[285/366] And Work-Related Activity

[cosmolinguist]

Someone I know online wrote an extraordinary piece for Not Going Back to Normal, a project by Scottish disabled people. I first read it last week and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Here's a big quote from it:

While the maintenance of business facilities other than workers (such as premises or equipment) is the paid work of other contracted workers within their own working hours, the maintenance of worker-as-asset is delegated without pay to the worker-as-person, and is expected to be conducted out of working hours....We could call outside of working hours “after work” although it is more accurate to say “afterwork”. The body’s afterwork duty is the maintenance of the health of that body: performing repairs etc. and keeping the body in good working order.

...

Of course no event can be arranged to perfectly suit everyone and an optimal time must be decided upon from a position of compromise. This time will be early-to-late evening – that is outside of working hours – to suit people who have been working all day and are now free to engage in afterwork, who are after all the majority of people who might want to attend, and after all you can’t suit everyone. This consideration of the needs of the majority of people is reasonable and commonplace and is called “ableism.”

...

The disabled body works. The work of a disabled person is at irregular times, at all times. A disabled person is working constantly to maintain their body in a state of closeness to health, whether theirs is a working body or not. A disabled person employed as such by the state is working more than full-time for a far lower wage than even minimum.

This disabled work bears more in common with abled afterwork, which produces no capital by itself. For the disabled, afterwork means real work; means maintaining the body in a state of closeness to health not fitness for work. Where would we go to “after work”?

His author bio at the bottom is worth reading too:

Brian Fog is the shadow of an artist who evaporated over ten years until all that remained was a disembodied voice. He was active in Scottish art. He is currently full-time disabled. His practice applied an interdisciplinary approach, which is now redirected squarely at living OK. He was already in lockdown and will continue to be after "this". He lives and works. He has a real name.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Ooooo! That's fascinating.

amandaw came up with "second shift for the sick" borrowing from Arlie Hoschild's "second shift for waged women."

One category in my calendar app is "healthwork," which takes 90 minutes/day right off the top.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I've got a tag called "healthwork is work" to remind me that it is. :) I've mentally called this kind of stuff "disabled hours" since I first wrote about it.

[otter]

So much to agree with there.

[raino]

This sparked a new insight for me, thanks for posting!

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I'm glad to hear that!

[silveradept]

What a wonderful world it would be where the work of maintaining the body were paid sufficiently to live and everything on top of that was something you enjoyed doing and did when you had the time and ability to do it.