Lessons from the past

 A couple of years ago, I was working at a place where the boss was much younger than me. He was the typical HR wunderkind - believer of corporate spiel and psychobabble, but generally harmless. Until, that is, we had a disagreement about the way he'd implemented a new policy. In the great scheme of things, it wasn't too big a deal, but - and this was a min wage job - it could impact you disproportionately if you had to take time off due to being injured at work.

By way of explanation, I was employed as a support worker for adults with learning disabilities. The residents, or 'service users' as we were expected to call them, could get frustrated and 'display challenging behaviour' - in other works, they'd give the support staff a slap, punch of kick if they were pissed off or faced with a set of circumstances that were causing them stress and anxiety.

I'd got on the wrong end of a kick doled out by a large resident whose behaviour had been 'challenging' all day, and by the end of my 12 hour shift, decided to lash out. The result was that I ended up with two cracked ribs and a month off work. On my return, the policy implications were made painfully clear - I would only be paid for three days at my full rate, the rest, was at the positively miserly statutory sick pay rate. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was then my turn to display challenging behaviour of my own. This led to an exchange of views with my boss, who fell back on a variation of 'just obeying orders'. Which is when our age difference became apparent.

You see, I'm a child of the 60s, and also a child of parents who went through the Second World War, in my father's case as a conscripted combatant and life long 'antifa', as we'd call it now. The concept of 'only obeying orders', was utter and complete bollocks to me, thanks to my upbringing and later legal education. And I told my boss this, by giving him the reply 'a Nuremburg defence is no defence'. He responded with 'what's that?' - which is when I realised that there are some lessons that have to be learned anew by each successive generation.

It also meant that I was going to get no-where by trying to appeal to his sense of justice - there's simply no room for that type of cock-eyed sentiment when you're climbing to the top and going by the book. Private sector involvement in the social care sector isn't necessarily as evil as Nazism, but at times it sure comes close.

Going into care

At the end of last September, I made a quantum break from my immediate past forms of employment - freelance editing and teaching - and took a job in the care sector. Now, society at large has a strange relationship with the concept of working in care: we're either doing a job that no-one else wants; working for a pittance looking after those that society would rather not have to deal with; or much patronised by politicians as selfless angels who dedicate themselves to caring for others. Depending on your views and/or personal experience at the time, you can mix and match these responses to suit your taste. For instance, if you've been mildly inconvenienced or embarrassed by a person with a learning disability displaying 'challenging behaviour' in public, you might go for the two former; but if you've seen support workers with happy smiling residents enjoying even the most mundane of activities, for example buying chocolate or catching a bus, you can slide into the latter camp and maybe even feel something approaching a nice warm glow. The truth lies somewhere in between; I've had good days and bad days in my new role. I don't teach ideas or correct text anymore, but I am called on to use some of those skills, as well as being empathetic to the needs of residents who face a world they don't understand or feel frightened by; we make the best of their situation and help them to make the most of their lives, exercising as much independence as they can handle while maintaining their dignity when things go wrong, as they inevitably will. It would help, of course, if the patronising words of politicians were matched by pay rates that exceeded the legal minimum, or if care providers didn't have a perpetual eye on the 'bottom line' or the share price: privatised care is a cynical oxymoron at best, pure balance sheet driven at worst. And of course, far more care staff need union representation; join as soon as you can, the monthly subs give you a peace of mind and strength of purpose than merely relying on the bland pronouncements of managers and HR could ever do.