MAY 2, 2020HIEROBOOK.COM

MAY 2, 2020 HIEROBOOK.COM

(please note that the link will not work prior to May 2, 2020)

All reblogs are appreciated  :)

Are western Europe's food supplies worth more than east European workers' health? | Costi Rogozanu and Daniela Gabor

The health threat facing fruit and vegetable pickers flown in from quarantined Romania underlines Europe’s inequalities.

In many ways the asparagus cutters, salad pickers and care workers represent the most efficient form of labour in Europe: cheap, highly productive, untaxed even if humiliated and a potential public health hazard. Europe’s political economy has created the post-communist universal soldier, capable of converting from farm labourer to caregiver to construction worker as the the season changes. Freedom of movement has morphed into migration for survival and even that privilege is reserved for the physically fit.

At the end of the day the huddled masses from the planes heading to the fields of Germany or Italy can rely on neither their own country nor the European Union. This begs tough questions about what east Europeans have a right to expect after years of EU membership: is this it?

Why can we not demand  a different Europe and renegotiate the social contract with it? Why is it so hard to guarantee the safety and the dignity of cross-border workers rather than reducing them to a dehumanised “labour supply” accessible with an app? Why does even the western left withdraw into fantasies about protected labour regimes while millions of east European workers toil under their noses? Why is the movement of millions of people in and out of quarantines, doing essential but undervalued work, not a European issue?

EU enlargement to the east gave millions of workers an opportunity to survive. But it is not a generous gift. Western Europe’s supply chains and essential social services rely on it.

i haven’t seen this being talked about on woke tumblr denouncing the evils of capitalism, so here’s a summary: westerners are too ~fragile to work in the fields picking non-essential crops, so let’s import a couple hundred thousand eastern europeans and make them work in conditions of modern slavery, in the middle of a pandemic, with no healthcare provisions. some of them may die, but it’s a sacrifice the west is willing to make because asparagus.

People who are in self quarantine really have no idea how weird it is to be a base level essential worker through this whole thing. I don’t mean a doctor or a nurse or someone else working round the clock to put a stop to it or find a cure. I mean a truck driver or a gas station attendant or a retail clerk. Because everything is basically normal, only a little bit off, and then again not as off as it should be.

Every day I get up. I go to work. I sell people things. There are fewer people coming through and they’re buying more because they’re stocking up or they haven’t been shopping in a month, but there are still lines, like always. There’s plexiglass between the cashiers and the customers, and no dividers, and we have to continually yell at people not to put their items on the belt until we’ve finished the previous transaction, and they ignore us or argue with us, same as always. The more rules we have, the more rules there are for people to ignore. And the longer it goes on, the more normal it gets. Pretty much no one thanks us for coming in to work anymore. People are starting to act like we should never, ever run out of an item. It’s just blanket assumed that we will have hand sanitizer and soap and toilet paper and people are shocked when we say we’re out.  But there are still ads on the TV in the break room telling us all to stay home and the more the customers ignore social distancing, the more management puts pressure on us to set a good example, until we’re expected to follow standards that are physically impossible.

The longer this goes on, the less ‘essential’ I feel.

And then I come home and get online as always and there are all of these people asking what you’re doing while you’re stuck in quarantine and coming up with fun things to do when you’re in quarantine and talking about what you’re going to do when this whole thing is over and you can finally, finally leave your house. Everyone just seems to assume that you, the person reading their words, are in quarantine, because everyone’s in quarantine. It’s like this big, international, universal experience that you’re not a part of.

It feels like fifteen years from now everyone in the world will be looking at each other and asking “Remember what it was like to be cooped up in the house? Wasn’t it awful?” and I’ll just be sitting there going “…….no, I don’t. I didn’t do that.” And people will look at me and wonder how I could not know.

in the tags put your pets name vs what you actually call your pet

En ce moment, niveau écriture, j’avance difficile et de plus en plus à contrecœur. Je me suis demandé si ce n’était pas un doute sur mes capacités après un nanowrimo qui m’a beaucoup remise en question, ou le stress au travail, ou (ces derniers temps) le stress de la pandémie mondiale avec laquelle on se débat tous. Je pense aujourd’hui qu’il y a de ça, mais pas seulement.

La vérité, c’est que je m’ennuie en écrivant.

Je travaille sur le tome 2 du premier roman que j’ai autoédité, une histoire qui me tenait vraiment à cœur, mais dont j’ai commencé le tome 1 il y a dix ans. Ça fait trois ans maintenant que le tome 1 est sorti et que les (quelques) lecteurs attendent le tome 2, et je n’en suis même pas à la moitié du premier jet, autant dire qu’il me reste du boulot. En plus, j’ai commencé la prépublication sur Wattpad, une sortie toutes les semaines, je ne peux pas lâcher comme ça. Pas après avoir passé tant de temps à rassembler des lecteurs.

Mais je m’ennuie.

Je sais ce que je fais, je sais où je vais, je sais comment y aller, je sais ce que j’ai à dire. C’est devenu une routine. Je suis attachée aux personnages, mais leurs péripéties ne m’émeuvent plus. J’ai perdu l’étincelle.

Et en plus de ça j’ai une nouvelle idée de roman, quelque chose qui serait plus simple, plus vif, plus drôle, avec des personnages déjantés assumés et qui reprend certains thèmes qui m’ont beaucoup touché pendant la crise actuelle…

La question étant : si je mets mon tome 2 en pause, c’est fini, je ne le terminerai jamais. Mais si je laisse trainer la nouvelle idée, elle va finir par s’étioler et ne plus avoir de sens. Donc, qu’est-ce que je fais ? Sachant qu’avec mon travail, les horaires calmes consacrables à l’écriture ne sont pas infinis non plus…

Pour l’instant, comme une adulte responsable, je fuis ce choix en me lançant dans la réécriture d’une vieille fanfiction que je devais faire depuis longtemps. Mais bon. Il va bien falloir que je me décide un jour…

25/5/2019 ~ Heads up high

Here’s to Reg Shoe.

Barricade boy became a zombie out of sheer revolutionary fervour and betrayal by the state. Buries himself each year in solidarity with the dead. 

(My digital colouring leaves a lot to be desired for, but I learnt a lot doing this - and I’ve wanted to draw something for 25th May for a long time).