A diary entry on invisible labor and why the most important politics rarely trends
Monday, A Scale Of Negotiation Worth Actually Naming
Fifteen separate bargaining units, representing more than six thousand City of Portland employees, are currently engaged in ongoing labor negotiations across wages, layoffs and recall provisions, standby and callback pay, and hours of work, a scale of active municipal labor organizing that, by my own informal survey of friends and colleagues this week, almost nobody outside directly affected departments seems to be actually tracking.
I raised this at a dinner party Tuesday and was met with genuinely blank looks from people who consider themselves politically engaged, follow national politics closely, could name every senator’s position on whatever the week’s federal controversy happens to be, and had no idea their own city was mid-negotiation across fifteen separate units simultaneously. This is, I think, the actual gap in how most of us practice political attention: national drama draws the eye, while the genuinely consequential, material negotiations happening in our own city hall pass almost entirely unnoticed.
Tuesday, The Guiding Principles Worth Actually Reading
The city’s own stated bargaining principles, respect, workforce competition, financial stewardship, shared responsibility, read, on paper, like fairly standard municipal HR language. Watching how those principles actually get argued over in real negotiation, respect meaning what, exactly, when set against financial stewardship, reveals considerably more genuine ideological tension than the bland language initially suggests.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, still mildly irritated at my dinner party’s collective blank stares from Tuesday.
Thursday, A Closing Commitment
I am starting a small habit this month: attending at least one bargaining update session monthly and actually reporting back to my own social circle what I learn, purely because someone needs to be the annoying friend who insists this matters as much as whatever is trending nationally that week.
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More labor organizing diary entries at my author page: https://prat.uk/author/megan/
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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