Cooperation for Dignified Labor: Moving Toward Unity

Abstract

Just as the adoption of my daughter Sarita was a sublime experience, so was the birth of Zoila Rodriguez’s “hero.” Day-to-day moments in life can become sublime and can lift us together into a community of the ought to be. The sublimity of others’ struggles demands an encounter with their dignity that dismantles our own guards against identification with them. Sublimity can manifest itself as an epiphany that takes us out of ourselves and makes us see what previously remained invisible to us.

When a girl comes to this world and a doctor takes her out of this, you know, the womb of the mom, and says, “This is a girl”chrw(133) I remember when I had my girl and the doctor told me, “It’s a girl,” I cried. And I didn’t cry during labor. Even with all that pain, I did not cry. But I cried when he told me “It’s a girl.” There is a name for it: a hero. It’s a hero. It’s a hero! Because when a woman comes to this world she will have to live in this world, and do so many things that a man will not do. Women will. Nobody else. So that was a hero … who came out of me. The first hero I met was my mother.

—Zoila Rodriguez, Administrative Assistant, The Workplace Project