Work and family clash, Kahn says

Scholar talks about effects of part-time work

Focusing on the topic of low paid women in the service sector of the work force, Peggy Kahn OC'74, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan at Flint, spoke last Friday to students in Wilder Union.

The speech was entitled "We Didn't Hire You For Your Children : Low-Paid Women and Nonstandard Hours in the Service Sector." It was adapted from Kahn's most recent research paper and consisted of anecdotes and life stories of the thirty women she interviewed. These stories covered issues like the problems with the night shift, seniority, and the minimal number of days of sick leave that most women have.

Kahn said that there is a major need to reconcile work and family in this country. "My research seems to bring out painful and hidden dilemmas facing women in the work force," said Kahn. One way Kahn suggested that these problems may be curbed is by strengthening the unions with these women's voices.

"To conquer the problems the industry needs to hear the seldom heard voice of poor women workers,"said Kahn.

Sophomore Katie Hansen was struck by the facts of Kahn's lecture.

"She really answered the questions well and clarified all that she was saying," Katie Hansen, a politics major, said. She was impressed by Kahn's thorough answers to the questions asked at the end of her lecture.

Kahn is an expert on women and labor studies. After earning her B.A. from Oberlin, Kahn went on to receive a Ph.D. from University of California-Berkeley. She also spent time in Britain, during Margaret Thatcher's term as prime minister, studying the miner's union first hand.

The last few years Kahn has been studying women, work and unions in the United States. Her most recent research has focused on thirty women service workers at the University of Michigan hospitals.

Kahn describes her work as, "research that addresses some of the shortcomings of culturalist and essentialist approaches to gendering organizations."

The lecture was sponsored by the Alumni Association and by the Department of Politics.