Monday, September 06, 2021

The Labor Day Wrangle



AUSTIN — All over America this weekend, people will be celebrating the achievements and advancements in society made by the labor movement. While some whose politics fall on the right side of the spectrum may only choose to use it an excuse to grill meats and drink beers, the truth is that Labor Day is all about celebrating unions and things like paid vacations, a forty-hour work week, and the minimum wage, all secured by the efforts of the labor movement.

In the Lone Star State however, a new executive order signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (Q-Gilead) means that Texans will be celebrating something else this weekend.

“With the stroke of this pen, I hereby designate this weekend as Forced Labor Day Weekend,” Abbott said as he signed the order. “We will gather together and honor the teenage rape victims who are forced by law to carry their stepdaddy’s baby to full term. We will celebrate the fact that here in Texas, we value every single life. Until it’s born, and then literally fuck off.”

Parades will be held in various cities and locales, Abbott announced.


In his new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, New Yorker writer Eyal Press profiles the workers we won't see politicians sidling up to for photo ops this Labor Day. He writes about drone operators, prison guards, poultry plant workers, and oil riggers. They do our dirty work and, as Press shows, they pay a price for it.

Flor Martinez, a Texas poultry plant worker, devours painkillers at the end of her grueling shifts. Stephen Stone's dangerous job on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig puts him in the way of a massive explosion that almost cost him his life. But Press is most interested in documenting a kind of hazard that is not typically accounted for in government safety reports: what he calls "moral injury." He borrows the term from military psychologists. It describes the impact of having to carry out tasks that violate a person's core sense of self.

Those psychic injuries can take a physical toll. Harriet Krzykowski, a mental health counselor, is so traumatized by the moral compromises her harrowing prison job entails that her hair begins to fall out in clumps. An analyst with the military's drone program suffers headaches, night chills and joint pain. Press' project is to ensure that a complacent public — those of us who consider ourselves at a remove from the jobs he describes — takes responsibility for our part in creating the conditions that allow "dirty work" to occur.


Praise the few victories and the fighters.


And prepare for the battle ahead.

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