!Orderlies
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agk's diary
30 May 2022 @ 0415 UTC
---
written on GPD Win 1 via puTTY
by candlelight in the garage
---
If you're unit restricted in the psych hospital
where I work, you can't go to the cafeteria or Rec.
Nursing staff can put you on UR or take you off it.
It doesn't need a doctor's order.
> I invent fictionalized composite patients for
> diary stories
Unit-restricted for behavior, Eliana stood in the
hall, dayroom to the right, med room left, nine
closed patient room doors down the hall. She wore
a high-viz Toyota plant t-shirt and was 14. The
glassed nurse's station watchfully ends the hall.
"My dad worked for Sodexo at the Toyota plant
before he went back to prison," Eliana said.
I asked if he liked working there. Unsure, she
asked what I know about Sodexo. "I had friends
didn't like working for them. Not that it matters
---around here nobody's union---but Sodexo's a big
union-buster."
"What's a union?"
I used my brief, patient, straightforward nurse
dialect. That day in that dialect I also explained
anemia to Eliana's pale-lipped peer and coached a
withdrawn peer on self-advocating to get the bena-
dryl/ativan/haldol injection she wanted for her
next escalation. I spoke the dialect of experts
educating plain folk.
Evy's intimidated about the labor conference she's
getting ready to go to with our daughter and---sort
of---some of her UCW union brothers. Partly it's
cultural, language---steward, local, open shop,
contract action, two-tier, rank-and-file. We didn't
grow up in union homes. We're children of experts.
Her parents' expertise is life science and medicine
though they owned a store and worked construction.
Our parents didn't reproduce their social position,
at least not yet. We're plain folk, at least now,
unlicensed nursing assistants. In the 1890s we'd be
classified as domestics, in the 1960s---when Bernie
Sanders did my job---orderlies. We get intimidated
by experts. Labor organizers and professional labor
historians are experts.
"I'm too stupid for this conference," Evy said,
looking at a print-out of the conference schedule.
"I made a mistake." She'll drive eight hours and
attend with our loud, squirmy half-infant half-
toddler, without me, without childcare. I think
Evy's pretty brave and smart.
From bookshelves in the garage by my 1976 motor-
cycle that needs front fork seals, I got two books
published in the '70s about midwestern trade union
women. They're in the collection I rescued from
Gone's squat when it was evicted but hadn't read.
In the dozen pages of the books I've now read are
two kinds of women: those like us who worked as
domestics, tradeswomen, prostitutes, etc. and "club
women" with wealthy husbands who organized for
social uplift. The working women started out as
plain folk and usually stayed that way. The club
women, who dubbed themselves allies, were spiritual
mothers of today's experts.
At 4:30 AM after reading those pages I got dressed
in black scrubs to work at the psych hospital where
Eliana'd ask me what's a union. I hit "seek" on the
radio. It lighted on Eastern Kentucky University's
National Public Radio station. I didn't immediately
hit seek again.
In daily life I don't hear NPR's collegial tone,
the "we're all friends here" dialect of experts
talking to each other. Second-class cabins on the
Titanic aren't underwater like us clients, research
subjects, and uplift cases in steerage. It's taboo
for them to discuss in polite company the waters
(predatory precarity)* that lap up the stair and
rinse the second-class deck as our shared sinking
ship tilts and pitches.
I'm in school to gain a profession, to join the
nurses, social workers, doctors, and managers in
second class, to learn to chatter like that. The
ghosts of the society ladies would exhibit me as
one of their success stories of what women can
achieve.
I should have told Eliana unions at worst break
your heart when they serve organizers and sacrifice
workers. At best they're a vehicle for some self-
liberation---from both capitalist exploitation and
domination by our benefactors.
---
*: Waldman, "Predatory precarity." Interfluidity,
20 Aug 2019
