witch it’s about time
I've been in the on-line group SWT (Shorter Work Time) for I can't remember how many years. Posts by women have been very few and far between. I've hung in. My faith based on a NYTimes clipping I carried in my purse until it crumbled, dated sometime in 1968.
It was about a study from one of the UC campuses. Predicting that within 20 years at the [then] level of productivity, Americans would within 20 years, be working 20 hour weeks or 6 month years. I remember there was also about then a spurt of academic prognosticating about meeting the impending crisis by increasing production and marketing of recreation products. We hadn't yet fully absorbed the commodization of services, but lest I digress from my point:
My religion became Prioritizing women's concerns to save the US Labor Movement and Prioritizing Unionizing woman's work to win Women's Liberation. Neither the women I knew with any clout in 'second wave feminism' nor the men I knew with any clout in the Labor movement ever did more than listen as long as required before politely bringing the subject back to what they were getting me to do to advance the agenda I'd accepted in the illusory hope of reciprocity. No one ever asked me to draft a proposal or meet again to talk about it.
BUT PL4ALL [Paid Leave For All] is a real campaign today, with solid funding and smart staffing, I've contributed not one penny nor penned one page of. Thus, herein and hereby be it known: Validated is my faith, prediction, or hypothesis if you will, has been validated. Please note -- in all seriousness -- this 52 year investigator-bias free finding as thanks to a new sociological methodology. I'd like to claim that my theory and practice since 1968 had some causal relation to the fact that Liz Schuler is now the President of the AFL-CIO, the PL4All campaign underway, and the first steps -- paid family leave, universal child care funding and child care tax credit -- stand a real chance of being enacted. But all I can honestly claim today is that I was a better sociologist than I thought.
Oh, and what prompted me to post this link. No man would have ever thought of drawing pastel chalk pictures on the sidewalk to win a national labor campaign. Only someone[s] reveling in the fun of Women In Time Changing History.
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