Quinn was my smoking buddy when I worked for a tech company in Seattle. They were always either quitting cigarettes or about to quit; short, stylish, and friendly, full of a deeply earnest anxiety peculiar to American Millennials. Primarily we talked about politics, both American and Scottish, but also about books, vegan food, Seattle, punk music, and nicotine alternatives.
Then, after a few months of this chit-chat, Quinn started talking to me about unions.
They broached the subject by way of an argument over parking. The converted warehouse we worked in didn’t have a parking lot of its own, Quinn explained, so employees who needed to drive had to spend huge amounts to park in a public lot nearby. The company refused to consider assisting them in this. The way for these employees to shift the burden to where it belonged, Quinn whispered with breathless excitement, was for us to form a union.
Being very cool and European meant I walked everywhere, so the parking issue was all news to me. But being very cool and European also meant I grew up thinking unions were a default setting in capitalism. I assumed, blithely, that we must already be in one. Why was Quinn so excited?
They took my unimpressed response to the u-word as conspiratorial consent. They invited me to loiter around one evening until the office emptied out so we could start drumming up interest in forming Seattle’s first tech union. When the coast was clear we skulked through the dimly lit warehouse together, spreading leaflets about the nascent union and its approach to parking fees on a random selection of desks. Midway through, a cleaner waved at us from the other side of a bank of desks — a broad smile — and I waved back, one human being to another. But before I could say hi Quinn grabbed my hand from the air and pulled me down under a desk with them like we were in a trench in the Somme and I’d just lifted my cigarette above the parapet.
Nobody can know we did this, Quinn whispered. I pointed to one of the wide room’s ceiling cameras and shrugged. Shit, they said, and took off immediately, collecting the flyers, truly spooked.
Quinn whispered generational wisdom while we gathered up our incendiary calls for cheaper parking. They told me that you don’t need to do anything wrong to get fired in America. Your employer can end your contract at will. They explained that if we were fired for cause from that particular company, our livelihoods and our families’ healthcare would vanish immediately, without severance. For cause would be a euphemism for, in this case, unionizing. Any new job would make us wait at least six months to restore our health insurance. So even if I was willing to instruct my own body not to get sick until I could afford it again, would I feel comfortable asking the same of my kids?
I imagined explaining to my partner that he would need to find new health insurance because I helped foment rebellion over a parking lot I’d never even seen. I was upset with myself for not grasping the risk, and deeply impressed with Quinn, who had known all along. I’ve never forgotten what they taught me. It persists back here in Europe where people read headlines and ask me, a volunteer American citizen, why aren’t they in the streets — they’re, what?
I answer that they are exhausted. They are terrified. Their system forces them to bring their partners, their children, their pets and their doctors along in even the pettiest act of defiance. This means that they’re not sleepwalking. Your white-collar American coworkers are wide awake, bound by the strange tyranny of their employment. Their capacity for collective action has been systematically destroyed by decades of capitalist endeavor.
We see them gape at the sight of a child hauled into a van by masked men, at the sound of a mother howling mi hija, mi hija, and from far away we wonder what stills the throat from screaming. Maybe they can afford the higher parking fee, I explain, or they live near a good bus stop, like their parents and grandparents did; maybe they think they’ll get through this if they just stay quiet. Others have endured violence from both the state and their neighbors for generations without justice or restitution. America threatens them on a minute-by-minute basis.
This is a nation that startles at sudden movements.
That, and the fact that everybody’s kids need glasses, new shoes, insulin, any item from a long list of things a working American can very abruptly lose on behalf of their loved ones. The sum total of this is an oppression so deep that it begins to look self-imposed, like it’s voluntary, even chosen.
I spent a decade working in America, and nobody but Quinn ever said the u-word to me and meant it. They’re still in Seattle, where people like them now stack barricades of e-scooters into the doorway of the federal building before the morning immigration raids, before they head to work, chanting while the city hums behind them for an audience already drowning in sound.
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Heather McLellan is a narrative designer living in Espoo.
