The protagonist of the story you are going to read does not exist in the
real world. We like to think that a little piece of her lives inside
every third sector educator because everything you are about to read is
a collage of facts, sensations, emotions, frustrations, anger, joys and
sufferings that we have shared collectively in the fantastic adventure
that is the Collective of the Angry Educators of Bologna. In the text
the universal feminine is used in many points, a choice that the
Collective has made and given it a critical meaning since educational
work is often identified as care work which in our society is in turn
attributed to a role that by "nature" should perform women. We would
like to subvert all this and much more.
It's 7:40 and my alarm starts ringing. I almost never set it at half
past seven because those extra ten minutes give me the illusion of a
longer rest.
With my eyes still struggling to open, the first thing I do is what is
not recommended by any doctor to protect our brain. Awkwardly feeling
around the nightstand, I reach for my phone to turn off airplane mode.
This night I was not available and so I decided to take care of myself
and make sure not to let any vibrations disturb me.
The phone vibrates nervously and, between a very good morning from Aunt
Carmelina and a meme about the group of friends, here she appears. "The
work chat". Thirty-five unread messages. I've been awake for two minutes
and I'm already looking at the ceiling, invoking some spiritual guide
who can protect me during this day that has just begun. In the meantime,
I soon reached the bathroom from the bedroom. I can't resist and so at
7.50, sitting comfortably on the toilet, I open the chat.
It seems that my on-call colleague was woken up at three in the morning
by an officer from a barracks to go and collect one of our boys who had
been stopped in the center and did not have the declaration certifying
that he was a guest of our facility. He does not yet have a residence
permit but, since he is a minor, this declaration gives him a sort of
pass because it shows that he is under our protection. The fact is that
she had to get up and go get it in a taxi, otherwise they would have
held it until my shift arrived. Even the idea of leaving him in the
barracks for a whole night is unacceptable. My colleague worked too much
in the previous months, she had to cover shifts for another colleague
who recently resigned and so she has many extra hours. She really didn't
need this late-night call. It will be yet another unpaid on-call
situation that will slip, silently for many and painfully for her, into
the very famous and highly criticized hour bank.
For those who don't know what the hour bank is, don't worry, it's a very
simple concept. Imagine a large deposit of surplus hours that will never
be paid but which the educator will sooner or later be forced to dispose
of if the aforementioned deposit were to grow excessively. This
mechanism is triggered for an equally simple reason: the lack of money
available to pay for overtime hours.
Our overtime hours often coincide with small or large emergencies. In
educational work, unpredictable events can occur because, dealing with
humans, we interact with situations that are part of everyday life: a
police stop, a fight, a broken arm, a high fever. Unforeseen events.
Unexpected events in life.
The feeling of guilt assails me. I could have been on call instead of
her, what would I have done if I had been awake? Would I pretend not to
hear the phone? What a nightmare. At the same time I think I was lucky
when I had been on call two days before and nothing had happened. And
again: guilt for having produced this thought. "What are you doing? Do
you wish others to be woken up in the middle of the night?" I wonder.
I stop and take a deep breath. The hope is to chase away, by throwing
the air out, this legacy of "guilt" which is nothing other than a trap
that often and unfortunately misleads me. I take courage and after
washing I prepare a coffee and eat two biscuits so as not to have to
spend yet another penny on frenetic breakfasts at the bar. Those
breakfasts where I get coffee at the counter and a croissant to bring.
Croissant that I quickly gulp down on the way from the bar to the bus
stop. In the worst case scenario, I spend five euros. No, I definitely
can't afford it. The salary arrives in the middle of the month and I am
left with one hundred euros on the card. If there's food in the pantry
it's best to make do. Breakfast outside will be postponed as soon as
there is new money.
From my seat on the bus, on my usual journey to work, I often look
around me and observe the city. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in
the glass and look at myself carefully. I am an evanescent "I", as if I
were a ghost. I'm just a shadow! I feel invisible in this city. I can
feel what Bologna has become every day on my skin. Lately I like to
compare it to one of those strange machines that tennis players use to
train; the ones who energetically spit tennis balls.
Well, imagine that instead of the yellow balls there are all those
people who have a bank account of less than a thousand euros. There are
many of us who are part of this macro-category. Among all these
subjectivities, the ones I can tell something about are us: the educators.
The educators of school services, socio-educational services,
communities for unaccompanied foreign minors, housing services; those of
home services, those of 24-hour educational communities and those of day
centres. The educators who work in mother-child communities and those
who instead deal with people with psychiatric problems. Those who do
street education and those who work as jokers; those who hold protected
meetings and the educators who work with disabled people.
Living in Bologna and being educators is a combination that is starting
to become jarring. The real estate market is skyrocketing and the
question from the aunts at Easter lunch is "but why don't you buy a
house?!" I don't know what to answer anymore!
How do I explain to him that to buy a house I need a permanent contract,
a decent paycheck and guarantors? This last element then suggests that
our parents must literally vouch for us. What if some of them no longer
have parents? What if someone doesn't want to burden their family? What
if someone wanted to finally take their life into their own hands and
become independent? Well, in these cases we could all agree that we have
a plan B. Plan B would be to live in rent. A single room in the city of
Bologna has come to cost between four hundred and one thousand euros.
Too bad I earn nine hundred euros. Per month. How can I afford it?
And now I feel like I'm a yellow ball in the queue of many other yellow
balls waiting for my moment. The one where I will be spit out of the
city I chose to live in. From the Bologna that everyone told me was
inclusive, full of space for everyone and which, instead, disappointing
all my expectations and hopes, was transformed into yet another showcase
city.
Bologna has been reshuffled into a honey cake displayed on the counter
of the showcase cities, designed to be made available to tourists who,
like greedy bears, come to visit it enchanted, ready to gorge themselves
on its beauties and its brilliant historic center . And where do
tourists sleep if not in those Airbnbs which until a few years ago were
rented apartments where perhaps a family, a student, a couple lived?
As expected, what happens in the showcase cities is rather simple: no
one cares about the margins; or rather it is better that the edges
remain hidden from the thousand eyes that pass through the center. Here
I feel like that tennis ball once again. But if I look carefully around
me, at my side, among the spherical and yellow shapes, I can distinguish
some of my colleagues and if I focus well, even the people I work for!
If I think about it I start to not feel so alone and I often wonder what
could happen if, all aware of what is happening
around us, we rebelled.
The first thing that happens, after two hours of arriving at the
facility and after having had my chat with the guys, is to start
receiving the first phone calls. She is my coordinator. "Alina is off
sick, she can't come and relieve you at one. You're staying, okay?".
Well no! Today I organized myself differently. I had finally made an
appointment with my psychologist after months of not being able to fit
her into any hole. If I miss it I will be forced to pay for the session
anyway. That's sixty euros which, subtracted from the hundred left in
the account, will leave me with forty euros and without the pleasure of
having vented my sense of frustration on that poor woman. She writes
down everything that comes out of my mouth and she nods in silence,
reminding me every now and then that "you have to understand what you're
looking for, you have to listen to yourself!". I would love to listen to
myself, but how the hell do I do it if every time I try to do so someone
sabotages me?
I try to ask the coordinator to find someone else, explaining my
condition explicitly but "and who do I send you? There's no one, you
know too that Giada quit last week. I'm sorry, I don't know how I can
help you, we can't leave the structure uncovered." I had been organizing
this change for a month. I'm forced to grit my teeth, listen to my
stomach churning, and awkwardly try to calm down. The result is failure.
I keep thinking about that word that I hate and detest: flexibility.
There it was floating in my mind and bumping against the skullcap a bit
like the Windows screensaver with which I usually wrote my domed name.
Being flexible is the mantra of educational work, it is the word spread
on any advert you find on the web and elsewhere. This is that famous and
ancient practice of squeezing people like a lemon, who in turn acquire
the ability to resume human form after having been reduced to a balled
up rag. That's what flexibility is. It's just a stupid excuse to plug
the holes in a collapsing colander/system. But how is it possible that
we are so small?
Sitting at the office desk, between one email and another, the great
slogans echo in my head: "we are all one big family", "we act for the
good of people", "being an educator is a vocation", "educators you are
born and not made", "we guarantee services to the person", "there is no
better exercise for the heart than holding out your hand and helping
others to get up". All this is mere and pure slogan!
What does it mean to be part of a big family? Doesn't that mean
leveraging the spirit of sacrifice? And again, the concept of "family",
that organ of our society about which someone said "too much family is
bad!". Isn't the direction we are taking that of de-constructing,
criticizing and reinventing the family? Free it from its traditional
value which has ultimately generated many oppressed men and women rather
than free and non-dysfunctional subjectivities. But be careful, here we
are not talking about social volunteering, vocation, piètas and
unbridled love towards others. Here we are talking about people who work
for other people. Work must be paid, protected and also with dignity!
What is it that drives many people to believe that an educator must
sacrifice herself for the good of the people she works for? What makes
you believe that I need to be as flexible as an accordion? I'm starting
to doubt that the sacrifice is made for the kids I work for. Instead, I
think that we often become like many small pieces of cloth that
frantically plug those holes in the colander system that I mentioned before.
However, those who pay the consequences are not just us, it is above all
the people we work for. Last in this assembly line. The goal is "to
invoice!". I wonder where are all the beautiful concepts that I had
studied at university, where have all the beautiful intentions and
images that I had created in my fantastic cinema ended up when I was
smilingly uncorking a bottle of prosecco with a laurel wreath on my head.
Social cooperatives have also fallen into the world of shop windows.
What is happening is that the social values, which we have been made to
read and study so much about, are struggling to be applied.
They collide with a harsh reality in which priority is given to
resources and tenders for which they work compulsively and
teleologically. The goal is no longer the person but rather reaching the
final objective, justifying the expense, making numbers and cashing in.
A slow process of dehumanization towards the corporate path where people
are numbers.
I feel like I have lived and continue to live in a world made up of
contradictions between what my values are, between what my intentions
have been and what the reality of the facts is. Where has my dignity
gone and where that of the people I work for? It becomes complex to live
a daily working life that goes in the opposite direction to what I feel
I am and what I think is right.
I finish my last chat with the boys but I'm distracted and sometimes my
eyes fill with tears from an anger that I no longer know where to
channel. At the end of the shift I realize I have two missed calls from
Clara. She will surely want to suggest that we go and have a spritz
downtown with the money I don't have while we complain about our work
misfortunes. Like me, she is also an educator. I'll call you back as
soon as I leave the facility. I can't believe it, she gives me news that
makes my whole body tingle. She told me that this evening at the San
Donato bar there is a meeting of those girls that she had already told
me about. The "angry educators". Clara, who frequents them, explains to
me that they called a public meeting to collectively rethink what the
fighting practices could be to start making our voices heard as workers
in the third sector and in the educational world. She tells me "enough,
I can't stand hearing all your criticisms of the system and then seeing
you react like a limp piece of seaweed. On this tour, either you come or
I won't talk to you anymore!". You are right. I get on the first bus to
reach the meeting place and I feel happy, tiredness be damned! Here she
is, Clara is waiting for me near the bar. Behind her I can see hundreds
of yellow balls.
Anger is subversive if it collectivizes.
The article appeared in «Gli Asini», n. 109, July-August 2023. We thank
Ilaria Paradiso, the Collettivo Educatrici Arrabbiate di Bologna and the
editorial team for the friendly permission to reproduce the text.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
real world. We like to think that a little piece of her lives inside
every third sector educator because everything you are about to read is
a collage of facts, sensations, emotions, frustrations, anger, joys and
sufferings that we have shared collectively in the fantastic adventure
that is the Collective of the Angry Educators of Bologna. In the text
the universal feminine is used in many points, a choice that the
Collective has made and given it a critical meaning since educational
work is often identified as care work which in our society is in turn
attributed to a role that by "nature" should perform women. We would
like to subvert all this and much more.
It's 7:40 and my alarm starts ringing. I almost never set it at half
past seven because those extra ten minutes give me the illusion of a
longer rest.
With my eyes still struggling to open, the first thing I do is what is
not recommended by any doctor to protect our brain. Awkwardly feeling
around the nightstand, I reach for my phone to turn off airplane mode.
This night I was not available and so I decided to take care of myself
and make sure not to let any vibrations disturb me.
The phone vibrates nervously and, between a very good morning from Aunt
Carmelina and a meme about the group of friends, here she appears. "The
work chat". Thirty-five unread messages. I've been awake for two minutes
and I'm already looking at the ceiling, invoking some spiritual guide
who can protect me during this day that has just begun. In the meantime,
I soon reached the bathroom from the bedroom. I can't resist and so at
7.50, sitting comfortably on the toilet, I open the chat.
It seems that my on-call colleague was woken up at three in the morning
by an officer from a barracks to go and collect one of our boys who had
been stopped in the center and did not have the declaration certifying
that he was a guest of our facility. He does not yet have a residence
permit but, since he is a minor, this declaration gives him a sort of
pass because it shows that he is under our protection. The fact is that
she had to get up and go get it in a taxi, otherwise they would have
held it until my shift arrived. Even the idea of leaving him in the
barracks for a whole night is unacceptable. My colleague worked too much
in the previous months, she had to cover shifts for another colleague
who recently resigned and so she has many extra hours. She really didn't
need this late-night call. It will be yet another unpaid on-call
situation that will slip, silently for many and painfully for her, into
the very famous and highly criticized hour bank.
For those who don't know what the hour bank is, don't worry, it's a very
simple concept. Imagine a large deposit of surplus hours that will never
be paid but which the educator will sooner or later be forced to dispose
of if the aforementioned deposit were to grow excessively. This
mechanism is triggered for an equally simple reason: the lack of money
available to pay for overtime hours.
Our overtime hours often coincide with small or large emergencies. In
educational work, unpredictable events can occur because, dealing with
humans, we interact with situations that are part of everyday life: a
police stop, a fight, a broken arm, a high fever. Unforeseen events.
Unexpected events in life.
The feeling of guilt assails me. I could have been on call instead of
her, what would I have done if I had been awake? Would I pretend not to
hear the phone? What a nightmare. At the same time I think I was lucky
when I had been on call two days before and nothing had happened. And
again: guilt for having produced this thought. "What are you doing? Do
you wish others to be woken up in the middle of the night?" I wonder.
I stop and take a deep breath. The hope is to chase away, by throwing
the air out, this legacy of "guilt" which is nothing other than a trap
that often and unfortunately misleads me. I take courage and after
washing I prepare a coffee and eat two biscuits so as not to have to
spend yet another penny on frenetic breakfasts at the bar. Those
breakfasts where I get coffee at the counter and a croissant to bring.
Croissant that I quickly gulp down on the way from the bar to the bus
stop. In the worst case scenario, I spend five euros. No, I definitely
can't afford it. The salary arrives in the middle of the month and I am
left with one hundred euros on the card. If there's food in the pantry
it's best to make do. Breakfast outside will be postponed as soon as
there is new money.
From my seat on the bus, on my usual journey to work, I often look
around me and observe the city. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in
the glass and look at myself carefully. I am an evanescent "I", as if I
were a ghost. I'm just a shadow! I feel invisible in this city. I can
feel what Bologna has become every day on my skin. Lately I like to
compare it to one of those strange machines that tennis players use to
train; the ones who energetically spit tennis balls.
Well, imagine that instead of the yellow balls there are all those
people who have a bank account of less than a thousand euros. There are
many of us who are part of this macro-category. Among all these
subjectivities, the ones I can tell something about are us: the educators.
The educators of school services, socio-educational services,
communities for unaccompanied foreign minors, housing services; those of
home services, those of 24-hour educational communities and those of day
centres. The educators who work in mother-child communities and those
who instead deal with people with psychiatric problems. Those who do
street education and those who work as jokers; those who hold protected
meetings and the educators who work with disabled people.
Living in Bologna and being educators is a combination that is starting
to become jarring. The real estate market is skyrocketing and the
question from the aunts at Easter lunch is "but why don't you buy a
house?!" I don't know what to answer anymore!
How do I explain to him that to buy a house I need a permanent contract,
a decent paycheck and guarantors? This last element then suggests that
our parents must literally vouch for us. What if some of them no longer
have parents? What if someone doesn't want to burden their family? What
if someone wanted to finally take their life into their own hands and
become independent? Well, in these cases we could all agree that we have
a plan B. Plan B would be to live in rent. A single room in the city of
Bologna has come to cost between four hundred and one thousand euros.
Too bad I earn nine hundred euros. Per month. How can I afford it?
And now I feel like I'm a yellow ball in the queue of many other yellow
balls waiting for my moment. The one where I will be spit out of the
city I chose to live in. From the Bologna that everyone told me was
inclusive, full of space for everyone and which, instead, disappointing
all my expectations and hopes, was transformed into yet another showcase
city.
Bologna has been reshuffled into a honey cake displayed on the counter
of the showcase cities, designed to be made available to tourists who,
like greedy bears, come to visit it enchanted, ready to gorge themselves
on its beauties and its brilliant historic center . And where do
tourists sleep if not in those Airbnbs which until a few years ago were
rented apartments where perhaps a family, a student, a couple lived?
As expected, what happens in the showcase cities is rather simple: no
one cares about the margins; or rather it is better that the edges
remain hidden from the thousand eyes that pass through the center. Here
I feel like that tennis ball once again. But if I look carefully around
me, at my side, among the spherical and yellow shapes, I can distinguish
some of my colleagues and if I focus well, even the people I work for!
If I think about it I start to not feel so alone and I often wonder what
could happen if, all aware of what is happening
around us, we rebelled.
The first thing that happens, after two hours of arriving at the
facility and after having had my chat with the guys, is to start
receiving the first phone calls. She is my coordinator. "Alina is off
sick, she can't come and relieve you at one. You're staying, okay?".
Well no! Today I organized myself differently. I had finally made an
appointment with my psychologist after months of not being able to fit
her into any hole. If I miss it I will be forced to pay for the session
anyway. That's sixty euros which, subtracted from the hundred left in
the account, will leave me with forty euros and without the pleasure of
having vented my sense of frustration on that poor woman. She writes
down everything that comes out of my mouth and she nods in silence,
reminding me every now and then that "you have to understand what you're
looking for, you have to listen to yourself!". I would love to listen to
myself, but how the hell do I do it if every time I try to do so someone
sabotages me?
I try to ask the coordinator to find someone else, explaining my
condition explicitly but "and who do I send you? There's no one, you
know too that Giada quit last week. I'm sorry, I don't know how I can
help you, we can't leave the structure uncovered." I had been organizing
this change for a month. I'm forced to grit my teeth, listen to my
stomach churning, and awkwardly try to calm down. The result is failure.
I keep thinking about that word that I hate and detest: flexibility.
There it was floating in my mind and bumping against the skullcap a bit
like the Windows screensaver with which I usually wrote my domed name.
Being flexible is the mantra of educational work, it is the word spread
on any advert you find on the web and elsewhere. This is that famous and
ancient practice of squeezing people like a lemon, who in turn acquire
the ability to resume human form after having been reduced to a balled
up rag. That's what flexibility is. It's just a stupid excuse to plug
the holes in a collapsing colander/system. But how is it possible that
we are so small?
Sitting at the office desk, between one email and another, the great
slogans echo in my head: "we are all one big family", "we act for the
good of people", "being an educator is a vocation", "educators you are
born and not made", "we guarantee services to the person", "there is no
better exercise for the heart than holding out your hand and helping
others to get up". All this is mere and pure slogan!
What does it mean to be part of a big family? Doesn't that mean
leveraging the spirit of sacrifice? And again, the concept of "family",
that organ of our society about which someone said "too much family is
bad!". Isn't the direction we are taking that of de-constructing,
criticizing and reinventing the family? Free it from its traditional
value which has ultimately generated many oppressed men and women rather
than free and non-dysfunctional subjectivities. But be careful, here we
are not talking about social volunteering, vocation, piètas and
unbridled love towards others. Here we are talking about people who work
for other people. Work must be paid, protected and also with dignity!
What is it that drives many people to believe that an educator must
sacrifice herself for the good of the people she works for? What makes
you believe that I need to be as flexible as an accordion? I'm starting
to doubt that the sacrifice is made for the kids I work for. Instead, I
think that we often become like many small pieces of cloth that
frantically plug those holes in the colander system that I mentioned before.
However, those who pay the consequences are not just us, it is above all
the people we work for. Last in this assembly line. The goal is "to
invoice!". I wonder where are all the beautiful concepts that I had
studied at university, where have all the beautiful intentions and
images that I had created in my fantastic cinema ended up when I was
smilingly uncorking a bottle of prosecco with a laurel wreath on my head.
Social cooperatives have also fallen into the world of shop windows.
What is happening is that the social values, which we have been made to
read and study so much about, are struggling to be applied.
They collide with a harsh reality in which priority is given to
resources and tenders for which they work compulsively and
teleologically. The goal is no longer the person but rather reaching the
final objective, justifying the expense, making numbers and cashing in.
A slow process of dehumanization towards the corporate path where people
are numbers.
I feel like I have lived and continue to live in a world made up of
contradictions between what my values are, between what my intentions
have been and what the reality of the facts is. Where has my dignity
gone and where that of the people I work for? It becomes complex to live
a daily working life that goes in the opposite direction to what I feel
I am and what I think is right.
I finish my last chat with the boys but I'm distracted and sometimes my
eyes fill with tears from an anger that I no longer know where to
channel. At the end of the shift I realize I have two missed calls from
Clara. She will surely want to suggest that we go and have a spritz
downtown with the money I don't have while we complain about our work
misfortunes. Like me, she is also an educator. I'll call you back as
soon as I leave the facility. I can't believe it, she gives me news that
makes my whole body tingle. She told me that this evening at the San
Donato bar there is a meeting of those girls that she had already told
me about. The "angry educators". Clara, who frequents them, explains to
me that they called a public meeting to collectively rethink what the
fighting practices could be to start making our voices heard as workers
in the third sector and in the educational world. She tells me "enough,
I can't stand hearing all your criticisms of the system and then seeing
you react like a limp piece of seaweed. On this tour, either you come or
I won't talk to you anymore!". You are right. I get on the first bus to
reach the meeting place and I feel happy, tiredness be damned! Here she
is, Clara is waiting for me near the bar. Behind her I can see hundreds
of yellow balls.
Anger is subversive if it collectivizes.
The article appeared in «Gli Asini», n. 109, July-August 2023. We thank
Ilaria Paradiso, the Collettivo Educatrici Arrabbiate di Bologna and the
editorial team for the friendly permission to reproduce the text.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten