Sarah Jaffe

And so it really struck me that like this man who is, you know, the leader of a coal miners union, his job is care.

His job is fighting for these, you know, his members health care and his job is commemorating its grieving.

Right.

It's commemorating the disasters and the people that were lost.

And that that was really true of the practice of solidarity, of being down the mine where it didn't matter if you like the guy next to you.

If the wall starts to cave in, you're going to grab him and get the hell out of there.

And then when I thought about the sort of entire social world of the miners outside of the mine that was built by the union.

So the union had the miners welfare hall, which was where you would go have a beer after work with your buddies.

And it was where you would have your wedding and it was where your children would be, you know, christened or baptized or I don't know, I'm Jewish.

And like that, that space, right, that social space also.

All of that is what went away when the mines went away.

Like what they miss is having a job that had some sense of purpose and having a decent wage that you could actually, you know, maybe send your kid to college so they didn't have to go down the mine.

To have a decent home and to have that kind of social life that was built in these places around the mines, because the mines are not in the center of a big city, right?

They're in rural areas.

Appalachia in the U.S.

They're in the north of England.

The destruction of that entire way of life means these towns are just, you know, they're wiped out.

And one of the things that to bring this back to care work, the first monument that I saw to COVID workers, right, was in Barnsley, which is the same place that the headquarters of the Mine Workers Union was in the north of England.

And I don't think that's an accident because they're used to commemorating workplace disasters.

And COVID was, among other things, a workplace disaster.