My sister was working over-night shifts, and trying to find child care for her 15 month old just completely bombed. Even in this city of the huge population she couldn’t find somewhere she was comfortable with leaving her baby overnight (most that offered it that she found and could afford were not in the nicest of neighborhoods. not that she found many.). She ended up finding a new job rather than continue to buck the child care situation. Its really a shame that more options aren’t open to women for child care, even in such a high-population area. And don’t get me started on what she’s paying for it, even now, with subsidies from the state. Its like anyone with odd hours or not making a lot without family to watch their kids for them is totally screwed. (By the way, it actually worked out that she found a much better, if lower paying, daytime job…but it is still a terrible thing that she couldn’t find child care)

Some things have gotten better in my Local. When I came in, the JATC (apprenticeship committee) was composed primarily of men who did not think women belonged in the trade, period. I was put to work with individuals who were viewed as the biggest assholes my Local had to offer, and doing the nastiest, roughest work available. The JATC hoped that I would quit. Ha! My hourly pay went from $3.50/hr to $5.56/hr from the moment I signed on! I was rich!! I’d'a left fingernail imprints in the concrete if you’d tried to drag me away!

And interestingly enough, I got along well with everyone that was supposed to be such a difficult asshole. They were crusty, don’t get me wrong, but they did respect hard work, no matter who it was coming from. Their work ethic was phenomenal, and they gave credit where it was due.

If I’m not careful, I could easily segue into a rant on the various Big Social Problems of My Fair City, so I’m gonna try to stay on point here! ;-)
1.) This city, and its commuting-from-the-smaller-towns workers, are roughly composed of two populations: those who, like me, originally came from somewhere else, and folks who not only grew up here, but so did their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. This city is provincial in the extreme; I’ve been here almost twenty years, and am still viewed in many circles as a newcomer.
2.) People like me, who come here from somewhere else, don’t often stay. There is a sizable transient, or temporary population here, which makes it hard to organize around building livable institutions (like child care). The largest employers around here have a built-in transient workforce: State government, insurance agencies, the hospitals, the schools and universities. There used to be manufacturing here. That is long gone. Like many areas of the Rust Belt, we are in economic transition; that is a fancy way of saying the old jobs and institutions (both brick-and-mortar and cultural) are crumbling or gone, and the new institutions or arrangements have not taken their place. Child care was handled in the past by a combination of family pitching in (including older siblings), latchkey arrangements, and creative use of shift-changes (between married parents, or between friends). Except for the hospitals, the shift-work is gone. Service industry work has oddball hours that don’t necessarily correspond to traditional shifts (and traditional hours of child care facilities). Loss of jobs keeps people on the move; some leave here, some come here—arrangements for child care made between friends and neighbors are always on a shaky basis as job instability makes this so. And latchkey kids are officially illegal by state law, until the age of thirteen.
3.) White Flight. This is the elephant in the room that no one seems to want to talk about. The decimation of the tax base is a huge problem; for the school district, for the park district, for social institutions. Traditional midwestern social institutions like the YMCA, YWCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, etc., are feeling the pinch. For a good explanation of this dynamic, see Thomas Shapiro’s “The Hidden Cost of Being African American”. I could rant for days on this. Shapiro is more concise.
4.) Anti-feminist backlash. The United States has always overdosed on “individualism”, preferring to see every individual’s challenges as a personal issue, completely unrelated to any societal trends. One way this manifests is the refusal to see child care as a societal problem; just an individual problem. An individual woman’s problem. There is a hostile attitude towards women that amounts to “hey! we gave you girls the right to abortion! Why didn’t ‘cha have one!”
5.) Economic breakdown translates into community breakdown. Loss of blue-collar work translates into culture clash, as more blue collar people have to seek work in white collar institutions—with the inherent different assumptions about How Life Works, including how children are raised.