Professional women in the health sector have responded with unease, seeing challenges to their skills and knowledge, and to training and education models through which they have been able to obtain relatively well-paid and protected jobs. These women are rightfully suspicious of the ways in which such a training model may be used by employers to split women, to transfer job classifications now held by professionals to lower paid workers trained through the apprenticeship model. For example, women who are trained and work as supervisors of daycare centers worry that better trained assistants may encroach on their turf, pushing supervisors out of dealing with children altogether and into solely administrative positions. As assistants will continue to be paid less, but will have better training, employers can argue that they can also take on a larger share of jobs. The same sort of arguments have been made about the distinction between nurses and nursing assistants (6).

Such fears are quite justified when public sector spending is under increased scrutiny and cuts are the order of the day, when conservative and social democratic governments alike adopt cost-efficiency models as measurements of productivity. At the same time there are large numbers of women whose working conditions and wages are completely out of step with the responsibilities they hold, and with the incomes they need to survive.

Through its initiative, the NKF has tried to turn the discussions of skills, competence, training and flexibility to the advantage of these women. They have tried to make visible the knowledge, skills and experience that are required in caring occupations, and to shift assumptions that such work "only" requires "naturally" feminine attributes. In this sense they are attempting to subvert the discourse and take the political initiative to say: What women do is important; what women do is hard; what women do requires knowledge and experience; what these women do is just as much skilled work as what men or "professional" women do. The NKF argues that the type of know-how women develop during years of caring for children, managing households, budgeting, planning and preparing food, cleaning clothes and rooms, looking after the needs of others, is just as much a skill as those acquired by boys and men fixing cars and machines. In developing the proposal to bring training and regulation of caring occupations within the law governing apprenticeship, the NKF has been careful not to emphasize the wage implications, though it is widely recognized that workers who have a trade are better paid than those categorized as unskilled.

Municipal government are the largest providers of childcare in Norway

The union is therefore caught in a political dilemma. It must sell the proposal to employers who are concerned about wage implications, who will only accept the scheme if they can obtain a more flexible and skilled workforce, without having to pay higher wages for such a large group of employees. On the other hand, women who work in these occupations have an obvious interest in obtaining higher wages as a reward for taking training and further education. For them, the promise of higher status and recognition of their skills are empty gestures in the face of employers' demands that they be more available and flexible.

At the same time, the male trade union movement leadership has been reluctant to accept female caring occupations as skilled work. One women in the NKF talked about this experience at a public meeting: "We repeatedly meet male culture in the expressed views of those who give thumbs down to women's reasonable claims to fair and just reform" (7). Another women union leader very tellingly asked me to turn off my tape recorder when I asked her about the responses of the union leadership to the NKF proposals. Her disappointment and frustration with her male trade union comrades were palpable, but too volatile to be expressed in an interview.