Back to the mudsill
Heather Cox Richardson January 31:
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:
“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”
After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”
Democrats just flatly reject a lot of things. Slavery is one. Punishment by torture is another. Murder is one more.
History is doing that rhyming thing again.
In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.
Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”
But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”
Or, to put it another way, one generation would pave the way for the next generation to get an education and have more options than being an underpaid overworked laborer. The horror!
The thinking behind Miller’s ideal is that some people just are suited only for grunt work. They’re born that way, their parents were born that way, their children will be born that way. It’s their essence. That used to be quite a normal thing to think, but it has faded out over time. Seeing as how we’ve had at least a couple of centuries of seeing the children of workers and enslaved people get educations and – miraculously! – turn out to be capable of far more than grunt work, you’d think Stephen Miller could manage to make the connection.
H/t Mike Haubrich
And at the same time, there will always be people in service professions. Whether white or BIPOC, native-born or immigrant, these people deserve and require the respect and rights we give everyone else. I respect and honor an honest custodian more than a dishonest lawyer, in spite of the differences in their education. I felt like the custodians at our schools were my equal; we were all working together to provide a quality education for the students. The custodians felt the same way. Why? Because the faculty all felt that way, and treated them that way. They were part of it, an important part of it, and they could feel it. The only thing is…that class of laborers needs to be paid better. Their work is far more important than the most talented of football players, rock singers, or movie stars. It’s also more important than that of the sleaziest of real estate hustlers and the nasties of talk show hosts.
brave new world
There will always be people in service professions but, at the same time, said people may be in service professions for five or ten years while working toward something else. It’s not a job with no off ramp the way it used to be. This fact contributes, I think, to the way people in service jobs are treated. I frequently look back at my childhood and remember how maids were treated and it’s one of the things I can barely stand to think about. That, thank fuck, has changed.
A lot of the people I know in service professions have been there their entire life. They are career professionals, and stay all the way through retirement. Yes, there are a lot of college students working there who are moving toward something else. But we spend very little thought on those career professionals who make it their life’s work to take care of other people, a thankless job with little pay. For every student custodian working at our school, there were about six full-timers. Many of them had been there 30 years or longer. Very few of them expected to go somewhere else. Most of them were neuroatypical, and had no illusions that they were going to go for a ‘better’ job somewhere in a few years.
I have a brother-in-law who worked as a custodian for his entire life. He was functionally illiterate, but was able to take care of his family because he was extremely good at what he did. He took pride in it. He never planned to go anywhere else, because it is difficult to find the higher level jobs when you can’t read beyond second-grade level. He took several specialized janitorial classes, but my sister had to read him the material. She read him the application and helped him fill it out. He could not have worked to something else, because he didn’t have the ability, so he became skilled and talented at the service of cleaning up after others. He was proud of what he did, and devastated when they outsourced the work and he was forced out.
I worked in professions like that for some time, partially while working my way through school, but also later as a single mother trying to hold on to whatever ability I had to feed a growing boy. I see people (J.T. Eberhardt comes to mind) saying that service people should have days off. I agree. He said he would never go to restaurants that were open on Christmas Eve or Christmas, because they wouldn’t give their employees the day off. I disagree. Why? Because while college students can possibly stand the days off, the single moms cannot. I dreaded November and December, because hourly workers lose so much if they work for businesses that are closed not only for holidays but for the day before holidays – and, with Thanksgiving, often the day after. Trying to make enough to make the house payment is difficult enough.
At some point, this country needs to stop thinking of service people as passers-through who are just working their way to another job. A large portion of service people in this country are full-time, permanent, and have no other career in their future. They are largely ignored. When a debate was held in our legislature trying to work out exemptions to the minimum wage law our state passed by referendum and the legislature wanted to weaken, they acted as though every single individual working for grocery stores was a temporary, upwardly mobile teenager or twenty-something. Funny thing is, when I go to the grocery store (especially the one at issue, which is owned by one of our legislators), almost all their employees are middle aged, and have been there practically forever. There are a lot of youngsters who come and go, but the backbone of their workers are older, relying on this job forever. They are treated like crap, even though they do a good job. I try to laugh and chat with them; they seem to appreciate it that I don’t growl and scowl. At the very least, they don’t have to deal with the hassle.
Sorry for the rant, but this whole idea of ‘just passing through on their way to another job’ thing does get my goat. The individuals doing these jobs as a lifetime way of keeping themselves fed and clothed, and a roof over their head, seem to be invisible to almost everyone. The woman who often bags our groceries is a woman who is obviously handicapped, both mentally and physically. The people I meet around doing these jobs may never have a chance to get respect in a job that people look up to.
It isn’t just about paying them better, either. I respect these workers as much as I respected my fellow professors. I respect them, and that’s what they need. A recognition of what they do, a respect for the importance of the job, and a recognition that they are part of whatever business they work for, and that the business couldn’t function without them.
They need to stop being invisible. But that’s not up to them, it’s up to us.
One of the things I advocate for at the school I volunteer at is helping students get an idea what life after/out of school is like. As part of my advocacy we’ve instituted career days, and a whole-curriculum programme helping students start to get an idea of what working for a living is like, and what they might want to do/how they will fit into their community. On one hand, we want to encourage students to go as far as they’re capable of with their educations, and dream as big as they can – we want them to at least initially believe there’s nothing stopping them from becoming high-income high-status professionals. On the other hand, not only are not all of them going to do that, or even want to do that, we also don’t want them to think of their own parents and adult relatives who haven’t achieved this kind of pay and status (the vast majority of the school are immigrants and refugees, and all are working class) as failures. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk.