{"id":2190,"date":"2011-03-07T09:00:03","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=2190"},"modified":"2011-03-07T09:00:03","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T14:00:03","slug":"nice-work-womenone-woman-in-the-public-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2011\/03\/07\/nice-work-womenone-woman-in-the-public-sector\/","title":{"rendered":"NICE WORK: Women\/One Woman in the Public Sector"},"content":{"rendered":"

The war on the public sector is very personal. As a public sector worker — I teach at a state university — I am a state employee and a member of a teachers union<\/span><\/span><\/a>. Even a little bit of the dismissive, contemptuous and ignorant rhetoric that I hear about public sector workers goes a long way with me<\/span><\/span><\/a>. I mean, I love<\/em> my job; I work hard and it feels good. But a co-worker and I laugh that if our private sector professional friends knew how little we make they would be sooo<\/em> uncomfortable. But the point is I am grateful to have job security, good health insurance, employee rights like due process and collective bargaining, and I feel good working in an institution where all the other people I work with have the same thing.<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with women? The Institute for Women’s Policy Research just published a fact sheet on men and women in the public sector<\/span><\/span><\/a>. Women make up 43 percent of federal workers; 52 percent of state workers; and 61 percent of local workers. The war against the public sector is a war against women workers. But it is also a war against workers of color, specifically African American workers. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research<\/a> (unpublished analysis of Current Population Survey 2010), while 10.7 percent of all workers are African American, 14.3 percent of public sector workers are.<\/p>\n

In the next week or so, I’l post a few questions and answers about the public sector puzzles, like why is it a \u201cwar\u201d?… what about \u201cWaiting for Superman\u201d?… what is collective bargaining anyway?… why don’t you care about the deficit?…and we’ll see what else comes up. Another question I will write about is why should women in particular or workers in general care about the assault on public sector workers’ rights if they are in the private sector?<\/p>\n

-Virginia Rutter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The war on the public sector is very personal. As a public sector worker — I teach at a state university — I am a state employee and a member of a teachers union. Even a little bit of the dismissive, contemptuous and ignorant rhetoric that I hear about public sector workers goes a long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nice-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}