"I think that that is what the teachers should be saying and doing. They should be spelling it out. They should be telling the parents, “If you want me to teach, fight for my wages, and fight for my time. Fight for the facilities, and fight for the children to have instruments to play in band and things like that, on school time, with school money.” You know, we want to give these children an education that really fits them to have a happy life, not fits them to be a repressed individual at the service of the state…I think that something similar has happened with nurses – and nurses are fighting to take care of patients…They’re not only fighting that they’re overworked and underpaid. They’re fighting so that they can take the proper care of the patients. You know, one of the nurses was complaining to me that his boss on the ward says that, “You spend too much time with the patients. If you have to go bandage a leg, just bandage a leg, but then you sit and talk with them, and that’s no good!” So, I think there’s a real crisis – this is in general – between us carers and those who exploit us. On the one hand, we want to care. But on the other hand, we don’t want that wish to care to be used against us as workers. And we have always to decide, as carers, as teachers, as nurses, as mothers, as neighbors, we have to decide how to defend our caring but not allow ourselves to be exploited because we have this “weakness,” and in fact, this vulnerability is the right word. We have to say, “You have to pay us to do the right thing.” And we don’t take the little bit that [either] we want to do the right thing, or we want to take the money. We want both. That’s really crucial, and it took a lot of years, I think, to be absolutely clear, to be able to say that in that succinct way because it’s very hard to figure out, if you are a carer, if your work is the health and well-being of other people, how to be dedicated to it but not exploited, not allow yourself to be exploited by it."
Selma James

January 1, 1970

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