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[firecat]

via keryx

"The Politics of Consumption: an Interview with Juliet Schor" in Aurora Online Magazine

http://aurora.icaap.org/2004Interviews/JulietSchor.html

Excerpt:

Basically, the market sector has been cannibalizing the domestic sphere, sucking huge flows of labour out of the unpaid sector - labour that is absolutely essential to the preservation and reproduction of the social fabric.

I was thinking about this while I was visiting the OH's aunt at the hospital yesterday. There weren't enough staff there to give patients attention they could use. At the same time, there are lots of people out of work and people working in dead-end, minimum-wage-or-less jobs and kinda pointless jobs. (Technical editing, which is what I usually do for money, seems kinda pointless to me when I'm visiting a patient in a hospital.)

I know it's not a matter of snapping your fingers and reassigning people where they can be more useful, but I kind of wish it were. Or something.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Schor article yet, so this may be repeating (or off the mark) ...

In this specific instance, one huge factor is our national unwillingness to pay the costs of health care. In every sector, employees are the big "cost center." We treat health care like a market commodity, and we aren't willing to pay for it. We act as if individuals like the OH's aunt are somehow either part of the problem or at least not part of a pattern. Thus, when it happens in us or our families, we take the brunt of it instead of demanding that the system pay attention to real needs.

I certainly know people who completely milk the system for aid and support, complain at how little is available, and get completely enraged and infuriated at how much tax they pay.

And I could go on and on and on.

[firecat]

So true. (The Schor article doesn't talk about health care per se. It talks about how our time and energy and money tend not to be spent on what we say our values are.)