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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
This is a more personal thing, I suppose, but one of the things that happens out in the world outside is that you learn to ask certain questions of yourself before you take actions, and one of the important ones is "Is it worth it right now?" But that's not the question we're asking for this entry.
At one of the regular meetings between the leadership team for our location, there were questions about what might happen to any leave caps that were temporarily expanded to cover the reality of the pandemic if they weren't renewed for the next year, which, by virtue of having scheduled enough vacation time before the end of the year, I don't have to worry about missing out on. But I also know that I'm a bit of a workaholic and schedule my programs and events so as to avoid having too much on the same day, which also has the effect of making it difficult for me to be able to take off random days here and there if I don't have a justification to myself for doing it. Which means that I start moving up toward my accrual caps.
There are ways of dropping the vacation amounts, aside from taking the vacation for yourself. It's possible to donate it to a shared leave pool for people who end up needing leave past what they have available, so, for example, if someone has to have extended leave for pregnancy or illness, they don't have to take the unpaid FMLA and are able, through the generosity of others, to keep getting paid while they recover. Knowing my own tendencies to notice that I'm getting to my cap and then to not do anything about it, either by scheduling vacation or by donating it to the leave pool, I mused aloud that it would be nice if we could all just automatically have our excess leave put into the donated leave pool. That way, at least, the leave gets used by someone, rather than being essentially put to waste. Apparently, that's a thing that I might have to ask my bargaining unit to do and advocate for.
One of the other people on the call, however, is entirely against this idea because she used to think that the idea was good, but in practicality, she claims, what happens is that there are people who choose to take a day off each week ("a day off each week when they were going to school" was the exact scenario described) and thus run their leave down to nothing, and then when they hit something where they need to use leave, they end up drawing on the shared leave pool. So she has no interest at all in contributing to the shared leave pool, because it will go to people who will be rewarded with more leave after they've spent all of theirs (in non-emergency situations is implied here).
At this point, I'm asking the question "Is it worth it?" and I decide that, no, it's not worth tangling with this particular coworker on this issue, especially when I suspect it won't change her opinion on the matter, because she's basically already shown that she believes that there are the "deserving" and the "undeserving" when it comes to charity or doing good things for others. And while I'm slightly too young to remember the demonization of "welfare queens" in real time, I definitely have been alive for the assault on the social safety net that boils down to the premise that whichever "they" you are prejudiced against are people who are using the social safety net for morally indefensible reasons, which allows them to have a life of ease and not having to work for their money, like you, good capitalist cog that you are. Which elides entirely the counterpoint that has become a lot clearer in 2020: rather than claiming that someone else is abusing the social safety net and that they should be punished for whatever moral failings can be flung against them that will stick in the eye of the bigot, we could just confiscate the obscene wealth of the richest among us and redistribute it in ways such that everyone except the richest has their standard of living raised to the point where we could fix a lot of problems in society. But, because of Protestant Work Ethic and a metric fuckton of White Supremacy replacing what are, for the most part, well-supported moral teachings of Christianity about who is your neighbor (which is not to say that others might be susceptible to it, but this particular narrative shows up a lot in places that have embraced both the metirocracy and Repulican TurboJesus-ism) with this idea that there are the "deserving" and the "undeserving", we end up with the idea that the charity that we provide should only go to the "deserving". But how do you tell if someone's "deserving?" Well, the short answer seems to be "if it's someone in your in-group, they're 'deserving', if they're not, then they're 'undeserving'," which is, as you might guess, -ist as fuck on as many axes as you can think of.
Have you heard the opinion that was trending some time ago that was frowning heavily at millenials that were using their supplemental nutrition benefits to purchase good cuts of meat, organic fish, and other presumably healthy and fine foods for their consumption? It was such an outrage, that these children were using their nutritional money to buy food! Clearly, since they were using this money to buy food, we should make it harder for them to get money to buy food with if they're struggling, Or so the reasoning went, at least at its core. What they actually said was something closer to "These millenials are buying steak, fish, and avocado toast with their SNAP benefis! Don't they understand that this money is for people who would otherwise starve? If they can afford to spend their SNAP on luxuries, then they clearly don't need it." Which gets to the idea of "deserving" and "undeserving". Part of being "deserving" is that you have to conform to a specific image in the giver's head, usually one that makes them feel good about how they're helping someone out who would otherwise be unable to complete even the most basic of tasks without their charity. If you are in a situation where you're almost making ends meet, where a couple hundred extra bucks to spend on food could be the difference between being able to eat and going hungry, those SNAP benefits are pretty important. But if you're using them, hell forbid that you include something that you know you can afford and that will be a nice treat to be able to make in your cart, because if you're poor enough to need SNAP, people around you insist that you're not allowed to be happy until you're wealthy enough to no longer need government assistance. Only the "self-sufficient" are allowed to have luxuries, although if you have luxuries and you're not showing enough of your own wealth ostentatiously, people will try to shame you for making bad decisions with your money by spending it on luxuries rather than putting it to work to make yourself wealthier. And that's before we start getting to things like asset caps for specific forms of assistance, where your continued ability to survive and thrive depends on you never being able to build any wealth for yourself ever again, so that you will always be wretched and destitute if you want to keep living.
As you might have guessed at this point, the definition of the in-group is malleable and porous to ensure that some people will never be able to become in and, correspondingly, some people will never have to worry about becoming out, and most of the ways that the group identity shifts are cloaked in the language of morality and ethics. "Welfare queens having children and driving Cadillacs" was pretty well targeted at BIPOC women, who have always been stereotyped as being morally looser and more prone to having children outside of marraige, nevermind what the statistics might say about the relative percentages of unwanted pregnancies. "Millenials buying steak and organic with SNAP" is outrage at the idea that benefits might be generous enough to allow for something other than the very cheapest food, bought in quantity, that will make for survival, if not for enjoyment. Why deny enjoyment to people who need benefits? Because being poor is seen as bad moral choices, bad fiscal choices, bad decisions that could have been avoided with better moral character, or better planning about the future. They're always the fault of the poor person and never the fault of a system that works its very hardest to make them poor so that the richest people can have everything they ever desired without having to worry about cost (or ethics.) If you're not willing to buy into the narrative that you're a morally deficient person for needing this assistance, then there will be plenty of people around who will demand that your assistance be removed, because you're not groveling hard enough to deserve it from them. Rather than looking at the root causes, or deciding that as a country, a government, a people, and especially for those people who insist that this is a Christian nation, that we want to provide for everyone enough that they don't have to worry about the basics of life, instead it's easier and serves both capitalism and white supremacy better to lie to ourselves and say that those people are poor because they are morally deficient, while we might be poor because of bad luck or circumstances beyond our control.
As I was saying, to pull this back toward what was said in the meeting, if a person wants to take every Monday off, and they have the leave to do it, that's their decision. I assume that the decision got approved somewhere in the managerial chain and isn't causing undue hardship for everyone else working there, so there's no reason to believe that it's being harmful to anyone. Or it's someone high enough up on the managerial chain that they can approve it for themselves and the scheduling still works out. What business is it of mine how someone else chooses to use their leave? And why should I grudge them getting some of my freely donated leave if they have a situation come up where they need some more? Unless, that is, I'm making a moral judgment about how someone uses their leave, whether out of jealousy that they're having an easier time of things than I am, or because I think they should be more invested in the Protestant Work Ethic or Doing It For The Corporation or Vocational Awe or whatever bullshit reason it is that I'm being judgmental about how someone else is living their lives that isn't likely to affect me in any way. What gives me the right to pass judgment on someone else? Leave is for using. And if I believe in keeping a cache of leave just in case of a situation that requires leave, then I keep a cache of leave just in case. And I still hope that I don't get hit by something that's going to wipe out my plans and my leave cache and put me at the point where I need to get some donated leave myself and deal with other people who think they're morally superior to me and blessed with good choices. Only the richest are insulated against the disaster that will wipe them out.
And, y'know, on a different axis of morality, having gone through undergraduate and graduate schooling myself, I can see why someone wouldn't want to go to work on a day they have classes, so they can focus on the classwork and get the homework and readings done for it. I had the privilege of being able to do both sets of schooling without having to work a work schedule around a class schedule, and it's a lot easier to succeed and get on your career path that way. If I can't work effectively after going to class, for whatever reason, it's better for me to take the rest of the day and possibly work on homework than to try and half-ass my way through work. Education is supposed to be a moral good, and people putting themselves through school is one of the foundations of the bootstraps narrative, so it seems like it would be a moral good to have someone who is focused on their education and bettering themselves, rather than resenting them for taking time off from work so they can understand and digest their classwork.
Gifts with strings aren't gifts. And the research continues to come in that proves any given person is the person most able to answer the question "What should I spend my money on?", so that if you are serious about defeating poverty, and not trying to use "defeating poverty" as a smokescreen for creating a permanent underclass to exploit or as a reason to find ever more ways to exclude the people you choose not to see as human from accessing the benefits of humanity and good government, the most effective action is to give someone cash grants, specifically with the idea in mind that you don't care how the money is spent. (Or not spent - sometimes the right thing to spend money on is something where, if someone knows they're getting some cash coming in, they'll save to purchase the really good pair of boots that will last them ten years, instead of having to waste more money buying boots that only last one year after year.) Basic, guaranteed income is one of the easiest ways to get people out of poverty. And to help them free up enough cognitive resources to be able to think about long-term decisions and putting their income to the use that suits them best.
"But Silver," I have heard, "guaranteeing income to everyone means that the rich people will also have it. Surely they could be excluded from the deserving, since it was their greed that got us into this mess." My response to that is if you're concerned that the rich will also be getting guaranteed income that they don't need, they're probably not being taxed hard enough, and focus your efforts there about making sure they are contributing sufficiently to the pool of money to draw on, than caring that they're going to be able to benefit from the pool to some degree. Equity over equality means that the redistribution of resources will primarily, perhaps even mostly, go to the people who have the least and taper off as people approach the point that qualifies as enough, but it doesn't preclude people from ever getting those resources as the general trends start approaching parity. (Bezos may never get any of that. Bezos should also be the person singlehandedly funding several localities' basic income programs to their fullest.)
Maybe it's my Hufflepuff values, maybe it's the understanding that healthy societies have socialist or collectivist cores, maybe it's that given the choice between moral disapproval of someone choosing a small luxury for themselves that they can afford and moral disapproval of a corporation that chooses to exploit and steal from their workers to enrich their executives and shareholders, my morals say I should always choose to focus my energy on making the corporation more human than on giving half a shit about making the human more corporate.
To summarize all of the above into something more compressed, the question of "deserving" and "undeserving" is a speck-plank problem, and it always says a lot more about the person who is asking the question than about the person the question is directed at. So my recommendation is to avoid it and try to set up and support situations where there are no judgments about "deserving", only people getting the help they need from a pool of resources large enough to provide for everyone that asks (and a few more that might be asking for the first time).
This is a more personal thing, I suppose, but one of the things that happens out in the world outside is that you learn to ask certain questions of yourself before you take actions, and one of the important ones is "Is it worth it right now?" But that's not the question we're asking for this entry.
Why are people so concerned at people being "deserving"?
At one of the regular meetings between the leadership team for our location, there were questions about what might happen to any leave caps that were temporarily expanded to cover the reality of the pandemic if they weren't renewed for the next year, which, by virtue of having scheduled enough vacation time before the end of the year, I don't have to worry about missing out on. But I also know that I'm a bit of a workaholic and schedule my programs and events so as to avoid having too much on the same day, which also has the effect of making it difficult for me to be able to take off random days here and there if I don't have a justification to myself for doing it. Which means that I start moving up toward my accrual caps.
There are ways of dropping the vacation amounts, aside from taking the vacation for yourself. It's possible to donate it to a shared leave pool for people who end up needing leave past what they have available, so, for example, if someone has to have extended leave for pregnancy or illness, they don't have to take the unpaid FMLA and are able, through the generosity of others, to keep getting paid while they recover. Knowing my own tendencies to notice that I'm getting to my cap and then to not do anything about it, either by scheduling vacation or by donating it to the leave pool, I mused aloud that it would be nice if we could all just automatically have our excess leave put into the donated leave pool. That way, at least, the leave gets used by someone, rather than being essentially put to waste. Apparently, that's a thing that I might have to ask my bargaining unit to do and advocate for.
One of the other people on the call, however, is entirely against this idea because she used to think that the idea was good, but in practicality, she claims, what happens is that there are people who choose to take a day off each week ("a day off each week when they were going to school" was the exact scenario described) and thus run their leave down to nothing, and then when they hit something where they need to use leave, they end up drawing on the shared leave pool. So she has no interest at all in contributing to the shared leave pool, because it will go to people who will be rewarded with more leave after they've spent all of theirs (in non-emergency situations is implied here).
At this point, I'm asking the question "Is it worth it?" and I decide that, no, it's not worth tangling with this particular coworker on this issue, especially when I suspect it won't change her opinion on the matter, because she's basically already shown that she believes that there are the "deserving" and the "undeserving" when it comes to charity or doing good things for others. And while I'm slightly too young to remember the demonization of "welfare queens" in real time, I definitely have been alive for the assault on the social safety net that boils down to the premise that whichever "they" you are prejudiced against are people who are using the social safety net for morally indefensible reasons, which allows them to have a life of ease and not having to work for their money, like you, good capitalist cog that you are. Which elides entirely the counterpoint that has become a lot clearer in 2020: rather than claiming that someone else is abusing the social safety net and that they should be punished for whatever moral failings can be flung against them that will stick in the eye of the bigot, we could just confiscate the obscene wealth of the richest among us and redistribute it in ways such that everyone except the richest has their standard of living raised to the point where we could fix a lot of problems in society. But, because of Protestant Work Ethic and a metric fuckton of White Supremacy replacing what are, for the most part, well-supported moral teachings of Christianity about who is your neighbor (which is not to say that others might be susceptible to it, but this particular narrative shows up a lot in places that have embraced both the metirocracy and Repulican TurboJesus-ism) with this idea that there are the "deserving" and the "undeserving", we end up with the idea that the charity that we provide should only go to the "deserving". But how do you tell if someone's "deserving?" Well, the short answer seems to be "if it's someone in your in-group, they're 'deserving', if they're not, then they're 'undeserving'," which is, as you might guess, -ist as fuck on as many axes as you can think of.
Have you heard the opinion that was trending some time ago that was frowning heavily at millenials that were using their supplemental nutrition benefits to purchase good cuts of meat, organic fish, and other presumably healthy and fine foods for their consumption? It was such an outrage, that these children were using their nutritional money to buy food! Clearly, since they were using this money to buy food, we should make it harder for them to get money to buy food with if they're struggling, Or so the reasoning went, at least at its core. What they actually said was something closer to "These millenials are buying steak, fish, and avocado toast with their SNAP benefis! Don't they understand that this money is for people who would otherwise starve? If they can afford to spend their SNAP on luxuries, then they clearly don't need it." Which gets to the idea of "deserving" and "undeserving". Part of being "deserving" is that you have to conform to a specific image in the giver's head, usually one that makes them feel good about how they're helping someone out who would otherwise be unable to complete even the most basic of tasks without their charity. If you are in a situation where you're almost making ends meet, where a couple hundred extra bucks to spend on food could be the difference between being able to eat and going hungry, those SNAP benefits are pretty important. But if you're using them, hell forbid that you include something that you know you can afford and that will be a nice treat to be able to make in your cart, because if you're poor enough to need SNAP, people around you insist that you're not allowed to be happy until you're wealthy enough to no longer need government assistance. Only the "self-sufficient" are allowed to have luxuries, although if you have luxuries and you're not showing enough of your own wealth ostentatiously, people will try to shame you for making bad decisions with your money by spending it on luxuries rather than putting it to work to make yourself wealthier. And that's before we start getting to things like asset caps for specific forms of assistance, where your continued ability to survive and thrive depends on you never being able to build any wealth for yourself ever again, so that you will always be wretched and destitute if you want to keep living.
As you might have guessed at this point, the definition of the in-group is malleable and porous to ensure that some people will never be able to become in and, correspondingly, some people will never have to worry about becoming out, and most of the ways that the group identity shifts are cloaked in the language of morality and ethics. "Welfare queens having children and driving Cadillacs" was pretty well targeted at BIPOC women, who have always been stereotyped as being morally looser and more prone to having children outside of marraige, nevermind what the statistics might say about the relative percentages of unwanted pregnancies. "Millenials buying steak and organic with SNAP" is outrage at the idea that benefits might be generous enough to allow for something other than the very cheapest food, bought in quantity, that will make for survival, if not for enjoyment. Why deny enjoyment to people who need benefits? Because being poor is seen as bad moral choices, bad fiscal choices, bad decisions that could have been avoided with better moral character, or better planning about the future. They're always the fault of the poor person and never the fault of a system that works its very hardest to make them poor so that the richest people can have everything they ever desired without having to worry about cost (or ethics.) If you're not willing to buy into the narrative that you're a morally deficient person for needing this assistance, then there will be plenty of people around who will demand that your assistance be removed, because you're not groveling hard enough to deserve it from them. Rather than looking at the root causes, or deciding that as a country, a government, a people, and especially for those people who insist that this is a Christian nation, that we want to provide for everyone enough that they don't have to worry about the basics of life, instead it's easier and serves both capitalism and white supremacy better to lie to ourselves and say that those people are poor because they are morally deficient, while we might be poor because of bad luck or circumstances beyond our control.
As I was saying, to pull this back toward what was said in the meeting, if a person wants to take every Monday off, and they have the leave to do it, that's their decision. I assume that the decision got approved somewhere in the managerial chain and isn't causing undue hardship for everyone else working there, so there's no reason to believe that it's being harmful to anyone. Or it's someone high enough up on the managerial chain that they can approve it for themselves and the scheduling still works out. What business is it of mine how someone else chooses to use their leave? And why should I grudge them getting some of my freely donated leave if they have a situation come up where they need some more? Unless, that is, I'm making a moral judgment about how someone uses their leave, whether out of jealousy that they're having an easier time of things than I am, or because I think they should be more invested in the Protestant Work Ethic or Doing It For The Corporation or Vocational Awe or whatever bullshit reason it is that I'm being judgmental about how someone else is living their lives that isn't likely to affect me in any way. What gives me the right to pass judgment on someone else? Leave is for using. And if I believe in keeping a cache of leave just in case of a situation that requires leave, then I keep a cache of leave just in case. And I still hope that I don't get hit by something that's going to wipe out my plans and my leave cache and put me at the point where I need to get some donated leave myself and deal with other people who think they're morally superior to me and blessed with good choices. Only the richest are insulated against the disaster that will wipe them out.
And, y'know, on a different axis of morality, having gone through undergraduate and graduate schooling myself, I can see why someone wouldn't want to go to work on a day they have classes, so they can focus on the classwork and get the homework and readings done for it. I had the privilege of being able to do both sets of schooling without having to work a work schedule around a class schedule, and it's a lot easier to succeed and get on your career path that way. If I can't work effectively after going to class, for whatever reason, it's better for me to take the rest of the day and possibly work on homework than to try and half-ass my way through work. Education is supposed to be a moral good, and people putting themselves through school is one of the foundations of the bootstraps narrative, so it seems like it would be a moral good to have someone who is focused on their education and bettering themselves, rather than resenting them for taking time off from work so they can understand and digest their classwork.
Gifts with strings aren't gifts. And the research continues to come in that proves any given person is the person most able to answer the question "What should I spend my money on?", so that if you are serious about defeating poverty, and not trying to use "defeating poverty" as a smokescreen for creating a permanent underclass to exploit or as a reason to find ever more ways to exclude the people you choose not to see as human from accessing the benefits of humanity and good government, the most effective action is to give someone cash grants, specifically with the idea in mind that you don't care how the money is spent. (Or not spent - sometimes the right thing to spend money on is something where, if someone knows they're getting some cash coming in, they'll save to purchase the really good pair of boots that will last them ten years, instead of having to waste more money buying boots that only last one year after year.) Basic, guaranteed income is one of the easiest ways to get people out of poverty. And to help them free up enough cognitive resources to be able to think about long-term decisions and putting their income to the use that suits them best.
"But Silver," I have heard, "guaranteeing income to everyone means that the rich people will also have it. Surely they could be excluded from the deserving, since it was their greed that got us into this mess." My response to that is if you're concerned that the rich will also be getting guaranteed income that they don't need, they're probably not being taxed hard enough, and focus your efforts there about making sure they are contributing sufficiently to the pool of money to draw on, than caring that they're going to be able to benefit from the pool to some degree. Equity over equality means that the redistribution of resources will primarily, perhaps even mostly, go to the people who have the least and taper off as people approach the point that qualifies as enough, but it doesn't preclude people from ever getting those resources as the general trends start approaching parity. (Bezos may never get any of that. Bezos should also be the person singlehandedly funding several localities' basic income programs to their fullest.)
Maybe it's my Hufflepuff values, maybe it's the understanding that healthy societies have socialist or collectivist cores, maybe it's that given the choice between moral disapproval of someone choosing a small luxury for themselves that they can afford and moral disapproval of a corporation that chooses to exploit and steal from their workers to enrich their executives and shareholders, my morals say I should always choose to focus my energy on making the corporation more human than on giving half a shit about making the human more corporate.
To summarize all of the above into something more compressed, the question of "deserving" and "undeserving" is a speck-plank problem, and it always says a lot more about the person who is asking the question than about the person the question is directed at. So my recommendation is to avoid it and try to set up and support situations where there are no judgments about "deserving", only people getting the help they need from a pool of resources large enough to provide for everyone that asks (and a few more that might be asking for the first time).
no subject
Date: 2020-12-19 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-19 08:12 am (UTC)or "my roommate and I are separate households for federal benefits purposes, and it wastes less time, effort, and grocery money if we take turns cooking for both of us instead of each of us cooking for just ourselves"
no subject
Date: 2020-12-19 03:47 pm (UTC)