New Orleans Yes, I know I’m bowdlerizing a Frost poem. It’s miles not hours, but that’s what hit me in seeing a piece that stirring up interest from the HBO hit show, “The Pitt”. I watched one season of the series on an airplane and some of the next on television. We signed up for HBO after we had children, realizing that we would never go out again, and that’s all she wrote. I haven’t seen the particular episode that stirring discussion, but I know what they’re talking about. I’ve lived it, and am either guilty or responsible for perpetuating it, depending on how you flip the coin.
Basically, a third-year medical student working twelve-hour shifts in the emergency room of the hospital tells the supervising doctor that it’s the end of her shift, sayonara, and goodnight. It’s worth noting that she’s essentially a student-trainee, which means this is on-the-job training where she is not getting paid, but is paying to be there in medical school tuition, which likely for us civilians, also known as future or current patients, means everlasting debt. There’s a little bit of guilt-tripping from the doctor, a stress case himself, but she turns on her heels, and says, “Maybe all you lunatics need to learn how to set some boundaries.” Reportedly, this has caused quite stir in real life among the IRL set of younger folks, not only in the medical world, but in some other occupations as well. The reactions have gone from “you go, girl!” to whether or not she’s hurting her future and abandoning people in critical situations.
Most of the comments seem to be on one or another side of the line about work-life balance, which is frankly not my strong suit, even as I read about this with interest. We used to tell new hires when they asked about the hours that “we work until the work is done.” We would try to add a little comfort to that by saying, “sometimes it’s endless and other times you can go home and do your laundry in the middle of the day.” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that organizing culture encourages endless work. You had to produce in the field, doubtlessly, but people noticed if you were in early and stayed late. Quite honestly, in the United States, we were benefited by the very low professional standard for salaried workers with discretion at the time. We went through numerous Department of Labor audits that always exempted organizers in the early decades, so there was no such thing as overtime for them.
Gradually, as the years went by, and we became larger it was harder for us to be that relaxed. Someone would file a wage-and-hour complaint somewhere or another as they left staff in one of the frontier offices. Our weekend long meetings that were mandatory, like the year-end meetings could become issues. We ended up carefully calibrating the hours over a six-day week with half on Saturday and factored into the 2080 hours for full-time work the midyear and year-end conferences and made sure the time sheets reflected the mandatory hours and the way overtime was calculated into the salary, as well as the fact that breaks and meal time were unpaid. Wages got higher and the relaxed standard changed finally in a compromise under the Biden administration.
Did the culture change? Not sure about that? I don’t mean to compare a medical emergency room to political and organizing work, but, if and when we’re honest, in the middle of the action, it all seems like life and death to many of us as well. We would notice someone walking or sneaking out like this student. We might let it go, just as the doctor did in “The Pitt,” but we would absolutely remember and never forget.