I agree with this. Besides, lowering lifting requirements would be good in itself, for both men and women, in many industries. Injury rates would become lower, I think, especially in industries that ask workers to perform repetitive lifting and handling of heavy packages.
Interestingly, even though taking care of the elderly + the disabled (e.g. home care, assisted living, nursing home) puts as heavy physical demands on workers as traditional 'men's jobs,' care-giving is still regarded as 'women's work.'
>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.
Since 'overtime' doesn't seem to have a desirable effect of increasing the number of the employed, because when benefits are taken into account, it's still cheaper to force existing employees to work overtime than to hire additional full-time workers, unions, I think, had better develop a new strategy in their politics of time.
Yoshie