Gender, Race, and Publishing on the Left

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 02:34 PM 6/15/98 -0500, Yoshie wrote:
>Also, something that may look gender- and race-neutral at first sight (for
>instance, seniority and experience) has, more often than not, gender and
>race embedded in it. To take just one example, as long as women are the
>ones who are asked to carry the burden of care-giving disproportionately,
>women will find it exceedingly difficult to accumulate the same degree of
>seniority and experience as men, in that women's labor market participation
>often gets interrupted by the need to take care of others (children, the
>sick, the disabled, the elderly, etc.) In my view, labor movements and the
>left should take on such questions actively.

A good point indeed.

I would add to it the whole issue of 'standards' used to define jobs , job
responsibility, and work schedule that 'engender' work by making it more
'suitable' for men or women - but without overly sexist overtones.  To
illustrate, establishing a standard that requires 100lbs lifting
autmoatically excludes most women but does not look like overtly sexist,
until we realize that the 100lbs standrad is arbitrary.

The same can be said about work schedule which is designed with the male
"breadwinner" and female "homemaker" in mind.  Interestingly, the unions
are in a very peculiar position here - fighting the loss of well paying
jobs on the 'breadwinner' grounds would be politically suicidal.  They use
the euphemism  the "living wage" but that assumes only one spouse working
without explicitly mentioning it.

I think one of the intellectual weakness (pardon that dreadful term) of the
union movement here is it inability to address the issue of the
organization of work (cf. excerpts from _Underground Woman_ posted by Lou
Proyect) that is not rooted in the (male) 'breadwinner' ideology.  In that
respect, capitalists with their notion of flexibility are far ahead of the
unions and, I am afread, most of the Left.

Regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski