Archie Bunker, roll over

...is pushing "women's issues," Clement Allen, a union spokesman, responded, "I'm a fourth generation coal miner and obviously a male and I don't see the question of parental leave as a woman's issue, and neither does this union...

...A Daniel Yankelovich survey finds, similarly, that even among the pro-Reagan, anti-ERA, anti-abortion people, pro-family policies and job benefits generally identified with liberal politicians have considerable support...

...remarked earlier this year that' 'the union will definitely be trying to expand what we now have on child care when new contract negotiations begin this summer.'' And even the nearly all-male Steelworkers, in their most recent contract negotiations, supported family-oriented (or what might previously have been called "women's") benefits and policies...

...Slightly more men (30 percent) than women (26 percent) said they had already refused a new job, promotion, or transfer because it would have diminished the time they had to spend with their families...

...Mark Levin-son of the U.A.W...

...This is the "bridge issue" of our time, the issue around which men and women, blacks and whites, and blue-, new-, and white-collar workers can come together...

...Only 20 percent said "yes" when asked about leave for working fathers...

...All of a sudden we're faced with Malcolm X and Tania (aka Patty Hearst) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Ms...

...Nearly three-quarters of these respondents support employee benefits such as parental leave, flexible working hours, and child care...

...A man's struggle to provide a "family wage" became more and more difficult through the inflationary, deindustrializing 1960s and 1970s...

...Women in the work force represent an opportunity for the family to get ahead...

...One man summed up the views of the majority: "Right now I would say that you almost have to have the wife working...

...Not surprisingly, the predominantly female unions emphasize women's and family issues...

...The men view women not as a competitor, but as a member of the household...

...What was passing was the traditional American promise that someone whose only credential was a willingness to work long and hard with his hands could earn a good wage for his family...

...It turns out that you don't really need most of those things I couldn't designate...

...Today's men, up and down the income ladder, may still want to be "king of the roost," but they are no longer the sole breadwinner...

...Far more surprising, however, is the substantial involvement of mostly male unions...

...In addition, the union is strongly supporting the Congressional Parental and Medical Leave bill now before Congress...

...Fortune's research suggests that young male executives are at least as likely as their wives to worry during work about their children and to turn down tempting new job offers that infringe on their family time...

...The United Auto Workers (U.A.W...

...The Communication Workers of America, for example, now provides child care at its annual meetings, as do many of its locals around the country...

...Their new accommodations are FA rose by any other name weeks, Dan Rather and theAfew York Times had been mentioning Sri Lanka as a "trouble spot...

...Caring for young children, in particular, is an ongoing struggle for most parents...

...The same holds true of people 470: Commonweal reflected in recent national attitude surveys...

...Proliferating advice literature and workshops on "stress" and "stress management" are after-the-fact responses to the pervasive speed-up...

...LABOR IS A'CHANGING ARCHIE BUNKER, ROLL OVER WHEN TWO BRING HOME THE BACON ¥he Teamsters' Union, that bastion of male supremacy, recently held a national conference on problems of family and family policy...

...The survey respondents were also asked to evaluate the job benefits they currently have and to list those they would like to have...

...But beyond "stress," or maybe because of it, there are important signs of new insights and new accommodations between husbands and wives...

...Cutbacks and plant closings as a result of foreign competition meant the loss of decent wages and jobs once thought to be secure...

...And another: "Wives have to work, the cost of living is ridiculous...

...A Wall Street Journal poll found family life to be far more important to the survey respondents than'' making a lot of money.'' (More than 90 percent of the people said they want to be a good parent and to have a happy marriage, while only 12 percent said they consider "being wealthy" to be very important...

...Median family income peaked in 1973 at $29,172 and has declined ever since, sinking to $27,757 in 1985...

...There are even signs of movement toward some genuinely pro-family policies...

...the defectors didn't take the bait...

...I knew synonyms like "designate" and "name," and antonyms like "hero'' and' 'draft dodger.'' But there was a mechanical aptitude test...

...These were men and women who firmly agreed that it was his job to support the family, hers to stay home and take care of it...

...And we can hear Edith, sincerely if submissively, echoing Archie's views...

...And an affluent few hire full-time nannies and housekeepers, most commonly before their children are ready to enter "full day" schooling...

...The increasing involvement of men in women's and family issues is not limited to readers of the Wall Street Journal and Fortune...

...Archie defined himself as the "king of the roost," the sole breadwinner whose wife "didn't have to work...

...But, short of polygamy or child labor, the limits of that safety net have already been reached by the majority of families...

...JAN ROSENBERG Jan Rosenberg teaches sociology at Long Island University and has written on issues concerning women, work, and family structures...

...And about 80 percent answered " yes " when asked, " Do you think that there should be a law that guarantees mothers sixteen weeks of unpaid leave when they have a baby...

...For many it was the family that provided the social safety net...

...And according to Fortune, the "balance of worry" is shifting in dual career families...

...Parental leave (unpaid, but with your job guaranteed when you return, and your health insurance covered while you're gone) would ease the strain where it really hurts...

...have also lined up behind the parental leave initiative before Congress...

...Though women's outside work may have eased life materially, households of two parents with full-time jobs have been a mixed blessing socially and psychologically...

...Merit raises would afford them more money to spend on child care, they said, and management training would sensitize their supervisors to the child care needs of the employee...

...Then teaching my daughter the countries of the world, I accidental ly put my finger on the country called "Sri Lanka.'' Both my three-year-old and I had trouble pronouncing "Sri Lanka," so we were about to move to more sensible places like Iceland and Greenland — when I noticed the small print under the name of Sri Lanka: "formerly Ceylon...

...When I was growing up and learning things, people didn't get up and name themselves...

...is throwing its full support behind the parental leave bill...

...On the army intelligence test, I first-became aware of things I couldn't designate...

...Mechanical aptitude...

...If the spirit of Archie Bunker were alive anywhere, you would think it would be safe among our "cowboys of the highway...

...As things now stand, working parents are left on their own to construct and mend the patchwork arrangements that meet their, and their children's, needs...

...Geraldine Ferraro and Sri Lanka...

...They justified their choices, not obvious outgrowths of family-centered values, in ways that complement the pro-family tilt I've been describing...

...Trade unions — male as well as female — are translating work/family tensions into sound policies on all levels: at the workplace through contract gains, and at the state and national levels through legislation...

...I got the hammer and nail...

...Alarming numbers of young black men were failing to grasp even the bottom rung of the job market ladder — a prerequisite to their ability to form stable families...

...Taking up the slack, women moved into the labor force in unprecedented numbers...

...Trade unions are taking the lead in translating family/work problems into programmatic demands...

...I did very well on the verbal aptitude section...

...As one woman writer — an affluent, recently remarried mother of two — puts it: "You can hire a wife to do the housework and cooking and shopping, but you can't hire a mother for your children...

...Dana Friedman of the Conference Board, a business organization, emphasizes the positive effects that competent, stable child care has on parents' productivity at work...

...The Archie and Edith Bunkers — and many others like them and their children — are making lives for themselves and defining their family relationships in ways that didn't seem possible a decade or two ago...

...Fast-track women with annual salaries of $80,000 or more still find themselves having to juggle skillfully the competing demands of work and family...

...From this perspective, the advancement of women at work is considered an economic necessity...

...Even the disgruntled "Democratic defectors" and the "new-collar" workers, while suspicious of big institutions, feel that employers and government need to ease their, and their families' lives...

...No wonder I feel disoriented, drifting, confused, in a world I never named...

...A surprisingly large number of parents work different shifts from each other in order to be at home for their children...

...Asked why the heavily male U.M.W...

...Child care is likely to be the fringe benefit of the 1990s, because being sound for employees, it becomes good for business...

...The United Mine Workers (U.M.W...

...Generally speaking, if I don't already know the name of something, it isn't necessary...

...to offset their vulnerability.'' When the questioner in the study, trying to surface resentment against working wives, asked, "Is too much time spent thinking about working women and not enough time spent on housewives...

...They wanted me to match up pictures of tools, gadgets, mechanical parts that somehow went together...

...Overall, the men's responses indicated not only a surprising absence of hostility, but a wellspring of sympathy...

...Work and family vie for what often feels like a shrinking amount of time...

...Maintaining that one shouldn't go looking for trouble, I remained blissfully ignorant of Us whereabouts...

...The U.M.W.'s rationale goes like this: union miners are stretched and stressed, like other working parents...

...According to analyst Stanley Greenberg, the men, like typical working women, define women's work in terms of its contribution to the family...

...A recent study of the values and attitudes of "Democratic defectors' ' (those traditional Democrats who voted for Reagan in 1984), provides evidence that even in this group there is a growing sensitivity to women's issues, particularly those concerning the workplace and working women...

...They placed merit raises and management training at the top of their "wish lists" and tied both to their child care concerns...

...The Democratic party, urges David Blan-kenhorn of the Institute for American Values, needs to seize this issue to rebuild itself into a majority party...

...So that's where Ceylon went...

...Men's incomes fared even worse as the number of high-paying, semi-skilled jobs dropped sharply after 1970 while the economy was generating a staggering number of low-paying positions...

...In my experience tools cause more trouble than they fix...

...Some have government- or employer-supported child care...

...In addition they have negotiated pilot day care projects in their "Big Three" contract...

...It's a family issue...