Angela Garbes | The 2022 MAKERS Conference

Angela Garbes at the 2022 MAKERS Conference.

Video Transcript

HOST: Please welcome Angela Garbes.

ANGELA GARBES: Wow. This is my first maker's conference. And I just have to say I'm thrilled. I'm so happy to be with you all today. And I want to start by saying that the only reason I'm able to be with you all here today is because some other people are doing my other job, my real job, which is taking care of my children.

And those people include my spouse, preschool and elementary school teachers, my father-in-law, my parents, my neighbors, and some good friends. They're all pitching in so that I can be here. And I would bet that the same is probably true for a lot of people in this room. Yeah. So shout out to caregivers.

[CLAPPING]

So care work, which is exactly what I'm here to talk to you about today, is the work that makes all other work possible. My latest book-- Essential Labor-- was really born out of a lot of grief and anger that I felt as a mother during the pandemic. For most of 2020 and a lot of 2021, I had to stop doing my professional work. I became a full-time caregiver.

I mean, I'm here with you all today. So, like, I'm doing all right, right? Like, I am a successful writer, but my job, as a creative person, does not give my family a regular paycheck. It does not give us health insurance the way that my husband's job does. You know, it was obvious to me that taking care of my children, who were just 2 and 5 at the time, and by extension, taking care of my community was the most important work that I could possibly be doing.

You know, it was easy to commit to care work, but I got to tell you, each day was a pretty tedious and endless cycle of changing diapers, and cooking, and cleaning, you know, doing laundry, all of that. It was-- frankly, it was terrible. I really felt so much of the joy and pleasure and color draining from my life.

And around that time, as I think we all remember, we heard a lot about essential workers, health care workers, sanitation workers, who yes, are absolutely essential. But I couldn't help but think what about me? What about mothers, parents? I was working 24/7, holding everything together and keeping people alive. That work felt pretty damn essential.

So all of this led me to ask, why? Why do we take care of work for granted in America? Why don't we talk about it as the necessary, physical, highly skilled and creative work that it is? How did care work and domestic labor come to be invisible and undervalued and expected of women, particularly black and brown women for very low wages?

Child care workers, many of whom are women of color and mothers themselves, they are three times more likely to live in poverty than any other worker in America. So we are entrusting that which we say is most precious, right? Our children are our future to these workers. And we can't pay them a living wage. That is shameful.

When I was writing, what I was trying to do was make sense of the present moment. And as all of us are gathered here to do, to envision a better future. And what I learned was actually that we first must reckon with our past. The devaluation of care work in America is a direct legacy of American slavery. The home has always been a workplace for black women. Many of them toiled without wages and treated as property, all of them. What am I talking about many? All of them.

You know, and honestly, when I was writing, I struggled. It's like how do you best explain to the widest audience possible that our entire economic system is inherently designed to exploit women of color? So in the midst of the pandemic, a statistic emerged that put it all in place for me. It was about Filipina ex nurses. People like my mother, who immigrated in 1970 and worked for over 40 years as a hospice nurse.

So Filipina ex nurses who were educated in English language systems because of America's colonial rule-- we don't talk about this much-- but America's colonial rule of the Philippines, they are overrepresented in critical care and ICU care because these jobs are much more physically intimate with patients. And therefore, they were considered less desirable by white nurses.

So this meant that starting in March 2020, Filipinas cared predominantly for COVID-19 patients. All right. Filipina nurses are 4% of the US nursing workforce. They are 34% of COVID-related nursing deaths. Yeah, thank you. So here was, here was a statistic that made it undeniable, that lives in my body, will never go away.

The lives of women of color in this country are considered less valuable than those of white women. You know, the women in my family were not enslaved, like generations of black women. And our family stories and individual stories differ, but I realized that all of these women's lives were shaped by the same forces-- capitalism, colonialism, exploitation, extraction white supremacy.

So I grounded my book in my Filipino-American family history because I know that storytelling is vital. It makes the political personal. It creates an emotional access point for people. It is really the engine of empathy. Writing this book forced me to wrestle with the privileges that I had being born an American. The way that my life is different, and frankly, much more comfortable than my mother's then all of the women of color who came before me.

It also forced me to reckon with how I am a beneficiary of and also complicit in an unjust system. And to ask, what do I want to do about that? So today, I am inviting all of you to join me in the very challenging and very necessary work of confronting our history, and starting to create real solidarity with domestic workers.

I think as Americans, we are really good at seeing ourselves and others, but how good are we at seeing others in ourselves? I know so many people in this room are mothers who are just trying to make ends meet, just trying to stay afloat in a country that really does not want us to thrive. We are no different from the women we hire to clean our houses. We are no different from the women we hire to take care of our children.

And you know, sometimes this can be uncomfortable to hear, but it's the truth. So the question is, the more important question is, what do we do with these unsettling truths, right? Those of us in this room, we have some measure of economic and social privilege. And we must listen to women of color. And we must leverage whatever power we have to advocate for them and to work with them to create a more sustainable and equitable care system.

As we all know, the theme of this year's conference is Making the Future. It is time for all of us to take an active role in making a future where all people are cared for and can care for their people. A future in which we finally value care, financially and culturally as the essential work that it is. Thank you.

[CHEERING]