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The Nation, Bryce Covert writes,
With State Budgets Withering, Get Ready for the 'Womancession':
Attacks on public employees, in Wisconsin and other budget-crunched states, may not sound like they’re specifically targeting female workers—but they’ll end up doing just that. Governor Scott Walker wants to strip collective bargaining from unions that disproportionately represent women—the only public employees he’s exempting are police officers, firefighters and state troopers, the majority of whom are men. In fact, jobs disproportionately held by women are those most at risk in any state considering budget cuts.
This isn't what we're used to hearing: during the “mancession,” female workers, concentrated in non-construction jobs, were less affected by the downturn than their male counterparts. But you might say we’re now entering a “hecovery.”
While construction and manufacturing were the first sectors to tank when the housing bubble burst, dragging male employment down with them, they’re now making some (albeit minimal) gains. Meanwhile, lost tax revenue and increased spending to cover unemployment benefits, coupled with a coming shut-off in federal aid, has led to state budget crises across the country. Traditionally female-heavy industries—once thought to be recession-proof—are now being hit hard by the “tough choices” made by governors facing depleted state coffers.
In other words, it’s time to start talking about the womancession.
Joanne Gallagher, a teacher in Stratford, Connecticut, has been unemployed since May. For seven years, she taught math for the shop class in a technical high school, where she received glowing reviews and was recommended for tenure. Her school had survived a round of cuts the year before; students didn’t have graphing or scrap paper, and administrators could only afford to buy forty graphing calculators per building. And then Gallagher was informed in March that the school would be reviewing and overwriting tenure recommendations; at the beginning of May she was told that her contract wouldn’t be renewed. She later found out that a single teacher has filled a job previously performed by both Gallagher and a co-teacher, while sports and art have been reduced, music cut altogether and after-school tutoring eliminated.
Joanne’s story is more and more common as the anemic economic recovery decimates state budgets. Male workers did take a huge hit when the economy first stumbled—in August 2009, the male unemployment rate stood at 11 percent while women’s was at 8.3 percent, the largest gap in the postwar era. But since late 2009, male unemployment has begun to either flatten out or make very modest gains....
My colleague Kaili Joy Gray addressed this issue today as part of her essay, Wisconsin's war on women.
• • • • •
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
We can of course expect the upper-class tax breaks to become permanent; the White House has been organizing nationwide tours to promote the idea that the Social Security program must be cut back and privatized; Greenspan has been carted out to "speak on his own behalf" about the dangers of deficits (hmm, ya think?) and how that means we must follow the specific anti-middle-class proposals of the Bush Administration; and limitations on bankruptcy via the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act" seek to allow the credit and lending industries extra protections for usurious practices, at the expense of middle class Americans targeted by those companies.
Simultaneously, Santorum's (R-PA/VA) minimum wage proposals seek to reduce the number of American companies which are even required to follow minimum wage laws, and to allow companies to force workers to work more than 40 hours per week on a regular basis with no overtime pay. In the very shallow background, tort reform is being pushed in an effort to limit the liabilities of companies manufacturing dangerous products, and the liabilities of the insurance industries in paying out those claims.
All this coming on the heels of curiously stalled investigations into companies such as Enron, which according to now-public taped phone conversations intentionally caused power outages in major west-coast cities -- threatening American lives -- in order to force higher overall utility prices.