The hidden activists of MeToo? Women of the working class | Inequality

TheOn Tuesday, McDonald's workers in 10 US cities quit work to protest widespread sexual harassment. A week earlier, female babysitters in California marched 100 miles from San Francisco to the state capital Sacramento to support anti-harassment legislation. The SEIU Concierges Union, in partnership with the East LA Women's Center, has quietly trained women in self-defense and is promoting anti-peer harassment workshops and a crisis hotline . And the mass parade of protesters around the nation on Monday in support of Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of trying to sexually assault her as high school students , was a new step.

These efforts are part of the MeToo movement, seen and heard too little – the protest and uproar of ordinary women, rather than the well-known MeToo defenders, who often show up at award ceremonies or on Twitter.

Yet a year after the popularization of MeToo by several famous actresses – and 12 years after activist Tarana Burke invented this phrase – we are inundated with stories of famous villains and famous survivors. fight between starlets MeToo Rose McGowan and Asia Argento to complain about the non-apology of alleged harassers, like former radio hosts John Hockenberry and Jian Ghomeshi, whose accounts were published this month in Harper and New York Review of Books, respectively.

But there comes a time when bold names must come out of the scene. MeToo must be a movement for all – for ordinary women as well as for the most famous of us. And to do this, we should clearly classify MeToo as both what it is and what it should be: a labor movement.

If we do not turn MeToo into fast food workers, janitors, farm workers, cashiers and waitresses, as well as teachers and librarians, we will continue to read and hear about the famous villains – they are on the other side of the coin. celebrity victims, after all.

The sad drinking game – name the next man who will extricate himself from the so-called well-financed exile to demand the sympathy of the public – could go on and on. Exhibit A is Ghomeshi, who kindly writes about being an "old 'celebrity" women of brutal acts, including hitting and choking them, diverting the story from his own alleged acts. (Ghomeshi was charged with sexual assault but acquitted.)

On the other hand, the bravery shown by poor, working-class women, such as McDonald's workers or even middle-class women, in this battle is rarely dramatic or self-damaging. Yet their risks – being fired, expelled or even physically harmed – far exceed those of survivors or celebrity writers.

We should bring them our collective look.

"We have to hear the people – not the actresses, not the people you ask for autographs, but the ones who do the night cleaning, who are struggling with this problem for decades" treasurer Alejandra Valles. She represents the "invisible women" as she says. "If the prominent women of MeToo do not listen to others, it will be a huge lost opportunity."

Like Bernice Yeung, author of In A Day's Work: Fighting Sexual Violence Against the Most Vulnerable Workers in America, I said that it is the "specificity" of what is happening in individual jobs and professions that is important. You need to look at the problem "industry by industry, workplace by workplace", detailing the specific ways in which women workers are abused in these places.

"If you just think" sexual harassment is happening ", you think generically and you risk getting out of the problem," says Yeung. "It's essential to know that in every work context – the couch, in hotel rooms, in hospitals, pastors in churches – it happens so differently."

Even the trajectories of stalkers or attackers can be very different from those of the most powerful attackers. Workers are not offered the opportunity to write bathastic odes to their former glory in national publications – citing Lolita and Brahms, like Hockenberry, to explain an apparent bias for harassment. But the relative anonymity of the first type is also favorable to them. As Valles explains, these men are often wristed and then "recycled" into new jobs where they easily repeat the same behavior.

There are contemporary movements that succeed but not dominated by celebrity stories. look no further than Black Lives Matter. In comparison, the types of Leo DiCaprio and their jets have weighed on another current movement, the environment. (To misquote Us Weekly: celebrities are not like you and me.)

A MeToo movement, less fame-oriented and more labor-intensive, involves not only poor and working women, but also women in middle-class occupations, such as the women technicians interviewed. five years in San Francisco or a lot of women. now participate in mass marches across the country to protest against Kavanaugh. At a conference on the infamous technology of sexual harassment, I attended a panel in which one of the participants made frequent remarks about the scene. – on the big "rack" of one of the panelists. And I was assured that it was quite typical.

The Time's Up campaign seems to be trying to include janitors and technology workers: the organization is "aware that so many working women do not get the same attention as celebrities," says Yeung. And the National Domestic Workers Alliance has lobbied to expand federal protections for sexual harassment for all workers by "filling in all the gaps".

In addition, celebrities can, of course, be useful to working women. Celebrity advocates bring media and donor visibility to fundraising for women's advocacy projects – and there is much to be done. Women must begin to recognize how social stratification allows sexism and to unite between classes to combat it, as they do this week.

"If we do not find out how to go beyond these headlines and celebrity voices, how do we find solutions?" Asks Valles. People can be "incredibly dismissive" of women who return their hamburgers to McDonald's or who clean the bathroom of boutique hotels and glassy offices or even those who store the books of their children. Yet listening to these women, their experiences and their protests – as the most recent activism shows – is "the only way the MeToo moment will become a real movement," she says.

"We do not need your sympathy," she adds. "We need you to learn from us."