The Labor of Maintaining Care Re:Considering the Relationships between Maintenance Worker, Institution, and Student
In: https://digitalcollections.saic.edu/islandora/object/islandora%3A66278
In this essay I call attention to segregation within the workplace, specifically the divide between maintenance worker (ABM staff), student, and the SAIC institution at whole. Through using a personal project as a case study to ground my critical interest, I delve into labor politics part of a capital system that leave us feeling underpowered, under appreciated, and with little to no say in how we choose to have relationships with those who we share space with. Through breaking down terms and policies like "liability" and "fraternization," I strive to disclose the realities they bare on our true human connection. I aim to understand how something so critical to society and our daily lives, that of labor, has become commoditized through a system which values profit and fears connection, rather than promoting well-being of all. In doing so, we as workers and individuals of communities become alienated from each other, our place of work and most importantly lose the ability to have empathy for one another. Through the power of storytelling and opening ourselves up to be aware of these systems, my hope is that it can allow for all individual's contributing to spaces beyond themselves to reconsider these spaces as shared, and truly act on that notion. More specifically, I want to reconsider the work place as a collective space. In such a collective space, individuals can be cognitive of each other's' service through communication, dialogue, every day interaction, empathy, solidarity and experience. I believe these collective spaces to render as "possible futures," ones which can challenge our current modes of recognition and gratitude for each other, therefore creating built realities where shared space inhabits common ground.