But both are featured in a paper assigned by my summer class (though I'm an access student who gets no credit) and inspired by a film the teacher showed about the exploitation of workers in the big assembly plants just across the US/Mexican border.
Mainly the condescending remarks in the film by corporate leaders regarding their work force. That they are all fine when clearly they are not.
And how condscension and minimizing infiltrates the workplace especially regarding working women. All kinds of lights and whistles went off in my head. BOOM! FLASH!
So memoir writer that I am, I started a piece about my last job and the loss (I lost the job or the job lost me, hard to say.) Since I named names, I can't really let it appear anywhere. Or maybe I can, it's unclear to me.
For the paper for the class, we needed an outside source; turns out the best source was an unread book I had on my shelf "The Time Bind." by Arlie Hoschild. I even took a women's studies class from Prof. Hoschild in 1971 at UCSC. I would include the evaluation she wrote about my work. If I could find my UCSC evaluations. I've seen them recently and I'm sure I put them in a really safe place. Unknown to me presently. The gist of her book is that families with children and two wage-earners suffer from a terrible time bind. Commitment to work requires increasing numbers of hours and those are all hours that you are not spending parenting your children. Zero sum game. You can't spend the time needed if you're working all the time. Duh. And when both parents are working, conflict erupts. You just can't be in two places and paying appropriate attention at the same time. Sometimes work is the more attractive alternative as children can be messy, demanding and difficult.
So I've written the story of my view of the job nearly four years gone. In some ways, to let it go, I have to stop telling the story. Can anything be gained by rehashing old injustices? However I felt the memoir calling "I must speak!". So I wrote about it, brought it in front of my writing group who gave me some good ideas regarding coherance. I rewrote it with more clarity and reordered it to make more sense.
It's only worth it if the exercise resolves some issues. One thing that falls out of it is the huge role of the Landmark Forum in the company infusing from the top down. How destructive it was. And how I as a non-Landmarker was finally driven out. How the Landmark language was twisted so the management accomplished what they wanted without regard for how the resulting structure affected those working in the company. I remember my direct supervisor quietly mentioned that she thought Landmark conflicted with her religious beliefs and she didn't quite think that was right in a work environment. Yeah! Obviously!
Was that the only reason? Of course not
2 comments:
Hi, hanging onto something for 4 years is not unusual, and very normal I would say. Taking old business into the future with us year after year is what people do. It is like grieving a death. The actual act of grieving a loss of a loved one actually only takes a few moments if that. While avoiding the experience grieving a loss of a loved one can go on for 1 - 70 years.
I agree. Often the thing that you hang onto all those years is a distorted picture of what happened anyway. When we feel we have wronged, it is only natural to overlook the role we personally had in how things went down. Over time, we also tend to assign motives to the people we are angry at that are simply not there. The real key to letting something go however is to own your personal role in why it didn't work out. If you do that, it is amazing how quickly you can leave anger in the past.
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