The Feet of the Working Class
Happy May Day, New York sucks, and I spend a lot of time worrying about my mom
When I went back to visit my parents last month, I spent a lot more time than I thought thinking and talking about feet.
(Not in that way, for the perverts in the audience).
My parents both have the kinds of jobs that don’t necessarily fit the definition of hard labor but still prematurely age you, especially your joints.
My mother mentioned that almost all of her co-workers spend their breaks discussing their foot problems. Like most American cashiers, they can’t sit during their shifts, even though the concrete floors at the store I am deliberately keeping nameless to avoid getting my mother in trouble wreak havoc on their feet, their legs. One of her coworkers is younger than me, barely out of high school, and developed chronic foot issues so bad he had to quit after managers were less than sympathetic to his need to take time off to recover.
My father wasn’t sure if he’d be able to take time off this summer to come and visit his ailing sister. His coworker and one of the only other experienced waiters left at his job needs knee surgery (not his first, although the poor man also can’t retire yet), and he has to work around his recovery schedule. Luckily my dad’s knees are still fine, but he has chronic back pain and had to have his first wrist surgery when he was young, barely into his forties. I was three when he had this surgery and I vaguely remember it because he had to get a granny grocery cart while he was recovering and he would take me with him to the Associated (I thought it was fun. He felt emasculated). Waiting tables for decades eventually breaks you down, and he’s resigned to that fate, along with the scores of other relatives I have that have formed the funnily-accented brigade staffing Italian restaurants for years (most Italian restaurants in New York are either owned by Croatians or Albanians. Apologies if this bursts anyone’s bubble).
I was lucky enough not to grow up poor, but I still grew up around people with these kinds of working class jobs. Doormen, waiters, shop cashiers, housewives who were cleaning ladies on the side. When you’re working class, you spend a lot of time thinking about parts of the body rich people don’t usually have to think about, like your feet. You have to think about them even more in America, when your insurance with a stroke of its pen gets to decide which parts of your body are essential coverage (although you will still be paying hefty sums out of pocket for those body parts, of course) and which parts aren’t. Like your teeth? Too bad, you don’t need them to sip your gruel after working 12-hour shifts in the mine, Oliver Twist.
Most of us don’t think about or take care of our feet, but most of us need them to walk, run, march, kick down the capitalist state and so on. If you think of the city as a body, then in the most ham-fisted (ham-heeled?) metaphors, the working class is its feet. They’re not glamorous except to a very specific group of fetishists, but they’re necessary.
I kept thinking about this analogy after visiting New York in early spring, my first visit to the city after Eric Adams took over. Even though it feels like the Adams administration intensified the general bullshit here, for my entire life, this city has been like the stepsisters in Cinderella cutting off their feet to win the Prince, except to make the analogy work I'd have to figure out who's the Prince we're trying to win here. More investor capital to buy up storefronts and drive rents up. Tourists from Middle America we can inspire to come spend money and walk really slow on the sidewalks.
The city would rather we exist as incorporeal beings with no messy bodies to take care of, as its complete inattention to the bodies of its working class shows. I visited Moynihan Train Hall for the first time and as many others have mentioned, there is almost nowhere to sit. There is nowhere to sit in the subways and in many other public spaces. In New York, whether you like it or not, you have to stay on your feet at all times. There are so few public restrooms that during my time as a tour guide for a private camp, my co-workers and I shared key places to pee in our group chat, because none of us felt like paying $5 for a Starbucks drink every time we needed to pee while at work at our job where our paychecks worked out to below minimum wage.
That’s not even getting into the most obvious ways that the city wages bodily war on its working class, from the frequent police murders of Black people to the forced clearings of homeless encampments without giving people anywhere to go.
I started working on this essay shortly after getting back from New York, but life got in the way. It seems fitting that I’m finishing it on May Day. So much of labor politics and working class agitation is tied to the realities of the body. Are people being fed? Do they have somewhere to rest and do they have time to rest? Can they get medical care when they’re sick, and is that medical care worth an owl’s fart?
I’m also thinking about my parents’ bodies, and the bodies of all the older adults in my family. All are working class, all are getting older even though I still like to think of them as the young people that easily threw me up in the air when I was a child. This May Day, I wish everyone I knew could afford to retire, even though so far it looks like only my dad will be able to reach that lofty goal. I wish that they could get medical care without me gritting my teeth and preparing to wage telephone, written, and personal ware against insurance companies and doctors in two different companies.
And if those goals are too lofty, then damn it, I wish that my mother could sit.