Letters to the Editor
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Turn it around
I would turn the argument around. Is it not true that bringing a huge number of women into the workforce over several decades has alleviated chronic skilled labor shortages and diluted the power of organized labor to negotiate reasonable working conditions and enabled employers to make unreasonable demands.
My own workplace has more women than men in employment and the situation with mandatory overtime is such that the 16-hour work day/night is becoming more the standard than the exception. In that respect we are regressing towards the horrors of the early Industrial Revolution.
In the early days of large scale assembly line production, Henry Ford had the novel idea (if the propaganda can be trusted) of paying his production workers enough that they would be able to afford to buy the product manufactured (a personal automobile).
While I am not sure that I see how this business model could really flourish unless other workers were also well paid, my point is that such thinking would be unthinkable today.
"No New Taxes" politicians keep a lid firmly on public sector pay and benefits, with a great many "good" jobs now farmed out to day-work contractors so as to avoid paying pensions, sick leave etc. Good jobs in manufacturing have largely been converted to low-pay jobs in China.
Salon, dare I say it, seems to employ mostly glorified bloggers rather than real journalists (but with some exceptions), and no doubt this is what is needed for economic survival in the marketplace.
No, women workers are the victims, not the perpetrators.