I honestly am exhausted. I work 6 days a week and 3 of those days I work two jobs, the other 3 I only work 1 but its only because I go to classes on those days. No one really talks about the sacrifices that need to be made if you don’t have your tuition covered or your parents can’t help you with it. Honestly I feel like half the time my body and brain want to give up on me. I never truly get a break and im constantly in front of a computer so my eyes hurt or my head hurts. Brain fog is real, especially because I’m always on the go. Sometimes I even have to sacrifice sleep because there’s just not enough time in the day. At night is when I have to focus on homework so when exactly does my body and mind have time to rest? I think im experiencing burnout. Today I actually read a tweet that said, “there’s no real way to rest away burnout, something in your daily life or schedule has to change.” and I think they’re right because no matter how much sleep I could possibly get, im still exhausted mentally. I think about what exactly I could do to change my day to day so that I feel less tired but I need both jobs to pay off the rest of my tuition that loans and scholarships didn’t cover, as well as having to pay for whatever other bills or expenses I have.
I don’t know, its just what I have to do right? That’s just life right? I don’t even want to sound like im complaining because I know there’s people out their that have less or don’t even have the opportunity to go to school, let alone two jobs. I’m grateful, I really am but im just tired. But my parents raised me to be strong, resilient, and to never give up. They came from a whole different country with nothing and were able to make a beautiful life for us. I never lacked any real necessities growing up, had a roof over my head, food in my belly, clothes on my body. So I’m doing this so one day I can create a beautiful life for myself and bring them along with me. So they don’t have to work anymore, because if im tired then I know they’re exhausted. I guess what im saying is, I’m praying that this is all worth it in the end.
Emotional labor is the act of “regulating or managing emotional expressions with others as part of one’s professional work role”. For the context of this blog post, I will also be referencing emotional work as well, which is the role people use in any social context. RANT: Every post, YouTube video, and link that I looked at typically focused on the emphasis of how women have been the brute focus of emotional work and often, labor. WHAT ABOUT THE MEN?! BLOG: Ideally, men have been the focus, but in our current generation, I am starting to wonder if men are becoming the scapegoat for blame. There are good and bad things to this, but I can only share my experiences. From growing up in a household as an adopted child to working in hospitality at some of the best hotels in the Houston area, to coming home and being expected to “clean up everyone else’s shit” (one of my ex’s fathers literally told me this and suggested I work for some type of plumbing company) to experiencing my own version of emotional labor is…exhausting. As a recommendation, if you’re dealing with being the emotional laborer of your family or workplace, I suggest counseling, good friends, hobbies, and money. Now that I have your attention, the emphasis on emotional labor during this period of the class was for women. Honestly, I love that. Often, the strongest women in my life have carried the emotional labor of EVERYONE in the family. My Grandmother (capital G, because she truly is a G), and my Aunt (who raised me, God bless her soul) have not only raised multiple members of the family but have guided others and influenced people for generations to come. I can endlessly explain what they have done for everyone, including my impaired brother (this falls into the disability category of the past few weeks, but I decided to not go in-depth with these issues and instead focus on emotional labor…anyway) My Grandmother has done amazing things as a widowed woman, and when my grandfather was alive, what I recall of him, he was a remarkable man, veteran, and overall generally good person. In order for him to be that he needed to have an even stronger woman there to not only support him, but to motivate and guide him. We so often focus on a certain gender, but I think its vital to focus and include everyone because we cannot physically do it all on our own – even if social media suggests that we do. When it comes to emotional labor for myself, as an older male, I grew up with the family vibe of “you want it? Do it yourself” This mindset has its own version of toxic masculinity and it worked for a time, but as I have grown older and started practicing gratitude, meditation, and fitness, I have learned that kindness is the key to growing. However, that is also the curse of being easily manipulated and being the scapegoat out of a lack of emotion – if you allow yourself to be. When working as a hotel supervisor, I found myself taking on the emotional verbal abuse of people that travelled so far and attempted to check in, but one minor inconvenience (Well…one time there was a major inconvenience, we sold out and by the time they got there…the people didn’t have a room… and they were diamond members which is equivalent to being a traveling version of Karen) set them over the top, and I had to apologize profusely, make up for their issues by giving them a free nights stay at another hotel, etc… all while keeping a smile on my face. So dumb, but it was vital in learning how to maneuver around people when they are angry and teaching myself how to stay calm in the face of disappointment. That’s an invaluable trait and lessons/memories that I am grateful for. I don’t know, I am a believer in the idea that everything happens for a reason. Maybe I should allow myself to be the gatekeeper of my own “shit”, to be more selfish and selfless at the same time, and to lack the attempt to understand everything and everyone around me but I cant do that shrug. In essence, I think all of us must have some type of role in emotional labor, but please, don’t forget to take care of your mental, physical, and financial well-being. Your family, friends, and pets will thank you for it. (I will always choose to be kind and thank you to all of the people in my life, wouldn’t be me without YOU).
I still remember that day in July. It was at a weird time in my life. I had been back on hormones for a few months now, after having been off for way too long due to a bad combo of adhd and anxiety making my life much harder than it needed to be. Similarly I had been working for the past few months in a grocery store. It was a frustrating job but at the very least it paid me.
First, let me just say that TikTok is a great platform for people to speak out on what seems like small moments in their lives but are ultimately extremely impactful: few other platforms expect you to produce 60-second vignettes of information with little further context, but TikTok allows and almost requires the person behind the camera to get to the point very quickly.
To summarize the video that does not have captions (not all creators in all countries have access to that feature yet): This person is deaf and was raised in a hearing community. They started a new job, and were surprised and overwhelmed when they walked in on their first day and everyone in the office was wearing clear, see-through masks, meaning they would be able to lip read. Their first reaction was to feel gratitude for what felt like a gesture of kindness and welcome, and that they feel seen as a person.
I want to take what this person almost said and bring it a step further. This creator felt gratitude, felt welcomed, and felt seen, and they felt these things because their workplace had done what could be argued they are legally required to do in order for them to be functional in their job. While clear masks may not be spelled out as an accommodation in the ADA, it definitely became necessary during COVID-19 for the deaf community in order for them to be safe, but also to participate in society. Providing clear masks to what is presumably an office would not be considered undue hardship as it would be only slightly more expensive than providing ordinary masks to the workforce. An office with a mask mandate is most likely providing their employees with masks, so an office with a mask mandate and a deaf employee would then be legally required to provide clear masks to their workforce.
I will reiterate: This person felt gratitude because their employer did what they were legally required to do to accommodate their disability and did it promptly so the accommodation was in place when they started their first day of work.
As a member of the disabled community this tells me that the bar is on the ground. It may even be buried, and we are then overwhelmingly grateful when someone unburies the bar and hands it to us. It may still be covered in dirt and we may have a new worm friend but it’s been so long since some of us have seen the bar that we accept it as-is.
Can we even conceptualize what it would look like if every disabled person was given their accommodations on their first day of work? What would it look like if in an interview we could just hand a list to our potential employer and it wasn’t a factor in the hiring decision but simply part of their resume? What if everyone was required to submit a list of accommodations and workplace preferences as a part of their application, and it was simply accepted as standard and a best practice in hiring? What if these were accepted as necessary and automatic requirements as long as they fell under ADA guidelines and did not cause undue hardship to the employer, and thus every employer automatically provided them?
Let’s take this thought experiment one step further. What comes next? What does disability acceptance look like in a world where each individual’s needs were met to the furthest extent possible?
This may take some creative thinking on our part, but I think it’s possible to imagine. I personally can imagine an office where wheelchairs were equally as common as chairs. I can imagine that one person may be at a treadmill desk (there’s always at least one fitness enthusiast in an office) and another desk may be empty most of the time, as its owner largely worked from home. I can imagine that transcription of recorded virtual meetings would be as automatic as meeting notes, and that it would be an expectation that the office would rotate through who took on that job just like we do note-takers. I can imagine that this office would throw out traditional concepts of what a work day would look like, and what work production would look like, and that each individual would be allowed to work and produce work in a way that best suited their personality, lifestyle, neurodivergences and sleep schedules.
These ideas, though, still linger within the realm of accommodation. Is it possible to get even more outlandish in our conceptualization of disability in the workplace?
I can imagine a workplace where a disabled person has been promoted several times. I can imagine a workplace where when someone schedules a happy hour, they take into consideration locations that would be functional and welcoming for every member of the team, which may mean having drinks at a quiet restaurant instead of a loud, difficult-to-navigate bar. I can imagine that at the desk of the person who works from home, there is a prank hidden in the drawer for that person to find from a coworker who is thinking of them whether they’re physically there or not, and doesn’t care how long it takes them to find it. (Who doesn’t enjoy the long game?) I can imagine a scenario where every team member is appreciated for their social contributions to the team, and that for some people that may mean not eating lunch in the cafeteria, but may look like them tracking everyone’s birthdays and sending out celebratory emails to everyone. I can imagine that people with disabilities are treated like people and are accepted in all contexts of the word and are welcomed not only on the surface of being able to do their work adequately, but are welcomed as a human being joining a collective enterprise.
When the bar for disability accommodation is buried underground, acceptance and equity for disability is buried along with it.
I worked at Aldi for nearly two years before disability and injury forced me to quit, and take on several non-physical part-time jobs instead. Aldi runs on an extremely robust high-efficiency model that is designed to eke out every ounce of labor every worker has for every minute they are on the clock in order to keep their costs low and the customer’s costs low. In order for Aldi to be profitable, they must be exploitative.
Many Aldi employees will refute this statement because “Aldi pays more than minimum wage!” And yes, they pay just barely enough to be competitive in the local market they are located in – but only if you are comparing them to other grocery stores. The reality of the Aldi model is the job requirements are more in line with working at a warehouse, and warehouses on average pay quite a bit more than grocery stores as the understanding is that it is a difficult physical job.
Many customers also fail to understand how difficult the Aldi job is. The most common complaint we heard as employees was how lazy we were for getting to sit. This quote from querysprout best explains my feeling on that topic, “Letting cashiers sit down – it’s actually not a comfort thing (employees have described the work at Aldi as “backbreaking”), but rather, the company found employees could scan faster if they were seated.” We as customers praise and stand in awe of the Aldi model that allows us to get basic grocery goods for so cheap because they leave the goods in boxes, how revolutionary! In the next breath we complain that there’s never an employee around to ask questions to – the reason being Aldi staffs the bare minimum of employees at any given time to, again, maximize efficiency.
One of the most interesting facets in Aldi’s worker exploitation is how thoroughly prepared they are for worker injury. The job is intensely physical, the training for the physical tasks is minimal, and the expectation for worker speed and production is through the roof. It’s a breeding ground for serious injury, and the reality I knew working there was anyone who worked as a stocker was injured at least once in a year period. If they lasted more than a year, they typically were hurt at least once a year. I knew several people who had worked there for many years and all of them had received reparative surgery, or desperately needed it.
Aldi has a robust worker’s compensation insurance system, and it’s clear that they fork over a lot of cash for it. (I’ve had worker comp claims at other employers that were much less streamlined, in comparison.) Aldi will happily plan for you to be injured, pay for your recovery and for a short time out if needed, and then expects you to be back on the workhorse as soon as possible. Restrictions are heavily discouraged, though they do, of course, abide by them reluctantly when required to.
What happens if you just can’t come back to work right away? Scalia v. Aldi (2012) is an interesting case in which one employee was booted off of worker’s comp for taking too long to heal, and then promptly fired because she hadn’t worked in 12 months. The employee claimed that her firing was retaliatory for her injury on the job. (She didn’t win, which is hardly a surprise in the U.S.) The reasoning behind the decision came down to Aldi’s extensive policies around termination, worker’s comp, and time out, that enough logic loopholes existed in their policies that had existed before this termination to make it “not retaliatory,” though apparently only in a neutral sense.
What does that mean for you as a consumer, and for Aldi? Well, Aldi has absolutely abysmal employee turnover, akin to the rates of fast food industries. They are a ship with a mild leak that has been patched over and over with mixed success, and only time will tell if their model is truly successful in the long run. For you, I recommend asking yourself when you walk into an Aldi: Do the employees actually look happy, or do they look exhausted? Can you even find an employee?
There have been so many times that we have allowed our body to be swept away with daily life. But, how often do we learn and establish ways to improve it?
I have failed to work with a system that prioritizes productivity over personhood.
I have chosen moving forward over suffering
I will accept myself to spite a value system that does not want acceptance – but always striving for “better”. If I internalize it, that I am always striving for “better”, then I build a comfortable place for the belief that I will never be enough, to rest upon. Instead, I will build space within myself to be less than ideal.
The face of an exhausted shiftworker is not unfamiliar to most: the half-opened eyes of a 7-11 employee, who drawls, “Good morning,” as they slowly move their sleepy arm to scan items. For many working class individuals, managing to secure 7-8 hours of sleep nightly is a constant struggle. Sleep deprivation and insomnia have a pervasive impact on those of lower socioeconomic status, resulting in numerous mental/physiological health risks and poor work performance. Sleep deprivation could be a potential factor that accounts for the near impossibility of escaping poverty.Continue reading →
Unruly Bodies 