Abstract
This book chapter explores the history of capitalism in the United States and its roots in slavery. It reviews business organizational theories born under the exploitation and dehumanization of enslaved people. The chapter attempts to make the legacies of these systems visible in today's working conditions that have led to the great resignation exacerbated by COVID-19. The chapter, per the authors, uses the context of the education and training of helpers to highlight how these systems impact students in their academic journeys, career opportunities, and financial stability from an intersectional lens. Lastly, as a call to action for readers, it explores the Caremongering movement, a bottom-up mutual aid network that can teach industry management and decision-makers lessons on creating equitable, inclusive conditions that meet the needs of the people.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Dialectical: From Marxist writings, it considers the contradictions and tensions within one issue that could also lead to change.
Bottom-Up Processes: grassroots level organizing, power from the people that shapes social change and policies that will benefit the majority of people and not just those at the top.
Capitalism: private ownership of property and means of production, profit-making through market competition that depends on the exploitation of people and their labor, and the accumulation/hoarding of wealth and capital by the elite.
Profit Over Life: A core value of capitalism which consists of prioritizing the bottom line, productivity, and financial gain and profit-making over human life-which includes the quality-of-life people lead, climate and environment, and more.
Decolonizing: In its most honest and transformational meaning, it means land back with reparations. There is no decolonizing without this. However, disrupting and destabilizing the status quo includes interrogation and naming colonialism and imperialism at multiple levels and that includes cultural impositions and knowledge systems that aim to erase and oppress and perpetuate colonial ways of being and knowing.
Intersectionality: A term coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, but historically discussed by many Black feminist scholars and thinkers such as Ida B. Wells, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collings and more. It is the consideration of multiple identities that compound the experience of oppression for one person. It is an analysis of systems of oppression across structures, identities, and time and geography.
Critical Theory: It is an umbrella term with different theories that analyze power structures that contribute to social inequalities, and interrogate and critique dominant ideologies to disrupt and create change.
Great Resignation: When there is a large number of people leaving their jobs due to inequitable working conditions, dehumanizing managerial styles, lack of benefits that compromise the worker’s health, and exposure to psychological and physiological illness.
Material Conditions: The material aspects of people's lives, such as their economic stability, housing conditions, access to healthcare and nutrition, and other material resources that ultimately determines their quality of life and how long they may live.
BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, used to center the position of BIPOC folks in relation to others and in relation to structural levels of oppression and racism.