!Orderlies --- agk's diary 30 May 2022 @ 0415 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 via puTTY by candlelight in the garage --- If you're unit restricted in the psych hospital where I work, you can't go to the cafeteria or Rec. Nursing staff can put you on UR or take you off it. It doesn't need a doctor's order. > I invent fictionalized composite patients for > diary stories Unit-restricted for behavior, Eliana stood in the hall, dayroom to the right, med room left, nine closed patient room doors down the hall. She wore a high-viz Toyota plant t-shirt and was 14. The glassed nurse's station watchfully ends the hall. "My dad worked for Sodexo at the Toyota plant before he went back to prison," Eliana said. I asked if he liked working there. Unsure, she asked what I know about Sodexo. "I had friends didn't like working for them. Not that it matters ---around here nobody's union---but Sodexo's a big union-buster." "What's a union?" I used my brief, patient, straightforward nurse dialect. That day in that dialect I also explained anemia to Eliana's pale-lipped peer and coached a withdrawn peer on self-advocating to get the bena- dryl/ativan/haldol injection she wanted for her next escalation. I spoke the dialect of experts educating plain folk. Evy's intimidated about the labor conference she's getting ready to go to with our daughter and---sort of---some of her UCW union brothers. Partly it's cultural, language---steward, local, open shop, contract action, two-tier, rank-and-file. We didn't grow up in union homes. We're children of experts. Her parents' expertise is life science and medicine though they owned a store and worked construction. Our parents didn't reproduce their social position, at least not yet. We're plain folk, at least now, unlicensed nursing assistants. In the 1890s we'd be classified as domestics, in the 1960s---when Bernie Sanders did my job---orderlies. We get intimidated by experts. Labor organizers and professional labor historians are experts. "I'm too stupid for this conference," Evy said, looking at a print-out of the conference schedule. "I made a mistake." She'll drive eight hours and attend with our loud, squirmy half-infant half- toddler, without me, without childcare. I think Evy's pretty brave and smart. From bookshelves in the garage by my 1976 motor- cycle that needs front fork seals, I got two books published in the '70s about midwestern trade union women. They're in the collection I rescued from Gone's squat when it was evicted but hadn't read. In the dozen pages of the books I've now read are two kinds of women: those like us who worked as domestics, tradeswomen, prostitutes, etc. and "club women" with wealthy husbands who organized for social uplift. The working women started out as plain folk and usually stayed that way. The club women, who dubbed themselves allies, were spiritual mothers of today's experts. At 4:30 AM after reading those pages I got dressed in black scrubs to work at the psych hospital where Eliana'd ask me what's a union. I hit "seek" on the radio. It lighted on Eastern Kentucky University's National Public Radio station. I didn't immediately hit seek again. In daily life I don't hear NPR's collegial tone, the "we're all friends here" dialect of experts talking to each other. Second-class cabins on the Titanic aren't underwater like us clients, research subjects, and uplift cases in steerage. It's taboo for them to discuss in polite company the waters (predatory precarity)* that lap up the stair and rinse the second-class deck as our shared sinking ship tilts and pitches. I'm in school to gain a profession, to join the nurses, social workers, doctors, and managers in second class, to learn to chatter like that. The ghosts of the society ladies would exhibit me as one of their success stories of what women can achieve. I should have told Eliana unions at worst break your heart when they serve organizers and sacrifice workers. At best they're a vehicle for some self- liberation---from both capitalist exploitation and domination by our benefactors. --- *: Waldman, "Predatory precarity." Interfluidity, 20 Aug 2019