Dignity 2022
Knowledge is a shield and a sword, a joy and a duty…”
-Amy Schneider, the latest winner of consecutive games of Jeopardy
Colonial Williamsburg is a “living historical museum” which 1,000 slaves once called home. The above quote, which I read over the holidays while watching Jeopardy with my family, stuck with me as I listened, driving back to Grand Ledge, to stories from the past year of hospitality workers at Colonial Williamsburg. A sample from one person:
Working on their feet all day on injured joints under threat of being fired
Having to leave their kids home alone repeatedly due to demanded overtime
Missing doctor’s appointments for their injured joints - and paying a fee for the absence - due to unpredictable scheduling.
A “living museum”, alright.
And God bless ‘em, the folks at Williamsburg were striking for fairer working conditions, in light of knowledge gained during the pandemic that, while they have conceded long hours, poor pay and poor benefits since the Great Recession, the value of the very wealthiest in society has grown incomprehensibly larger than that of the rest of us.
Then after getting home, I learned the biggest news - they won. An immediate wage increase of $3 an hour from $12.50. A 48% wage increase by 2025. A bonus. Short- and long-term disability. A guaranteed 8-hour work day with dramatic overtime changes that include time-and-a-half pay. There’s even more than that.
The hospitality workers’ ambition, and their win, really struck me because in 2021, many of the working people in my own life, whose careers range from health care to shipping, also related to me experiences of seeing their own dignity, or that of their colleagues, or that of their clients, being compromised. A clinic here ordering unnecessary procedures to get a little more money, a delivery firm there requiring such tight schedules that their drivers bring empty bottles to pee in.
Unfortunately, these experiences are all too common if you’re a working person in America today, like those in hospitality, food manufacturing, and dozens and dozens of others. There’s a decent chance in America today that your job makes it pretty hard for you to live a life that your organization’s owner or leadership would see as “dignified” if they had to live it.
To varying degrees, these situations are created by decisions borne from “forced scarcity” - scarcity of funding, scarcity of labor - due in no small part to the ways that our country’s economic structure systematically funnels resources to the wealthiest and to owners, not to workers.
The hospitality workers of Colonial Williamsburg wielded their knowledge and their experience - and their power - like gladiators. But, as their years of struggle and stories show, sometimes, before knowledge can be wielded to help you, it first can strike you like a dagger through the heart.
2021 was a year of resilience for all of us, yet one of indignity for many. For some, at least those workers in Williamsburg, 2022 will be a year of sweet victory.
In this year 2022, my prayer for the world is that more of us find ways to use what we have learned about our world to struggle just little bit more for our own dignity and for that of all of humanity.
Photo: UNITE HERE Local 25
