Happy day-after-Admin Professionals Day. I’m sure you’re exhausted from the huge party your company threw in your honor and still hungover from all the fancy free cocktails that were sent your way on golden platters. Or not.
Anyway, just had to share this comment on that post that came from a fake email address and was signed only “RCL”:
There’s a big difference between a maid and a personal assistant. And neither is a profession.
There are so many fucked up things going on in those two sentences that I barely know where to start. But I’ll try.
First of all, how many personal assistants have had to serve as de facto maids/housekeepers/nannies to their bosses? A LOT. Take this one, this one, and this one for examples.
Second, a “profession” is defined as “a vocation or business.” That’s kind of clumsy, so let me translate. A profession is a longterm job that you do because it enables you to earn money. And for a lot of us, being an assistant is precisely that: a thing we do for a couple of years, whether it’s one or four or thirty, because it pays the bills. So, you’re not just wrong, you’re grossly ignorant.
[I warned you guys about the whole no-bread-makes-Lilit-grumpy thing. I just didn't realize the grumpiness would take the form of extended manifestos.]
In an editorial on the website MercuryNews.com, Patty Fisher defended the rights of domestic workers, saying, “Behind every super-successful two-career couple, there’s a person who makes it possible for them to work such long hours and still come home to a clean house, clean laundry, freshly scrubbed children and home-cooked meals. Call her the maid, the nanny or the personal assistant. Whatever you call her, she belongs to one of most exploited professions in the country.”
Behind every great person, there is a great assistant. Behind every board meeting that goes off without a hitch and behind every conference call with eighteen participants that results in an international merger, there is an assistant. The executives may get press for signing a contract, making a deal, or winning a sponsorship, but there would be no article without an assistant to get the boss on the phone.
Where would companies be without that person whose job it is to get soaking wet running back from Starbucks on a rainy day with a dozen espressos? What would happen if every copy machine in America jammed, and there was no assistant who knew how to fix them? How would any bosses be able to do all their work without a trusty assistant to fact check, screen their calls, and order in lunch?
Assistants in this country don’t just deserve a holiday. They deserve a whole fucking lot of respect. And this website is here to give it to them.
The Jewish holiday of Passover starts this weekend. There are two reasons I am mentioning this.
1. It means that all of next week I will not be eating anything leaven, which means bread, rice, pasta, beer (beer!), and the like. Because carbs make up an abnormally high percentage of my favorite foods, I am going to be a very grumpy Lilit. I can’t even have croutons in my salad. It’s killing me. Please excuse any posts that sound a little snippy. I really do love carbohydrates, y’all.
2. Passover is a holiday commemorating the Exodus–when the Jews, who were slaves, were freed from their bondage in Egypt. Maybe it’s a stretch, but the Exodus story is at the core of what Save the Assistants represents. There’s a line in the Passover prayers: “Because we were once slaves, and now we are free, may we help all who are slaves to become free.” I was once an office slave, and now I am free. My job is to run this site and help other office slaves who want to become free. That is the job of all of us who were in terrible situations and got out–we owe an obligation to help other assistants, to be nice to that new girl in the office even though she’s really annoying, to bail out the temp who can’t figure out how to use the copier, to help your brother write his first resume.
So happy Passover to all of you who are celebrating, and a great weekend to those of you who are not.
Liz Weiss, senior policy analyst for Interfaith Worker Justice, has an excellent post on this week’s God’s Politics blog about the plight of the ‘working poor’ in America. It really hits home how many people in this country aren’t entitled to sick days and put up with terrible working conditions because they are poor and have no other options. A choice selection:
Last Tuesday was a great day for low-wage workers in my hometown of Washington, D.C., when the City Council voted to mandate paid sick and safe days for many private-sector workers. The legislation could affect 200,000 District workers who do not currently have the right to a single paid sick day.
In fact, this is an indignity that exists nationwide. Neither the federal government nor any state has granted workers the right to paid sick days. (San Francisco passed a municipal measure in 2006.) As a result, more than 50 million workers in the U.S. must work when they are sick – through colds, fevers, and stomach flus – on pain of lost wages or even lost jobs.
Nearly 100 million workers can’t take a day off to care for a family member, such as a sick child or elderly parent. When a worker or a loved one gets sick, she or he must either work anyway or risk losing a day’s pay or even her job.
This is yet another example of why fighting for the rights of some workers means fighting for the rights of all workers. Except for a very few people at the top echelon, we are all working for someone, and we all deserve to be treated with respect while on the job.
Hi, everyone, Lilit here. I’m back from two weeks in Argentina and Uruguay, and I was amazed to come back and see how well Ashley and Co handled the porn epidemic on the site. While I was away, in addition to STA getting all porninated, my sister twisted her ankle, one of my friends broke his leg skiing, and another friend’s dad passed away. Clearly, this means I should never leave the country again.
One really cool thing about Argentina is that since they recently (within the past few decades) overthrew a military junta, they have a lot of respect for the common working class guy or gal. I respect that a lot. There’s even a statue in a main plaza dedicated to the working class. (When the photos get developed, I will post here).
Although the US does not have a lot of public monuments dedicated to the working class hero, there are many worker-themed sites, if you know where to look. In New York City, about fifteen minutes away from where I live, is a really popular area called Union Square (above is a photo of the very awesome farmer’s market held there on weekends). The name is no coincidence: years ago, it was the site of the very first ever Labor Day celebration in America. When that holiday rolls around I’m sure we’ll have more to post on the topic, but if you have labor/worker/peon-related stuff in your own hometown, please write in and let us know about it.
Have you seen the craptastic new show Millionaire Matchmaker? Basically, this chick gets paid a bunch of money to find rich old dudes trophy wives.
USA Today makes the excellent point that men on the show claim to want ambitious women whose interests match their own, yet usually end up asking for second and third dates with women with much lower-paying jobs. Among some of the jobs that USA Today lists as “unthreatening” professions? You got it–being an assistant.
Are assistants by nature unthreatening? A lot of our job requires us to work behind the scenes, so to the casual observer it can seem we’re not really doing anything. And if we’re a PA, we often devote more time to running someone else’s life than running our own, but does that make us unthreatening or just good prioritizers? And shouldn’t the writer have said “non-threatening” instead of “unthreatening”?
Let us know what you think.
Kellogg, Brown, and Root is a military contractor that used to be a division of Halliburton. As if being stationed for a job in Iraq isn’t a daunting enough prospect, several women have come forward with stories of rape and assault at the hands of their coworkers. Admin assistant Jamie Leigh Jones, 22, was gang raped by several coworkers and fired when she tried to contact her family and tell them what had happened to her. Driver Mary Beth Kineston, was assaulted twice by different colleagues and fired when she complained to her superiors.
Even if someone doesn’t have the word “assistant” in its title, let’s remember that fighting for rights of assistants essentially means fighting for the rights of all employees. If you can judge a nation by the way they treat their poorest citizens, you can judge a culture by the way they treat their least powerful employees. We should always speak up against discrimination in the workplace, even when it’s not our workplace.
For more on the almost 40 women who have come forth with allegations against KBR, click here.
STA was created as a place where all assistants from all professions could come together. Whether we’re lab assistants, legal assistants, or celebrity assistants, our jobs are more alike than different. Graham T. Beck has an excellent editorial in this week’s issue of The Brooklyn Rail about his life as an artist’s assistant. The piece is also a manifesto, demanding respect for all assistants. Let’s cut straight to him:
Behind every great artist there is an assistant. Or more accurately, behind the artists most often called “great” there are two, or twenty, or enough for a full-time accountant. Many of my friends are artist’s assistants. I worked as one. My girlfriend is an assistant; my sister is too. When I first became involved in this peculiar profession, I was struck by the variety of tasks collected under that one umbrella, but the art world is big, studio habits are varied, and methods of fabrication so specialized that the required labor is as diverse as its results. Depending on who you ask, being an artist’s assistant is a lot like being a friend, or a secretary, or a 19th-century factory worker.
It would be a gross understatement to say that it’s engaging to talk with assistants about their workdays; it’s often like hearing from a star-struck therapist freed from the binds of doctor-patient confidentiality.
Read the rest of Graham’s essay here.
A company named Elance, Inc, “an online workplace where businesses find and hire people on demand” (yeah, we hadn’t heard of it either) recently conducted a poll asking people about personal assistants. According to the survey, 80 percent of Americans believe assistants shouldn’t be reserved for celebrities only. (Newsflash: they’re not! Just ask all the EAs who read this blog.) What are some of the tasks people would like to outsource to this hypothetical assistant?
- Organizing/planning travel (33 percent)
- Paying bills (28 percent)
- Answering the phone and taking messages (26 percent)
- Sending RSVPs or thank you notes (26 percent)
It seems that as more and more assistants enter the public eye (we’re thinking of people like Fonzworth Bentley, CaCee Cobb, and Cousin Alli, who became famous while they were assistants) more and more people think they deserve assistants. It’s sort of like when you see enough famous people sporting Rolexes or driving Bentleys…you want one too. I think anyone who wants to have an assistant should be required to spend at least six weeks working as an assistant. It’s called “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
Here’s the best part: Elance is sponsoring a contest, where the winner gets $5,000 toward the cost of hiring a virtual assistant. You can enter here: all you have to do is explain why you think you deserve an assistant, and what you would make him or her do. If you’ve always dreamed of having someone do your job for you, now’s your chance!
I just found out that Celeb Staff magazine exists, and now that I’ve pulled myself away from vomiting, I want to share this horrifying thing with you. Celeb Staff bills itself as a publication “about managing mansions and estates and about the staff who provide services for high net-worth individuals.”
In the case of Celeb Staff, you can be not just an assistant but a personal chef, bodyguard, trainer, nanny, or butler. You may work in a fancy kitchen instead of a greasy restaurant, but that does not mean your boss is any more worthy of a human being. In fact, the major fucking Stockholm Syndrome the “editors” of this “magazine” seem to have is on par with Patty Hearst’s. The people writing these sad excuses for articles are either so far brainwashed they think they’re a famous person instead of someone who cleans up after a famous person or bosses who write this magazine under aliases so they can convince their employees that working for them is some kind of a fucking privilege. Reading this drivel is like reading prison inmates write about how comforting they find the sweet peacefulness of solitary confinement.
Dear Readers of Celeb Staff,
Your boss is famous, you are not. Your boss is rich, you are not. And while you do get to accompany your boss on exotic vacations, it is so you can babysit their kids and clean up after their drug binges, not so you can lie around on the beach. Taking pride in your work is one thing, but being delusional is another.
Best wishes,
STA
