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/