March 20, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

A deeply more insidious loss of wealth to a family with two wage earners is the loss of Social Security benefits when a spouse dies. Women who work in the market place lose the social security they earned while working when their husbands die. In the average two-income family the husband will earn more than the wife, and as a result will have the higher pension, which is the one that will survive upon his death, when the lower pension, hers, will automatically cease. 

In marriages where women earn as much as their husbands a surviving spouse will lose half of their benefits when the pensions are equal. If a woman has worked consistently through her marriage the family has incurred numerous expenses over time for lost services and for actual expenditures such as taxes, wardrobe, childcare and transportation that they would not have spent if she had worked at home. Keep in mind that this money comes right off the top of the combined family earnings. 

Now consider the fact that in exchange for those work-related expenses, for the discounted wages that she received, for the 720 annual hours of the ‘Second Shift’ she worked yearly performing household chores in addition to working away from the home, and for the diminished outcomes for her children, that her pension – her Social Security ceases to exist. For all of the work, and all of the individual and family sacrifice, she gets – nothing - once her husband dies. Her income will be reduced to what they had previously received for him alone, as if she had never existed or contributed. This is a double-edged sword for men, too, whose wives die before them, because they will also lose the amount of benefits their wives had received, benefits earned while wives were absent from their families. 

Mary Ann Mason writes in The Equality Trap: “An economy that requires the labor of women in the workforce must pay for the consequences of taking that labor from the home,” (Mason, 42), but in fact that is not anywhere near the case in the United States where we actually further penalize women and families, rather than rewarding them as we should for their contributions.   This is the reward we receive from our country for going into the marketplace, a country whose massive economic growth in the service sector was fueled by our absence from our homes, and whose strength, growth and vibrancy rested on our underpaid shoulders.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/