April 22, 2913

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

The term “latch keykid” was coined, and a new industry, known as “daycare” was born for children who had previously been raised at home by their mothers. Organized child care facilities had previously only existed in primarily communist nations that deliberately separated children from their parents for ideological and economic reasons (weakened family ties contributed to state security, as did female labor participation); now they were to become the new “normal” in American child rearing. 

As women entered the workforce families and society struggled to replace the ghost of the missing mother. Services and conveniences exploded in the market place at this time, gaining momentum as we morphed into the greed-based culture of the 1980’s.  A slew of consumer products now were absolutely necessary for the “working mom” to be able to put in her 40 hour week and still remain the primary care and service provider in the home, which countless future studies would prove she would be. 

Women worked more than they ever had been before, and now were paying for services that only the wealthy had utilized in previous years. They paid for cooking (but it was bad - HamburgerHelper, Pop Tarts, frozen microwave dinners and fast-food drive-through meals hardly replaced the nutritious cooking Moms once provided, and came at a much higher cost), they paid for laundry (husband’s shirts now went to the cleaner along with Mom’s work clothes), they paid for childcare like they had never paid before, and on top of all that, the women who entered the workforce paid taxes.

Where their work had never been taxed before, and belonged only to themselves and their families, it was now a commodity of the government: “employed” workers pay taxes. Previously, 100% of these women’s efforts had accrued to their families; now, depending on tax rates, only 50 – 60% of the pay for 100% of their efforts would find its way into use by the family, resulting in a huge net loss to women and to families (the gender pay gap never goes away, so taxes diminish what is a small piece of the pie to start).

In fact, by the time women paid for the costs of employment – taxes, the costs of services at home to replace a fraction of the work they had done for the family in the past (despite the need for the cruel and inhumane “second shift” which immediately developed), the actual costs of working, such as transportation and wardrobes and worst of all, the loss of the safety net a non-employed adult represented as a reservoir of potential income in times of emergency, it is hard to believe that all of this could be accomplished on a fraction of the pay that men were earning for the same work, and still make it worthwhile for the family unit for the mother to go out of the home for paid employment. And it couldn't. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 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

My Heart is in Boston

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

As I began to refine my argument for why we should nurture a grass-roots social movement to return to our most functionally sustainable model of a family unit – the single wage earner/homekeeper model – I searched for discussion on the topic of homekeeping. Most discussions about homekeeping as an actual “job” were negative and rigidly focused on child-watching, as if the only real service a homekeeper performed was child-care, generally ignoring the plethora of other valuable but mostly invisible acts of service these women routinely provide. 

Curiously, considering that the three eight-hour shifts of care needed for a child each day would be exorbitantly expensive by nearly anyone’s standards if purchased from a provider, these arguments didn't assign any greater value to that part of homekeeping than it did to scrubbing toilets, a service which can be purchased cheaply. Other than the media’s annual totaling up of the value for these services around Mother’s Day each year, the actual art of homekeeping is generally invisible in public discussion, probably because it suffers from a terrible image problem.

Occasionally I would find discussion about The “Second Shift,” the landmark research by U.C. Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild, which asserts that women who work outside the home labor an additional 720 hours per year in addition to their regulare paid employment. Discussion I found regarding the “Second Shift” never calculated the market value of those 720 hours of labor provided by these women, and were crafted more to point out how much less than their ‘share’ men contribute to homekeeping.  Naturally these conversations ignored the fact that as a rule, men make more money in the market place, and that it is therefore more efficient for the family economy for them to spend their efforts there.  

The main takeaway points from most discussions about the labor a homekeeper performs are that it is mindless, boring, unrewarding, repetitive, unappreciated work, and is beneath most women’s educational levels. Funny, that is exactly how I would describe my time spent in my last “real job,” at a large non-profit organization as a program director, whereas the time I spend at home is spent at my own direction (except for child care, which is 24/7, period), is spent improving my life and my family’s lives, is calming and rewarding and allows me to be able to feed my family healthy, low-cost meals, while providing a comfortable home from which we all can grow, achieve and prosper. 

Nothing, including the level of income I earned, was better about that frankly horrible job than being at home. And of course, after I paid the costs related to working, direct and indirect, I came away having lost to the House.

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/