March 27, 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

We have lost ground in every way that matters. We are poorer, sicker, definitely more ignorant and credulous, and less protected than ever from financial instability in our home and national life. All of these losses are directly tied to the fact that we have too many people in the job market, not too few, as political candidates are so fond of telling us. 

By being over-represented in the market place, all male and female labor is devalued: the laws of supply and demand always rule in a ‘free’ market.  The illusion of the extra income that sent so many of our home front workers into the paid labor force is to blame for the decline in our health, in our quality of life, and for a government that has become our nemesis rather than our servant. 

The bottom line is that we are paying for our own enslavement - we are shooting ourselves in our collective foot by supplying employers with endless supplies of cheap labor and by over-consuming the goods they supply – the ‘two hands clapping’ part of this scenario, sadly, which is exactly what leaves us owing our souls to the company store.

Whether we can reach out of our boundaries of class, gender, race, and political persuasion (boundaries which are often predictable responses to blatant manipulation by interested parties), and join together in an intellectually rigorous national conversation about values and policies that would truly benefit families and strengthen society, will decide whether or not we can rebuild a strong, and healthy society. We must demand and receive truly family-friendly policies from government which reward rather than penalize homekeepers, and we must maintain a reasonable safety net for the vulnerable, and the only way to do that is at the ballot box. 

But in order to effectively do that, we have to remember something we clearly have forgotten (with help aplenty) – that all legitimacy of the government derives from the citizens – not from the government! To not do so will mean allowing the government to continue to ignore the needs of families in favor of moneyed interests, and will mean allowing women, children and the elderly among us to slip further and further into poverty – which is currently at the highest rates those groups have experienced in 90 years.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

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/

March 17, 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

In only fifty years, the United States has gone from being one of the healthiest countries in the world to one that is raising children who are currently projected to have shorter life expectancies than their parents, courtesy of a raging first world epidemic of obesity.  It is no coincidence that the explosion in the size of the snack and convenience food industry, including the ‘drive-thru’ restaurant, occurred precisely as women entered the labor market. The resultant obesity epidemic shows how poorly (and lethally) that attempt filled the vacuum. And if that weren’t dire enough, over a third of the people who live in the United States now exhibit clinical symptoms of diabetes and heart disease, another ticking bomb that will soon blow up in our faces, much the same as the financial crisis did in 2008.

Women’s health is declining rapidly in the United States, too, with women in some regions of the country losing an unprecedented two and a half years of life expectancy between 1997 and 2007, alone. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare, and setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.[1] It is also no coincidence that kindness, trustworthiness, empathy, civility, and the other attributes which make up the oeuvre of moral and civic behavior are missing in generations of increasingly impoverished children who ‘do time’ in stranger daycare, where every day begins with parental abandonment. These children exhibit more violent and antisocial behavior than children who are raised in the home setting, and are the weak links in our society, prone to violence and dangerous attention-seeking behavior which puts us all at risk.

Families lost an estimated 40% of their wealth in the financial meltdown of 2008 - and, it is not alarmist thinking to fear that another financial crisis may occur in the near future, possibly on an even larger and more devastating scale than we have seen to date, in which we could lose even more of our diminished resources.  The structural problems which led to the financial meltdown have not been corrected; no titans of Wall Street have been imprisoned to send even the faintest of messages to the rest that we will not tolerate their excess and thievery. This loss of wealth and uncertainty about the future is a calamity which we will show is attributable to a massive failing in our family and educational systems - both of which turn out citizens too ignorant to protect their interests from government and corporate theft, welfare and abuses. We are not educated enough to protect ourselves at the ballot box anymore, and we are turning out citizens who are too ignorant and credulous to understand the subtle ways that we are tricked into doing harm to ourselves when in that box. When they even make it to the box, that is.
 

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The two-earner employment game is rigged against families and women, and the average non-professional family is in fact going into debt by having a second wage-earner. The steady loss of income American families have experienced since the 1960’s, combined with the gender pay disparity between male and female wages (It takes until April 20 of the year for a woman to catch up to the earnings an equally qualified man in the same job had earned by the previous December 31^st), has resulted in a fundamentally unsustainable economic system for the family with two wage earners, unless both are highly paid professionals who can purchase services to replace the absent homekeeper (but this is certainly not the norm among American workers). This system has large hidden costs beyond discounted or lost earnings, including the very real loss to the family of needed services, services which are either not provided, or are provided at a non-discounted cost to the family by contracted service providers, and paid for with post-tax wages which can completely consume the discounted dollars a homekeeper can earn in the marketplace.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

March 14, 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

When our wives and mothers went into the labor force in the decades following the 1960’s we lost a resource that had been a constant backbone of strength in our society and to our families: those women’s service to their families, neighborhoods, churches, schools and communities. We will prove that their service was far more valuable to their families and their communities than the wages that those women could ever realistically earn in the market place, even if those wages were untaxed, and even if they were not working for historically discounted ‘female’ wages in generally lowly paid ‘female’ occupations, which they inevitably were, with few exceptions.

This resource – a person to manage the household (and an extra temporary earner in the wings in case the primary earner becomes ill or loses work) - used to represent a powerful alternate non wage-based economy in America, an economy driven by the tyrannies of necessity under which all humans exist: We have to eat, we have to have a reasonably clean home, we have to have clean laundry, children need to be cared for and educated, yards need to be kept, groceries bought, pets cared for, bills paid, errands run, sick children nursed, elderly parents cared for – these are all fundamental, unavoidable elements of daily life, and the tyranny of their necessity guarantees that there is a value attached to the person who performs them (whose replacement value in dollars is calculated to be worth between 67K and 113K, depending on your source). Therefore, an entire non-monetized economy used to exist which was fundamentally more sound and sustainable (and local) than one that is based solely on wage-earning combined with subsequent service-buying from other workers in the market.

One part of the true value of this economy is that it is not taxed, and that all of a worker’s efforts accrue to their families, as opposed to when they work in the market place and are levied taxes. In other words, if a woman worked in the market place and earned her discounted ‘female’ wages, and then paid her taxes she would have much less ‘real’ purchasing power to acquire those absolutely necessary services from other workers than if she performed them herself for her family instead. Basically, this woman is working to pay taxes and buy services, and often is paying her service providers an even more unfair wage than she is earning herself, which is yet another way that we undercut the overall strength of families and women in our society.

This change in our domestic structure which came about during the social and economic upheaval of the 1960’s and 1970’s disastrously merged with the forces of corporate avarice, anti-working class government policies, and wrong-thinking consumerism in a way that has unraveled family health and wealth like nothing else has done before in American history. The dramatic convergence of these forces has also birthed a society in which the number one indicator that a woman will be likely to file a bankruptcy in her lifetime is if she has children, and in which 22% of children live under the laughably defined Federal “poverty” level, and ominously, in which 40% of children born are now born outside of marriage – an important precursor to even more generational poverty down the road. 

This statistic is particularly disturbing considering our historically low birth rates; we have been below ‘replacement’ levels since 1976, and it does not auger well for our retiring baby-boomers that their ‘replacements’ in the work force are so overwhelmingly poor (especially when considering how closely economic adversity and academic failure are linked) in addition to being diminished in their actual numbers. We are going to be in for some rough times in our elderly years because we refuse to acknowledge that this experiment has been a colossal failure. The only way to avoid that is to mend our country now, while we still have our strength and energy. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

March 13, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

The fifty-year abandonment of the traditional single-earner plus homekeeper partnership model of family economics and division of labor, has negatively and dramatically affected family security, health, and wealth, and is at the root of most of the challenges we currently face as a society.  Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, I ask this question: Are we better off now than we were fifty years ago? Sixty years ago? Seventy? Is life now better by measurable indicators than it was then? Have the changes in the way we live conferred a better quality of life, stronger families, or greater family wealth upon us since our homekeepers entered the wage market?

Has our shift from an economic and family management model that depended on one partner working outside, and one inside of the home, to a family model that depends on two income earners outside of the home, led to more prosperous or secure lives for families? Are we happier? Healthier? Are our children ok? The answer, based on statistics that outline a grim picture of child and female poverty, and overall declines in Americans’ health (made orders of magnitude worse by the current economic situation), is a resounding no. We are not better for these changes; we are actually much worse for them. Our national health and wealth have suffered dramatic losses over the last fifty-plus years, due to the negative effects of the most dramatic shift in family social structure to ever occur in our culture, or to our economy: the flight of our homekeepers into the labor market.

Slave Nation is an analysis of what has happened to those women, and their families, in the wake of the great diaspora from the home into the labor force, and into what we, the authors, term modern day serfdom. This serfdom is due to many factors, including an overcrowded labor market, unequal pay, work and government policies that unfairly affect women, loss of security nets and the additional taxes that families pay in order to have their mothers in the workforce. We believe that the facts we will present here clearly demonstrate that the flood into the marketplace of ‘paid’ (wage) labor was the end of freedom for these women, and the beginning of an era of unimaginable loss of wealth and security for their families.

In Slave Nation, we will address the loss to the family structure, the social fabric, our health, our wealth, our social justice apparatus, our critical thinking skills, our ability to self-govern, and our knowledge base that has occurred in the wake of homekeepers being alternately pushed and lured into the marketplace - by economic necessity in the case of the former and by employers who were salivating for the cheap, reasonably educated workforce the women represented, in the latter. We will then expose the falsehood of the economic ‘necessity’ of having two income earners in a family by detailing how little of the second paycheck (if any) is left over once a family adjusts for the wage gap, taxes, lost social security survivor’s benefits after a spouse dies, transportation expenses, wardrobe costs, and additional services that have to be purchased due to the absent homekeeper, in a game that is guaranteed to be lose-lose for families.

We will examine how these losses have weakened the family unit and we will look at who is gaining what we are losing, and what measures they employ to orchestrate that reverse of fortune. We will explore reasons why we as a society passively allow this theft, and we will outline specific values and truths that we need to promote to strengthen our families and communities so that we cease to be vulnerable to those who intend to exploit us if they can.

We will then propose methods that we can employ to reconstruct the society (and the protections for women and children which used to be an inherent part of that society) which fell apart in the wake of the homekeeper diaspora. The methods, are multi-pronged, using withdrawal from the labor force by as many workers as possible combined with voter-driven policy change to make homekeeping a more accessible choice for families than it has been these last many decades.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/