Care-givers, Wages, etc. (jim o'connor)

Barbara Laurence cns at cats.ucsc.edu
Tue Sep 14 09:25:55 PDT 1999


Yoshie,

Sorry for the shorthand, that gave the wrong impression. Karen Hossfeld (Sociology, SF State University) did her Ph D with me, on women workers in Silicon Valley. She showed that when women demanded child care, companies would respond by saying "you're workers here, we're not in the child care business." When women demanded higher wages, they were told that "you're women, your income is secondary, you don't need a higher wage." Not the same company, obviously. To Karen's knowledge at the time (and her self-defined job was to promote women organizing by giving them info she acquired as a scholar) no women or women's group demanded both. So you're quite wrong to think that there have never been women who haven't demanded both. Demanding both is quite a sophisticated demand. We're talking about the heart of high tech, where there are no unions, and where the women who work in the clean rooms are mainly Asian newcomers. Karen also found that no black women were hired in production processes - "too uppity" as one big employer told Karen. Meaning of course that in that part of the world black women had no trouble asking for both.

I agree with Carrol Cox's observation that there were at one time two perspectives, as described, and that the one I think we would share has been absent or weak, thanks to the "decline of the left."

- Jim O'Connor



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