Insights on being fired from the only job I actually kinda liked
In September I was fired from the first job I ever actually liked (weirdness of grad school aside). I worked at a small library in a rural town and it paid well enough that I could work part-time and still make rent and internet and food and such (~dreamy~ right?). Despite this job being damn good, and me being damn good at it, I kept showing up late (four times in six months) which eventually resulted in my bosses terminating my contract.
The team at the library was small which was fine except that HR and management were each embodied in a single person. Those two people had some trouble with their professional remove. This lead to awkward work relationships as anyone who has worked with a manager on anything is familiar. Interpersonal relationships steeped in sympathy and empathy were lacking as was demanded by the structure.
So, after being significantly late one day (30 minutes), I was written up and given a copy of an HR policy that had several levels. I was on level three of five. We're this to happen again, the policy stated, I would be suspended with pay for a period of time. It also refereed to “coaching” which I was supposed to receive at level one.
Accordingly, I asked to meet with management to discuss the “coaching” and to explain the reasons for my lateness in hopes of building some kind of better understanding than “good enough revolutionary doesn't care about work and is late to fuck everyone over.” I explained that I moved out for the first time proper and hadn't found a working rhythm yet, that I have had problems sleeping for years that has gone unexplained and unremedied, and that I have anxiety and depression for which I was adjusting my cocktail of meds which in turn was further fucking with my sleep. They said that the issue is black and white and that I cannot be late. However, they added that I was excellent at my job and got along very well with the “team.” My work, they said, is flawless other than that I show up late occasionally (three times in four ish months: 10, 15, and then 30 min). This is my citation for claiming to be “damn good” in that first paragraph. Importantly, I had the opening shift and though I was sometimes late, I had never opened the library late, and when I did show up late there were always enough people that the library would be okay with out me while I made my way there.
At the end of the meeting (during which I learned that they had no plan for “coaching”), they told me that they would let me know as soon as possible if they are able to extend my contract citing budgetary concerns. As a contract employee, this smelled like death. When I was hired, I was told that, assuming everything went well, I would be made a permanent employee; I will not be falling for that trick again. So either, they misjudged their budget, their funding got cut, was mismanaged, or they just wanted to get rid of me. I can't help but feel it was the latter.
Give or take four months of perfect attendance later, I slept in and was a half hour late again. This time, I slept in because I'd been sick, picked up an extra shift earlier in the week, and had a gnarly cough which kept me up. After saying this to the HR person when I arrived, and not seeing them for the rest of the week, I figured things were okay.
This was wrong, and the following Monday I was asked to attend a video meeting with management, told that they had covered my shift, and that my contract was to be terminated. Neither of the people I met with turned their cameras on, and the HR person couldn't get their mic to work. I asked if I could ask questions and they told me to wait until I received a letter they were drafting. So that was it. In the letter, they said I was late again after being warned, so on the chopping block I go. As if the policy from before never existed and was never cited.
As my fellow contract employees know, a clause in my contract allowed either party to terminate the contract for any time at any reason, so that's what they did. My sense of security was naive and my employment was terminated.
Rather than whinge, I think there's something interesting at play here in the tensions between priorities and what I am able to imagine getting away with (even when I don't).
Here is what I didn't tell them in that first meeting. I spend 5-20 hours a week volunteering with mutual aid initiatives and doing community organising. Additionally, I have a partner and community of friends and family to whom I have obligations, as most people do. These things are all a much higher priority for me than toil/wage slavery. By adjusting my priorities accordingly, I am attempting to “live the revolution” in a small way in spite of being compelled to work – that is to bring about social change by enacting it in my own life.
The first time I was late by 15 minutes, was because I was running from some event or other and hadn't eaten all day. I had a choice to either show up to work shaking and liable to pass out at any moment (my health is in veritable shambles, not sure why), or stop and get some fast food. So I opted for a burrito, called 5 min before my shift to let my colleges know I was running late. Burrito in hand, I drove like hell to work and was able to wolf down some sustenance. The college I spoke to on the phone said it was fine and not to worry about it, as did all the other people I work with. I prioritised a small amount of self-care over getting to work on time because I want to do better than to just “reproduce” myself as “the worker.” I want to live and be well.
This is the first important site of tension, that between being forced to submit to the coercion of toil under liberal capitalism – work or lose access to food, shelter, water, etc. – while trying to live a revolution into being. Of course, capital can't allow this; if more people could prioritise whats most valuable in life rather than making ends meet, they would bring the ruling classes to their knees by acts of refusal, sabotage, and walking away. This constitutes a fine line that activists need to walk if they want to both live and live with themselves.
But here's the other thing, as many of you presumably picked up by now, it's a substantial privilege that I can experiment to find this line. My parents are rich (upper middle-class white hetronormative settlers in so-called Canada) and so I have enough of a safety net to fuck up again and again and maybe even again after that. My partner, on the other hand, who also works for a library but whose family is working class has no such option. They are in a position where they must toil to the letter of their bosses whims as long as they are precarious.
For them, not only is there a limited-to-non-existent safety net, but the lack of security throughout their life has presumably shaped how they think and feel about the kinds of risks they can take. I can be reckless with what my family has stolen, they can't make any mistakes because of what has been stolen from them. And these constraints and lack thereof shape the kinds of revolutionary actions we can take.
This is nothing new. It's literally how privilege works in left-activist spaces. The white dude at the protest can afford to get spooked by the cops and spook them in turn because the consequences come down harder on everyone else, if they touch him at all.
Two weeks after I was fired, I was hired elsewhere. At a different library, in fact. A job I like even more, though it does pay a little less. Painful though losing that job was, it came nowhere close to ruining my life because through white supremacy and extractivist capitalism, my family has stolen the ability to buck some of the worst of the system.
I think this is worth writing about (and reading about, dear reader), because it illustrates a somewhat complicated and certainly messy aspect of that whole “living the revolution into being thing” that I'm trying to be “good enough” at. The more intersecting privileges one has the closer one can get to feeling as though they are living in a world they want to live in – because they have the power to shape it and variously curtail its dangers. In such a position, it becomes easy to lose sight of this aforementioned intersectional privilege and congratulate oneself on a job well done. Further, it might lead to the assumption that this is what others should do which best-case scenario is a calling-in moment from your comrades, and worst-case ontario is that you fuck up someone's life with harmful advice.
All this is to say, that “living the revolution into being” absolutely cannot happen individually. There is no liberal enlightenment where we all figure out how to be a perfect revolutionary subject and bring utopia into being. No two instances are the same and utopia is a literary device. Revolutionary struggle is a messy thing, happening in the lives of many people simultaneously and making real gains when those people organise together. Mutual aid to dual power, etc.. Solidarity forever.