If I may be permitted to weigh in with an opinion...
At 12:24 PM 6/18/98 -0400, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>>Sexual harrassment has two legal definitions:
>>
>>1. Sexual demands which are unwanted by the recipient.
>>2. The creation of a sexually demeaning atmosphere.
>I am not disputing these facts. All I am saying is that driving out women
>out of blue collar jobs is not about sex but about work. Some of the
>methods used to that end may fit defintion 2 above, if directed at females,
>but how about intimidation directed at males to accomplish the same end?
>
>I think what explains this particular kind of blue collar behaviour is not
>'sexism' supposedly inherent in the working class, but job insecurity, or
>rather lacks of access to formal-institutional channels of controlling the
>workplace. I bet you that if the unions had a genuine say in defining
>importants aspects of work (qualifications, schedules, pay, workload, etc.)
>the incidence of these supposedly 'sexist' incidents would decrease quite
>noticeably.
I think your mistake is in trying to categorize behaviors and infer motivations based on assumptions about outcomes.
An employer may move to rid itself of all the female employees performing a task because of any number of reasons: Sexist attitudes of management; decision to ship labor-intensive work outside the country; decision to automate that work, etc. A coworker may harass a woman for any number of reasons: exercising power over someone with less power; defensive, if misguided, effort to protect job control; fending off a potential competitor for promotion; endeavor to elicit or extract sexual favors; etc.
The actions taken against the woman/women could be identical for very different reasons or motivations. The consequences for the woman, however, will be the same. When a blue collar male worker creates a climate of harassment and abuse toward a female coworker or all women coworkers by, for example, posting pornographic materials, scrawling lewd graffiti, physical contact like grabbing their breasts, lewd and offensive behavior like exposing himself, sabotaging her work, etc., what difference does it make what the motivation might be, the result is a climate of harassment and intimidation for the women who experience this behavior. This particular kind of behavior is sexist because it uses gender differences and gendered power relations in ways that would not be true if the coworkers were men. It is behavior that draws on socially conditioned and gender-sanctioned forms of behavior that the worker brings to the jobsite. That is no different than a racist who takes every opportunity to undermine, attack, demean, and harass workers of color. Even if it is triggered by job insecurity, that insecurity is expressed through the ingrained racist attitudes in ways that would not be true of the coworker were white. Motivations in these cases are filtered through the harasser's prejudices and bigotry, not their insecurity alone.
I would remind you that the record of unions with respect to sexism and racism is not so decidedly positive as you would suggest. There are ample examples of unions that have *organized* the harassment of women and Blacks. It was not all that long ago that Blacks, if permitted in a union, were consigned to a segregated local and held in the lowest, dirtiest, most dangerous job classifications by explicit agreement between the union and employer. And it was also not so long ago that women were driven by union members and their leadership from jobs they had held to make a place for men, or that women's roles in the labor movement were consigned to "axillaries." All one has to do is look at the gender and racial composition of the top executive officers of national labor organizations and the AFL-CIO to see how racism and sexism has affected the selection and promotion of leaders.
In solidarity, Michael E.