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4 min read 47

UofWinds 425, Week 47: Cleaning Supplies are Extremely Stupid, "Your Temper, My Weather", Workers Inquiry


Good morning. I am stretched out on the sofa in the study. My son has slept through the early morning Chelsea FC game. My daughter and husband will be leaving shortly to prepare and help run an indoor soccer league held in some domed building near Dominion Golf Club. Outside, it is bright with sun and cool enough that one of our cats has rediscovered her heating pad. Today I am hoping to pick up some basic sewing supplies.

When I sit down and consider which bookmarks that I want to share in this newsletter, I tumble through a bunch of combinations in my mind in hopes to discover a thread of connection between them — no matter how thin — so they don't come off as random. This week I am hard-pressed to find a theme. My choices reflect my past two weeks in which, judging by the piles of books that I've received from binging on interlibrary loan, I am feeling between things and in a exploratory mood. My conclusion is that I am collecting materials for keeping my hands busy and my eyes off the screen for the upcoming winter respite.

Cleaning Supplies are Extremely Stupid


Tis the season for shopping recommendations. Here's mine, via a video transcript from the video, Cleaning Supplies are Extremely Stupid by Hank Green:

One of the things that has annoyed me most about the world ever since I first stepped into a lab is how much water gets shipped around entirely unnecessarily. When you go to the grocery store and you see like laundry detergent and big plastic jugs and spray cleaners and hand soaps, all this stuff. I do not understand why we are creating a bunch of plastic to put a bunch of water in when in fact the ingredients in those products are mostly solids that you yourself could dissolve in water at home. Now, there are some complexities here and now that I've talked to some people who run businesses like this, I understand some of them. So, for example, some places have different water than others. There might be more or less mineral content in that water and that can affect the final product when you are mixing a product together to make a hand soap for example. But there are ways to solve these problems and they are worth solving for two very big reasons. Number one, because water is heavy and moving it from the place where they make Tide all the way to your grocery store is inefficient. It doesn't need to be that way. And number two, because liquids when they get shipped around have to go inside of thick plastic containers to prevent spills...

To better understand what Hank is getting at, just look at the size and cost difference between buying a single tablet vs buying a bottle of Windex.

Reader, I bought a set of Ecogeek products and I made my own bottles of stuff. But I am sharing this here not because I'm endorsing this particular brand – I just want to let you know that these kinds of products exist so that you might look for them locally or find a company that makes something similar in your own country.

Your Temper, My Weather


This week, I stumbled upon an art performance that has long passed but I am still utterly charmed by it.

For Scotiabank Nuit Blanche on October 5, 2013, Borsato gathered 100 regional beekeepers in a massive collective meditation in Walker Court entitled Your Temper, My Weather. The beekeepers silently meditated on notions of “good weather” for the bees and for all of us, attempting to transform environmental conditions with their minds.

In this short video, Diane Borsato explains the connection between beekeepers and meditation:

... It's a piece called your temper, my weather and for this piece I've enlisted the participation of just over 100 beekeepers from the Toronto and wider area. The piece is about something that beekeepers already actually know – I'm also a beekeeper; I've had bees for a few years – and that (there) is a very particular way of managing your own temper and being calm and moving slowly and i was really interested in sort of exploring this at a bigger scale with a lot of people.

I know that when I'm calm among my bees that it calms the bees and when the bees are calm I'm calm and when I'm agitated and I start to move nervously and roughly then the bees get agitated and it's a really immediate sort of reciprocal loop of calm or otherwise. And so I wondered if I had 100 beekeepers at this really massive scale for an extended period of time all practising their skills – that sort of focus and attentiveness and calm – what we might (we) produce in a bigger scale in the museum – you know – in the audience – in the city – in the world even.

Workers Inquiry

While I may have come across the phrase before, the first time that I started paying attention to the phrase workers inquiry was from episode 156 of the podcast, Library Punk. In that episode the hosts talk with a labour organizer about he is using workers inquiry as a solidarity building tool among coffee shop workers and the pamphlet "The American Worker from 1947" [transcript].

While new to me, workers inquiry is not new. Indeed, it was first developed in 1880 by Karl Marx himself as a survey of 101 questions ("Marx died a few years after this first stab at inquiry, never receiving a single response."). And I now know that the 1947 American Worker pamphlet came from Detroit (and that Windsor, Ontario had its own Tendency).

This perspective can be found in The American worker, a pamphlet by Paul Romano and Ria Stone (1946), which aimed to document the conditions and experience of rank-and-file workers in an American car factory. It is a two part study, the first part is a workers’ inquiry written by Paul Romano, who worked in the car factory; the second part contains the theoretical analysis, written under the pen name of Grace Lee Boggs. Romano worked in a car plant during the research for the study and describes how he had spent most of his life in various industries of mass production amongst many other workers.

I became curious about the history of workers inquiry, when suddenly it seemed like I was seeing calls for workers inquiries in response to the ascendance of GenAI. Over the last two weeks, I've stumbled upon the following:

It appears that zines are the new pamphlets.

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