>>173This is a really cool idea, and it's one of the few things that could cause cascading labor withholding.
Some critiques: it's true now that working/non-college-educated women aren't having kids at as high of a rate, especially if they aren't married to a wealthier man. This might not impact as many people as we'd assume, based on that. Basically, instead of child-rearing being able to be leveraged to harm labor, labor is already harming the ability to have children. Secondly, (unless your idea is totally voluntarist and involves prior mass radicalization of daycare workers), the reason for striking, which is generally that types of work that women dominate are poorly compensated for the intensity of work - this has material roots that are not so easily attacked. I work in caregiving and so I've had to confront this myself. If you want reading on this, I believe Mike Macnair of weekly worker also talks about this (i need to finish his pieces on it, but i've been so busy). But basically women, due to pregnancy and child-rearing, tend to have to rely on family or their husband regardless of if they're self-sufficient. This reliance means that they can be underpaid at any time, since the reliance is both maintained constantly, and averaged (that is, a single young woman doesn't have this support, but it doesn't matter because she competes in the labor market with other women that do). So a company can parasitize the husbands or families of their workers by paying under a liveable wage, since they'll still be able to reproduce their labor (on average) by relying on the other wage-earner/s in their household. My point is that for some areas that seem ripe for organizing due to the poor conditions, there is actually more going on and it can't be treated so simply.
In my line of work I know lots of, A) youth who live with parents, B) women (and one man with a gambling addiction lol) wanting to earn some pocket money while their husband makes enough for both, C) petite-bourgeois sons and daughters who treat the job as a temporary stepping stone to owning their own business/property/whatever, as well as working class women who intend to go into higher education - both willing to put up with anything since they know its temporary and they have some kind of familial support, D) a minority of genuinely hardworking, absolutely dry and haggard women who are working multiple jobs or 60+ hours a week to survive, sometimes single income. The fact that so many people employed don't "need" the job or see it as temporary make it hard to organize, since they can just fuck off and leave if they don't like the conditions or pay, there's no urgency to getting a raise or increase staffing, etc.