Very often, activists are people working for little to no money on things that are personally important in their lives. Take me as example. Because of our positions and our expertise, we are often asked to talk about our experiences and share our knowledge. The people we spend our time educating are overwhelmingly those without these life experiences, and those who hold more structural power in society than we do.
Most often, this is around disability or being on a low income, and the context in which this is happening. I give up my time, share my knowledge and provide guidance and support.
This should be valued as labour. This can be described as emotional labour. A term coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, it describes the process by which workers manage and regulate their feelings and emotions in order to fulfil emotional requirements as part of a job. In this context, it is the time spent politely educating people about the intimate details of my life, often being expected to answer invasive and personal questions about the impact that being severely disabled and skint has on my life and my mental health.
If you want to look at it in terms of the number of hours spent actually working, it is in preparing for these exchanges, undertaking them, and recovering afterwards. Talking about the intimate details of your personal experience of oppression is draining, debilitating, and work. It often falls on those with low status in society i. But paying people for their time is against the code of ethics in journalism, right? Within this there is a distinct misunderstanding of both what activists and campaigners do, or just how much of our lives are consumed by our efforts.
Nobody is asking for payment for our activism, the hours and hours we spend working and organising to make society a slightly fairer place. But talking to journalists for their own projects and gain goes far beyond this. Courts pay expert witnesses to give evidence based on their skills and expertise, charities pay trainers and consultants, newspapers and TV shows pay journalists to provide skills and expertise. Why are we treated differently? It is common knowledge that tabloids give large sums of money in exchange for stories.
