Empowerment
As always, I’ve been watching the MTs’ corner of the web with interest. Lots of interesting discussions about wages, speech recognition, offshoring, and the future of MT (or lack thereof) in general, as well as some fairly self-serving folks in particular. In the last year or so, there has been a move to market MT courses (and as always, some not terribly great ones) to capitalize on military spouses. We’ve seen the usual suspects (matchbook schools) and their hotel seminars, all the way to MTSOs trying to package themselves as philanthropists in order to curry favor and government money, all in the name of patriotism--a very overworked theme these days.
Honestly, the pool of mobile jobs is not that great and military families are a group that could really benefit from that option, even if the field is sinking faster than the Titanic. Utilizing a good school (do I need to mention M-TEC and Andrews again?) would be of paramount importance, to ensure one was up to speed and ready to fly solo because you really don’t want to have to stress about your job when you’re already having to deal with yanking your family around every couple of years. The right school means you don't need to suffer through some slave-wage "internship" because you graduate ready to dive into the deep end of the pool.
This has made me ponder how I got into the field--and mine is not a unique story, as I’ve found. It wasn’t really possible to pick up where I left off in my college career, so I spent the last decade of a lousy marriage trying to figure out how to support myself and get out from under the situation. After raising my 2.3 kids, it just wasn’t that easy to pick up and start over. I’d hardly even bought myself new clothes in all that time, wasn’t even sure I’d have transportation or a place to live, and the nearest vo-tech is an hour away, so naturally, I focused on something I could do from home. Crossed a ton of things off my list, from daycare (BTDT, not for me) to web design (my son is an expert and I’d feel like a fraud in comparison) to junk like Avon (I don’t even use the stuff) and even weird jobs like becoming a doula (I once wanted to become a midwife and this just seemed bogus). In this town, my artistic and secretarial jobs were not going to amount to more than piecemeal work and I needed a real income.
I kept reading that so many people were telecommuting, but where were these jobs? I spent months scouring the internet and found little more than MLM scams and very little of substance--certainly nothing that utilized my skill set, even my tenure as a division secretary in a university. That’s when I stumbled into MT, and the rest is history. In just a few months I was through a Crappy School (hence, my calling to spare others that same mistake) and was working. In less than a year, I was paying all my bills and in two, I had enough set aside to pay for a very good divorce attorney. Another year and the house was in my name and I had a new car--not doing too badly, but when you’re told you can have a raise only when you type faster and work harder, that glass ceiling comes up pretty fast.
In this short few years, I’ve encountered an awful lot of women (yes, women still comprise probably 95% of the MT workforce) in the same--or worse--boat. Many of them are so beaten down that they still don’t have much self confidence, but by the goddess, they’ve grabbed their bootstraps and kids and sent a bad marriage bye-bye. Others found themselves widowed or downsized, and even less prepared to cope. Even the young mothers (also a prime target for matchbook schools' sales pitches) looking for a viable second income for their families can find limited options. MT has been a lifeline to many of us--often the only thing that offered a real way out AND a legitimate career in the process.
But now what, given that this is no longer a career, but more of a sweatshop? To some, it seems very obvious that the big nationals are hell-bent on dumping their relatively “high-paid” US MTs in favor of speech recognition and offshore editors. The clients are being groomed to accept lousy quality and they won’t miss us because they’ll have lower expenses to show for it. I marvel that newbies can even make minimum wage when offered crap wages like 4-7 cents per line when I see veterans cursing SR and struggling to earn enough to live on-- but that’s the market now. The pink collar ghetto was always the lowest on the totem pole in this hierarchy, but now we’ve sunk off the radar. There are profits to be made and we apparently don’t register as much of an asset anymore.
Despite the cries of pro-family fanatics, women have always been nearly invisible in society. We’re still supposed to sacrifice our needs to churn out children and hold down the home front, but no one’s standing there with a fistful of money to help us do that, let alone make more of ourselves. There is no easy money helping us pay for good daycare, education, and living expenses, and there are countless women with next to no clue how to step out on their own and make something happen for themselves otherwise, especially if already limited by the options where they live.
MT is not set to keel over next week, but instead of being that big, inflatable life raft to self sufficiency, it’s becoming more like a flotation device that will barely serve to keep you afloat until you figure out which way to swim to safety. I’m not even 100% sure I’m going in the right direction myself, but I’m paddling as hard as I can--and I'm trying to impress upon my daughter that it's more important than ever to ensure her own self sufficiency now, because no matter how perfect your life is, it's a whole lot easier with Plan B safely at hand in case you should need it.
Online courses have opened up a whole world to people who previously had no options, but once MT is off the table what’s the next choice? I see huge numbers of you going into coding, but that can be a hard field to break into and not everyone is cut out for such left-brain work. What other field offers work and study from home, with hours flexible enough to manage without paying for day care? If the lowly transcriptionist goes the way of the dodo, what are the options for the next generation of women who need to find their own empowerment? What do you tell your sister to do when she suddenly finds herself head of the household and wondering where to turn?