A message from Clarence White, ESFL Associate Director

Some time ago, earlier in the pandemic, I overheard someone saying something to the effect that workers who were finding themselves vulnerable to the COVID-19 virus should not complain.  Many of these workers were deemed by this person as less deserving and in lesser occupations and they said that if they didn’t want these “crappy jobs” where they were faced with starvation or the loss of life due to the virus, they should get some training. Training.

Yes, we lost a lot of people who had jobs that we miscategorize as unskilled. We lost a lot of postal workers, packing plant workers, bus drivers, and jobs that would never be the subject matter of a course selection at Harvard. These words made me think of two things: 

• First, this person has no idea what they are talking about.
• Second, they know exactly what they are talking about

My first thought was that these are not unskilled, untrained workers. They do jobs that require a lot of training and skill. I have driven bigger trucks in my life, and received limited training in order to do that, but I don’t dare train to handle a city bus. I thought about the teachers, many of whom were forced into the classroom before there were significant safety measures (if we even have some today). I thought about nurses, who are among the most trained workers in our society, whose training is crucial to our existence and care. My thought was this person is wrong. Just wrong.

Then I had another thought: there is a way in which they are right. Or that this thinking fits into a worldview that is often dismissed instead of acknowledged as the antithesis of justice, but prevalent nonetheless, and is foundational to our sense of capitalist empire and order.

I remember a visit University of Minnesota professor Jimmy Patino Jr made to our library several years ago where he was talking about a solidarity movement with Black and Latino workers. During his talk, he mentioned that immigration policy in the United States is really labor policy–that we determine immigration policy based on how much cheap labor we need at jobs we’d rather not do ourselves. He also pointed out that criminal justice policy is also really labor policy, with its effect of enslaving people in our carceral system, requiring forced labor with virtually no rights and virtually no pay. 

We have this idea that there are people, for whatever identity we assign to them, who are fated and deserving of working conditions so poor that they can lose their life. This is what enslaved people did. Regardless of proclamations of emancipation or our status living in a “northern” state, this idea that people can be used like this persists. 

Like enslaved people, during the pandemic, we force people to be put in danger. There were some programs, policies and pockets of culture that protected workers, but the sentiment persists that leaves us livid and insulted at the inconveniences that might come with someone choosing their life and health over the commitment to the fast latte to which we feel entitled. There is this idea that we deserve it and that we should not have to care that someone might die so that we can have it–and that someone should force them back to work. There is even this neo-liberal idea called “quiet quitting.” Quiet? The idea that people should be paid for their work, their acquired skills and for the risks they take seems to be lost on many. 

The reason I am thinking of this is because of the narrowly averted nurses strike. The animosity against nurses was so great that corporate hospitals would spitefully pay more to hire roving temporary nurses two and three times as much as they would pay their own staff. This is a foolish spite, but not when you can arc the landscape of labor pitch away from justice. 

The nurses are highly trained people who must execute their jobs in an environment where getting it right is critical. They have been doing their jobs in an environment of the past three years where much of the reason behind their most vital work has been dismissed by COVID deniers and many who are fine with putting our medical workers at risk out of a juvenile defiance of what is obvious to the face. They face hostile, contrary and violent patients. They work with patients who have even higher needs with fewer staff to help them due to the various tolls of the pandemic. While hospitals protect corporate profits, they hoped for a weariness by attrition from the people who are most critical to our care. 

Carolyn Olson, Doctors Getting Vaccinated – Essential Workers Portrait #71, 2021. Pastel on paper. 20 in. x 29 in.

Earlier this month, we had an exhibit from Duluth artist Carolyn Olson. Her “Essential Workers” exhibit in ESFL featured a dozen of the 100 portraits she created to show the reality of people in their day-to-day lives, workers who we called “essential,” a term that became a tragic euphemism during our hardest days. Many of these portraits are of medical workers and nurses. The images, their pastel light, are deeply somber, but still filled with color and light. The quiet is a warmth around which we can gather and work in solidarity. 

Even as we have not crushed the empire, live in our neoliberal capitalist reality, and with a federal government that has one house led by a proto fascist party and the other house existing under a pall of the century-and-a-half-long tradition of nullification. But we have our solidarity. We have our victories that move along the arc of justice. We have each other, our human selves. We are not slaves. We are not fodder. We are not heroes, because “Superman never made any money/saving the world from Solomon Grundy.” We are sisters, brothers and kin. We are essential.