strong resonances with that lady “not picking cotton” comments
I hate how capitalism codifies the division of labour so much. Nursing is an amazing profession that taught me a lot and made me much more capable in my other work. If the revolution happened tomorrow, I’d probably spend two days out of the week nursing on the commune just for all the humanising elements of it. Anyone else would benefit from doing that work, but we wall it off and feminise it and demean it.
This fucking judas goat worked as a booba-growing hynotherapist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_Polanski) and he has the audacity to insult actual workers doing the actual work that will keep his body from breaking down the moment he becomes ill. He more than anyone could benefit from wiping asses until he’s normal and can talk to people normally.
and i mean, i sure as hell would like person caring for my grannies receives better compensation than person importing plastic bums or developing drones. one i care about more than money, the other not so much.
Every bourgeois smartbrain thinks they’re above the system until they find out which nursing home they can afford and the conditions those workers face. The last one I worked in, a skilled nursing facility so it included all-ages surgical rehab, paid its CNAs $1 above minimum wage to solo watch 20-60 patients with complex needs. Usually staff lasted less than a month before fleeing anywhere else. We had one medicaid bed per 20 patient wing, and otherwise beds started at $2300/month. I knew someone who managed to get in a $7000/month nursing home and it was only marginally better than that beige prison.
Maybe this charlatan can hypnotise the disease out of his body and the shit off his ass, but I think he’s going to end up in a place like that completely dependent on the people he thinks are beneath him. He’ll only have a couple hours to pull off that magic trick before his body starts rotting and plenty of chances to try.
I’m super far removed from the medical profession and therefor may be talking out of my ass, but its always been strange to me the hierarchal division between nurses and doctors. It seems the system would work better if everyone had to enter as something like a CNA and gradually skilled up with doctor being something you became after many years of nursing.
That’s what nurse practitioners were supposed to be, but they never worked well in an emergency setting and were just an excuse to not employ doctors in the nursing homes. Even if we abolish the patriarchal hierarchy between the two professions they’re very different jobs. A doctor can’t be overwhelmed with the practical and human elements of care because they have to focus on all the theoretical parts that psychologically abstract you from the patient and trap you on a computer. A nurse can’t be overwhelmed by the theoretical parts of the job because they have to connect with the patient and do the interventions. Trying to do both on my own in paramedicine was miserable compared to being a specialist on a team. Even if my role in emergency was being the physician’s arms, their role was only being their brain and doing the things too risky for me to do. The care was more holistic when it was split between the two and we could give adequate attention to the very different sides of a case.
And people were saying this is where the socialists need to flock to? Ok…
he says in that transcript that foreign nationals are only a fifth of care workers so not that reasonable to map it to migrants in general. the wiping bums bit is reductive but he has a short time to deliver the general idea that this is a thankless and unpleasant job, it’s an error but i don’t think it’s that bad
the gist is understandable, but the direction of logic is “who will do degrading work with birth rates being what they are” instead of “who will care for unable people with birth rates being what they are”, it shouldn’t be thankless job
you’re right it shouldn’t be thankless but it currently is, at least in terms of pay. similar arguments (who will pick strawberries etc) are made by middle class lib types but i think polanski is trying genuinely to put the case that inward migration is beneficial, clumsily in this instance
but in this framing is everything, because who will pick strawberries is bad argument not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t point to (leftist/just/equitable) solution, porkies managed to get strawberry pickers under tories, under labour and will manage under farage, it’s capital interest after all. Saying you want worker’s rights for strawberry pickers is entirely different proposition from “we need them lmao”
i’m heading out but not sure that the necessity to capitalism of the role matters to this type of argument in favour of migrant workers. good chance i’m wrong though, thanks for your responses, i will check back later
no, but circular logic of immigrant labor is this: we can’t pay full citizen with worker protections the salary to take this job (frequently menial and hard, for example in usa media i remember reading a story that someone tried to get bell pepper pickers for 15 bucks an hour, and local workers fucked off after a month) or change the conditions of the job (more frequent breaks/portable chairs/higher number of workers) for them to consider, so we have to get someone without rights who can’t complain (south americans in usa/romanians+asians for uk) because we can just shove them out of a country without paying them a cent/penny if they start to complain.
And we can’t raise prices because without using tariffs we can’t compete with pisraeli strawberries or whatever, and we can’t do tariffs because we are all free marketers. Thus immigrant labour and it’s “necessity” for porkies. (as an aside, funnily enough, apparently consumers are fine with paying through the nose because we have to sanction russia’s energy, and still raise food prices.) it all comes down to workers rights/compensation/and regard for those workers by the public, if you can convince them migrants are dirty subhumans, maybe they are more likely to ignore abominable conditions of their lives and labour, and still import them, cause you need them.
and same goes for hospitality/nursing etc, where you create shitty llc to subcontract for big business that labor, so when it goes tits up, they point to llc who provided migrants, and that firm is a fiction without any liabilities or anything, and one man office in cyprus.
