The discussion about hiring firing and strikes is really moot. As I mentioned before the SEIU has already agreed with WID on the disabled persons right to hire, fire and the no strike clause.
We are in agreement that workers need better wages and health care. No one is arguing that is badly needed for a host of reasons.
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Hmm. Should I or should I not? I am not sure. I know all this stuff by heart, lived it, argued it, fought on both sides of it, and always lost.
Well, why not? It might help. The no strike clause is dead wrong logically, politically, economically, and very last, way down there near the bottom, morally bankrupt. It reads like the raw assertion of power it is, that nevertheless insists on hiding behind a flimsy fig-leaf of humanitarian concern. It plays directly into the hands of worst sort of neo-liberal apologetic for the ideologies of power, oppression, and subjection. It is blatantly paternalistic and fascist, period. (I can hear and see Debbie Kaplan laughing at me, right now)
Yes disability has the right and obligation to self-determination to make it's place at the table. But, yes, any worker, no matter what, has the right to strike. So, the question becomes how do these two positions find themselves in conflict? How do we escape the dialects of power? The only way possible. By interrogating the meta-narratives that bring us these conflicts. In this case the conditions. What specifically are we dealing with? Are these city and county workers? Are these licensed contract workers? Or are these people just answering ads in the newspaper or community bulletin board for attendant work? See, the same sort of no strike clause is used against all medical and emergency personnel, from hospital nurses and orderlies to the police and fire departments. After all, what if blah blah, blah (fill in the horror story of choice). Need I point out that the logical flaw in the necessity of a no strike clause, lays in the presumption that indeed, disability is a 'medical' condition in need of life-giving treatment? Or, that the moral argument of right to control one's destiny includes the right to oppress others? See, the arguments are all wrong headed.
My answer twenty years ago was simple. Go to Sacramento and fucking demand more. More of everything, period. And, that might not be such a bad idea now. In the meantime, it is long over due, that this relationship between the disabled and the attendant be re-worked theoretically so that it can be re-defined in the concrete, so that this sort of conflict between independence and right to strike does not have to arise. It is a no win battle that divides the bottom to the advantage of the forces that brough us into this condition in the first place.
So, in concrete terms I would propose the same old solution. Demand community based organizations run by disabled people who manage and administer the full spectrum of home, school, and community services required. In addition, since such organizations would be state and county funded, their staffs and the people they administer as various service providers should all be members in the same union, with the same collective bargaining rights and right to strike. In other words go backward twenty years and resuscitate what would have worked, if it had ever been funded and administered well.
Such a solution will not solve the detailed problems of this particular cripple-attendant relation, but at least within such a community organization there are just means available to sort these intimate struggles out, and certainly get rid of the bad folks that abound in these scenes.
Chuck Grimes