I don't know what these guys are paid, but it isn't much, and no doubt it's a lot less than the uniformed sanit workers I used to see doing the same work. There's also some forced savings program involved. I've always wanted to talk to them, but I'm afraid they'd get in trouble; there's some supervisor in a van who drives them around & drops them off. (Doug Henwood)
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Among my endlessly downward spiral employment record, there, near the bottom can be found, attendant, right next on list with casual day labor, and hospital orderly--both of which pay more. Actually all these jobs require the same absolutely desperate, preferably illiterate, likely foreign born, recovering-from-something-awful, type worker, living outside any attention, or care by the larger social, economic, or legal institutions for the total exploitation of everybody in the great USA. I guess migrant farm workers are below some of the other jobs I've had, but that's about it. Since I've never picked fruit or cut vegetables I don't know--just judging from film and video footage.
Do I think putting the rejects of society together to abuse and use each other is a good plan? Hmm. It's hard to say. Let's see, How about putting the crank addicts to work in the maternity ward?
Oh, yes, I struggled briefly in solidarity to unionize attendants up here, and then went on strike against the evil cripple hegemony of CIL, then broke the picket line when it turned out that one of the women mechanics in the auto shop who organized the strike was in a righteous lesbian rage over her girlfriend getting fired in the accounting office--the office where, naturally enough co-mingling funds, graft, corruption, fraud and no bookkeeping took place regularly. Pay checks were late as usual no matter what. Where does one stand on these issues? These were some of the dark sides to Alitsky(?) style community organizing. On the other hand, just exactly how CIL differed significantly from Oakland City Hall is a little hard to measure, except everything was just more so downtown.
These are no win oppositions and they obscure the larger view of how a thorough going socio-economic and political oppression works, as it poisons and destroys all human relations and institutions under the thumb. There must be a great Marx quote that fits here, anybody got one? In the meanwhile, the sorts of relations that Butler renders in Psychic Lives, do have real equivalents and relationship between attendants and the disabled are one of these. But just as analyzing the the relation of bondsmen to lord does not bring down feudalism, neither does an analysis of the mutually oppressed at the bottom of the capitalist exploitation hierarchy, bring one closer to the destruction of this system either.
I escaped some of the dead ends of trying to figure out who was oppressing who in this attendant-cripple relation by realizing this was nothing more than the consequence of the politics of scarcity. By making money scarce at the bottom, the bottom eats itself alive and succeeds in its own oppression much better than an overseer ever could. Solidarity then becomes the route out.
Chuck Grimes