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/
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