Blog #11

I read an article from the AFLCIO website, which is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the article was titled “Helping Women Workers Helps Us All” by James Parks. According to the article, working women make up 40% of the work force. This article talks about other factors women face on the job- sexual harassment, unequal wages, and maternity leave benefits. A problem women face, which men do not, is harassment from coworkers. Most sexual harassment charges are male to female, not females acting on males. This brings up a story I read one time about a woman who was afraid to tell on her male counterpart for harassing her because she thought she may lose her job over it. If she did go to human resources and the male was fired she was afraid that her fellow coworkers would look down upon her, this one problem men do have in work force. Women’s wages are still only 77 cents to every dollar that a man makes, which is not equal by any means. It does not seem fair that a woman and a man in the same position could optionally get paid different amounts. Although education, experience, and years on the jobs should be taken into a consideration men are usually paid more than women. Finally, not all jobs offer maternity leave for mothers. It is hard for a mother have a child and then immediately go back to work. Our text book mentions that the time from when a child is born till when they are entered into childcare by someone other than the parents is getting younger and younger. The fact many work places do not offere any sort of paternity leave to males shows that is it a social stigma that women take care of child therefore only maternity leave is offered. This article was written September 16, 2009 and covered many topics covered at the AFL-CIO Convention, its interestingly enough brings up points not made by readings or videos in this section.