The Most Radical Act Of Resistance You Can Ever Make
Being busy and distracted only perpetuates the status quo.
Richard Jaimes, Ave Calvar | Unsplash A few weeks ago, my partner collapsed unexpectedly at work. He was transported via ambulance to the nearest hospital, where a doctor surmised that the collapse was probably stress-related. But no definitive cause was determined.
My partner has been dealing with several health challenges over the past year, resulting in 13 unexcused absences from work — “unexcused” meaning that he didn’t get approval ahead of time.
Collapsing on the job was his most inexcusable infraction to date. The next day, his supervisor informed him that he would not be able to return to his previous position. He would be transferred to a different office (twice as far from our home) and possibly demoted.
It’s worth pausing here to note that my partner has a doctorate. He works in the highly specialized field of hand therapy, a field with a multi-year learning curve, a field in which demand far exceeds the number of available providers. Once he passes his certification exam, he will be one of approximately 8,385 certified hand therapists in the entire world.
And yet, despite his years of education, despite the untold unpaid hours he’s poured into studying for his certification exam, despite his commitment to prioritizing work through Covid, parenting challenges, health challenges, and more, and despite the extra emotional labor he expends daily as the only Black employee at his company, he is now getting scolded and punished for “unexcused absences” like a high schooler who was caught cutting class.
And this, just after being transported from his office to a hospital in an ambulance.
My partner had been planning to return to work as soon as possible, but after being informed of his pending transfer, he said, “Screw it.” His primary care provider proceeded to approve him for up to 14 weeks off under the FMLA.
He won’t get paid for them, of course, but he plans to use them all.
As the co-owner of a marketing agency, I understand that we need workers to reliably show up to make a profit. I understand that 17 people’s livelihoods, as well as the livelihoods of their families, depend upon our company’s continued profitability.
I also understand that the evolving realities in which our team members live matter. Ignoring them doesn’t do any of us any good.
My partner’s company tried to ignore them, and now an employee who had planned to take just a few days off is taking 14 weeks. He was a previously loyal member of the team, but he now feels used and left out in the cold. The hundreds of hours they invested in training may have yielded them only short-term benefits.
Sure, the people in charge at his company have done nice things from time to time. They’ve hosted an annual event at Topgolf and a summer picnic at the owner’s mini-mansion. They’ve given the staff thoughtful holiday presents and sent occasional bonuses.
But these gestures ring hollow when these same people are telling you to show up, or else. Your father died? Your daughter has Covid? Your health is deteriorating? We’re sorry. Please keep working.
The people in charge can claim they are just trying to meet rising demand, to make sure that everyone who needs hand therapy can access it. But we all know it’s profit that drives the majority of company decisions, not altruism. During Covid, they chose to continue pursuing an aggressive 100% five-year growth goal, using their profits to build a new location rather than invest in their increasingly stressed and burnt-out staff.
They could have radically revised their PTO policy.
They could have developed a contingency plan for “unexcused absences” so employees had more leeway when confronted with illnesses, canceled flights, extreme weather, and other unexpected events.
They could have taken note of the fact that employees with children were leaving the company, one by one, and made an effort to better address their needs.
There are so many things they could have done. Instead, they chose to stay on their hamster wheels, squeezing the maximum number of hours from their employees to maximize profit.
At the end of the day, it’s not to anyone’s benefit. The team is getting burnt out. And the company is not only losing hard-to-find and highly-trained employees, but the patients are receiving worse care.
What initially seemed like one of the worst things that could have happened to us may ultimately be one of the best things that’s ever happened to us.
Sometimes it takes getting off the hamster wheel to realize how sick and tired and out-of-breath you are.
Years ago, Covid knocked many of us off our respective wheels, allowing us a chance to pause and reassess. Of course, many of us found ourselves trading one set of challenges for another. I no longer had to commute downtown each day, but I had to figure out how to simultaneously manage work and online school for two children who were suddenly always around.
Still, there were new pockets of time built into the day and with so much less to do, there were more opportunities to simply be. With weekends suddenly devoid of playdates and activities and birthday parties, we spent hours walking, simply putting one foot in front of the other. We hunched against the rain, shivered through the wind, and squinted into the sun. Sometimes we did all three in the course of a single walk, once beholding a rainbow so close, that my kids tried to reach out and touch it.
It was an anxiety-ridden, isolating, and oddly magical time.
But over the last year, as Covid has released its grip on our lives, our hamster wheels are quietly increasing their velocity. We have been granted no time to process, no time to heal, no time to collectively acknowledge, “Hey, we just went through some crazy stuff.”
Instead, we’re being told: “Don’t worry, everything is back to normal now.”
But I’m very worried indeed.
The first problem with this message is that for so many of us, perhaps most of us, the pre-Covid “normal” sucked. It sucked for dual-income couples trying to balance work and children. It sucked for women and people of color who had to work twice as hard to get ahead. It sucked for people piecing together minimum-wage jobs to stay afloat. It sucked for everyone in every field who was told they had to sacrifice everything else to succeed.
The second problem with this message is that it’s simply not true. Everything is not back to normal. And if there’s anything worse than “normal,” it’s pretending things are normal when they aren’t.
Take my partner’s job, as a case in point. Before COVID-19, he had two daily charting blocks and saw most patients twice a week. These patients were understandably upset about the loss of function in their hands, but otherwise, most of them seemed to be more or less okay.
Now, he has one daily charting block and sees most patients once a week, which means double the caseload and double the paperwork. His patients are, on the whole, a hot mess. They are barely holding it together, and losing function in their hand is the last straw.
They show up anxious, distressed, sometimes in tears. They are terrified of losing their jobs, terrified of The Powers That Be deeming them irrelevant, terrified of being shoved off their hamster wheels and unable to get back on. They don’t want to take the time to heal and don’t feel they can take the time. They are hurting and anxious and breathless and scared.
My partner has received small raises each year, still less than the rate of inflation, and he has a handful more PTO days to work with than he did four years ago, which still barely cover a one-week summer vacation and a couple days around Christmas. If anything else comes up — which tends to happen in life and particularly tends to happen when you have children — the time off is on his own dime. But even worse, he gets a black X next to his name. One more unexcused absence in the books.
Other than the small raises and a few additional PTO days, his job did absolutely nothing to acknowledge the demands of working during COVID-19, which included the anxiety of being exposed, 10-hour days in masks, emotionally distressed patients, and extra cleaning protocols with no extra time.
His company is doing even less to acknowledge the demands of working in this dystopian post-COVID era, in which our systems and people are slowly unraveling while we plug our ears, shake our heads, and march grimly forward.
That is, until we collapse.
Before my partner’s recent ER visit, we had already been doing what we could to resist the hamster wheel. I’d cut back to 36 hours a week and he’d cut back to 32, though much of the “extra time” was spent studying for his certification exam.
The slightly reduced schedules have made life more tenable, to be sure. We can better keep up with the household chores. We can cart our children to All the Extracurriculars and still have some time left over to think. With a great amount of intention and a pre- 6 a.m. wake-up call, I can carve out some time each week to write.
But still, it hasn’t been enough to cope with the additional challenges the last year has layered on us, like new and worsening illnesses and a daughter deep in the throes of adolescence.
That’s not even to mention how hard it’s becoming to do things that used to be not that hard. A simple holiday trip turned into three hellish days of seething airports, endless lines, and hours spent on hold. A simple insurance claim for a damaged bumper involved 27 phone calls, nine emails, and six months of waiting for a single part caught up somewhere in a broken supply chain.
What we all need, quite simply, is more time. More time for our daily chores, yes, and more time to contend with life’s increasing headaches. But also, more time to breathe. To be. To process. To connect.
The Great Resignation could have been the beginning of something even greater, but alas it seems to have petered out, without the lasting effects many of us were hoping for. Companies, once again, seem to be calling the shots and doing relatively little, if anything, to address the burnout, dissatisfaction, and childcare challenges that fueled all that gleeful quitting.
Meanwhile, most of us have simply resumed our furious spinning. It’s as though a global pandemic never happened. It’s as though climate disasters aren’t currently happening, with alarming and increasing frequency. It’s as though our systems and supply chains aren’t slowly crumbling. It’s as though we’re not in the throes of a mental health crisis.
The “new normal,” as far as I can tell, is simply the old normal + double the anxiety and depression + a heaping dose of denial.
My partner and I are currently reassessing not just his job but also our approach to life. How much money do we need to be financially stable? What’s the bare minimum we need to survive our next season of parenting, and can we do it on one income? What are we buying that we don’t need to buy? What subscriptions can we cancel? How much should we even be saving for the future when the future is so tenuous? How can we make a living on our terms?
I’m well aware that we are asking these questions and making these assessments from a position of middle-class privilege. There are many of us, far too many of us, earning below a living wage, for whom one missed paycheck could mean the difference between a roof or no roof over one’s head.
But for those of us with any level of financial flexibility, no matter how small, I’ve firmly come to believe that the most radical and effective way to take back our lives is to take back our time.
The more of us who request reduced schedules, the more of us who quit jobs that give us no grace or flexibility, the more of us who recognize that what full-time jobs demand of us is simply untenable, the more of us who piece together our living to minimize our participation in an extractive economy, the more we can challenge the “new normal.”
The status quo flourishes when we’re busy, sick, and distracted. Keep moving, keep working, keep consuming, they say.
It takes time to reimagine and unlearn. And it’s time that should be ours for the taking.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.