Help DKG Solidarity Group celebrate Valentine's Day! This story is part of a series of I ❤️ DK Guild posts written by Community members to show their support for the writing, activism and site services work of DK Guild members. All of us together make Daily Kos the most vibrant progressive community on the net. Let's do everything we can to keep it that way!
While I was growing up, my father worked for himself, right up until the day he didn’t. He had his own business and, when that failed, he went to work for a hotel as the maintenance guy. There was no way he could frame it—not to his family, not to himself—as anything other than a personal failure. And for the rest of his career, he scraped by with subpar wages and unreliable hours.
What I remember most about those years is the change in his sense of dignity, his feeling that he had failed because his business failed. He talked about it rarely and barely, bitterly—with an anger and resentment that poor people nurse against everyone who’s never known anything but failing upward. It led to weird dynamics in my family; he felt no dignity in his new job, not because the work demeaned him, but because he couldn’t refuse and couldn’t ask for better wages, better working conditions, or better hours. So he endured, resenting and hating the people who deigned to pay him a pittance and called him in at all hours to fix everything from a kitchen drain that the chef absolutely would not stop pouring hot grease down and clogging, to a jacuzzi that guests fouled with—well, that’s best left to the imagination—to icy parking lots and blocked toilets and leaky roofs and what-all and then questioned his hours and begrudged him his pay. It helped to make him a bitter man, lonely in his work and desperately resentful.
I moved out as soon as I could. And in time, married a guy who was a proud factory worker. He’d been a Republican until he started working on the floor and realized which party had workers’ backs. Being really smart, he also saw how corporate forces feed workers anti-union propaganda and fuel worker division. Again, it was a situation of dangerous work, bad hours, and terrible choices. When he was hurt on the job and lost part of his hand, he had to study up on all the state and federal codes to make sure he wasn’t further taken advantage of, and he wrested dignity from an adversarial system. The situation in his plant is much worse now because, since the ‘90s, the chipping-away of pensions, benefits, and wages has accelerated hand-in-glove with the wealth extraction. His place of employment is no longer a magnet for workers—it’s the place you work when you’re pretty much out of options.
Now, I live in a “right to work (for less)” state, and change is glacial. But it’s coming. California, where Daily Kos is based, has already crossed that divide of dignity, so it makes no sense to me that management is not dealing squarely and transparently with the Daily Kos Guild. Yes, the Guild is negotiating for economic security, but they’re also negotiating as equal partners, as the people who bring the value-added to a valuable enterprise. It’s about dignity. Without dignity, we’re all desperately surviving. Unions bring dignity to work.
It’s really that simple.
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