accounted for as an integral dimension of the caring work that we do. 

What I am most excited about by this pamphlet is its description of the Popular Health Movement, as opposed to the "Feminist" movement led by white, middle class Victorian ladies. The Popular Health Movement involved the widespread dissemination of knowledge about herbal medicine, preventative care, and expertise about the body and hygiene, as opposed to the elitism and isolation of doctors, the professionalized medical establishment.
[To continue, read here]