mornings thoughts....
Can we be more than animals?
The more I look into human populations and societal ills - the more I see inequality generating anger, illness, helplessness, sorrow, frustration, prisoners or slaves, and death. I see how accumulation sickness has struck on every landmass of the world. That regardless of the development of altruism and technology, humanity is still being savaged by those in power. That even rebellion and revolutions for equality ultimately end with new players in those positions ready to become the next beasts of the world.
With all that evolution and God has given humanity, why cannot we see our way to equality and peace? With the brilliance of our advanced minds, why cannot we be enlightened on how to share and preserve?
There are two possible outcomes for homo sapiens. They may destroy our world and all within ... or ... they may become the guardians of life.
... it is possible for us to be more than beasts.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Medicine: More Than Just a Body
Long ago my mother, Utahna, was dying from a brain tumor. There was no way for us, her children, to prevent her death irreplaceably damaging all of our young lives. Her body and its ability to fight such an anomaly was failing; and we were powerless to stop it. Fortunately, there are those that endeavor to enter the war against such entities, illnesses, and diseases in order to save the lives of those entangled within. They practice more than just the art of medicine, but also the craft of power. “Led by medicine, the ‘human sciences,’ through their production of knowledge, developed increasingly refined ‘technologies of power’” (Davenport, pg 312). It goes without saying that in order to control the internal physiological environment doctors have to have power over it. However, such interplay is not without its social consequences. In this paper I’m going to look at some of the ways power works in and through medicine. Namely: the objectification of the body; how impoverished displaced sugar cane cutters in Alto de Cruzeiro suffer “nervosa” as a consequence to the political, social, and medical play of power; and finally, how Angel Bay medical students try to bridge the objectification and social politics in order to truly help their patients.
When my mother woke up paralyzed one morning, the emergency personnel were quick to itemize her condition into blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, what limbs she couldn’t move, where there was pain, and so on. She no longer was Utahna, a poet and mother six, but rather a puzzle that they needed to break down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to find out why her body wasn’t working. In a sense, my mother stopped being a person and became an object. This “objectifying” is when doctors, “transform them into problematic body parts rather than view them as whole human beings in fully contextualized psychological and social environments” (Davenport, pg 311). As the body is broken down into systems then subsystems, the microscopic way the doctor’s view their patients has been coined as the “medical gaze” by Michel Foucalt. The technical discourse that follows only supports the distancing of the patient from the “condition”. One might wonder why there’s a critique against this objective perspective when it seems inevitable or even professional. However, the critique is not about what it takes into account, but rather what it lacks. If the cause or the solution lies outside the physical body, will even the greatest microscope or “medical gaze” be able to find it? An example of this is sorely seen in the impoverished cane cutters of Alto de Cruzeiro.
After a quarter of a century of repressive military rule, the political climate in Alto de Cruzeiro is uneasy. Here the, “dominant exercised their power both directly through the state and indirectly through a merging with civil society… that hegemony operates as a hybrid of coercion and consensus” (Hughes, pg 171). In “Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs,” Nancy Scheper Hughes indicates that it’s, “into this potentially explosive situation, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and the first few timid psychologist to appear on the landscape are recruited in an effort to domesticate and pacify an angry-hungry population” (Hughes, pg 211). In Alto de Cruzeiro the power to address the physical ailments of its starving people lies not only on the doctor, but also on the political and social climate. With so many engaged, it raises some questions as to why their physical needs are not being met. Beyond that is why the doctors are treating their patients for “nervoso" and not hunger. “How have these people come to see themselves primarily as nervous and only secondarily as hungry?” (Hughes, pg 177) Two examples of these mortally tired cane cutters are Severino Francisco and Seu Tomas’.
Starting as an eight year old child, Severino cut the cane until he became sick. He like many others had to work the cane on empty stomachs (Hughes, pg 176). They would eat when they could and, when they couldn’t; they would try to sleep till the next day (Hughes, pg 182). Severino continued until the “illness” that spread through his legs and body got too bad for him to work in the fields. After searching for a “cure” he took up the barber profession to provide for his family. “I barely make enough to feed my wife and children. The cacula [last born] cries for milk all the time, but I have to deny her because out of the little besteira that I earn I have to put something aside every week for my medicines.” In addition, it falls to the doctors to sign his disability papers and, therefore, it is in his best interest to turn to them to for help. However, “they just kept sending me home with remedios for my heart, for my blood, for my liver, for my nerves. Believe me, so vivo de remedios [I live on medications]” (Hughes, pg 181). Seu Tomas’ was also prescribed many medications for his “illness” although, in Seu Tomas’ case, he stopped taking certain ones because they “began to offend” his empty stomach (Hughes, pg 183). When asked why they are treating his nerves and not his hunger, he laughed and said, “Who ever heard … of a treatment for hunger? Food is the only cure for that.” He goes on to say that, “It’s easier to get help with remedior. You can show up at the prefeitura with a prescription… but you can’t go to the mayor and beg for food!”(Hughes, pg 184) In both of these examples they were treated at the doctor’s for “nervoso” which is a folk term that manifests like hunger in their physical bodies as headaches, tremors, weakness, tiredness, irritability, angry weeping, among others. How are the doctors of Alto de Cruzeiro going to fight their war on illness if they cannot see their patients in their “fully contextualized psychological and social environments?” And, since they don’t, the consequences to objectifying their patients has become a population that is slowly dying of hunger, yet sees themselves as “ill” or nervous. Nancy Hughes sums up their unfortunate conclusion.
“There are power and domination to be had from defining a population as ‘sick’ or ‘nervous’ and in need of the ‘doctoring’ hands of a political administration that swathes itself in medical symbols. To acknowledge hunger, which is not a disease but a social illness, would be tantamount to political suicide for leaders whose power has come from the same plantation economy that has produced the hunger in the first place. And because the poor have come to invest drugs with such magical efficacy, it is all too easy for their faith to be subverted and used against them. If hunger cannot be satisfied, it can at least be tranquilized, so that medicine, even more than religion, comes to actualize the Marxist platitude on the drugging of the masses” (Hughes, pg 202-203).
As the cane workers are, “paralyzed within a stagnant semifeudal plantation economy that treats them as superfluous and dependent,” they are left with two choices (Hughes, pg 182). They can recognize their political, social, and physical suffering and protest; which may offer them lethal consequences. Or, they can turn to medicine to “cure” their physical crisis. In the hospital, or clinic, the doctors have two choices as well. The first is to take the pain on under the, “technical domain of medicine, where they will be transformed into a ‘disease’ to be treated with an injection, a nerve pill, a soporific” (Hughes, pg 214). While the second is to, “provide a space where new ways of addressing and responding to human misery,” is worked out (Hughes, pg 215). By practicing more than just the art of medicine and the craft of power, one way a doctor can balance the act of “gazing” is by “witnessing”. This is seen throughout the city of Angel Bay where local university medical students learn and practice in homeless clinics.
The ideology of “witnessing” is directly in opposition to how medicine constructs its patients as “objects” (Davenport, pg 316). What Beverly Ann Davenport calls “witnessing” is where the doctor consciously works to “see” the whole patient, “not simply the medical aspects of the patient’s complaint, but also his or her social and psychological environment” (Davenport, pg 318). As Beverly reports on their “quality, not quantity” motto through five micro-practices, the conflict between “gazing” and “witnessing” becomes more apparent. It starts with a gentle, thorough probing of the patient’s history. For example, when a first year student asks how long he should let the patient “ramble on” before he jumped “to the important medical stuff,” the second year student points out that allowing the patient to “ramble on” was a powerful interview technique. She asserts basically that, “what is ‘medically important’ would be revealed in the ‘witnessing’ process” (Davenport, pg 318-9). Otherwise, treatment might end up like it did for the drug user that moved to Angel Bay City from the East Coast. In that case, “the ultimate irony … is that a heroin-user is advised to quit smoking in order to take birth control pills to relieve the symptom of irregular periods, which is caused by her heroin addiction in the first place” (Davenport, pg 320).
Another aspect of “witnessing” is thinking of the patients as subjects; where the doctor sees both the disease and the person who is suffering from it. One doctor tackles this by not referring to his patient in third person singular, but rather by name. It’s not, “a 46-year-old white man who comes in with a history of …” but rather, “So I met Bill. And Bill was disheveled…” (Davenport, pg 321-2) When charting or meeting with other doctors they tend to depersonalize their patients and the discourse becomes more of “gazing” and less about the human around it. For my mother, her extreme poverty and physical beatings from her father when she was young never came into her discourse. Every time she would seek help with her headaches the doctors wrote her off a prescription or indicated that her pain was imagined and did nothing. For decades, no tests were run because they never looked beyond her body for a cause and, therefore, they never felt expensive tests were warranted. Like for my 40 year old mother, “gazing” rather than “witnessing” costs and destroys lives.
Objectification of the body may simplify medical learning, but it complicates patient care. As seen in the cane cutters of Alto de Cruzeiro, the medical removal of humanity from the people makes them political and social power tools. Unless new ways of responding to human misery are generated, and the objectification of the patient is challenged, then the loss and destruction of lives will continue. The students of Angel Bay have begun this process with the “witnessing” of their patients. Fortunately, there are those that endeavor to enter the war against illnesses, and diseases in order to save the lives of those entangled within. “Seeing” their patient may be their next great step.
Bibliography
Davenport, Beverly Ann. 2000. "ARTICLES - Witnessing and the Medical Gaze: How Medical Students Learn to See at a Clinic for the Homeless". Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 14 (3): 310.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
When my mother woke up paralyzed one morning, the emergency personnel were quick to itemize her condition into blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, what limbs she couldn’t move, where there was pain, and so on. She no longer was Utahna, a poet and mother six, but rather a puzzle that they needed to break down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to find out why her body wasn’t working. In a sense, my mother stopped being a person and became an object. This “objectifying” is when doctors, “transform them into problematic body parts rather than view them as whole human beings in fully contextualized psychological and social environments” (Davenport, pg 311). As the body is broken down into systems then subsystems, the microscopic way the doctor’s view their patients has been coined as the “medical gaze” by Michel Foucalt. The technical discourse that follows only supports the distancing of the patient from the “condition”. One might wonder why there’s a critique against this objective perspective when it seems inevitable or even professional. However, the critique is not about what it takes into account, but rather what it lacks. If the cause or the solution lies outside the physical body, will even the greatest microscope or “medical gaze” be able to find it? An example of this is sorely seen in the impoverished cane cutters of Alto de Cruzeiro.
After a quarter of a century of repressive military rule, the political climate in Alto de Cruzeiro is uneasy. Here the, “dominant exercised their power both directly through the state and indirectly through a merging with civil society… that hegemony operates as a hybrid of coercion and consensus” (Hughes, pg 171). In “Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs,” Nancy Scheper Hughes indicates that it’s, “into this potentially explosive situation, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and the first few timid psychologist to appear on the landscape are recruited in an effort to domesticate and pacify an angry-hungry population” (Hughes, pg 211). In Alto de Cruzeiro the power to address the physical ailments of its starving people lies not only on the doctor, but also on the political and social climate. With so many engaged, it raises some questions as to why their physical needs are not being met. Beyond that is why the doctors are treating their patients for “nervoso" and not hunger. “How have these people come to see themselves primarily as nervous and only secondarily as hungry?” (Hughes, pg 177) Two examples of these mortally tired cane cutters are Severino Francisco and Seu Tomas’.
Starting as an eight year old child, Severino cut the cane until he became sick. He like many others had to work the cane on empty stomachs (Hughes, pg 176). They would eat when they could and, when they couldn’t; they would try to sleep till the next day (Hughes, pg 182). Severino continued until the “illness” that spread through his legs and body got too bad for him to work in the fields. After searching for a “cure” he took up the barber profession to provide for his family. “I barely make enough to feed my wife and children. The cacula [last born] cries for milk all the time, but I have to deny her because out of the little besteira that I earn I have to put something aside every week for my medicines.” In addition, it falls to the doctors to sign his disability papers and, therefore, it is in his best interest to turn to them to for help. However, “they just kept sending me home with remedios for my heart, for my blood, for my liver, for my nerves. Believe me, so vivo de remedios [I live on medications]” (Hughes, pg 181). Seu Tomas’ was also prescribed many medications for his “illness” although, in Seu Tomas’ case, he stopped taking certain ones because they “began to offend” his empty stomach (Hughes, pg 183). When asked why they are treating his nerves and not his hunger, he laughed and said, “Who ever heard … of a treatment for hunger? Food is the only cure for that.” He goes on to say that, “It’s easier to get help with remedior. You can show up at the prefeitura with a prescription… but you can’t go to the mayor and beg for food!”(Hughes, pg 184) In both of these examples they were treated at the doctor’s for “nervoso” which is a folk term that manifests like hunger in their physical bodies as headaches, tremors, weakness, tiredness, irritability, angry weeping, among others. How are the doctors of Alto de Cruzeiro going to fight their war on illness if they cannot see their patients in their “fully contextualized psychological and social environments?” And, since they don’t, the consequences to objectifying their patients has become a population that is slowly dying of hunger, yet sees themselves as “ill” or nervous. Nancy Hughes sums up their unfortunate conclusion.
“There are power and domination to be had from defining a population as ‘sick’ or ‘nervous’ and in need of the ‘doctoring’ hands of a political administration that swathes itself in medical symbols. To acknowledge hunger, which is not a disease but a social illness, would be tantamount to political suicide for leaders whose power has come from the same plantation economy that has produced the hunger in the first place. And because the poor have come to invest drugs with such magical efficacy, it is all too easy for their faith to be subverted and used against them. If hunger cannot be satisfied, it can at least be tranquilized, so that medicine, even more than religion, comes to actualize the Marxist platitude on the drugging of the masses” (Hughes, pg 202-203).
As the cane workers are, “paralyzed within a stagnant semifeudal plantation economy that treats them as superfluous and dependent,” they are left with two choices (Hughes, pg 182). They can recognize their political, social, and physical suffering and protest; which may offer them lethal consequences. Or, they can turn to medicine to “cure” their physical crisis. In the hospital, or clinic, the doctors have two choices as well. The first is to take the pain on under the, “technical domain of medicine, where they will be transformed into a ‘disease’ to be treated with an injection, a nerve pill, a soporific” (Hughes, pg 214). While the second is to, “provide a space where new ways of addressing and responding to human misery,” is worked out (Hughes, pg 215). By practicing more than just the art of medicine and the craft of power, one way a doctor can balance the act of “gazing” is by “witnessing”. This is seen throughout the city of Angel Bay where local university medical students learn and practice in homeless clinics.
The ideology of “witnessing” is directly in opposition to how medicine constructs its patients as “objects” (Davenport, pg 316). What Beverly Ann Davenport calls “witnessing” is where the doctor consciously works to “see” the whole patient, “not simply the medical aspects of the patient’s complaint, but also his or her social and psychological environment” (Davenport, pg 318). As Beverly reports on their “quality, not quantity” motto through five micro-practices, the conflict between “gazing” and “witnessing” becomes more apparent. It starts with a gentle, thorough probing of the patient’s history. For example, when a first year student asks how long he should let the patient “ramble on” before he jumped “to the important medical stuff,” the second year student points out that allowing the patient to “ramble on” was a powerful interview technique. She asserts basically that, “what is ‘medically important’ would be revealed in the ‘witnessing’ process” (Davenport, pg 318-9). Otherwise, treatment might end up like it did for the drug user that moved to Angel Bay City from the East Coast. In that case, “the ultimate irony … is that a heroin-user is advised to quit smoking in order to take birth control pills to relieve the symptom of irregular periods, which is caused by her heroin addiction in the first place” (Davenport, pg 320).
Another aspect of “witnessing” is thinking of the patients as subjects; where the doctor sees both the disease and the person who is suffering from it. One doctor tackles this by not referring to his patient in third person singular, but rather by name. It’s not, “a 46-year-old white man who comes in with a history of …” but rather, “So I met Bill. And Bill was disheveled…” (Davenport, pg 321-2) When charting or meeting with other doctors they tend to depersonalize their patients and the discourse becomes more of “gazing” and less about the human around it. For my mother, her extreme poverty and physical beatings from her father when she was young never came into her discourse. Every time she would seek help with her headaches the doctors wrote her off a prescription or indicated that her pain was imagined and did nothing. For decades, no tests were run because they never looked beyond her body for a cause and, therefore, they never felt expensive tests were warranted. Like for my 40 year old mother, “gazing” rather than “witnessing” costs and destroys lives.
Objectification of the body may simplify medical learning, but it complicates patient care. As seen in the cane cutters of Alto de Cruzeiro, the medical removal of humanity from the people makes them political and social power tools. Unless new ways of responding to human misery are generated, and the objectification of the patient is challenged, then the loss and destruction of lives will continue. The students of Angel Bay have begun this process with the “witnessing” of their patients. Fortunately, there are those that endeavor to enter the war against illnesses, and diseases in order to save the lives of those entangled within. “Seeing” their patient may be their next great step.
Bibliography
Davenport, Beverly Ann. 2000. "ARTICLES - Witnessing and the Medical Gaze: How Medical Students Learn to See at a Clinic for the Homeless". Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 14 (3): 310.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
An Aid of Meaning
Assumptions about the ailing are as common as doctors hypothesize on what’s wrong with their patients. In the work’s of John Aggergaard Larsen “Finding Meaning in First Episode Psychosis,” and Rachel R. Chapman “Endangering safe motherhood in Mozambique,” these assumptions are challenged by a broader understanding of the how and the why. Namely, by the context of the patient, and the meaning that they take in their experiences, will model how they are treated or diagnosed; the effectiveness of the treatment; and what other avenues they will take to understand their illness in order to get better.
As people go throughout their daily lives they attach meaning, symbols, and images to not only their communication, but also in their understanding of life and the world around them. In a very real aspect they are living a metaphor. These life metaphors find their voice in the narratives that often are passed over or missed entirely. When missed they present themselves in puzzles like, “why women are not going to a free maternity clinic until the end of their pregnancy, regardless of the high infant and child mortality rate?” (Chapman, 355) Or seen in the initiation of an early intervention program, OPUS, to study and understand why the mentally ill suffer as they do. (Larsen, 451) There are those that would be tempted to claim, like in the Gondola data, “high-risk women in developing countries as unmotivated and/or non-compliant victims.” (Chapman, 371) This in essence blames the women for the death of their children. Or that the mentally ill are just crazy and their ailment causes their suffering. (Larson, 451) But to accept these arguments would be to completely abandon conceptual clarity.
Conceptual clarity, or a system of explanation, emerges from many aspects. These are found in the biomedical aspect of an illness, the spiritual or religious, the financial, the cultural, and the individual narratives. In “Finding Meaning in First Episode Psychosis,” John Larson calls it Bricolage when, “they tried to connect and supplement various systems of explanation in innovative theory-building work.” (Larson, 461) That even the delusions themselves are a patients attempts, “to master a frightening and bewildering subjective state by imposing meaning or forcing an explanation upon experiences which would otherwise be meaningless or inexplicable.” (Larson, 460) In essence they are taking pieces of what makes sense and building an understanding of what they are experiencing. And for many, “they found resonance in a wider cultural repertoire, that is, the myths, traditions, and institutional bases of authority in the wider society.” (Larson, 462) It is through all the pieces or layers of understanding that the OPUS intervention program could find success.
Another parallel reference to a patients layering of treatments to find the cure is in Rachel Chapman’s “Endangering Safe Motherhood in Mozambique.” In Chapman’s chart on page 363 we see the veritable bricolage in the form of treatments the women pursue. Namely: Pharmaceutical, herbal, district health center, church, curandeiro, prophet, prayer, mission clinic, traveling “nurse”, and maternity clinic. For example, in Raquel’s story the layering of her treatment was related to finance, culture, religion, and biomedicine. After paying for first diagnosis, she was given a prescription that she could not afford. The pharmacy gave her half her treatment for the money which did not help her at all. The next month a curandeiro accepted the same amount of money for three months of an infusion of roots. This helped but did not cure the patient but gave her an understanding that it cleaned inside her for the baby. Then finally a traveling “nurse” charged three times the amount for the pills and infusion to inject Raquel and her husband over the next three weeks. She believes that the injections attacked the site where her illness was fixed. Although this overcame her symptoms, Raquel also went to her prophet who gave her a blessing and sacred water to drink and bathe in. This was to cleanse her body and to not have anymore bad luck. According to Raquel it was the multiple layers that was her cure under the umbrella of her belief that the three treatments were symbolic of the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (Chapman, 364)
With more of an Ethnographic research style that took into account attention to the Bricolage or fluidity of treatment, both authors’ uncovered important aspects in how to help and understand their patients better. This starts with understanding that the patients are very active in finding meaning in their ailment in order to help them. For example, Chapman noted that, “under conditions of frequent reproductive morbidity and loss, little access to cash, immense domestic and agricultural work burdens, and limited routes to female social and economic self-determination” the women still, “demonstrate significant initiative in mobilizing the resources they deem necessary to influence their own reproductive labor and decrease the odds of poor pregnancy outcomes.” (Chapman, 371) While Larsen argued that; “individuals take an active role when applying understandings and meanings to their situations and experiences,” that, “plural healing systems can exist within an overarching cultural tradition,” and that, “culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories rituals, and world-views” will be used “in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems.” (Larsen, 457) Due to these discoveries solutions could be addressed.
For the women in Mozambique, social conflict and economic tension are reproductive threats. Those, due to migration of women from large patrilocal and polygynous households into smaller nuclear residence, many women suffer under an economic vulnerability due to lack of wage paying jobs for women. (Chapman, 369) The women without cash capital cannot compete and must be directly or indirectly dependent on male cash resources. As these women compete for resources many keep their pregnancies secret as a protective measure. That once it is known they are preyed upon by mal espirito kin and midwives seeking assistant gifts. Basically, safe motherhood in Mozambique, “lies beyond the scope of medical or even public health solutions alone.” (Chapman, 372) However, some changes can be made. Merging the maternity clinic with the District Health Center will provide patient privacy and may draw more women in for early maternity care. Also, better service that lowers the wait time will draw the women who can’t be away from home or the farm long.
For those that are mentally ill, teaching them a psychoeducation, “provided highly influential concepts and theories.” Through this education many “found explanations by drawing on systems of explanation available from the cultural repertoire of the wider society.” (Larsen, 465) As meaning comes, many are relieved of their tormented feelings and to an extent their helplessness. Indeed, it is a goal as different explanations are, “rejected, accepted, appropriated, and reevaluated in a continuous process.” (Larsen, 465) By providing an institution or mental health community to provide education and various contexts, the patient can become part of the solution.
In both of these articles the Anthropologist’s looked for the narrative of those that were ailing. This required that they put aside assumptions or conclusions that they and others jumped to early on. By doing this a broader understanding of the how and why emerged in a format that could assist not only in effective treatment, but also in ways for the ailing to find meaning in their experiences. As noted above, understanding does not fix all problems. But it did offer incite into small changes that can make a difference. Perhaps, with more seeking meaning within a culture the larger socioeconomic changes can be made. In fact, I would submit that it is the only way those changes ever came to be.
Bibliography
Larsen JA. 2004. "Finding meaning in first episode psychosis: experience, agency, and the cultural repertoire". Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 18 (4): 447-71.
Chapman RR. 2003. "Endangering safe motherhood in Mozambique: prenatal care as pregnancy risk". Social Science & Medicine (1982). 57 (2): 355-74.
As people go throughout their daily lives they attach meaning, symbols, and images to not only their communication, but also in their understanding of life and the world around them. In a very real aspect they are living a metaphor. These life metaphors find their voice in the narratives that often are passed over or missed entirely. When missed they present themselves in puzzles like, “why women are not going to a free maternity clinic until the end of their pregnancy, regardless of the high infant and child mortality rate?” (Chapman, 355) Or seen in the initiation of an early intervention program, OPUS, to study and understand why the mentally ill suffer as they do. (Larsen, 451) There are those that would be tempted to claim, like in the Gondola data, “high-risk women in developing countries as unmotivated and/or non-compliant victims.” (Chapman, 371) This in essence blames the women for the death of their children. Or that the mentally ill are just crazy and their ailment causes their suffering. (Larson, 451) But to accept these arguments would be to completely abandon conceptual clarity.
Conceptual clarity, or a system of explanation, emerges from many aspects. These are found in the biomedical aspect of an illness, the spiritual or religious, the financial, the cultural, and the individual narratives. In “Finding Meaning in First Episode Psychosis,” John Larson calls it Bricolage when, “they tried to connect and supplement various systems of explanation in innovative theory-building work.” (Larson, 461) That even the delusions themselves are a patients attempts, “to master a frightening and bewildering subjective state by imposing meaning or forcing an explanation upon experiences which would otherwise be meaningless or inexplicable.” (Larson, 460) In essence they are taking pieces of what makes sense and building an understanding of what they are experiencing. And for many, “they found resonance in a wider cultural repertoire, that is, the myths, traditions, and institutional bases of authority in the wider society.” (Larson, 462) It is through all the pieces or layers of understanding that the OPUS intervention program could find success.
Another parallel reference to a patients layering of treatments to find the cure is in Rachel Chapman’s “Endangering Safe Motherhood in Mozambique.” In Chapman’s chart on page 363 we see the veritable bricolage in the form of treatments the women pursue. Namely: Pharmaceutical, herbal, district health center, church, curandeiro, prophet, prayer, mission clinic, traveling “nurse”, and maternity clinic. For example, in Raquel’s story the layering of her treatment was related to finance, culture, religion, and biomedicine. After paying for first diagnosis, she was given a prescription that she could not afford. The pharmacy gave her half her treatment for the money which did not help her at all. The next month a curandeiro accepted the same amount of money for three months of an infusion of roots. This helped but did not cure the patient but gave her an understanding that it cleaned inside her for the baby. Then finally a traveling “nurse” charged three times the amount for the pills and infusion to inject Raquel and her husband over the next three weeks. She believes that the injections attacked the site where her illness was fixed. Although this overcame her symptoms, Raquel also went to her prophet who gave her a blessing and sacred water to drink and bathe in. This was to cleanse her body and to not have anymore bad luck. According to Raquel it was the multiple layers that was her cure under the umbrella of her belief that the three treatments were symbolic of the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (Chapman, 364)
With more of an Ethnographic research style that took into account attention to the Bricolage or fluidity of treatment, both authors’ uncovered important aspects in how to help and understand their patients better. This starts with understanding that the patients are very active in finding meaning in their ailment in order to help them. For example, Chapman noted that, “under conditions of frequent reproductive morbidity and loss, little access to cash, immense domestic and agricultural work burdens, and limited routes to female social and economic self-determination” the women still, “demonstrate significant initiative in mobilizing the resources they deem necessary to influence their own reproductive labor and decrease the odds of poor pregnancy outcomes.” (Chapman, 371) While Larsen argued that; “individuals take an active role when applying understandings and meanings to their situations and experiences,” that, “plural healing systems can exist within an overarching cultural tradition,” and that, “culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories rituals, and world-views” will be used “in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems.” (Larsen, 457) Due to these discoveries solutions could be addressed.
For the women in Mozambique, social conflict and economic tension are reproductive threats. Those, due to migration of women from large patrilocal and polygynous households into smaller nuclear residence, many women suffer under an economic vulnerability due to lack of wage paying jobs for women. (Chapman, 369) The women without cash capital cannot compete and must be directly or indirectly dependent on male cash resources. As these women compete for resources many keep their pregnancies secret as a protective measure. That once it is known they are preyed upon by mal espirito kin and midwives seeking assistant gifts. Basically, safe motherhood in Mozambique, “lies beyond the scope of medical or even public health solutions alone.” (Chapman, 372) However, some changes can be made. Merging the maternity clinic with the District Health Center will provide patient privacy and may draw more women in for early maternity care. Also, better service that lowers the wait time will draw the women who can’t be away from home or the farm long.
For those that are mentally ill, teaching them a psychoeducation, “provided highly influential concepts and theories.” Through this education many “found explanations by drawing on systems of explanation available from the cultural repertoire of the wider society.” (Larsen, 465) As meaning comes, many are relieved of their tormented feelings and to an extent their helplessness. Indeed, it is a goal as different explanations are, “rejected, accepted, appropriated, and reevaluated in a continuous process.” (Larsen, 465) By providing an institution or mental health community to provide education and various contexts, the patient can become part of the solution.
In both of these articles the Anthropologist’s looked for the narrative of those that were ailing. This required that they put aside assumptions or conclusions that they and others jumped to early on. By doing this a broader understanding of the how and why emerged in a format that could assist not only in effective treatment, but also in ways for the ailing to find meaning in their experiences. As noted above, understanding does not fix all problems. But it did offer incite into small changes that can make a difference. Perhaps, with more seeking meaning within a culture the larger socioeconomic changes can be made. In fact, I would submit that it is the only way those changes ever came to be.
Bibliography
Larsen JA. 2004. "Finding meaning in first episode psychosis: experience, agency, and the cultural repertoire". Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 18 (4): 447-71.
Chapman RR. 2003. "Endangering safe motherhood in Mozambique: prenatal care as pregnancy risk". Social Science & Medicine (1982). 57 (2): 355-74.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Working Poverty and the unwanted solution
Since I was a child the term “minimum wage” has been heard from the mouths of many around me as a plea, as a protest, and as a demand for a way to be more than slaves to labor. Daily the working poor seemed to be asking, “How can we be so poor when we give so much?” To a young person it was a puzzle that was painted by their voices with broad strokes of poverty. Throughout the world its diction changed but not the colors of the “have not’s”. They were the colors of hunger, class division, repression, pain, and ignorance that all developed in my mind into a painting of wretched proportions. I remember crying one night as I wondered who could or would want to hold such a paintbrush that brought so little to so many. Yet, without a doubt the artists existed. So began my search for an answer to the destitution in business that allowed for working poverty. First I had to explore the nature of the beast, define who the potential artists are, and what could possibly be a solution to problem.
The question on how to define the right of a human worker seems to be answered in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Namely, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” Would it be reasonable to say that a certain individual that worked full-time should be able to, with all of their wages if necessary, cover this minimal standard of human rights, even if there was nothing left over for personal extra’s? As a minimal standard, shouldn’t the full-time labors of that individual be considered adequate? Or, would it be better for food and shelter to be a privilege rather than a right? Should shelter be marketed so high that banks have to liquidate in order to cover dropped mortgages? And finally, when did we as a society make these choices for our laborers?
Some have argued that what we call capitalism and free enterprise was abandoned, “long ago in the aftermath of WW I in favor of Mussolini's "corporatism," where Big Business, Big Government, and Big Finance form combines to exploit the people with monopolized prices and corrupted dollars.” (EFES, pg.1) Regardless of the cause, the byproduct is clear, social inequality. Richard Freeman, author of America Works, boldly states that, “If there were a gold medal for inequality, advanced country division, the United States would win hands down.” (Pg. 43)
With the decline of the middle class in the 1980’s, a polarization emerged in the United Sates, which became more dramatic in the 1990’s. This was due to the enormous increase in earnings of those in the top income bracket, and the stagnation of the wages of those in the bottom income bracket. (pg.49) Freeman goes on to state that, “Inequality in earnings in the United States increased so massively over a quarter-century or so of economic growth that the main beneficiaries were a small number of super-rich individuals and families.” In addition, the CPS survey ranked the top 10 percent of earners were the only group whose earnings grew at a pace comparable to the nation’s growth in productivity. But, “the CPS earnings survey understates the increase in earnings for persons with high earnings. It top-codes high earnings so that persons making more than the top-coded value (150,000 per year in 2005) are reported as earning the top amount rather than what they actually earned.” (Pg. 39) The direct result of this is inaccurate accounting of the top 10 percent and their earnings; and the growing gap is the number of people living below the poverty line, which has been steadily increasing. Richard Freeman states that, “In other words, the United States, alone among the advanced countries, lost its war on poverty.” (Pg. 53) As this gap broadens with the disparity between those that have money and those that do not, societal ills emerge; in fact it could be called the progenitor of societal ills.
Allow me to share how this looked to me when I was a ten-year-old child. My father had no insurance and shortly before my mother was admitted into the hospital paralyzed, he lost his full-time job. It was a desperate time for my family as my five older siblings and I waited for word on our mother’s condition. Eventually our father returned from the hospital and told us that our mother had a brain tumor. For years she had gone to doctors trying to gain relief for her headaches, but they never ran any tests nor did a CAT scan because we didn’t have good enough insurance. Frustrated over finding out so late, having so few choices with no insurance, my father waited nearly a week before he finally gave the “okay” to take my mother off of life-support. There was not going to be any life-saving operation. As it was, father was going to have to appeal to the state for a poor-man’s grave for my mother.
As for the next fifteen years, they are pretty much a write off for my entire family. Within a year, all I knew was gone. My family blew apart like leaves on the wind and I didn’t see them for many years to come. At the age of twelve I started working to help support myself. At fourteen I labored full-time, paid rent, and endeavored to put myself through school. My brothers had moved to Arizona and had gotten involved in dangerous things like gangs and drugs in their perceived quest of survival. My eldest sister married and moved to California, while the younger sister had difficulty in base survival. It’s hard to explain all the usable skills, contagious smiles, and brilliant minds that they had before mother died to someone who never knew them. But it is safe to say that had you seen them before and compared them to after, you would not have thought they were the same people. The point of this story is that it is not a unique one. This happens all the time in America. Over 47 million Americans in 2005’s statistics did not have health insurance. Between 2005 and 2006 the number of uninsured rose 2.2 million, with nearly 1.3 million of those being full-time workers. Over 80% of all uninsured are native or naturalized citizens. Over 80% of all uninsured are from working families. And over 70% of all uninsured Americans are from families with one or more full-time working family member. (NCHC 2008) Uninsured workers in America are becoming an epidemic. It is one of the colors of poverty that slashes into even the best-intended family and can neutralize them to the point of destitution and even homelessness.
Last year I was involved in a point-in-time homeless count for the state of Washington. It was understood and quoted in all of the coalition documents that the majority of families in America are two paychecks and/or one crisis away from being homeless. Our group’s goal had been to organize resources for the homeless, fund a homeless drop-in center, and raise social awareness with an anthology of homeless stories and artwork. As we interacted with the homeless we found their local statistics to coincide with Washington States overall statistics. For example, over half of the homeless were employed, many at more than one job; thirty percent of the homeless were veterans; and over half of the homeless were women, most of which had children either with them or couch surfing with a relative. (TYHP 2006) One of the women that I met during that time had been juggling two jobs and two kids when she fell a behind on her rent. Unfortunately, she was evicted and ended up moving her family into a motel that cost thirty dollars a night. The reason I mention her is because I had known her before she was homeless at my daughters after-school care program. She was one of those people that is well put together and works steady and hard, even with a bunch of little ones going crazy around her. She lived humbly and was not addicted to any substance, and yet, working two jobs was not enough for her to support her family here in Washington. The struggle she was going through trying to have housing for her family was not as simple as raising enough funds to move into another apartment, as if that wasn’t hard enough with first, last, and deposit. But because she was evicted it went on her credit report and now she having great difficulty finding an apartment complex that would rent to her, and will for seven years to come. According to the Department of Labor, in 2003 nearly a quarter of all workers were earning poverty level hourly wages, and in King County it takes at least four minimum wage earners to afford a two-bedroom apartment. (AW, Pg. 13; TYHP 2006) When all the facts are considered, there is little surprise that working homelessness is on the rise.
Although these stories and statistics in America are hard to stomach, our country does not hold an exclusion on working poverty. An example of the working poor outside of America would be Sufia Begum of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Sufia is illiterate but has a strong work ethic and usable skills. She borrows five taka (22 US cents) from the paikars (creditor) to buy bamboo. She then weaves the bamboo into stools, which she sells back to the paikars for a profit of fifty paisa (2 US cents). This is an example of the dadan system, traders advance loans against standing crops or product for the compulsory sale of the crops or product at a predetermined price, which is lower than the market price. (BTTP, pg. 8) This system is similar to what was used in the US after the emancipation proclamation for the laboring freed slaves. For the freedmen it became a new form of slavery, an economic one. (TSBF, Du Bois) In Chittagong, the fact is that less than twenty-seven US dollars of investment capital was preventing forty-two people in that area from progressing beyond their economic subjection. Muhammad Yunus said in regards to this situation, “It seemed to me that the existing economic system made it absolutely certain that her [Sufia’s] income would be kept perpetually at such a low level that she could never save a penny and could never invest in expanding her economic base.” (BTTP, pg. 9) This system not only holds her down but also consigned her children to live a life of penury with no exploration of knowledge, genius, or skills outside that of base survival. But the problem is greater than how it affects her home. All of her valuable skills, genius, intellect has not been developed and will never contribute to the elevation of her society as a whole. Society is not being newly enriched with new genius and therefore has become stagnant due to the grip of those in power, or the usurers.
It has been said that, “There are usurers in every society. Unless the poor can be liberated from the bondage of the money-lender, no economic programme can arrest the steady process of alienation of the poor.” (BTTP, pg. 8) It is perhaps the easiest tool of subjection because the laborer has to labor for survival, and when that consumes all their time, there is no genius or power to contest with those in whose grip they are held. With law on the employers side under the ‘employment at will’ doctrine for easy job elimination, many US workers are offered little to no security and have to jump from job to job in order to survive. This ultimately reduces the power of the individual to provide for their families in the US corporate system.
Throughout history there has been some form of subjection: be it religious, culture, race, or gender. The brightest color of subjection of our time is one of economic subjection, which is played out by our businesses, by our governments, and by our banks. I think John Stewart Mill said it best when he stated that, “There is also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation; and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more an more formidable…and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world to see it increase.” (OL, pg. 13) With the increase of working poor, one often wonders what has happened to the champions of rank and file? Or, who will stand up to the increase of economic subjection? The truth is that we can’t count on our Unions to turn this tide.
In The Future of Global Unions, Alan Howard says that, “Unions may have lost so much ground on the international playing field and have been so weakened over the past half century that they will no longer be able to provide an effective counterweight to the inequalities of capitalism. This is a race against time, and the stakes are very high. As weak as it is, organized labor, with it’s global reach, its billions in assets, tens of millions of members, thousands of employees, and historic vocation for uplifting the downtrodden, is the largest social movement on the planet and perhaps the last, best hope we have for averting the rendezvous with disaster that our profit-crazed economic system seems determined to keep.” (Pg. 64)
In some ways the answer is simple and in other ways it is complex, but what is obvious is that, “the abuse of power cannot be very much checked while the power remains,” and that, “the love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.” (SW, pg. 85; OL, pg. 105) This paper is not about overthrowing the government but it is about the restructuring of labor to conform with universal human rights. It is about the solution that no one wants to hear; it is about placing a cap on profit.
This idea came to me one day when I was pondering the problem. As researched the possibility I realized I wasn’t the only one to come up with the idea. Harry Bridges, a rank and file union leader, once said that the labor problem could be averted if there was a cap placed on profit. At the time the corporate representative laughed wanting to think that he had just made a clever jest, but he hadn’t. It is as with history that until the subjection is contested, societal balance will be unachievable. “The matter is certainly not improved by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on one side and subjection on the other; and that every concession which the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any warning, be recalled.” (SW, pg. 43) So we need to look at this from the bottom up rather than the top down, and step outside of the current governing system.
Lets say that I work full-time for a company where everyone who works there earns within 10% of each others wages, regardless of position, experience, and education. As productivity and profit increase, the excess trickles down to the employees until their wages and benefits are within 10% of those at other businesses in their city. At this point the excess profit goes into a city holding tank where it is used to assist other companies with the community reach the same level of productivity. Where the money goes would be determined by a board represented by the contributing company members, social members, education leaders, and those people within the community that would petition use of such funds in the generation of their ideas, companies, or education. Now imagine all the companies within the city using this trickle-over and profit-balance until over-lapping business efforts blanket the entire community. So what happens when the cities profit-excess exceeds that of other cities within the state? Well, it trickles into a state capitol tank to work in conjunction with other cities to assist with their productivity and profit elevation. As you can probably see by now that an equalizing is taking effect that would inevitably spread from company, to city, to state, to country, and to the world until all human rights, education, and labor are equalized. What would be the results of such liberation from economic subjection?
Business creation would not be for a selfish reason, but rather a social one. As the social aspects of society are more awarded then the alienation of man from their labor will be reduced, along with many of the social diseases that are created by this accumulation competitiveness of a capitalistic society. As the world becomes more productive, so will their benefits become more lucrative due to the increase in societal productivity. By the expansions back into genius from strict capitol gain, productive behavior will not exist solely in business and where it does it will branch out into untested waters due to liberation of thought from under the suppression of money. Through the increase of intellectual diversity our societies and freedoms will be improved upon. New outlets will be explored, previously forgotten due to the repression of wages and rule of the dollar. The challenge would not exist for accumulation of wealth, but who can contribute more through genius to society – ultimately leading to the improvement and progression of the society, rather than the harnessing of the poor for greater capital gain. In the words of Muhammad Yunus, “Poverty can be eradicated in our lifetime. We only need the political will.” (BP, pg. 23)
It will not be known exactly what will emerge from such a broad range of explored genius, because it has never been done. True opportunity has not been available to society as a mass and cannot until we reach as a society our universal human rights, which includes equality of economics. But as once people doubted the contribution women could make to society, I imagine our communities will be greatly advanced with the whole of the global society having increased opportunity to explore their natural gifts in a socialist structure. “The real wage-productivity paradox is not about accounting. It is about another aspect of America’s exceptional labor market: the economics that put so much of the growth of productivity into the pockets of so few.” (AW, pg. 40) This is where the battle should begin, by the distribution of profit to all the laborers that generated it in the first place. And perhaps, as society becomes stronger through it’s individuals, the painting of the worker will be full of so many rich colors’ that poverty’s colors will disappear along with the paintbrushes that put them there to begin with. That is if we have the courage to embrace the “unwanted” solution.
Bibliography
Yunus, Muhammad, and Alan Jolis. Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs, 1999.
Howard, Alan. “The Future of Global Unions: Is Solidarity Still Forever?” Dissent Fall (2007): 62-70.
Adelman, Larry. “Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (2008)
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/larry_adelman.cfm
National Coalition on Health Care. “Health Insurance Coverage.” National Coalition on Health Care (2008)
http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml
Hultberg, Nelson. “Economic Fascism and Economic Slavery.”
Mill, John Stuart, and David Spitz. On Liberty. New York: Norton, 1975.
Freeman, Richard B. America Works: The Exceptional U.S. Labor Market. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.
Whistler, Mark. “Starvation Wages.” IA (March 2008)
http://community.investopedia.com/news/IA/2008/starvation_wages.aspx
Kollontai, A., and Alix Holt. Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Westport, Conn: L. Hill, 1977.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications, 1961.
State of Washington, Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness (July 2006)
http://www.endhomelessnesswa.org/WSCH/About%20Homelessness/abouthomelessness.html
Ferguson, Ronald. “The Working Poverty Trap.” BNET (Winter 2005)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_158/ai_n8680972
The question on how to define the right of a human worker seems to be answered in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Namely, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” Would it be reasonable to say that a certain individual that worked full-time should be able to, with all of their wages if necessary, cover this minimal standard of human rights, even if there was nothing left over for personal extra’s? As a minimal standard, shouldn’t the full-time labors of that individual be considered adequate? Or, would it be better for food and shelter to be a privilege rather than a right? Should shelter be marketed so high that banks have to liquidate in order to cover dropped mortgages? And finally, when did we as a society make these choices for our laborers?
Some have argued that what we call capitalism and free enterprise was abandoned, “long ago in the aftermath of WW I in favor of Mussolini's "corporatism," where Big Business, Big Government, and Big Finance form combines to exploit the people with monopolized prices and corrupted dollars.” (EFES, pg.1) Regardless of the cause, the byproduct is clear, social inequality. Richard Freeman, author of America Works, boldly states that, “If there were a gold medal for inequality, advanced country division, the United States would win hands down.” (Pg. 43)
With the decline of the middle class in the 1980’s, a polarization emerged in the United Sates, which became more dramatic in the 1990’s. This was due to the enormous increase in earnings of those in the top income bracket, and the stagnation of the wages of those in the bottom income bracket. (pg.49) Freeman goes on to state that, “Inequality in earnings in the United States increased so massively over a quarter-century or so of economic growth that the main beneficiaries were a small number of super-rich individuals and families.” In addition, the CPS survey ranked the top 10 percent of earners were the only group whose earnings grew at a pace comparable to the nation’s growth in productivity. But, “the CPS earnings survey understates the increase in earnings for persons with high earnings. It top-codes high earnings so that persons making more than the top-coded value (150,000 per year in 2005) are reported as earning the top amount rather than what they actually earned.” (Pg. 39) The direct result of this is inaccurate accounting of the top 10 percent and their earnings; and the growing gap is the number of people living below the poverty line, which has been steadily increasing. Richard Freeman states that, “In other words, the United States, alone among the advanced countries, lost its war on poverty.” (Pg. 53) As this gap broadens with the disparity between those that have money and those that do not, societal ills emerge; in fact it could be called the progenitor of societal ills.
Allow me to share how this looked to me when I was a ten-year-old child. My father had no insurance and shortly before my mother was admitted into the hospital paralyzed, he lost his full-time job. It was a desperate time for my family as my five older siblings and I waited for word on our mother’s condition. Eventually our father returned from the hospital and told us that our mother had a brain tumor. For years she had gone to doctors trying to gain relief for her headaches, but they never ran any tests nor did a CAT scan because we didn’t have good enough insurance. Frustrated over finding out so late, having so few choices with no insurance, my father waited nearly a week before he finally gave the “okay” to take my mother off of life-support. There was not going to be any life-saving operation. As it was, father was going to have to appeal to the state for a poor-man’s grave for my mother.
As for the next fifteen years, they are pretty much a write off for my entire family. Within a year, all I knew was gone. My family blew apart like leaves on the wind and I didn’t see them for many years to come. At the age of twelve I started working to help support myself. At fourteen I labored full-time, paid rent, and endeavored to put myself through school. My brothers had moved to Arizona and had gotten involved in dangerous things like gangs and drugs in their perceived quest of survival. My eldest sister married and moved to California, while the younger sister had difficulty in base survival. It’s hard to explain all the usable skills, contagious smiles, and brilliant minds that they had before mother died to someone who never knew them. But it is safe to say that had you seen them before and compared them to after, you would not have thought they were the same people. The point of this story is that it is not a unique one. This happens all the time in America. Over 47 million Americans in 2005’s statistics did not have health insurance. Between 2005 and 2006 the number of uninsured rose 2.2 million, with nearly 1.3 million of those being full-time workers. Over 80% of all uninsured are native or naturalized citizens. Over 80% of all uninsured are from working families. And over 70% of all uninsured Americans are from families with one or more full-time working family member. (NCHC 2008) Uninsured workers in America are becoming an epidemic. It is one of the colors of poverty that slashes into even the best-intended family and can neutralize them to the point of destitution and even homelessness.
Last year I was involved in a point-in-time homeless count for the state of Washington. It was understood and quoted in all of the coalition documents that the majority of families in America are two paychecks and/or one crisis away from being homeless. Our group’s goal had been to organize resources for the homeless, fund a homeless drop-in center, and raise social awareness with an anthology of homeless stories and artwork. As we interacted with the homeless we found their local statistics to coincide with Washington States overall statistics. For example, over half of the homeless were employed, many at more than one job; thirty percent of the homeless were veterans; and over half of the homeless were women, most of which had children either with them or couch surfing with a relative. (TYHP 2006) One of the women that I met during that time had been juggling two jobs and two kids when she fell a behind on her rent. Unfortunately, she was evicted and ended up moving her family into a motel that cost thirty dollars a night. The reason I mention her is because I had known her before she was homeless at my daughters after-school care program. She was one of those people that is well put together and works steady and hard, even with a bunch of little ones going crazy around her. She lived humbly and was not addicted to any substance, and yet, working two jobs was not enough for her to support her family here in Washington. The struggle she was going through trying to have housing for her family was not as simple as raising enough funds to move into another apartment, as if that wasn’t hard enough with first, last, and deposit. But because she was evicted it went on her credit report and now she having great difficulty finding an apartment complex that would rent to her, and will for seven years to come. According to the Department of Labor, in 2003 nearly a quarter of all workers were earning poverty level hourly wages, and in King County it takes at least four minimum wage earners to afford a two-bedroom apartment. (AW, Pg. 13; TYHP 2006) When all the facts are considered, there is little surprise that working homelessness is on the rise.
Although these stories and statistics in America are hard to stomach, our country does not hold an exclusion on working poverty. An example of the working poor outside of America would be Sufia Begum of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Sufia is illiterate but has a strong work ethic and usable skills. She borrows five taka (22 US cents) from the paikars (creditor) to buy bamboo. She then weaves the bamboo into stools, which she sells back to the paikars for a profit of fifty paisa (2 US cents). This is an example of the dadan system, traders advance loans against standing crops or product for the compulsory sale of the crops or product at a predetermined price, which is lower than the market price. (BTTP, pg. 8) This system is similar to what was used in the US after the emancipation proclamation for the laboring freed slaves. For the freedmen it became a new form of slavery, an economic one. (TSBF, Du Bois) In Chittagong, the fact is that less than twenty-seven US dollars of investment capital was preventing forty-two people in that area from progressing beyond their economic subjection. Muhammad Yunus said in regards to this situation, “It seemed to me that the existing economic system made it absolutely certain that her [Sufia’s] income would be kept perpetually at such a low level that she could never save a penny and could never invest in expanding her economic base.” (BTTP, pg. 9) This system not only holds her down but also consigned her children to live a life of penury with no exploration of knowledge, genius, or skills outside that of base survival. But the problem is greater than how it affects her home. All of her valuable skills, genius, intellect has not been developed and will never contribute to the elevation of her society as a whole. Society is not being newly enriched with new genius and therefore has become stagnant due to the grip of those in power, or the usurers.
It has been said that, “There are usurers in every society. Unless the poor can be liberated from the bondage of the money-lender, no economic programme can arrest the steady process of alienation of the poor.” (BTTP, pg. 8) It is perhaps the easiest tool of subjection because the laborer has to labor for survival, and when that consumes all their time, there is no genius or power to contest with those in whose grip they are held. With law on the employers side under the ‘employment at will’ doctrine for easy job elimination, many US workers are offered little to no security and have to jump from job to job in order to survive. This ultimately reduces the power of the individual to provide for their families in the US corporate system.
Throughout history there has been some form of subjection: be it religious, culture, race, or gender. The brightest color of subjection of our time is one of economic subjection, which is played out by our businesses, by our governments, and by our banks. I think John Stewart Mill said it best when he stated that, “There is also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation; and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more an more formidable…and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world to see it increase.” (OL, pg. 13) With the increase of working poor, one often wonders what has happened to the champions of rank and file? Or, who will stand up to the increase of economic subjection? The truth is that we can’t count on our Unions to turn this tide.
In The Future of Global Unions, Alan Howard says that, “Unions may have lost so much ground on the international playing field and have been so weakened over the past half century that they will no longer be able to provide an effective counterweight to the inequalities of capitalism. This is a race against time, and the stakes are very high. As weak as it is, organized labor, with it’s global reach, its billions in assets, tens of millions of members, thousands of employees, and historic vocation for uplifting the downtrodden, is the largest social movement on the planet and perhaps the last, best hope we have for averting the rendezvous with disaster that our profit-crazed economic system seems determined to keep.” (Pg. 64)
In some ways the answer is simple and in other ways it is complex, but what is obvious is that, “the abuse of power cannot be very much checked while the power remains,” and that, “the love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.” (SW, pg. 85; OL, pg. 105) This paper is not about overthrowing the government but it is about the restructuring of labor to conform with universal human rights. It is about the solution that no one wants to hear; it is about placing a cap on profit.
This idea came to me one day when I was pondering the problem. As researched the possibility I realized I wasn’t the only one to come up with the idea. Harry Bridges, a rank and file union leader, once said that the labor problem could be averted if there was a cap placed on profit. At the time the corporate representative laughed wanting to think that he had just made a clever jest, but he hadn’t. It is as with history that until the subjection is contested, societal balance will be unachievable. “The matter is certainly not improved by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on one side and subjection on the other; and that every concession which the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any warning, be recalled.” (SW, pg. 43) So we need to look at this from the bottom up rather than the top down, and step outside of the current governing system.
Lets say that I work full-time for a company where everyone who works there earns within 10% of each others wages, regardless of position, experience, and education. As productivity and profit increase, the excess trickles down to the employees until their wages and benefits are within 10% of those at other businesses in their city. At this point the excess profit goes into a city holding tank where it is used to assist other companies with the community reach the same level of productivity. Where the money goes would be determined by a board represented by the contributing company members, social members, education leaders, and those people within the community that would petition use of such funds in the generation of their ideas, companies, or education. Now imagine all the companies within the city using this trickle-over and profit-balance until over-lapping business efforts blanket the entire community. So what happens when the cities profit-excess exceeds that of other cities within the state? Well, it trickles into a state capitol tank to work in conjunction with other cities to assist with their productivity and profit elevation. As you can probably see by now that an equalizing is taking effect that would inevitably spread from company, to city, to state, to country, and to the world until all human rights, education, and labor are equalized. What would be the results of such liberation from economic subjection?
Business creation would not be for a selfish reason, but rather a social one. As the social aspects of society are more awarded then the alienation of man from their labor will be reduced, along with many of the social diseases that are created by this accumulation competitiveness of a capitalistic society. As the world becomes more productive, so will their benefits become more lucrative due to the increase in societal productivity. By the expansions back into genius from strict capitol gain, productive behavior will not exist solely in business and where it does it will branch out into untested waters due to liberation of thought from under the suppression of money. Through the increase of intellectual diversity our societies and freedoms will be improved upon. New outlets will be explored, previously forgotten due to the repression of wages and rule of the dollar. The challenge would not exist for accumulation of wealth, but who can contribute more through genius to society – ultimately leading to the improvement and progression of the society, rather than the harnessing of the poor for greater capital gain. In the words of Muhammad Yunus, “Poverty can be eradicated in our lifetime. We only need the political will.” (BP, pg. 23)
It will not be known exactly what will emerge from such a broad range of explored genius, because it has never been done. True opportunity has not been available to society as a mass and cannot until we reach as a society our universal human rights, which includes equality of economics. But as once people doubted the contribution women could make to society, I imagine our communities will be greatly advanced with the whole of the global society having increased opportunity to explore their natural gifts in a socialist structure. “The real wage-productivity paradox is not about accounting. It is about another aspect of America’s exceptional labor market: the economics that put so much of the growth of productivity into the pockets of so few.” (AW, pg. 40) This is where the battle should begin, by the distribution of profit to all the laborers that generated it in the first place. And perhaps, as society becomes stronger through it’s individuals, the painting of the worker will be full of so many rich colors’ that poverty’s colors will disappear along with the paintbrushes that put them there to begin with. That is if we have the courage to embrace the “unwanted” solution.
Bibliography
Yunus, Muhammad, and Alan Jolis. Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs, 1999.
Howard, Alan. “The Future of Global Unions: Is Solidarity Still Forever?” Dissent Fall (2007): 62-70.
Adelman, Larry. “Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (2008)
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/larry_adelman.cfm
National Coalition on Health Care. “Health Insurance Coverage.” National Coalition on Health Care (2008)
http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml
Hultberg, Nelson. “Economic Fascism and Economic Slavery.”
Mill, John Stuart, and David Spitz. On Liberty. New York: Norton, 1975.
Freeman, Richard B. America Works: The Exceptional U.S. Labor Market. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.
Whistler, Mark. “Starvation Wages.” IA (March 2008)
http://community.investopedia.com/news/IA/2008/starvation_wages.aspx
Kollontai, A., and Alix Holt. Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Westport, Conn: L. Hill, 1977.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications, 1961.
State of Washington, Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness (July 2006)
http://www.endhomelessnesswa.org/WSCH/About%20Homelessness/abouthomelessness.html
Ferguson, Ronald. “The Working Poverty Trap.” BNET (Winter 2005)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_158/ai_n8680972
Labor
While the industrial era sprang from the demands of war it introduced several changes that eventually increased the standard of living. These were the increased of employment associated with the increase in production and machinery. Ultimately, this drew larger groups of people into cities. Then things changed again as society progressed into the post-industrial era. With this new era various kinds of work emerged. For example, the development of the assembly line and mechanical production work ironically deskilled many workers by becoming more specialized. To explain how this is transforming our economic infrastructure, I will brake it down into the domestic changes, the international changes, and the emergence of globalization.
On the domestic labor front unions are having a hard time. The development of a segmented labor market eventually hurt the unions by making it difficult for small groups of workers to organize. On top of this, was the Taft-Hartley Act that limited the rights of unions to negotiate collective bargaining agreements, which lead to the decline in unionism and the weakening of domestic workers. (Organizing Power, pg. 49) In contrast, the employers were empowered through “employment at will” which allowed companies to eliminate jobs at the discretion of the employer. (America Works, pg. 16) Also, with the rise of global businesses, domestic labor has had to turn to consumer-worker alliances in order to use their working power along with their purchasing power in an effort to open up new domestic structures for solidarity. (Consumer-Worker Alliances, pg. 373)
Accompanying these domestic changes, international labor, on the other hand, saw the rise of big labor, or global labor chains, and big box business. An example of this is Costco. According to Gary Kotzen, the Vice President of General Merchandise, Costco has six global strategies: leverage, standardization, branded merchandise, private label, reputation, and becoming known as a global company. By controlling every aspect of the business, from overseas where the product is generated to where it is sold, the business has become one of volume and saving money by being the middleman and controlling the logistics. This has developed certain economic trends within globalization that are responsible for shifting the balance of market power.
Where once the manufactures would tell the retailers how many goods to purchase from them, now the retailers tell the manufactures exactly how much they want of their product, which can be credited to the growing power of the consumers and technology. By tracking exactly what the consumer is spending currency on, manufactures can predict how much of a certain product is required and where. (Wal-Mart) Also, with the dispersion of the industrial supply chains into other countries and new production centers being generated, globalization has opened up a whole new can of worms. A few of these are the exploitation of child laborers, corruption, hazardous working conditions, excessive hours, poor wages, and agreements between governments. (Beyond Corporate Codes, pg.21) Gay Siedman looks at this corporate role with “concerns about how to regulate corporate behavior across borders.” He determined that a nationally based system of corporate regulation would be required above and beyond corporate codes of conduct. (Monitoring Multinationals, pg. 388-403) That it would require the efforts of government, corporate business, and suppliers together to address these concerns of globalization.
By looking at the changes in domestic labor, international labor, and the development of globalization, the post-industrial era has become one of challenge to both the domestic and international worker. Although one may argue that it has enhanced productivity and efficiency through the new logistics of corporate business, it can be concluded that the strain on the working class is felt economically on both sides of the borders.
Essay 2
During the twentieth century there were several laws that dramatically affected the US labor movement. They are the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Wagner Act), the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Taft-Hartley Act. Some of these acts benefited workers while others suppressed them.
The Aid to Families with Dependent Children was designed to aid dependent children from poverty-stricken families. (America Works, pg. 98) Many of the mothers were single parents and what was called “welfare mothers.” One end of political thought believed it was better to help support the mother while she supported her children. The conservatives believed it was better to outsource the parenting and make single-parent families more like two-parent families. Although the AFDC was never enough for a single-parent to live on, the sheer number of recipients boomed. So the AFDC was followed by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) to rectify the number of welfare recipients, and it succeeded. The number of recipients dropped from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million in 2005 and welfare single-mothers were employed at multiple minimum wage jobs in order to support the children that they rarely saw.
Prior to this, the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935 was passed. (When Affirmative Action Was White, pg. 53-55) The Wagner Act was good for unions in that it made employers unions illegal. Workers could also freely elect monitor workers and officers in their unions while utilizing successful union strategies from the past. Strikes and pickets were legalized and the power of the unions and the workers grew. Times were only made better when the Wagner Act was shortly followed by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Now, with federally set minimum wage and safety oversights, unions thrived and “unfair labor practices” were starting to be addressed.
The enthusiasm was checked when a strike wave through 1945 and 1946 brought a labor law reform to the top of the domestic policy agenda. (When Affirmative Action Was White, pg. 61) In 1947 the Labor-Management Relation Act (LMRA, or the Taft-Hartley Act) as passed when the pivotal Southern Democrat vote came in on the side of the Republicans. By giving them the supermajority, Truman’s veto ability was disabled. His opinion was that it was “a slave labor bill.” (When Affirmative Action Was White, pg. 62) The Taft-Hartley Act limited the rights of unions to negotiate collective bargaining agreements and barred the use of secondary boycotts, picketing, and strikes. In addition, it claimed that close-shop unionism was illegal and employers could higher non-union workers while pursuing “unfair labor” suits in NLRB. This reduced the effectiveness of unions and tied their hands with red tape.
By the 1970s, labor for many, especially African-American and female workers, was scrapping the bottom of the barrel. The hero’s of equality and fair wages did not diminish, just the laws helping them. Real hourly earning for much of the workforce had lowered while productivity had increased. (America Works, pg. 36) And it is on this foundation and history that future reforms of our labor market will be made to equalize the distribution of income and power.
On the domestic labor front unions are having a hard time. The development of a segmented labor market eventually hurt the unions by making it difficult for small groups of workers to organize. On top of this, was the Taft-Hartley Act that limited the rights of unions to negotiate collective bargaining agreements, which lead to the decline in unionism and the weakening of domestic workers. (Organizing Power, pg. 49) In contrast, the employers were empowered through “employment at will” which allowed companies to eliminate jobs at the discretion of the employer. (America Works, pg. 16) Also, with the rise of global businesses, domestic labor has had to turn to consumer-worker alliances in order to use their working power along with their purchasing power in an effort to open up new domestic structures for solidarity. (Consumer-Worker Alliances, pg. 373)
Accompanying these domestic changes, international labor, on the other hand, saw the rise of big labor, or global labor chains, and big box business. An example of this is Costco. According to Gary Kotzen, the Vice President of General Merchandise, Costco has six global strategies: leverage, standardization, branded merchandise, private label, reputation, and becoming known as a global company. By controlling every aspect of the business, from overseas where the product is generated to where it is sold, the business has become one of volume and saving money by being the middleman and controlling the logistics. This has developed certain economic trends within globalization that are responsible for shifting the balance of market power.
Where once the manufactures would tell the retailers how many goods to purchase from them, now the retailers tell the manufactures exactly how much they want of their product, which can be credited to the growing power of the consumers and technology. By tracking exactly what the consumer is spending currency on, manufactures can predict how much of a certain product is required and where. (Wal-Mart) Also, with the dispersion of the industrial supply chains into other countries and new production centers being generated, globalization has opened up a whole new can of worms. A few of these are the exploitation of child laborers, corruption, hazardous working conditions, excessive hours, poor wages, and agreements between governments. (Beyond Corporate Codes, pg.21) Gay Siedman looks at this corporate role with “concerns about how to regulate corporate behavior across borders.” He determined that a nationally based system of corporate regulation would be required above and beyond corporate codes of conduct. (Monitoring Multinationals, pg. 388-403) That it would require the efforts of government, corporate business, and suppliers together to address these concerns of globalization.
By looking at the changes in domestic labor, international labor, and the development of globalization, the post-industrial era has become one of challenge to both the domestic and international worker. Although one may argue that it has enhanced productivity and efficiency through the new logistics of corporate business, it can be concluded that the strain on the working class is felt economically on both sides of the borders.
Essay 2
During the twentieth century there were several laws that dramatically affected the US labor movement. They are the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Wagner Act), the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Taft-Hartley Act. Some of these acts benefited workers while others suppressed them.
The Aid to Families with Dependent Children was designed to aid dependent children from poverty-stricken families. (America Works, pg. 98) Many of the mothers were single parents and what was called “welfare mothers.” One end of political thought believed it was better to help support the mother while she supported her children. The conservatives believed it was better to outsource the parenting and make single-parent families more like two-parent families. Although the AFDC was never enough for a single-parent to live on, the sheer number of recipients boomed. So the AFDC was followed by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) to rectify the number of welfare recipients, and it succeeded. The number of recipients dropped from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million in 2005 and welfare single-mothers were employed at multiple minimum wage jobs in order to support the children that they rarely saw.
Prior to this, the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935 was passed. (When Affirmative Action Was White, pg. 53-55) The Wagner Act was good for unions in that it made employers unions illegal. Workers could also freely elect monitor workers and officers in their unions while utilizing successful union strategies from the past. Strikes and pickets were legalized and the power of the unions and the workers grew. Times were only made better when the Wagner Act was shortly followed by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Now, with federally set minimum wage and safety oversights, unions thrived and “unfair labor practices” were starting to be addressed.
The enthusiasm was checked when a strike wave through 1945 and 1946 brought a labor law reform to the top of the domestic policy agenda. (When Affirmative Action Was White, pg. 61) In 1947 the Labor-Management Relation Act (LMRA, or the Taft-Hartley Act) as passed when the pivotal Southern Democrat vote came in on the side of the Republicans. By giving them the supermajority, Truman’s veto ability was disabled. His opinion was that it was “a slave labor bill.” (When Affirmative Action Was White, pg. 62) The Taft-Hartley Act limited the rights of unions to negotiate collective bargaining agreements and barred the use of secondary boycotts, picketing, and strikes. In addition, it claimed that close-shop unionism was illegal and employers could higher non-union workers while pursuing “unfair labor” suits in NLRB. This reduced the effectiveness of unions and tied their hands with red tape.
By the 1970s, labor for many, especially African-American and female workers, was scrapping the bottom of the barrel. The hero’s of equality and fair wages did not diminish, just the laws helping them. Real hourly earning for much of the workforce had lowered while productivity had increased. (America Works, pg. 36) And it is on this foundation and history that future reforms of our labor market will be made to equalize the distribution of income and power.
"Slave-Morality"
In order to understand the concept of “slave morality” one must first understand how the democratic prejudices of the age eschewed the ideas of “good” and “bad” which created the language of morality. Friedrich Nietzsche states in his first treatise that, “with respect to morality’s genealogy this appears to me to be an essential insight; that it is only now being discovered is due to the inhibiting influence that democratic prejudice exercise in the modern world with regard to all questions of origins.” (Pg. 12) With the “essential insight” being that the concept of “good” did not emerge from a nonegostistic actions, as we currently view it, but rather as a defining concept of being a noble or an aristocrat.
In order to understand “our problem,” Nietzsche inquires where the judgment of “good” originated. He said, “it is of no small interest to discover that often in those words and roots that designate “good” that main nuance still shimmers through with respect to which the nobles felt themselves to be humans of a higher rank.” (Pg. 13) Therefore the good morality was to be brave, noble, knightly, well-born, capable, rich, and strong (esthlos, agathos, arya, being some of the Greek words that translate into the above descriptions.) This morality became a rule where superiority in politics was the same as “superiority of soul,” a standard for truth. Therefore, the inverse was applied to those who did not have a higher political station; they were labeled “bad,” “ugly,” “ill-born,” “base,” “cowardly,” “ignoble.” (Pg. 14) The poor or common man could not say otherwise because the act of naming came only from those with power, which he does not possess. This is what Nietzsche claims, instigated the slave revolt.
For all those that were repressed or conquered, tormented in their lowly station, the Jews that dared to take their revenge on the aristocratic conquerors in an inversion of the “good morality,” or by what Nietzsche calls a spiritual revenge. They said that it is, “The miserable alone are the good; the poor, powerless, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the only blessed in God, for them alone is there blessedness.” (Pg. 16) This is what is referred to as the “slave morality;” namely, where the weak or bad justify their lack and invert the bad morality into a good morality. For example, the poor are humble, god chooses the weak, and those that suffer will inherit the earth. It is this reactive attitude and psychology of resentment that reveals what is unappealing and unattractive about slave morality.
Where truth becomes that of a lie, and bitterness it’s sword, slave morality starts a war with “the power-holders.” It grows out of revenge or hate described as, “the deepest and most sublime hate, namely an ideal-creating, value-reshaping hate whose like has never before existed on earth,” but it doesn’t end there. According to Nietzsche, it finds it’s most unappealing form in a “new love” that is “reaching out, as it were, in the realm of light and of height, for the goals of that hate – for victory, for booty, for seduction.” (Pg. 17) This “toxication” spread very successfully until it triumphed over all other ideals, which is its excuse as well. The reason no one remembers this slave revolt in morality was because it was two-thousand-years ago and was forgotten due to its complete victory. (Pg. 18)
“Slave-morality always needs and opposite and external world,” in order to exist. (Pg. 19) In essence the “good” is called “bad” and the “bad” is called “good.” In the beginning, “the well-born” simply felt themselves to be the ‘happy’; they did not first have to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies.” (Pg. 20) Although morality is used in a broader sense by Nietzsche, it is where the paradigm shifts. As stated in his prose, “take a look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on earth,” which I believe is his entire objective of writing this genealogy of morality. (Pg. 26) Whether it can be historically supported or no, Nietzsche wants the origin of why we think what we do, do what we do, believe what we do, to be questioned so that the problem of value can be solved.
In order to understand “our problem,” Nietzsche inquires where the judgment of “good” originated. He said, “it is of no small interest to discover that often in those words and roots that designate “good” that main nuance still shimmers through with respect to which the nobles felt themselves to be humans of a higher rank.” (Pg. 13) Therefore the good morality was to be brave, noble, knightly, well-born, capable, rich, and strong (esthlos, agathos, arya, being some of the Greek words that translate into the above descriptions.) This morality became a rule where superiority in politics was the same as “superiority of soul,” a standard for truth. Therefore, the inverse was applied to those who did not have a higher political station; they were labeled “bad,” “ugly,” “ill-born,” “base,” “cowardly,” “ignoble.” (Pg. 14) The poor or common man could not say otherwise because the act of naming came only from those with power, which he does not possess. This is what Nietzsche claims, instigated the slave revolt.
For all those that were repressed or conquered, tormented in their lowly station, the Jews that dared to take their revenge on the aristocratic conquerors in an inversion of the “good morality,” or by what Nietzsche calls a spiritual revenge. They said that it is, “The miserable alone are the good; the poor, powerless, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the only blessed in God, for them alone is there blessedness.” (Pg. 16) This is what is referred to as the “slave morality;” namely, where the weak or bad justify their lack and invert the bad morality into a good morality. For example, the poor are humble, god chooses the weak, and those that suffer will inherit the earth. It is this reactive attitude and psychology of resentment that reveals what is unappealing and unattractive about slave morality.
Where truth becomes that of a lie, and bitterness it’s sword, slave morality starts a war with “the power-holders.” It grows out of revenge or hate described as, “the deepest and most sublime hate, namely an ideal-creating, value-reshaping hate whose like has never before existed on earth,” but it doesn’t end there. According to Nietzsche, it finds it’s most unappealing form in a “new love” that is “reaching out, as it were, in the realm of light and of height, for the goals of that hate – for victory, for booty, for seduction.” (Pg. 17) This “toxication” spread very successfully until it triumphed over all other ideals, which is its excuse as well. The reason no one remembers this slave revolt in morality was because it was two-thousand-years ago and was forgotten due to its complete victory. (Pg. 18)
“Slave-morality always needs and opposite and external world,” in order to exist. (Pg. 19) In essence the “good” is called “bad” and the “bad” is called “good.” In the beginning, “the well-born” simply felt themselves to be the ‘happy’; they did not first have to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies.” (Pg. 20) Although morality is used in a broader sense by Nietzsche, it is where the paradigm shifts. As stated in his prose, “take a look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on earth,” which I believe is his entire objective of writing this genealogy of morality. (Pg. 26) Whether it can be historically supported or no, Nietzsche wants the origin of why we think what we do, do what we do, believe what we do, to be questioned so that the problem of value can be solved.
"modern" societies?
The idea that modern societies are not modern enough is linked to the slowing effect of custom, according to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Custom is the many-headed tyrant that controls with the whip of “status quo,” thus preventing the development of modernity within our societies. Mill states that, “society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression … it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.” (Pg. 4) In order to prevent this, an understanding needs to be reached on how custom does this and how it reveals itself. The heads on this tyrant take shape and form in our society as the burdens of tradition, the intolerance of individuality, the hindrance of human genius and advancement, and the subjection of women.
Currently, custom prevails on the legs of precedent. It is the “what has been” or the tradition. Mill states, “yet to conform to custom merely as custom does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Mill implies that a virulent hold onto the past inevitably generates a lack of history within a society, that they are inversely related. Under the yoke of conforming to an approved standard all originality is lost and the standard becomes ultimately one of no color, no desire, and no ingenuity. And the people within that society become without any marked character due to its loss of originality and adaptability. This generates what Mill likes to call “dead ideas” and “dead beliefs” that can only be hedged by new ideas and new beliefs. “There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people.” (Pg. 33) So what is required is a liberty of atmosphere which can only be realized by the release of precedent or tradition.
Mill also states that, “In this age the quiet surface of routine is as often ruffled by attempts to resuscitate past evils as to introduce new benefits,” which plays out on the set public opinion and it’s intolerance of individuality. If one were to wake up the veritable lion of “status quo” it will attack, as history can attest. Far too often when a fiery revolutionary hero or free thinker is spoken of it’s chilled by the tale of how public opinion brutally silenced them to the point of death, a terrifying deterrent to those that would attempt to elevate their expression and activism. For example, Socrates, who was charged at his tribunal as a “corrupter of youth” and was put to death. (Pg. 23) So it is no surprise that when such a one could meet such an end that another free thinker would rather choose discretion than jump into the lions den. To society this discretion has become a reasonable art, but to Mill, “the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.” (Pg. 29) This is where the lion becomes self-feeding by generating it’s own tyranny of the majority where many progressive individuals are lost by either suppression or capitulation. As in all things, “there is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence,” and so it would take a significant persuasion of public opinion to be tolerant before the individual can be free.
Unfortunately, Mill states, “Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either.” (Pg.28) This paradox is a trap for human progression in society because “genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”(Pg. 62) The freedom of opinion and the freedom of expressing an opinion are necessary for society’s genius to be healthy and active. However, Mill does not go so far as to say that this freedom will put an end to all evils, only that without genius societal advancement becomes difficult; an event that has been witnessed in the stagnation of many “modern” countries. He also goes on to say that the value of a country is ultimately “the worth of the individuals composing it.” (Pg. 113) He calls this the government of mankind and it is this government’s break from custom that will be the leading step into a more modern society and the advancement of culture.
Another prevalent yoke of custom is on the necks of women. In The Subjection of Women, Mill raises concerns for the, “disqualified half of the human race.” (Pg. 108) Mill argues the capacities of the female gender and its fitness to being “exceptional” is primarily due to opportunity. “How are they to be answered if that which requires to be answered is not spoken? Or how can the answer be known to be satisfactory if the objectors have no opportunity of showing that it is unsatisfactory?” (Pg. 36) He goes on to state that when historically women were allotted an opportunity they did very well for the “weak sex”, in some cases much better than men, as in the case of Queen Elizabeth and Margaret of Austria. (Pg. 59) Although, he does not specifically address upper versus lower class women, it is implied that the exceptional woman is bourgeois or upper class. He states that, “there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit…due provision being made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a family,” but only a few women could afford it. (Pg. 52) In addition, it is the woman’s duty to rear the children in the family economics. According to Mill, by empowering society’s women, men would no longer be corrupted by a sense of entitlement to privileges that they have not earned, and the family would change from a school of despotism to a school of virtues of freedom. (Pg. 47)
In order for “modern” societies to become more “modern” The sword to slay the hydra-headed beast called “custom” is the help of new values, created within and answering the needs of the people, that will strengthen the society as a whole. It can only successfully win power from those groups in society that are hostile to it by holding to these new norms and ideals. (Pg. 249) This would be enabled the reduction of repressing governments. Mill says that society is at fault and the cure is less government, not a new government. In order for the individual to be sovereign it needs to have the freedom to pursue it with minimal compulsion. Once that can be obtained then the value, or principle foundation, of life can be achieved in human happiness. By the abolition of traditions yoke, the intolerance of individuality through tyranny of the majority, the hindrance of human genius and advancement, and the subjection of women, Mill states that society would be able to advance to a more modern, a moral state of existence. According to Mill this is the very definition of liberty as “pursuing our own good in our own way,” which leads to our well being as people, families, and society as a whole. (xviii)
Bibliography
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1978, originally published in 1859. Indianapolis, Indiana.
John Stuart Mill, Subjection of Women, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1988, originally published in 1869.
Currently, custom prevails on the legs of precedent. It is the “what has been” or the tradition. Mill states, “yet to conform to custom merely as custom does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Mill implies that a virulent hold onto the past inevitably generates a lack of history within a society, that they are inversely related. Under the yoke of conforming to an approved standard all originality is lost and the standard becomes ultimately one of no color, no desire, and no ingenuity. And the people within that society become without any marked character due to its loss of originality and adaptability. This generates what Mill likes to call “dead ideas” and “dead beliefs” that can only be hedged by new ideas and new beliefs. “There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people.” (Pg. 33) So what is required is a liberty of atmosphere which can only be realized by the release of precedent or tradition.
Mill also states that, “In this age the quiet surface of routine is as often ruffled by attempts to resuscitate past evils as to introduce new benefits,” which plays out on the set public opinion and it’s intolerance of individuality. If one were to wake up the veritable lion of “status quo” it will attack, as history can attest. Far too often when a fiery revolutionary hero or free thinker is spoken of it’s chilled by the tale of how public opinion brutally silenced them to the point of death, a terrifying deterrent to those that would attempt to elevate their expression and activism. For example, Socrates, who was charged at his tribunal as a “corrupter of youth” and was put to death. (Pg. 23) So it is no surprise that when such a one could meet such an end that another free thinker would rather choose discretion than jump into the lions den. To society this discretion has become a reasonable art, but to Mill, “the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.” (Pg. 29) This is where the lion becomes self-feeding by generating it’s own tyranny of the majority where many progressive individuals are lost by either suppression or capitulation. As in all things, “there is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence,” and so it would take a significant persuasion of public opinion to be tolerant before the individual can be free.
Unfortunately, Mill states, “Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either.” (Pg.28) This paradox is a trap for human progression in society because “genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”(Pg. 62) The freedom of opinion and the freedom of expressing an opinion are necessary for society’s genius to be healthy and active. However, Mill does not go so far as to say that this freedom will put an end to all evils, only that without genius societal advancement becomes difficult; an event that has been witnessed in the stagnation of many “modern” countries. He also goes on to say that the value of a country is ultimately “the worth of the individuals composing it.” (Pg. 113) He calls this the government of mankind and it is this government’s break from custom that will be the leading step into a more modern society and the advancement of culture.
Another prevalent yoke of custom is on the necks of women. In The Subjection of Women, Mill raises concerns for the, “disqualified half of the human race.” (Pg. 108) Mill argues the capacities of the female gender and its fitness to being “exceptional” is primarily due to opportunity. “How are they to be answered if that which requires to be answered is not spoken? Or how can the answer be known to be satisfactory if the objectors have no opportunity of showing that it is unsatisfactory?” (Pg. 36) He goes on to state that when historically women were allotted an opportunity they did very well for the “weak sex”, in some cases much better than men, as in the case of Queen Elizabeth and Margaret of Austria. (Pg. 59) Although, he does not specifically address upper versus lower class women, it is implied that the exceptional woman is bourgeois or upper class. He states that, “there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit…due provision being made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a family,” but only a few women could afford it. (Pg. 52) In addition, it is the woman’s duty to rear the children in the family economics. According to Mill, by empowering society’s women, men would no longer be corrupted by a sense of entitlement to privileges that they have not earned, and the family would change from a school of despotism to a school of virtues of freedom. (Pg. 47)
In order for “modern” societies to become more “modern” The sword to slay the hydra-headed beast called “custom” is the help of new values, created within and answering the needs of the people, that will strengthen the society as a whole. It can only successfully win power from those groups in society that are hostile to it by holding to these new norms and ideals. (Pg. 249) This would be enabled the reduction of repressing governments. Mill says that society is at fault and the cure is less government, not a new government. In order for the individual to be sovereign it needs to have the freedom to pursue it with minimal compulsion. Once that can be obtained then the value, or principle foundation, of life can be achieved in human happiness. By the abolition of traditions yoke, the intolerance of individuality through tyranny of the majority, the hindrance of human genius and advancement, and the subjection of women, Mill states that society would be able to advance to a more modern, a moral state of existence. According to Mill this is the very definition of liberty as “pursuing our own good in our own way,” which leads to our well being as people, families, and society as a whole. (xviii)
Bibliography
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1978, originally published in 1859. Indianapolis, Indiana.
John Stuart Mill, Subjection of Women, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1988, originally published in 1869.
Color Line
When the twentieth century was supposed to herald the age of modernity it was tripped by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the color line” or what politically was referred to as “the racial question.” It was derived from the political, philosophical, and geographical differences between the northern and southern United States. If modernity was going to herald individualization, class elimination, future orientation, and freedoms for all it had a well-seated problem with the emancipation and freedom of the slaves. And if the United States could not protect the rights of these new citizens through it’s thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, then modernity by definition, or progress, would grind to a halt. Therefore, Du Bois “sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem.” (Pg. 9) Some people interpret in The Souls of Black Folk the “problem of the twentieth century is the color-line,” as the problem of modernity. However, when Du Bois says that people avoided directly asking him the truth, “How does it feel to be a problem?” implies to me that what he is saying is that being black in the twentieth century is the problem. It is a problem to the government, a problem to the whites, a problem to modernity, and a problem to African-American progress. And is seems to me that only by raising the social conscious of these problems, Du Bois was attempting to build a platform for the resolution of the color-line. But first, lets take a look at how being black is a problem to the government.
Politically, Du Bois follows the color line through history and time to the American Negro where he summed up that “slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice,” while emancipation was to be the song of liberty. (Pg. 7) According to Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” started the Civil War in 1861 even when congress said that the war didn’t have anything to do with slaves. But shortly after it started the fugitive slaves appeared in northern lines as starving, homeless, helpless, vagabonds, and this is where the problem gained it’s legs as the blacks emerged, or a problem of emergence. “But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them.” (Pg. 14) In an attempt to deal with the “flood” the Freedmen’s Bureau was created, but which could only do too little in the hands of army officials. Du Bois states that, “it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem of vast dimensions.” (Pg. 16) The question arise, how do we clothe, feed, shelter, and compensate the freed slaves as wards to the nation? “the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying ‘Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity--vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!’"
It was clear that the Freedmen’s Bureau was going to need more provisions and enlarged powers, but then the war ended. The Freedmen’s Bureau was a war measure that was considered “unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen.” (Pg. 23) So two arguments emerged, one that “the Bureau threatened the civil rights of it’s citizens,” while the other being “present abandonment of the freedmen,” which would lead to their “practical re-enslavement” by an angry white South. This is where the problem for the whites increased. Although the argument found it’s final form in the act of 1866, when it failed the promised “forty acres and a mule,” to the freed slave. Feeling validated and punished, the previous slave owners took it upon themselves to rectify the situation. “The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centers simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of the blacks.” (Pg. 30) So, “the color line” remained and segregation was persued by law in the South by the white community leaders in order to maintain control on what they perceived was the black problem.
Du Bois uses a metaphor of “the veil” throughout his book; which is the real threat to modernity. The veil suggests a literal separation between whites and blacks through segregation and psychology, which maintains class separation and deindividualization. (Pg. xi) For Du Bois this veil was unknown to him where he grew up. Then a fateful day came and a blond stranger refused his visiting card. At first it didn’t make sense until, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others … shut out from their world by a vast veil.” (Pg. 4) He held this prejudism in contempt and endeavored to rise above the veil. However, the veil itself introduced a double consciousness to Du Bois as he walked among the whites. He said, “The Negro is sort of a seventh son … born with a veil and gifted with a second sight of the America world.” From the black side of the veil they saw the world and yet were invisible to where the whites were. Therefore they had two sets of values, one that they live in their world with, and one when they interact with the white world.
Problem to African-American progress lay in being considered individuals. Wouldn’t they need the choices first in order to be marked by their individuality? Was not the definition of “slave labor” accompanied by the understanding that the slave was a form of mute property? Du Bois quotes the bible when he asks, “Is not life more than meat and the body more than reignment?” That there is more than just the material needs but a “higher life” that needs to be claimed by the African-American people. One full of choices and interaction without a color line dividing them their portion. A “problem” that is compounded by their lack of understanding on what life on the other side of slavery required, “the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.” (Pg. 7) Du Bois said they were conscience bound to ask the nation for three things, “1. The right to vote. 2. Civic equality. 3. The education of youth according to ability.” And that without these necessary elements for individuality a paradox to progress develops for the freedman, in which they will just be left as the “remnants of a broken group.”
Did the twentieth century become victor over the “problem of the color line” through the raised social conscious? I’ll let you be the judge. Maybe Du Bois realized all along that trying, “To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires,” because he concluded that, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people.” (Pg. 7) And so the herald of modernity has not blown its bugle and the problem to African-American progress still exists. Perhaps, not wearing the same clothes as before, dealing with the same laws, or dealing with the same white people as before, but the African-American people are still hobbled by history. Perhaps, more readers will hear Du Bois cry and somehow an answer will be found and the African-American people will become victors over the past.
Politically, Du Bois follows the color line through history and time to the American Negro where he summed up that “slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice,” while emancipation was to be the song of liberty. (Pg. 7) According to Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” started the Civil War in 1861 even when congress said that the war didn’t have anything to do with slaves. But shortly after it started the fugitive slaves appeared in northern lines as starving, homeless, helpless, vagabonds, and this is where the problem gained it’s legs as the blacks emerged, or a problem of emergence. “But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them.” (Pg. 14) In an attempt to deal with the “flood” the Freedmen’s Bureau was created, but which could only do too little in the hands of army officials. Du Bois states that, “it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem of vast dimensions.” (Pg. 16) The question arise, how do we clothe, feed, shelter, and compensate the freed slaves as wards to the nation? “the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying ‘Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity--vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!’"
It was clear that the Freedmen’s Bureau was going to need more provisions and enlarged powers, but then the war ended. The Freedmen’s Bureau was a war measure that was considered “unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen.” (Pg. 23) So two arguments emerged, one that “the Bureau threatened the civil rights of it’s citizens,” while the other being “present abandonment of the freedmen,” which would lead to their “practical re-enslavement” by an angry white South. This is where the problem for the whites increased. Although the argument found it’s final form in the act of 1866, when it failed the promised “forty acres and a mule,” to the freed slave. Feeling validated and punished, the previous slave owners took it upon themselves to rectify the situation. “The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centers simply for punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely institutions for perpetuating the slavery of the blacks.” (Pg. 30) So, “the color line” remained and segregation was persued by law in the South by the white community leaders in order to maintain control on what they perceived was the black problem.
Du Bois uses a metaphor of “the veil” throughout his book; which is the real threat to modernity. The veil suggests a literal separation between whites and blacks through segregation and psychology, which maintains class separation and deindividualization. (Pg. xi) For Du Bois this veil was unknown to him where he grew up. Then a fateful day came and a blond stranger refused his visiting card. At first it didn’t make sense until, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others … shut out from their world by a vast veil.” (Pg. 4) He held this prejudism in contempt and endeavored to rise above the veil. However, the veil itself introduced a double consciousness to Du Bois as he walked among the whites. He said, “The Negro is sort of a seventh son … born with a veil and gifted with a second sight of the America world.” From the black side of the veil they saw the world and yet were invisible to where the whites were. Therefore they had two sets of values, one that they live in their world with, and one when they interact with the white world.
Problem to African-American progress lay in being considered individuals. Wouldn’t they need the choices first in order to be marked by their individuality? Was not the definition of “slave labor” accompanied by the understanding that the slave was a form of mute property? Du Bois quotes the bible when he asks, “Is not life more than meat and the body more than reignment?” That there is more than just the material needs but a “higher life” that needs to be claimed by the African-American people. One full of choices and interaction without a color line dividing them their portion. A “problem” that is compounded by their lack of understanding on what life on the other side of slavery required, “the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.” (Pg. 7) Du Bois said they were conscience bound to ask the nation for three things, “1. The right to vote. 2. Civic equality. 3. The education of youth according to ability.” And that without these necessary elements for individuality a paradox to progress develops for the freedman, in which they will just be left as the “remnants of a broken group.”
Did the twentieth century become victor over the “problem of the color line” through the raised social conscious? I’ll let you be the judge. Maybe Du Bois realized all along that trying, “To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires,” because he concluded that, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people.” (Pg. 7) And so the herald of modernity has not blown its bugle and the problem to African-American progress still exists. Perhaps, not wearing the same clothes as before, dealing with the same laws, or dealing with the same white people as before, but the African-American people are still hobbled by history. Perhaps, more readers will hear Du Bois cry and somehow an answer will be found and the African-American people will become victors over the past.
Highlighting Gender
From my experience “highlighting” will always happen in the media to one slant or another. In a country where suffrage is not outgrown, the gender highlight is inevitable; which leaves it up to the candidate to find a way to make their “womanhood” an asset. In order to look into this possibility, one needs to first recognize that there is a gender gap, evaluate how this gap hurts or helps their candidacy, and then how to respond as a progressive female in politics. In “Gender and Elections,” Susan Carroll and Richard Fox explore how women and men differ in the aggregate and in the election pools, which I will use to extrapolate how gender hurts and helps women.
To evaluate weather the gender gap really existed, Carroll took us back to the suffrage movement to view how women reacted to having the right to vote. The interesting part was how activists at the time marketed that women’s experiences in the home gave them special values and perspectives that would be assets in the political arena. But, when allowed to vote, not many women voted or when they did it was similar to the men’s. The irony occurred sixty years later when the “woman’s vote” emerged and part of the new gender gap came not only from independent women, but also from a change in the male political behavior. Many male votes shifted to the Republican Party while the majority of the women voted for the democrats. Although the male shift seems unstudied, there appears to be three key factors that aided women and their emerging political legs.
Primarily, women were heading many households, there were more women in professional and managerial positions, and because a contemporary women’s movement was taking hold. This coupled with moral values, more women living below the poverty line, and more women voting generated a gender gap that in a way seems to have elevated women voters political influence. So the question now raised is will this gender gap hurt or help a woman in politics?
I believe we would all agree that women’s influence in politics has not been fully realized, but to what extent does it help? I think Gloria Steinem put it well when she spoke of the “white man only sign” that is a mentally understood graphic in politics. This “sign” is a great attribute to how gender has hurt women politicians. It was very evident in the in 1972 where Shirley Chisholm, a woman of color, entered the presidential race in order to point out the sign and raise the question of “Why?” The fact that she didn’t have a chance of winning was indicative that gender highlights hurt a woman’s candidacy. But, changes have taken place in the years since and Fox calls this the “3rd evolution” where opportunities for female candidates have increased. In fact, the movement toward gender parity in political institutions progressed rapidly in the 1990’s in the historic increase of women appointed to the House and the Senate.
To evaluate weather the gender gap really existed, Carroll took us back to the suffrage movement to view how women reacted to having the right to vote. The interesting part was how activists at the time marketed that women’s experiences in the home gave them special values and perspectives that would be assets in the political arena. But, when allowed to vote, not many women voted or when they did it was similar to the men’s. The irony occurred sixty years later when the “woman’s vote” emerged and part of the new gender gap came not only from independent women, but also from a change in the male political behavior. Many male votes shifted to the Republican Party while the majority of the women voted for the democrats. Although the male shift seems unstudied, there appears to be three key factors that aided women and their emerging political legs.
Primarily, women were heading many households, there were more women in professional and managerial positions, and because a contemporary women’s movement was taking hold. This coupled with moral values, more women living below the poverty line, and more women voting generated a gender gap that in a way seems to have elevated women voters political influence. So the question now raised is will this gender gap hurt or help a woman in politics?
I believe we would all agree that women’s influence in politics has not been fully realized, but to what extent does it help? I think Gloria Steinem put it well when she spoke of the “white man only sign” that is a mentally understood graphic in politics. This “sign” is a great attribute to how gender has hurt women politicians. It was very evident in the in 1972 where Shirley Chisholm, a woman of color, entered the presidential race in order to point out the sign and raise the question of “Why?” The fact that she didn’t have a chance of winning was indicative that gender highlights hurt a woman’s candidacy. But, changes have taken place in the years since and Fox calls this the “3rd evolution” where opportunities for female candidates have increased. In fact, the movement toward gender parity in political institutions progressed rapidly in the 1990’s in the historic increase of women appointed to the House and the Senate.
Women in Combat
Does a woman need to have combat experience in order for the country to accept a woman as president? Well I don’t know that answer, but what I do know is that it would help. There are several arguments raised against women in combat that in some ways parallel the arguments against a woman being the leader of the free world. As a female Armed Force member that has served in one capacity or another and listed as a GI (government issue) since 1991, I would like to reflect on the arguments against women in combat, namely - physical, psychological, and practical, so that I can summarize how women in combat would help a woman running for the presidential office.
To start I will elaborate on where the argument comes from and why I have the opinion that I do. First of all, I would like to tackle the “physical” argument against women in combat. “Women are the weaker sex, that is why there are no women in the NFL,” said Kathleen Parker on NPR, “that they weaken military effectiveness because they are generally weaker.” Kathleen is just like many others that place the microscope on the “weaker sex” and narrow women down to; half the upper body strength, lower aerobic capacity, prone to more stress fractures, an average of 5” shorter, along with that women are not equally geared for aggression (i.e. men have ten times the amount of testosterone in their bodies). At this point, I’m not going to bore you with fancy counter statistics, being this is my reflection paper, but rather a piece of my story. By all accounts, I am an average woman. I’m 5’6” tall, 160 pounds, not overly fast or strong, and I have lived an average life. If Kathleen Parker were right, then I would have weakened military effectiveness because of this, which is not the case.
During coed physical testing of over 400 airmen/cadets, I started out in the last flight of thirty and finished as one of the first dozen. The only variation on the course for the female was a wall had a second lower shelf for any girl that did not or could not scale the “male” wall, and the rest of the course was identical for both genders. First hand I got to see the value of my “average” nature as men struggled or fell into the water pits all around me. One time I was hanging onto very wet monkey bars trying to pass an extremely long water obstacle when two of these elite men with enormous upper body strength slipped off in front and behind me while I stayed the course and finished without incident. I’m not amazing physically, not even remotely, yet I was able to outmaneuver the majority of the men there that day. This wasn’t an exclusive physical test either. During emergency survival training, triage training, combat litter carry training, weapons training, siege defense training, and aircraft repair training, and many others, at no time did my physical “specs” prevent me from excelling against the majority of my male comrades. And, as far as combat, I saw a glimpse of what this would look like during siege defense training.
Many women in that combat exercise were just as aggressive as the men in defending the commander’s post and capturing the raiding militia. Even when our fort was under siege with automatic M-16’s firing all around, at no time was there a division between our women and our men in the noisy conflict. We worked as a team where our objective and thoughts were on our job plus the success of our unit, and not remotely on if the person you were fighting with had breasts or bulging biceps. I don’t believe that a soldier in combat thinks about gender. However, the argument continues to women lacking the strength to pull or move a fellow wounded combatant to safety, even when there are many cases of nurses doing that in Korea; or that women lack the strength to engage in hand to hand with a male opponent army, when the Vietcong women were extremely effective doing just that against our soldiers. I’m of the opinion that a unit is more effective with both genders presented within it.
Ultimately, I believe the military effectiveness was improved with my presence. Another example is when I transferred from Air Combat Command to Air Mobility Command during Desert Storm. They had a KC135 tanker that was not flight capable for over eight months, a time in which the entire male GAC squad had been not been able to repair it. The importance of this was that during a wartime situation, the planes break down more often due to extended uses. Even the loss of one air refueler is sorely missed in a day, none the less eight months. After only two hours of working on the plane, it was fixed and cleared for flight capability. Regardless of women’s physical weakness they are an asset to our military’s effectiveness, because it is not the “specs” that make a good soldier, but the desire to protect. Which leads me to the second and third argument, psychology and practicality.
These arguments haven’t been taken as far as they will before the end of sexual prejudism against women in combat, so I will just cover the current key elements and my rebuttal. When America suffered its first female POW (prisoner of war), she was asked to write a letter by her jailers. In her own words, her first thought was to code a message in it for her young daughter. Being that was her first priority, she was then considered psychologically unsuitable for the military or combat. I find this argument one of the weakest because every soldier thinks of those they love in those conditions, and nearly every soldier carries a letter in their pocket for their loved ones in the event that they give the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But this will not stop those against women in combat to make women appear weak when in truth their heart and desire to protect is what makes them so strong. Again this argument has been generalized in order to state that all woman, especially those with children, psychologically cannot handle being soldiers and therefore become unviable in the military. That pregnant women are unable to deploy and the units are less cohesive units due to love affairs. I like how Colonel Barbara Wilson USAF retired addressed women unable to deploy due to pregnancy, she said, “The reality is that yes some women were undeployable for reasons due to pregnancy – as were many more men undeployable for substance abuse, alcoholism, court martials, sports related injuries, off-duty fight related injuries and pending charges of domestic violence.” When it comes down to it, women are no less effective then men, and the asset they are to a unit is undeniable, even with love affairs. Every unit I’ve been in was tight and natural in their defense of one another, the way they pushed each other to do better, to calm down, to be decisive in their actions because it plays out on the entire unit was impressively cohesive.
If there is a job that requires a skill, then those with that skill and capacity should fill to the exclusion of those that can’t. And if we base our exclusion on gender, then we are going against our own constitution. Therefore, if a woman is inhibited from serving in our countries defense, then one would probably not be considered a contender as leader of the free world. Which is why women should be allowed to serve in combat as a necessary step in the progression of women's rights.
To start I will elaborate on where the argument comes from and why I have the opinion that I do. First of all, I would like to tackle the “physical” argument against women in combat. “Women are the weaker sex, that is why there are no women in the NFL,” said Kathleen Parker on NPR, “that they weaken military effectiveness because they are generally weaker.” Kathleen is just like many others that place the microscope on the “weaker sex” and narrow women down to; half the upper body strength, lower aerobic capacity, prone to more stress fractures, an average of 5” shorter, along with that women are not equally geared for aggression (i.e. men have ten times the amount of testosterone in their bodies). At this point, I’m not going to bore you with fancy counter statistics, being this is my reflection paper, but rather a piece of my story. By all accounts, I am an average woman. I’m 5’6” tall, 160 pounds, not overly fast or strong, and I have lived an average life. If Kathleen Parker were right, then I would have weakened military effectiveness because of this, which is not the case.
During coed physical testing of over 400 airmen/cadets, I started out in the last flight of thirty and finished as one of the first dozen. The only variation on the course for the female was a wall had a second lower shelf for any girl that did not or could not scale the “male” wall, and the rest of the course was identical for both genders. First hand I got to see the value of my “average” nature as men struggled or fell into the water pits all around me. One time I was hanging onto very wet monkey bars trying to pass an extremely long water obstacle when two of these elite men with enormous upper body strength slipped off in front and behind me while I stayed the course and finished without incident. I’m not amazing physically, not even remotely, yet I was able to outmaneuver the majority of the men there that day. This wasn’t an exclusive physical test either. During emergency survival training, triage training, combat litter carry training, weapons training, siege defense training, and aircraft repair training, and many others, at no time did my physical “specs” prevent me from excelling against the majority of my male comrades. And, as far as combat, I saw a glimpse of what this would look like during siege defense training.
Many women in that combat exercise were just as aggressive as the men in defending the commander’s post and capturing the raiding militia. Even when our fort was under siege with automatic M-16’s firing all around, at no time was there a division between our women and our men in the noisy conflict. We worked as a team where our objective and thoughts were on our job plus the success of our unit, and not remotely on if the person you were fighting with had breasts or bulging biceps. I don’t believe that a soldier in combat thinks about gender. However, the argument continues to women lacking the strength to pull or move a fellow wounded combatant to safety, even when there are many cases of nurses doing that in Korea; or that women lack the strength to engage in hand to hand with a male opponent army, when the Vietcong women were extremely effective doing just that against our soldiers. I’m of the opinion that a unit is more effective with both genders presented within it.
Ultimately, I believe the military effectiveness was improved with my presence. Another example is when I transferred from Air Combat Command to Air Mobility Command during Desert Storm. They had a KC135 tanker that was not flight capable for over eight months, a time in which the entire male GAC squad had been not been able to repair it. The importance of this was that during a wartime situation, the planes break down more often due to extended uses. Even the loss of one air refueler is sorely missed in a day, none the less eight months. After only two hours of working on the plane, it was fixed and cleared for flight capability. Regardless of women’s physical weakness they are an asset to our military’s effectiveness, because it is not the “specs” that make a good soldier, but the desire to protect. Which leads me to the second and third argument, psychology and practicality.
These arguments haven’t been taken as far as they will before the end of sexual prejudism against women in combat, so I will just cover the current key elements and my rebuttal. When America suffered its first female POW (prisoner of war), she was asked to write a letter by her jailers. In her own words, her first thought was to code a message in it for her young daughter. Being that was her first priority, she was then considered psychologically unsuitable for the military or combat. I find this argument one of the weakest because every soldier thinks of those they love in those conditions, and nearly every soldier carries a letter in their pocket for their loved ones in the event that they give the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But this will not stop those against women in combat to make women appear weak when in truth their heart and desire to protect is what makes them so strong. Again this argument has been generalized in order to state that all woman, especially those with children, psychologically cannot handle being soldiers and therefore become unviable in the military. That pregnant women are unable to deploy and the units are less cohesive units due to love affairs. I like how Colonel Barbara Wilson USAF retired addressed women unable to deploy due to pregnancy, she said, “The reality is that yes some women were undeployable for reasons due to pregnancy – as were many more men undeployable for substance abuse, alcoholism, court martials, sports related injuries, off-duty fight related injuries and pending charges of domestic violence.” When it comes down to it, women are no less effective then men, and the asset they are to a unit is undeniable, even with love affairs. Every unit I’ve been in was tight and natural in their defense of one another, the way they pushed each other to do better, to calm down, to be decisive in their actions because it plays out on the entire unit was impressively cohesive.
If there is a job that requires a skill, then those with that skill and capacity should fill to the exclusion of those that can’t. And if we base our exclusion on gender, then we are going against our own constitution. Therefore, if a woman is inhibited from serving in our countries defense, then one would probably not be considered a contender as leader of the free world. Which is why women should be allowed to serve in combat as a necessary step in the progression of women's rights.
Working in Equality
Regardless of federal laws designed to offer women equal opportunities in the workplace, women still suffer unequal pay and employment options. I’ve seen this impact most of the women in my family with negative feelings of inferiority while they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their families. Although working equally feels natural to human rights, it hasn’t necessarily played out as such, which brought about this research paper. In this report I will review what laws currently protect women in the workplace, how this plays out in for the modern day paycheck, how our courts have responded, and what is needed for a future of women to working in equality.
Anyone that has experienced discrimination in the workplace might at first wonder how it could be possible in our advanced country. They may ask, “Am I not equally protected by equality laws?” Which raises the first legitimate question regarding what laws do currently exist that will offer me or any woman equality opportunity in the workplace. As my research progressed, three laws stood out in what seemed to be the keys to equality. Namely: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Pay Act of 1963, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
Title VII states that, “it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” (Sec 703(a)78 Stat. 255, 1964) In order to enforce this law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created as a vehicle for employees to take their discrimination cases to the courts for resolution and recompense. The title suffered fierce opposition from many parties at the time, yet prevailed and has offered women some ground to build on for equal treatment.
In addition to Title VII, we have the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The Equal Pay Act states that, “men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment are protected from sex-based wage discrimination,” while the Civil Rights Act states, “monetary damages are to be awarded in cases of intentional employment discrimination.” Taken at face value, these laws united seem reasonable and can blanket a broad range of discrimination. As Stetson says, “Law should be assessed according to whether it helps women overcome subordination to men…Men and women are entitled to identical treatment by the government. Anything else would condemn women to certain inferiority.” (WR, pg.21-22) With these laws to protect them, women have entered the workforce. But, are the laws good enough to offer women equal pay? Statistically, they unfortunately are not.
In 2007, women were paid only 77 cents for every dollar that a man is paid, which contributed to the working class losing $200 Billion of income annually due to the wage gape. (U.S. Census Bureau) This not only hurts women but also many of our working men that work in predominately female occupations an average of $6,259 loss each year. With 72% of our nation’s mothers working, the impact on the home is undeniable. For example, if married women were paid equally, their family’s poverty rates would drop from 2.1% to 0.8%. If our single working mothers were paid equally, their family’s poverty rates would drop from 25.3% to 12.6%. And if our upcoming mothers, our single women, were paid equally their poverty rates would drop from 6.3% to 1%.
According to my research, there are many beliefs as to why women work and what created the prevailing gender roles. Some say that women work to develop themselves as a part of society by developing their intellect and skills, while others say that women work our of economic necessity. Both are correct but irrelevant when considering their pay. Regardless of whatever reason a woman may give they should not be viewed as a reserve or substandard labor force that requires less income for equal labor. On the contrary, they require equal pay for equal work because it’s fair. For many it will directly impact their homes and it will reduce the nation’s poverty rates. For others it will help expand skills, interests, and intellectual property for those women. So the question now is how do we make public policy recognize all workers as the same?
One of the current cases that is raising awareness and challenging equal pay is Ledbetter v. Goodyear 2007. Lilly Ledbetter was hired in 1979 by Goodyear as a supervisor in Alabama. Towards the end of her employment she had a feeling that she was not being paid fairly, but there was no way to know being that pay levels was strictly confidential. After receiving an anonymous letter in the mail she discovered that as the only woman supervisor she was making $3727 per month, while her 15 male counterparts received $4,286 to $5,236 per month.
During the trial, Goodyear was found to have discriminated and ruled that she be awarded back pay and damages in the amount of three million dollars. Goodyear appealed the jury verdict and the case went to the Supreme Court. Their response was that since her pay gap was sequentially created through smaller raises over twenty years that Ledbetter should have complained every time her pay was less than the others. Therefore the Supreme Court reversed judgment of an award for back pay and damages, and instituted that pay discrimination must be filed within 180 days of the event. Many believe that their ruling was an impractical solution to a billion dollar problem in the United States. This is because the vast majority of employees who suffer pay discrimination don’t know about it for years, which would put them well past the six month window. Also, typically in order to generate a compelling case for the courts, there needs to be a successive record of pay loss. However, with the current ruling, if a pay discriminated employee doesn’t figure it out immediately, then, in the words of Lilly Ledbetter, “the company can treat you like a second place citizen for the rest of your career.”
Fundamentally, the ruling is unfair to the victims of pay discrimination, it ignores the realities of the workplace where salary information is protected in nine out of ten employers, and it doesn’t take into account the risk to the working class family if employment is terminated, under a made up reason but due to the possibility of an EEOC charge. So, in essence, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for women to prove they are paid unequally, and the question remains as to why they did it.
Being that it is not clear as to why the five of the nine Supreme Court justices ruled as they did, I looked to those that supported the decision and found namely business groups that supported the ruling. Basically, they applaud the decision because it establishes a certainty for employers in clarifying their potential exposure to claims of pay discrimination, and protects employers from pay decisions made 20 years ago or more. Being that pay discrimination is a documented two hundred billion dollar problem, it could potentially have a notable economic impact if businesses were required to make repairs for pay discrimination that had lasted for many years. Perhaps the Supreme Courts ruling will become more clear, or fair for that matter, in the future since democrats have recently introduced legislation in Congress that would essentially overturn the Supreme Courts decision, the Fair Pay Act.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would provide that discriminatory acts occur by extension each time wages, benefits, or other compensation has been paid, not solely assigned to the first discriminatory paycheck but to any discriminatory paycheck received by an employee. If a company chose today to pay their female employees equal to their men, women would only have 180 days from their last discriminated paycheck to file with the EEOC. However, if an employer didn’t choose to pay them fairly today, the time would remain 180 days due to the continued discrimination. Obviously, there is an incentive for a business to evaluate their wages for fair pay under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
On July 31, 2007 the House passed the Fair Pay Act, but now it will require 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the filibuster, which they hope to consider the measure later this year, and a signature by the President. I believe Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it best at the Congressional Women’s Rally for Fair Pay when she said, “Equal pay is an issue of fundamental fairness. As families grapple with difficult economic times, it is also often about daily survival for millions of families, for those reasons, we must work together to bring the Paycheck Fairness Act to the floor for the vote it deserves…. We must take action to close the wage gap.” (For Immediate Release, 17 July 2008)
Equal pay could be the tip of a solution. Dorthy M. Stetson clarified in Women’s Rights in the USA, that “policy is in fact a process that involves continuing debate. Statutes enacted by legislatures and major court decision are usually important milestones in the evolution of the debate. Statutes and court decisions are readable and quotable. Although the process of implementing and interpreting them is more difficult to observe and delineate than are the documents themselves, both implementation and interpretation must be described in order to define women’s rights policy.” (pg. 17) How equal pay will be handled in the courts will reflect on how it will be handled in business groups; affecting not only equal pay, but organizational politics (which deny power to predominantly female jobs which reproduces male cultural advantages), harassment, and other discriminations in the workplace against women. More than just hoping for the best outcome, interested parties should petition their Senators and support those that are progressive in closing the wage gap.
To conclude the question on whether law offers equality in the workplace for women, there are laws in place but they’re not adequate. It will require further action and resolution in and out of the courts by those that are discriminated against. We may have to rely on our elected officials to generate laws that will ensure equal pay and equal opportunities, but we can also try to help ourselves by addressing in the courts any discrimination that has affected us in an EEOC claim. By defining better policies to cover equal-opportunity laws and enforcement, women will be more confident in and out of courts in assuring not only what is fair, but what is right.
Works Cited
Congresswoman Capps, Lois. “Congressional Women Rally for Fair Pay.”
For Immediate Release (2008) 17 July 2008
"It’s Time for Working Women to Earn Equal Pay." AFL-CIO. 2008. AFL-CIO America’s Union Movement Online
“Ledbetter v. Goodyear Equal Pay Hearing: Lilly Ledbetter.” 2007. Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives. 14 June 2007
Hoffman, Saul D., and Susan Averett. Women and the Economy: Family, Work, and Pay. The Addison-Wesley series in economics. Boston: Pearson Addison Wesley, 2005.
Stetson, Dorothy McBride. Women's Rights in the U.S.A.: Policy Debates and Gender Roles. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.
“Peaceful Revolution: Equal Pay for Equal Work – Time for the Senate to Vote.” 2008. The Huffington Post. 22 April 2008.
Anyone that has experienced discrimination in the workplace might at first wonder how it could be possible in our advanced country. They may ask, “Am I not equally protected by equality laws?” Which raises the first legitimate question regarding what laws do currently exist that will offer me or any woman equality opportunity in the workplace. As my research progressed, three laws stood out in what seemed to be the keys to equality. Namely: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Pay Act of 1963, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
Title VII states that, “it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” (Sec 703(a)78 Stat. 255, 1964) In order to enforce this law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created as a vehicle for employees to take their discrimination cases to the courts for resolution and recompense. The title suffered fierce opposition from many parties at the time, yet prevailed and has offered women some ground to build on for equal treatment.
In addition to Title VII, we have the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The Equal Pay Act states that, “men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment are protected from sex-based wage discrimination,” while the Civil Rights Act states, “monetary damages are to be awarded in cases of intentional employment discrimination.” Taken at face value, these laws united seem reasonable and can blanket a broad range of discrimination. As Stetson says, “Law should be assessed according to whether it helps women overcome subordination to men…Men and women are entitled to identical treatment by the government. Anything else would condemn women to certain inferiority.” (WR, pg.21-22) With these laws to protect them, women have entered the workforce. But, are the laws good enough to offer women equal pay? Statistically, they unfortunately are not.
In 2007, women were paid only 77 cents for every dollar that a man is paid, which contributed to the working class losing $200 Billion of income annually due to the wage gape. (U.S. Census Bureau) This not only hurts women but also many of our working men that work in predominately female occupations an average of $6,259 loss each year. With 72% of our nation’s mothers working, the impact on the home is undeniable. For example, if married women were paid equally, their family’s poverty rates would drop from 2.1% to 0.8%. If our single working mothers were paid equally, their family’s poverty rates would drop from 25.3% to 12.6%. And if our upcoming mothers, our single women, were paid equally their poverty rates would drop from 6.3% to 1%.
According to my research, there are many beliefs as to why women work and what created the prevailing gender roles. Some say that women work to develop themselves as a part of society by developing their intellect and skills, while others say that women work our of economic necessity. Both are correct but irrelevant when considering their pay. Regardless of whatever reason a woman may give they should not be viewed as a reserve or substandard labor force that requires less income for equal labor. On the contrary, they require equal pay for equal work because it’s fair. For many it will directly impact their homes and it will reduce the nation’s poverty rates. For others it will help expand skills, interests, and intellectual property for those women. So the question now is how do we make public policy recognize all workers as the same?
One of the current cases that is raising awareness and challenging equal pay is Ledbetter v. Goodyear 2007. Lilly Ledbetter was hired in 1979 by Goodyear as a supervisor in Alabama. Towards the end of her employment she had a feeling that she was not being paid fairly, but there was no way to know being that pay levels was strictly confidential. After receiving an anonymous letter in the mail she discovered that as the only woman supervisor she was making $3727 per month, while her 15 male counterparts received $4,286 to $5,236 per month.
During the trial, Goodyear was found to have discriminated and ruled that she be awarded back pay and damages in the amount of three million dollars. Goodyear appealed the jury verdict and the case went to the Supreme Court. Their response was that since her pay gap was sequentially created through smaller raises over twenty years that Ledbetter should have complained every time her pay was less than the others. Therefore the Supreme Court reversed judgment of an award for back pay and damages, and instituted that pay discrimination must be filed within 180 days of the event. Many believe that their ruling was an impractical solution to a billion dollar problem in the United States. This is because the vast majority of employees who suffer pay discrimination don’t know about it for years, which would put them well past the six month window. Also, typically in order to generate a compelling case for the courts, there needs to be a successive record of pay loss. However, with the current ruling, if a pay discriminated employee doesn’t figure it out immediately, then, in the words of Lilly Ledbetter, “the company can treat you like a second place citizen for the rest of your career.”
Fundamentally, the ruling is unfair to the victims of pay discrimination, it ignores the realities of the workplace where salary information is protected in nine out of ten employers, and it doesn’t take into account the risk to the working class family if employment is terminated, under a made up reason but due to the possibility of an EEOC charge. So, in essence, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it harder for women to prove they are paid unequally, and the question remains as to why they did it.
Being that it is not clear as to why the five of the nine Supreme Court justices ruled as they did, I looked to those that supported the decision and found namely business groups that supported the ruling. Basically, they applaud the decision because it establishes a certainty for employers in clarifying their potential exposure to claims of pay discrimination, and protects employers from pay decisions made 20 years ago or more. Being that pay discrimination is a documented two hundred billion dollar problem, it could potentially have a notable economic impact if businesses were required to make repairs for pay discrimination that had lasted for many years. Perhaps the Supreme Courts ruling will become more clear, or fair for that matter, in the future since democrats have recently introduced legislation in Congress that would essentially overturn the Supreme Courts decision, the Fair Pay Act.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would provide that discriminatory acts occur by extension each time wages, benefits, or other compensation has been paid, not solely assigned to the first discriminatory paycheck but to any discriminatory paycheck received by an employee. If a company chose today to pay their female employees equal to their men, women would only have 180 days from their last discriminated paycheck to file with the EEOC. However, if an employer didn’t choose to pay them fairly today, the time would remain 180 days due to the continued discrimination. Obviously, there is an incentive for a business to evaluate their wages for fair pay under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
On July 31, 2007 the House passed the Fair Pay Act, but now it will require 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the filibuster, which they hope to consider the measure later this year, and a signature by the President. I believe Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it best at the Congressional Women’s Rally for Fair Pay when she said, “Equal pay is an issue of fundamental fairness. As families grapple with difficult economic times, it is also often about daily survival for millions of families, for those reasons, we must work together to bring the Paycheck Fairness Act to the floor for the vote it deserves…. We must take action to close the wage gap.” (For Immediate Release, 17 July 2008)
Equal pay could be the tip of a solution. Dorthy M. Stetson clarified in Women’s Rights in the USA, that “policy is in fact a process that involves continuing debate. Statutes enacted by legislatures and major court decision are usually important milestones in the evolution of the debate. Statutes and court decisions are readable and quotable. Although the process of implementing and interpreting them is more difficult to observe and delineate than are the documents themselves, both implementation and interpretation must be described in order to define women’s rights policy.” (pg. 17) How equal pay will be handled in the courts will reflect on how it will be handled in business groups; affecting not only equal pay, but organizational politics (which deny power to predominantly female jobs which reproduces male cultural advantages), harassment, and other discriminations in the workplace against women. More than just hoping for the best outcome, interested parties should petition their Senators and support those that are progressive in closing the wage gap.
To conclude the question on whether law offers equality in the workplace for women, there are laws in place but they’re not adequate. It will require further action and resolution in and out of the courts by those that are discriminated against. We may have to rely on our elected officials to generate laws that will ensure equal pay and equal opportunities, but we can also try to help ourselves by addressing in the courts any discrimination that has affected us in an EEOC claim. By defining better policies to cover equal-opportunity laws and enforcement, women will be more confident in and out of courts in assuring not only what is fair, but what is right.
Works Cited
Congresswoman Capps, Lois. “Congressional Women Rally for Fair Pay.”
For Immediate Release (2008) 17 July 2008
"It’s Time for Working Women to Earn Equal Pay." AFL-CIO. 2008. AFL-CIO America’s Union Movement Online
“Ledbetter v. Goodyear Equal Pay Hearing: Lilly Ledbetter.” 2007. Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives. 14 June 2007
Hoffman, Saul D., and Susan Averett. Women and the Economy: Family, Work, and Pay. The Addison-Wesley series in economics. Boston: Pearson Addison Wesley, 2005.
Stetson, Dorothy McBride. Women's Rights in the U.S.A.: Policy Debates and Gender Roles. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.
“Peaceful Revolution: Equal Pay for Equal Work – Time for the Senate to Vote.” 2008. The Huffington Post. 22 April 2008.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Redefining the "irreversible coma"
You come across an accident and the person that tumbled from their motorbike is dead; as defined by the cessation of all vital functions including the heartbeat, brain activity, and breathing. Then technology arrives and shocks the heart back into beating and they bag breath for the biker until he can be hooked up to an artificial ventilator. The body is sustained, but the person is in a coma. This is not a alpha coma or a alcoholic, diabetic, hepatic, myxedema, Kussmaul's, metabolic, or uremic coma. This is an irreversible coma which means that every second after blood stopped flowing to the brain, the brain started shutting down. But is the person dead? It's true that had technology not stepped in the biker would have died. But was it's purpose ever to save the life of the biker or to preserve the body for organ transplant? Since identifying the moment of death may now involve another life, biomedicine has made the effort to precisely define death in order to avoid "false positive errors ... People must never be misdiagnosed as biologically dead when in fact they are alive." (Lock,191) I'm going to take a look into what is the criteria for death and it's changes, how redefining death commodified organs, and what the future holds for those in a irreversible coma or brain-dead.
According to the medical dictionary, there are twelve current indicators that death has occured. These are not mutually exclusive, but are accumulative and are as follows.
#1) no pupil reaction to light
#2) no response of the eyes to caloric (warm or cold) stimulation
#3) no jaw reflex (the jaw will react like the knee if hit with a reflex hammer)
#4) no gag reflex (touching the back of the throat induces vomiting)
#5) no response to pain
#6) no breathing
#7) a body temperature above 86 °F (30 °C), which eliminates the possibility of resuscitation following cold-water drowning
#8) no other cause for the above, such as a head injury
#9) no drugs present in the body that could cause apparent death
#10) all of the above for 12 hours
#11) all of the above for six hours and a flat-line electroencephalogram (brain wave study)
#12) no blood circulating to the brain, as demonstrated by angiography
In the past, there were various identifiers of death depending on where one lived, what religion they had, or what cultural beliefs were in place. In addition, death's value to those that lived was determined by the culture norms. The reason death became specific with the list above is because those in a irreversible coma became not only takers of time, money, and emotions, but also givers. And anywhere that there is taking and giving, by definition, exchange is happening; which is the driver of commodities.
"Without transplant technologies, aside from possible use for experimentation, human organs could have no value other than to the individual in whom they reside, and then only if they remain healthy." (Lock, 48) However, with the arrival of the artificial ventilator and other equipment, the brain-dead have taken on new value - that of their organs. Do the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the one? "Only between 2 and 5 percent of patients in ICUs are eventually declared brain-dead. The organs of brain-dead donors were, from the outset, a scarce resource, and it was evident that the urgent need for organs might threaten the presumption that every effort should be made to preserve human life." (Lock, 65) That effort comes with a cost.
*A heart cost approximately $787,700
*A single lung costs $450,400
*Two lungs cost $657,800
*Heart and lungs $1,123,800
*A liver costs $523,400
*A kidney costs $259,000
*The pancreas costs $275,200
*The intestines costs $1,121,800
"Commodity candidacy" is culturally determined.(pg 46) As long as there are people that want what other has to give, then they are candidates. But how can it be determined what a person in an irreversible coma wants? With media and altruistic adds saying that, "when your life is done, give life to another - sign your donor card." Why wouldn't someone want to do so? They are done using the organs after all. Or are they? What if the coma isn't the end and recovery is possible? Is organ transplantation the best that we have to offer the brain-dead?
There are many who oppose making the person in an "irreversible" coma the definition of dead. The fact that the brain does not cease functioning or the body working as an integrated unit bothers them. "The claim that whole brain death marks the end of unified organic integration of a human being is empirically false," and that, "if the brain-dead is a 'corpse' it certainly has some unusual properties ... brain-dead patients suitably maintained, can breath, circulate blood, digest food, filter wastes, maintain body temperature, generate new functions, and fulfill other functions as well." (Potts, 129-130) The fact that these coma patients require machinery to stay alive is immaterial in defining death. This is because it is not so very different than a man walking on the street with a pace-maker near his heart, or a woman working a job to feed and shelter her body. Sustaining life in the modern world requires machinery in one aspect or another; therefore, a living organism is defined by it's ability to function as a integrated being. And if it's alive then it has identity and rights to live.
Will the future hold something more than commodification for those in an irreversible coma? Probably not. Once something organic has achieved the status of commodity, like slavery, history has shown that those in power over it will hardly let it go. Is there a problem with "removing organs from someone whose heart is still beating?" (Lock, 44) Perhaps there is, but as a culture we have yet to oppose powerful exchangers from dictating their desires in the legal, medicinal, and personal realms. Many of us will wait to see what technology has to offer next in defining death, but there is no guarantees that it will ever be right.
Bibliography
Lock, Margaret M. 2002. Twice dead: organ transplants and the reinvention of death. California series in public anthropology, 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Potts, Michael, Paul A. Byrne, and Richard G. Nilges. 2000. Beyond brain death: the case against brain based criteria for human death. Philosophy and medicine, v.66. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
"Death." The Free Dictionary. http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/death
"Financing a Transplant." Transplant living. http://www.transplantliving.org/beforethetransplant/finance/costs.aspx
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