April 21, 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

Homekeepers bore the children that would support their generation as it aged. They kept their own houses, socialized their children, cooked their family’s meals, made certain the children went to school clean and fed, volunteered in their local communities, and watched out for problems in their neighborhoods such as sick or elderly neighbors who might need help. By not hiring help, they were able to live on one income, raise their own children and be a benefit to their families and their communities.

One of the most valuable parts of this arrangement was that if something were to happen to the key income earner in the family the mom could work part time until the family situation stabilized before returning to the home that she had been able to help preserve through a lay-off or sickness. She was a blanket insurance policy for her family, in effect - she was a “card up the sleeve” during times of family adversity. Until the 1970’s there was no stigma attached to this sort of traditional lifestyle, and it was considered an honorable and sensible way for a woman to “support” herself, through her service to family and community, in addition to realizing the benefits of raising her progeny in the most supportive available construct. Contrary to the home being the site of oppression, home was the site of a small family business, with women managing and caring for family assets.

These women would typically marry men from their same social and economic class, and typically men who would be involved in some form of blue-collar factory work, or low-level service field such as mail carrier or bank teller. The men did not have college educations, but they had skills and increasingly well-paying jobs as America roared back from World War II.

Union membership strengthened the sector that worked for it and during the fifties and sixties the working class family was making more money than ever and was now realistically able to send their kids – boys and girls - to college for a very brief and fleeting moment in history. And then the ride ended. Manufacturing work in the U.S. declined abruptly and dramatically between 1960 and 1975, with the new practice of corporate “outsourcing,” which meant sending millions of jobs that had previously been performed by Americans to countries with more cheaply priced (and far less protected) labor pools.

At that point the scarcity of jobs put downward pressure on the family wage and the loss of buying power began to force these women, these providers of all things domestic and these insurance policies against disaster, out of their homes into low paid ‘pink collar’ jobs. Their budgets became pinched to the point that they no longer had a choice: they had to enter the labor market, increasingly on a full-time basis, as periods of under- or un-employment occurred in their husbands’ work lives.

As the economy worsened (ironically the flood of new workers could only have the effect of pushing down wages while raising prices for goods and services), as the inflation of the 1970’s stripped more and ever more buying power from the family budget these families had to send out their women to work and saw their quality of life seriously deteriorate as a result. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/