Women affected by the NKF proposals work in home-care and visiting home-making, others in municipal homes for the elderly or childcare centers.

The union came up with what they call a generalist scheme. This scheme aims to provide women working in areas such as home-help and day-care assistance with a training model that could improve their wages and occupational mobility, both geographically and institutionally. The generalist apprenticeship model would offer a combination of experiential and theoretical learning, workplace and school-based training, and promises of increased status if "women's work" could be seen as a trade or craft. Women already in these occupations were to be offered grandmother clauses, whereby their skills and experiences would be recognized and accredited.

When the NKF began to work on an apprenticeship training model for childcare assistants, the organization of childcare workers had a mixed response. Although they took part in discussions about curriculum and organization of training, they were concerned that job classifications would be altered to the detriment of their members as trained childcare assistants became a cheaper and more competitive source of labour for cash-strapped municipal employers (4). Pilot projects are underway in Bergen and Oslo, and it is not clear whether or how the tensions between the two groups of female workers will be resolved.

Apprenticeship training presumes certain models of learning: it begins with experience rather than theory and it moves in and out of learning and work. It is a working class training system, regarded by working class men as a way of learning a job so that they can control access, obtain autonomy, organize collectively to protect employment, bargain for wages, negotiate job classifications and so on. The apprenticeship is also widely regarded in Norway as a solid and popular form of training. It has status attached to it, although it is a status hitherto reserved for working class men. As in Canada, attempts to "fit" women into traditional male apprenticeship have not paid off in terms of significant numbers, in spite of very dedicated efforts (5). The generalist proposal, then, brings "male" and working class models of learning to women's work, rather than bringing women to "male" employment.

This initiative could also have an effect on the class relations among women in the health and social service sector. As in Canada, there is a hierarchical division of labour between health/social service sector workers according to categories such as professional and non-professional, supervisors and front-line. While professionals such as nurses, social workers and teachers obtain their credentials and status through widely recognized and compulsory certification processes, non-professional and so-called unskilled workers may or may not have training, their employment is less secure, often part-time and low paid.

There is an intention built into the apprenticeship proposal to reach those who have been excluded from professional education and certification procedures those who take non-academic programs in secondary schools (or who drop out), or women who are returning to work after many years as full-time home-makers. In this way, one of the effects of the union initiative could be to reorganize class relations among women in affected sectors, to the advantage of the lowest paid and most vulnerable workers.