April 15, 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

At the time women entered the workforce it was morphing from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, and the demand for workers who were educated (enough), and cheap – a mere sixty cents on the dollar for what a man would have to be paid - cannot be overstated. The marketplace drooled for these production units and courted them ably with vast amounts of carefully orchestrated propaganda. The temporary solution for families became part of the new permanent problem - overall wages in society for all earners began to fall (wages are determined the same way other prices are – by supply and demand) and women who had planned to temporarily shore up the family’s economies now found themselves trapped like lobsters in a one-way trap. Employers no longer needed men to do the heavy, dirty, hard, and sometimes dangerous work of manufacturing, so women who had high literacy rates, and who fit easily into ‘customer service’ positions were the perfect fit for the new mostly part-time jobs in the mushrooming service industry (which would never pay them or their husbands a living wage again).

Now, in the 21^st century, even the addition of a wife’s income to the family budget is not enough. In most families, it is no longer enough to have two income earners, as families must additionally go into debt in order to maintain a family lifestyle that was previously managed on one income, only five decades ago. As I researched the phenomenon of vanishing income, I came to realize that Americans had been duped. Not just women, but Americans across the board. In the last five decades real wages have fallen dramatically, social protections have decreased, wages are perennially stagnant, debt-drowned young college graduates cannot find work in their fields, and we have lost a staggering amount of wealth in the financial melt-down that few of us participated in constructing. We are in shockingly bad condition, and in many more ways than just economically.

There is virtually no part of American life that has not been dramatically and negatively altered by the flood of women entering the labor market since the original Diaspora from the home to paid employment beginning between the 1960’s and 1970’s. As the result – direct and indirect - of that rush to paid female employment our American culture in the early 21^st century has hit nadir by any number of measurable indicators. From our physical and mental health, to our economy, to even our over-all intelligence, we are worse off than we have been at any point in our country’s history, in large part because we have lost our homekeeper–wage earner partnerships.  http://livingwage.mit.edu/