Labor enters the fray for a family’s rights > Maine women vent workplace worries

AUGUSTA — Karen Pleau of Auburn was working on a big project at work when she got a call from her daughter’s preschool: Her 4-year-old was sick. “I had to leave, no ifs, ands or buts,” she said Tuesday during a round-table discussion on issues facing working women.

Pleau also had to stay home with her daughter the next day since the youngster had conjunctivitis — not a serious illness, but a condition so contagious she couldn’t find a baby sitter. As a single mother, Pleau said, she had no alternatives.

Her boss, though, told her if she didn’t come to work, she’d be fired.

She was, and now she’s looking for a job.

“There are bosses who ask, `What is more important to you, your children or your job?’ — as if that’s a legitimate question to ask, and as if we’re going to answer, `Oh, my job!”‘ said Karen Nussbaum, who led the discussion. The director of the AFL-CIO Working Women’s Department, Nussbaum kicked off a national tour of 20 cities at the Capitol in Augusta Tuesday.

As she travels from city to city, part of the union’s major new recruitment effort, Nussbaum said her priority is “to give working women a voice. We solve these problems in the confines of our kitchens, and we don’t get help beyond that.”

That doesn’t always work, she said. “Employers have to change policies, or government needs to.”

Right now, there are 5 1/2 million women members of the AFL-CIO.

“It’s the largest women’s organization in the country,” Nussbaum said. “No one has thought of it that way. But we’re gonna change that.”

Women who came to the discussion talked about the difficulties of finding child care for night shifts, of paying for health care, and of the difficulties of leaving work for family priorities.

“We need something more flexible,” as parents, said Jennifer Granger of Auburn. “I was always scared to death — what if I’m a minute late when I punch in?”

She was fired when she missed a meeting at the factory where she worked a third-shift job six nights a week. Her baby sitter was late, something that had happened enough times to get her fired. “I’m scared to death to find work now,” she said. “I’m facing 5- to 6-dollar-an-hour jobs, or even less. Child care is $165 every week.”

Pleau isn’t looking forward to the future, either. She said that with only a year of experience as a travel agent, a job she loved, she hasn’t been able to find anything in the month since she was fired. She kept wiping tears from her eyes.

“I’m a licensed cosmetologist, so I think that’s what I’ll end up having to do,” she said. The pay is terrible, she said, but she probably would find a job more quickly and get the health insurance that she and her daughter need.

Charles O’Leary, president of the Maine AFL-CIO, said the stories reassured him that the union is on the right track. “Our agenda includes day care, an expanded family leave program, health care, expanded job security.”

Nussbaum said there will be some tough fights ahead. “For 25 years employers have insisted that they needed labor costs to go down at any cost.” But now, she said, with the union’s new emphasis on the concerns of working women — her department was established only last year — and with what she says is the growing political clout of women, she is optimistic.

“If you look at the elections last year, working women did find their voice. It was the biggest gender gap in history,” she said.

Now there are more women joining labor unions than men. At a time when union membership has dropped to just under 15 percent of American workers, compared to 35 percent in the 1950s, the AFL-CIO needs new people if it wants to have power. They plan to increase the money spent on recruitment from 2 percent to 30 percent of their resources.

Sen. Anne Rand, the assistant majority leader, who attended the discussion, said the survey which the AFL-CIO is sending out to a million women will help motivate people to make changes.

“In order to convince your state government or federal government to make something a priority, you really do have to have some power behind you,” said Rand, especially when the state budget is stretched so tightly. “Only when enough women are organized and speaking with one voice are we going to see child care and health care as priority issues that state government should address.”

She told the women at the discussion, “Even with a so-called ideal situation,” which is what she said she has had, with a husband to help her raise her four children, and never being without a job, she said the feelings they were describing were all too recognizable.

“The guilt, the pressure, the anxiety, the feeling of having no time for yourself … it all gets stirred into the pot and can drive us crazy. It affects how we relate to children, how our job performance is, and so many aspects of our lives.”

Sharon Carroll, who works for the state of Maine, reminded the women that children aren’t the only people dependent on the 99 out of every 100 women who will work at some point in their lives: She is the primary caregiver for her elderly parents.

But it was left to O’Leary to point out that the problems the women around him were talking about weren’t just women’s issues. He has raised two granddaughters, both of them with special needs that have required him to rush to school or home to help them.

The problems, he said, are labor issues.