Revitalised by Recognition

 

'The Sun' card. Source: Rider-Waite Tarot pack

Negative life-experiences, properly re-evaluated, can help us define what we really want out of life. I believe I gained that insight at least partially from reading Dorothy Leeds’ Secrets of Successful Interviews: How to Get the Job You Really Want in 1998, as well as from earlier, 1984-86 experience of psychotherapy. (Secrets of Successful Interviews has clearly been since reformulated and updated as Marketing Yourself: The Ultimate Job Seeker's Guide.)

That insight was made more alive for me by way of the interviewing skills of a recruitment agency's founder, Jacquie, in 1999. She asked me about the supports I would require in my ideal job. I recited a work placement experience in which my line-manager had been the CEO of my employer (whom I had previously known through shared volunteering in childminding), my workbase was my training provider’s facilities and line-manager never visited me on placement except for three interviews with training provider’s Placements Officer in an 8 week placement. “I would like good supervision,” I stated, while I recalled that the CEO too busy with other things never really gave me that and later emphasised my failure to meet deadlines.

“Don’t you really mean that you would require recognition?” Jacquie replied, and I resonated with that insight.

 

I recall that interview insight as I reflect on the resurgence I gained recently by the revival of my rapport with Hereford Times letters pages, and the impact on me from a research-oriented telephone interview I received yesterday by way of referral by Alison Mann as Kundalini Yoga teacher to both the researcher and me.

In the telephone interview, I was asked about my resilience under lockdown, and we clarified the definition of ‘resilience’. I said that I take the approach that I’m a survivor, whatever has happened to me in the past, and I have a lot more scope as a state pensioner on more-than-’working age benefits’ and free of the shackles of a Universal Credit ‘Claimant Commitment’ that is oriented to getting the claimant off the unemployment register more than it is to helping the claimant get the job they really want.

I referred to a sense of life purpose as an essential ingredient in my resilience — my capacity to bounce back from whatever happens to me: “I’m an expert witness, applying verbal literacy skills and ‘expert witness’ testimony, rather than a victim of life’s circumstances and waste of space.”

I felt revitalised by that interview, whereas I would no doubt feel drained by interactions with someone who probably had no experience of recruitment experience from the recruiter’s point of view and yet professed to providing “the help you need, when you need it.” (Namely, a Universal Credit 'workcoach'.)

Thus, last night I responded to a friend’s feedback on my latest Hereford Times published letter that provided the impetus for blog posts:

After a very stimulating research conversation with University of South Wales counselling course student re lockdown and access to wellbeing promoting therapies such as Yoga this afternoon, I had a fresh burst of blogging impetus, in which I gave loads of info related to what I told the student/researcher: that for far too many people, financial lockdown has long preceded Covid-19 lockdown.

https://newsforwardsfromalanwheatley.blogspot.com/2020/10/agenda-for-caring-economy.html

And before that blog post, I noted that the print issue of New Internationalist magazine referred to in the 'Agenda for a Caring Economy' posting, is not on the New Internationalist home page, but there is this reference to related online article about the skewed values of the Global Economy

https://newsforwardsfromalanwheatley.blogspot.com/2020/10/global-economy-as-debtors-prison-newint.html

 

Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the current economic system is that while the caring that props up national economies is an underrecognised form of modern slavery, carers and the people who need their care are treated as expendable. That is instanced by, say, the fact that downgrading a claimant's entitlement to Personal Independence Payment that replaces Disability Living Allowance also downgrades the carer's prospects of getting Carer's Allowance.

Alan Wheatley

Agenda for a Caring Economy

 A news 'scoop' that I was told about at Sandalls Newsagent, Sandall Road, Hereford HR4 told me of when I got my print copy of Hereford Times yesterday was that the November-December 2020 issue of New Internationalist magazine is now in print. (That 'scoop' has not yet made it to the New Internationalist home page!)

 In the 'editor's letter', Amy Hall writes:

Home Truths

 An innocent question: "How are you feeling about the care magazine?" my housemate asked me over coffee. "Angry" was my answer, in fact, I've spent a large part of the Covid-19 pandemic feeling this way, with the issue of care a major focal point of my rage.

 I'm vexed about the glaring inequality in who does care work and domestic labour — in the 'wider world' and in my personal life. I'm enraged about the lack of recognition and the disrespect often displayed for the (mostly) women and/or racialised people doing this work and how they, along with people who may need their care, are treated as expendable.

But there is hope: 2020 has demonstrated our interdependence and plenty of people have shown up to make sure people are cared for — friend or stranger. There has also been an outpouring of public appreciation. Over the peak of the pandemic here in Britain, Thursday evening's 'clap for carers' was a highlight for my nurse housemate and her three year old, who would bang on everyone's bedroom doors to remind us. Although many key workers loved it, for others the applause was hollow without concrete changens to their pay and working conditions.

This issue's Big Story explores care in its widest sense and its, often conveniently ignored, relationship with the wider economy. In the magazine we hear from people who are navigating this in a system which too often treats them with contempt.

Elsewhere in this edition, Stepanie Boyd reports from the Peruvian Amazon on how indigenous people, especially hard hit by the pandemic, are fighting for survival. Rahia Gupta makes the case for 'political blackness' and our food justice series questions the rise of food banks as a solution to world hunger.

And I know from my past as a Community Care magazine reader from 1998 to 2011 — ie, before it lost its interest for service user and unpaid carers' issues and focused more on the managerialism and privatisation agendas that Social Work Action Network (SWAN) opposes — and Green Party of England & Wales Spokesperson on Social Care between 2008 and 2011, of the enormous undervaluing of carers in the UK economy. One of the online articles that Community Care magazine website has not yet jetisoned is 

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2009/07/16/change-the-terms-of-carers-allowance-to-allow-more-carers-to-work/

I was also in contact with CarerWatch, an online network of family-based carers. 

The Carer Watch Blog was last update 6 March 2017 —
Testimony to the burnout carers experience under ever-increasing
"lack of recognition and the disrespect often displayed for the (mostly) women
and/or racialised people doing this work and how they,
along with people who may need their care,
are treated as expendable,"
as Amy Hall's New Internationalist editor's letter describes the issue

Further, I would mention that Gingerbread One Parent Families website alerted me to the fact that 1/7 of single parent families were family carers of disabled children, or were themselves disabled, while the Tory Conference spin kept asserting that the benefits system was overloaded with feckless teenage parents. Gingerbread sources for those figures? Department for Work & Pensions data!

Gingerbread: Single Parents Facts & Figures

Further, there is https://globalwomenstrike.net/

 

#CareIncomeNow!
for all Caring Work for People & Planet

New Internationalist magazine print edition, priced at £7.45, can be ordered through good newsagents. 

New Internationalist: The Hidden Debt of Care —
Covid-19 has pushed the world' caregivers to the limit and
beyond. Amy Hall explains how their work continues to be
undermined and undervalued

 

 

Alan Wheatley