Slavery

Why does a White GRITS -- Girl Raised In The South -- have so much fascination with slavery if she's not some evil slavery apologist? 

And I'm not. 

I've covered it in previous posts that my mom was a German immigrant, my dad was a Hoosier originally from Indiana, so please come up with better personal attacks than "You're a Southern honky and have GUILT about slave owning ancestors!"

I was a homemaker for two decades. AKA "chattel property" or polite slavery, especially if the marriage is bad.

That's a long time for a modern American woman my age. These days, women typically have paid jobs regardless of marital status and whether or not they have children. 

I occasionally did a little child care for money but I mostly didn't do any paid work while married. Yet as a military wife, I had rights granted to me by the US federal government through the military superior to what most American women seem to have.

This fact has been food for thought for a lot of years about women's rights and informs my writing on Feminine Character Works plus any pieces I write critiquing heternormative culture which I think of as culture defined by:

1. Assuming everyone is heterosexual and never mind we know they aren't. 

2. Assuming all adults are married to an opposite sex partner where the man is the primary breadwinner. 

3. Designing all serious jobs with the implicit assumption it will be held by a married man financially responsible for a wife, children and possibly other relatives while the wife takes care of "the women's work" so you know he will be well fed, get adequate sleep etc while investing no time in addressing that beyond shoveling food in his mouth, sleeping etc because the wife is handling all the grocery shopping, food prep, washing the bed sheets etc etc etc.

4. Designing all housing and housing financing etc. for a middle class or upper middle class nuclear family with a male breadwinner, wife who is primarily a full-time wife and mom and 2.5 adorable, well-behaved children. 

5. Designing all other essentials of society around this broken mental model, such as retirement benefits and medical benefits such that women need to whore themselves out to a man via marriage, like it or not, to have any real hope of the good life even if they work full time.

My ex husband was career military. This is not a normal job where you can give your two weeks notice and quit if you don't like it.

You sign up for a multiple year commitment. They typically work you at least 60 hours a week. They require you to do PT (physical training) and pass a fitness test. 

There's no calling in sick. You show up at 6 a.m. no matter how sick you are and ASK to see a doctor. IF the DOCTOR says you are too sick to work, HE sends a note to your boss telling them you won't be in for X number of days.

In a nutshell, the US government owns your ass and can throw you in jail for trying to leave or otherwise failing in your duties.

Yet, it's an excellent job with good benefits and it's a young man's job. Most people who join are 18 when they do so. If you make it to twenty years, you can retire with a check for the rest of your life and medical benefits and other benefits for the rest of your life.

It won't make you a millionaire, no. But it provides the basis for a solidly middle class life and a safety net such that if you are a retiree, it's challenging to screw things up so bad you stop being middle class.

Military benefits for buying a house and going to college are a large part of the story behind the Baby Boom years of an unprecedented large American middle class that shaped the American landscape and mindset and which we are failing to live down because most Americans don't realize how World War II gave us that, what it cost us to establish that wealth and why we can't readily replicate it today.

So my husband "owned" me and the US government "owned" him yet we had good lives. This fostered an interest in reading up on things like slavery and indentured servitude and historic practices. 

Historically, there was often little difference in quality of life between slaves and the servant class. Both could be beaten by the people they served.

Indentured servitude was a contract voluntarily entered into by many people immigrating to The New World (the US in its early years) in hopes of getting a better life. You traded a promise of 7 years labor for someone to pay your boat ticket.

When I was homeless, I somewhat often spoke on Hacker News about doing freelance writing while sick under circumstances where I might be making a dollar an hour for my time because it took me several hours while sick to write a piece that paid $5.

It was $5 I wouldn't have otherwise had under circumstances where I was too sick to work a regular job.

Business founders frequently take little or no pay at first. Hacker News is run by a VC (venture capital) company and my point of view that as a poor person I should have the RIGHT to work for less than minimum wage flew in the face of the general consensus that while upper class, privileged people could choose to work without pay in hopes of a better future, poor people were being abused if they were doing the same.

I also made the point on Hacker News that I have multiple Reddits I run as an unpaid moderator. The punchline of that discussion is:

There's no contradiction.

"I can choose to work for free on some things if I wish." does not contradict "Other folks are in the wrong to expect and demand that I work for free."

Do poor people get conned into doing stuff for free that benefits wealthy people? Absolutely, but in my experience that's frequently in the form of treating people they know as servants and expecting services they aren't paying for that won't ever somehow come back to the person. 

My mother began working when I was twelve. Her first work was cleaning apartments at an apartment complex and she got paid by the apartment. 

She complained a LOT at home about management asking her to run little small errands because she was not PAID for that. She wasn't on salary nor paid by the hour, so every single time management said "Hey, can you change a lightbulb?" or whatever instead of tasking hourly staff with it, they were asking for unpaid work. 

Management probably wasn't really thinking about that and mentally lumped her in with all the staff that worked for them by the hour. It may not have been intentionally abusive but if management is too fucking lazy to think about that, it puts people like my mom in a difficult position because arguing with the boss is not a good way to endear yourself and get ahead or even keep your job.

My mom soon moved on to working for wealthy families because it was better working conditions than that. She still at times was treated like slave labor.

Some employers routinely expected her to purchase items for them without paying her for her time "because you are going to the store anyway." My mom made a habit of using coupons to help purchase items for her employer and charged her employer full price while pocketing the coupon amount as her way to get paid for her time and etfort without having to argue it with her employer. 

No, she didn't tell her employer who likely would have wanted the discount for the coupon as well. Because people are assholes. 

One of the challenges of business is figuring out how to pay employees enough to make it worthwhile for the employee AND also get enough value for the employer.

All jobs have some pieces of the jobs that "don't count" but need to be done to keep the job. At my corporate job, I needed to do "60 claims a day" to keep my job and I nominally worked 7.5 or 8 hours at that, but I could spend up to two hours a day on tasks like calling doctor's offices to verify information that may or may not have helped me meet quota. 

In practice, I needed to do ten claims an hour during the six hours a day I was directly working on meeting quota and the time I spent on "other tasks" when I first showed up HAD to be done to keep my job but often did little or nothing towards meeting quota, the primary metric by which I kept my job.

And it gets further complicated because cutting a check might count as one claim,  two claims or three because one check for one claim might cover inpatient, outpatient and preventive ("wellness") care, all classified differently internally for purposes of counting MY productivity. 

Or if you got lucky, cutting one check might count as twenty claims if someone realized they had a wellness benefit and sent in a claim for multiple years of wellness benefits. 

But the company had an ongoing effort to auto pay those by computer and was steadily doing all in its power to eliminate those quick, easy claims from ever having human eyes on them, leaving increasingly heavier tasks for the claims people to do to try to meet quota.

So a complex society NEEDS jobs so low level people can get paid work without jumping through a lot of hoops and understanding a lot of complex legal stuff as independent business people. And working out how to make those jobs pay adequately is complex.

1. Probably countries that provide people medical benefits because they live there do better than the US generally which idiotically provides medical benefits through the employer and then assumes it's a MAN with a serious career who is providing benefits for a wife and children. 

This would help WOMEN stop whoring themselves out and politely calling it marriage. I had multiple women tell me I was too sick to get divorced. 

No, they were too sick to get divorced and ended the friendship when I divorced anyway.  As a longtime military wife, I had excellent military benefits and would keep them when I left.

2. As a freelance writer, I preferred to charge by the page rather than by the hour. In my experience, charging by X quantified completed task and let ME worry about how many hours that takes helped me make my life work as a medically handicapped person who sometimes was SLOW but still needed an income.

3. Aflac ran into problems when it set up a program to allow people to work from home and expected them to do like 130 percent of quota for the "privilege" of working from home because some people were working 12 hours a day to meet that goal and the authorities were not happy with that.

Rather than revisit that figure which had been pulled out the air by a VIP, they put limitations on how many hours you could be logged into the system. 

4. The movie Men in Black II has a scene where an automated mail cart turns out to be a guy sitting in a cart throwing mail rapidly with eight arms. 

I think one of the books from the Myth Adventures series makes the point that paying an employee with multiple arms the same as an employee with two arms is abusive and likely to lead to those jobs being underpaid and only held by employees with multiple arms, running other people out of the industry. 

So other employees shouldn't smirk about how they get paid the same while doing less. They should insist that pay be structured to pay equitably so they don't find themselves unemployed while multi armed species become slave labor and the only ones being hired for that work at all.

Slave labor is not whatever many people imagine it is.  Slaves in the American South were not only not paid by their owner, they were not fed either and this is why Black Americans eat things like hog jowls and chitterlings: it's what the White plantation owners threw out.

Slaves worked the fields all day, then tended their own plots on the worst strips of land unfit for profitable use by the plantation owner where they grew vegetables to feed themselves and supplement the hog jowls and pig intestines discarded by their owners. 

Yes, they were also beaten. Other servants were sometimes beaten as well.

No, I'm not justifying that or saying it's okay. I'm saying historically the lower classes were generally treated pretty badly. 

After the Civil War, Black Americans were often worse off than they had been under slavery. They frequently defacto had no right to vote, were illiterate and no longer allowed to live on the land of the wealthy and grow their own vegetables on the worst plots of land. If they could get a job at all, they were paid half what a White worker was paid.

I read a well documented history book that claimed American minimum wage laws were intended to put a stop to paying Blacks half what Whites got paid and I wish I had realized at the time it was a contrarian view because I don't remember the author or title. 

Minimum wage laws have become the focus of attempts to eliminate poverty by providing a living wage while in the US homelessness is on the rise because we simply don't have a paradigm for providing basic decent housing for individuals or childless couples and too much of our housing is designed for the nuclear family. 

It simply doesn't MAKE SENSE for a single person to rent a two bedroom apartment even if they can readily afford the rent because they now need to clean all that space and probably have no real need for a full service kitchen to cook a family style meal.

Historically, we had boarding houses where you rented a ROOM and got breakfast and dinner and supplied your own lunch, probably by eating at a diner or the cafeteria at work. College dorms, SROs and military barracks were all substantially similar spaces providing a place to sleep and minimal storage and access to a bathroom but little to no means to cook and intended to be occupied by single young adults.

Now we expect young people to rent a bedroom in a place designed for a family, get roommates and make horror movies about roommates from hell, like Single White Female, and no one goes "Um. What is wrong with this picture???"

I wrote Project SRO because I'm clear minimum wage laws don't begin to fix this broken society.

I likely have more I could say, but I'm done for now. Me hitting publish on this brain dump doesn't mean I don't have more to say.