April 23, 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

To make matters even worse, if they could be, the illusory extra income, while the illusion lasted, was spent in bidding wars against other families for homes in neighborhoods with the “good” schools, or on second and third cars, bigger televisions, obscenely large homes (McMansions, defined by Urban Dictionary as 'a large and pretentious house, typically of shoddy construction')  and expensive restaurants and hobbies. 

When the illusion of the “extra” income faded and reality set in, the families were frequently saddled with debt that enslaved their wives and mothers for the duration, rather than until the economy gained strength and they were able to return home, as they always had in the past after saving the family finances (ironically, the economy would gain strength - because of the large, cheap, fresh labor supply of women, but debt and increased appetites for consumption and conveniences sealed their fates). In 2013 full time homekeepers are so rare that there are only an estimated five million of them left (and falling), and they are demographically younger, less educated and far more likely to be foreign-born than the housewives of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

So, why does it matter? Why shouldn’t women work in the market place exactly the same as men? The answer to that is simple - because most female workers do not earn a fair or equal wage; if they could earn a living wage, this would be an entirely different conversation, but would still be based around reclaiming a society where one income can sustain a family in reasonable security and comfort. With nine out of ten women employed in the lowly-paid service sector,  it is safe to say that these women are not earning anything that approaches a fair living wage, especially when you consider that even they, at the very lowest rung of the employed economic ladder make less than men in their same classifications. The gender wage gap is blind to class, too; professional women suffer the same overall beginning ratio of underpayment as non-professional women, only at higher income levels with professional women earning $8000 less in their first jobs after graduation, than their male counterparts, initiating a gap which actually widens over time.

The next question is: Who needs homekeepers, anyway? The answer is simple: we all do, especially our children, especially in their infancy. In my own experience as a mother I have always known in my heart of hearts that it would be very unlikely that I would step in front of a speeding car to save another woman’s child, unless I had an extraordinarily close connection to the woman or child. It would have been unfair to my own who needed me; my first priority would always be to my own children. 

Therefore, I had to ask myself, how could I pretend to myself that it would be ok for another woman to have the main responsibility of keeping my children safe? When I took my children to the city pool, or to the beach, I never considered it the life guard’s responsibility to make sure my children didn’t drown. He was good back-up, but they were my progeny, my future, not his. No lawsuit or settlement would ever bring my children back if someone else didn’t do their job. And in fact, it wasn’t the lifeguard’s job, anyway, it was mine and mine alone. Parents are the people best-suited to raise their own children – because they have the biggest investment in their children’s survival.

We also need homekeepers to raise our children to be good and productive citizens who are able to manage this democracy the way it was intended to be managed – prudently, by an informed electorate who would hold the elected responsible for their actions. The state of our government in this country is a tragedy. We are now going on a third generation of voters (if they even vote, which is a different and even more tragic outcome) who have been raised from pre-K to college by strangers instead of their parents. Children enter daycare as young as two weeks old; from there they graduate to public schools that are better at crowd control and mass testing than they are at teaching the basics of critical thinking necessary for self-governance, or basic skills necessary for life. It is inevitable that the influences of strangers will eventually affect our children’s world view, and not necessarily in ways that match our own.

Equally harmful to our children and our way of life is the single most necessary element to control the large gatherings of children in one place that are a signature of our collectivist childcare system: conditioned obedience. A herd mentality is not only encouraged but vigorously insisted upon, and harshly enforced in our child care centers - at whatever age or grade children may be (public schools are the number one form of subsidized childcare in our nation).

Critical thinkers, learning questioners and children who are just too active for the sedentary school environment are labeled as troublemakers, and learn to endure a constant stream of disapproval. Children who are not suited to the rigid, highly-regulated environment that is our public school system are now routinely drugged with highly addictive narcotics which make them passive and sedate, often at the insistence of the school personnel – in order to be “focused” enough to absorb the material they need to be able to regurgitate during “testing,” so that they can eventually be “successful.” It is just easier to control a room full of 30+ students when they are toned down with their daily dose of chemical compliance.  Drugged obedience, and herd mentality are not the building blocks of a healthy and prosperous democracy. I just can’t say it any more plainly than that.

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 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/

April 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

There is another very real social tension over the worth of a supported woman who doesn’t “work,” whether or not she must to survive, as seen in the recent case of Anne Romney being called out for ‘never working a day in her life.’ That tension is part and parcel of the social culture of gender-feminist-driven “choice,” and “individualism” that has permeated society for the last fifty-plus years. Its propaganda clouds our thinking when it comes to homekeepers, casting them in the roll of an almost willful parasite - unemployable at best, weak or stereotypically self-indulgent or lazy,  at worst - rather than as some of society’s toughest and most valuable human capital.

In short, we have confused the value of women’s actual contributions to their families and communities with the act of earning income, mistakenly assigning value in direct proportion to earnings, somehow managing the mental acrobatics necessary to ignore the numerous services the homekeeper provides when we assign ‘worth.’ Because of this we value women who do not earn income less than we value those who do, which is not exactly an incentive package for these women to jump into the unpaid avocation of homekeeping. At a time when we need to woo women across all economic and educational sectors back into the home we need to do better by them in terms of respect, at the very least.

And while we are examining our values and beliefs, how did it become an accepted part of who we are and how we live that we farm the majority of our children out to so-called “child care,” rather than pay ourselves to raise them at home? Although I make the case that child-caring is only one facet of homekeeping, it is nonetheless one of the most important jobs a homekeeper performs, and the results of how that job is done resonates through our culture. Therefore, I ask:  How can we thrive as a democracy when the lowest paid members of society are the main care-givers during infancy and early childhood for our future voters and decision makers? Why do we allow our children’s values to potentially be shaped and formed by the least educated, lowest paid and most transient members of the workforce? Why do we accept the “inevitability” and consequences of stranger childcare as if there were not a perfectly good alternate solution to raising children – a model that worked very well for millennia?

I also want to ponder our actual quality of life in the United States in 2013.To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off now than you were fifty years ago? Is life better now by measurable indicators? I would argue not. We have gone from being one of the healthiest countries in the world to one that is raising children who are currently projected to have shorter life expectancy's than their parents, courtesy of a raging epidemic of self-induced obesity.  

We are now a country where appointed Supreme Court justices uphold the rights of corporations, whose lawfully mandated goal is to create profit, to spend without limit in elections (predicated on the farce that corporations are people, fully imbued with 1^st Amendment rights), thereby allowing elections to be sold to the highest bidder, regardless of whether or not that will result in policies that will make life better or worse for families. 

Women and children are poorer now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country. I want to repeat that: Women and Children are poorer now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country, with 22% of children living under the laughably defined Federal Poverty Level. In short, we have lost ground in every way that matters. We are poorer, sicker and less protected than ever from instability in our home and national life. We did not do what we needed to as a society to retain our homekeepers, and we are suffering the consequences. 

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/

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/

April 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

As I researched the composition of the female work force and the dynamics that surrounded the female flight into the workforce, I came to realize that ‘choice’ had little to nothing to do with most female labor force participation, and that ‘need’ was the true driver of most women’s choice to work. Despite Hirshman’s harsh criticism of “choice feminism,” true “choicers” are an avis raris in the female work force, regardless of how relentlessly those few that do exist are propagandized in media as ordinary, everyday female workers (Google "working mom," and every image that will come up depicts a woman in a suit; the majority of the female workforce is employed in the service sector, and is more likely to wear a maid's uniform than a business suit. True choicers have as much in common with ordinary female workers as Bill Gates has in common with ordinary male workers.

As I grappled to refine my premise (still rooted in my belief that this country has flown completely off the rails since women entered the work force), I realized how wrongly I had viewed the landscape of female employment, and how unfair it was to target women for the sin of wishing for “more,” at their families’ expense, when actually they were in an epic struggle just to keep what they had. 

I have come to realize that the shifting labor patterns of the 1970’s which forced most women into the labor market were in fact driven by  greed and outsourcing - the true culprits in the “who dunnit” I was trying to solve. Greed, outsourcing and globalization are the direct cause of the near-death of private sector unions and also for the loss of the manufacturing base that had once supported  hard working Americans (who were not college educated) with a decent living wage to raise a family.

In my research I have found that the real reason women had been sent out to work in the 70’s and 80’s was to recapture the loss of real wages in their husband’s paychecks, not for “liberation.” The working class women who were dragged from their homekeeping by economic necessity must have had a very dim regard for “liberation” based on hours labored away from home for low wages. They knew better than to believe the old chestnut Arbeit macht frei (sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, which proclaims that ‘work will set you free’), and were rightly suspicious of the women’s lib (read gender feminists) propaganda glorifying work. 

Shrinking male wages combined with the brutal inflation that characterized the era, and household purchasing power contracted to the point where wives’ earnings became necessary to cover the necessities. Enter Women’s Liberation with its ‘all women work all the time’ rhetoric, essentially giving men permission to quit supporting their families at exactly the point when they no longer could do so, conveniently drowning out conversation about where the wages went. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 13, 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

In the beginning, armed with premises which I now understand were faulty, I had originally planned to write In Defense of the Homemaker, a stirring call to women to abandon the insanity of the workforce and to return to their hearths, their children, their gardens – my book was to be a manifesto for modern domesticity and its multiple, detailed, social benefits – and for a fresh start for a culture which clearly is in grave trouble. 

I felt, and do still feel that women returning to homekeeping would be the solution to many of our current social ills, but as I plunged into my research I began to realize that I had the right solution, but for the wrong reason. My plan to rally readers around a unifying concept of the nuclear family, harking back to the days when Dad worked, and Mom baked pies, and we could afford to send our children to college, even if we had not gone ourselves, wasn’t a bad plan, it just blamed the wrong people for the problem we needed to fix.

I planned for my book to be a harsh repudiation of books like Linda R. Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which I consider hopelessly cruel, anti-woman and anti-family for its message that “opting out” of the workplace is a form of deliberate self-betrayal, and that security can only be derived from paid employment, rather than from family bonds. Hirshman argues that Feminism failed in its transformative mission because it hasn’t insisted that women work. 

Naturally Hirshman’s message was aimed at upper middle class, college-educated women who could earn far more than the vast majority of their less-educated sisters, who would automatically reject this manufactured debate as entirely ridiculous (the lowly-paid sisters who make up the majority of the female work force would instantly recognize the eerily Marxist ‘glorification of labor’ propaganda and dismiss it with the contempt it deserved).

Hirshman presents ‘rules’ to women, to revive Feminism’s transformative mission; one is to have one child – if you must – but not two, and second, to force your husband to do his ‘share’ of the household chores (cruelly ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the lowest-paid women in the work force are single mothers). Many of these women who earn pitifully low wages will likely need their children’s support in their elderly years, and Hirshman’s advice to diminish their families below what well could be their own future subsistence levels indicates the dismissal of these women which shines through clearly in her exhortations. Her total ignorance about the fact that our birthrate has been below replacement levels since the mid-1970’s shines yet more light on her ‘choicer’ class tunnel vision which does not require her to wonder from where the women will come who will be so happy to live for work in the future.

Hirshman also wastes little ink on how children actually fare in daycare, or how the majority of women workers actually fare in their perpetually under-rewarded efforts in the market, as they continue to earn substantially less pay across all fields, decade after decade, in an infinitely predictable arc across the decades. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 12, 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

I am not naive enough to believe that a year or two will heal over half of century of real damage, but I am proposing that with a vision of how much stronger we would be as individuals and families, that we can engineer a great social movement, a movement to turn our country around and make it safe for women and children again (as they now suffer the highest poverty rates recorded in those groups in 90 years), make it once again a land of strong families and individuals who are able to take care of themselves. 

Slave Nation is a call to Americans to carefully consider the toxic effects of a terrible social experiment, and to then deliberately choose to return to an infinitely more sustainable lifestyle in which the average family can survive on one income and be reasonably comfortable and safe from the weathers of fortune. Slave Nation is a call particularly to women to honestly evaluate what they have gained, and what they have lost by taking their under-valued productivity into the labor market. I believe that if we do not make these changes we will remain permanently enslaved, in chains we paid to have made, probably with a nearly maxed-out credit card.

I am calling for no less than a social and political movement that will rival the movements that demanded suffrage, and civil rights, a movement which I believe has the potential to return this country to greatness and families to health and stability. When women entered the market place they left a vacuum which could not be filled, and never was, and the losses that are attributable to the exodus of homekeepers into the labor market resonate negatively through every sector of modern American life. The partnership model was successful for a reason – it is the best way to raise families and to build strong and safe societies, and it provided a structural safety net that is gone now that we ‘need’ two incomes to survive.

Success in reclaiming the one-earner model for as many families as possible will require that we educate ourselves and take our civic responsibilities seriously, that we re-examine and re-articulate what we value, and that we reject a social experiment that has led to dire poverty for women and children, and to a shocking loss of wealth and health across the spectrum of American society.

Slave Nation is a manifesto for men and women who can see for themselves in their own homes and communities that female employment has been a “trickle up” wealth transfer system which is destroying family life and impoverishing women and children. Slave Nation is a passionate call for Americans to change the current two-income earner paradigm, before it is too late.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/ http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 6, 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

Large numbers of women were pushed into the market by structural changes in the economy, while many others (almost exclusively college-educated) joined willingly, prodded by social movements such as Civil Rights, and ‘Women’s Liberation,’ entering into lives that were dramatically different from what their mothers and grandmothers had experienced. 

These mass entrances into the market have been destructive in ways that have done anything but liberate women, or families, or in fact anyone, except for the few highly-educated women who were able to go into (and stay in) professional fields. Worse, these women who represent such a minuscule portion of the work force  set a perversely twisted example for average women, in essence sending the message that getting hit by lightening twice and surviving to win the lottery is normal, “if you want it enough and are willing to work hard enough for it,” ala Sheryl Sandberg. This is not to say that professional women don't work very hard, or that they do not deserve their success, but the vast, vast majority of women don’t and never will earn the kind of wages that the women who are held up to them as 'normal' by numerous interested parties, and certainly not because they don’t work hard enough.

My ultimate goal is to convince readers that wooing women from the workforce back to the home front is a matter of urgent national concern and that all Americans should actively support a social movement to voluntarily return to the traditional division-of-labor model that is a crucial element for a good life in a prosperous, reasonably well-governed country. 

To do that, we need to ask ourselves this key question: How did we manage to convince ourselves that it was worth working our lives away from our homes and our children, for an employer, to earn enough money to pay taxes and to pay still other people to do our stuff, while earning the privilege to suffer a seriously lower quality of life than we used to have?  I am confident that an honest assessment of how we got into this situation will provide clarity in determining how we will get out of it.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 5, 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

From the gender wage gap, to the tax code, to the costs to taxpayers for institutionalizing our children from babyhood to young adulthood (in order to facilitate the participation of the tax-paying, second-class workforce in the first place), we are losing the modest lifestyle, wealth and security that most families used to be able to take for granted.

 In the United States today the lowest 2 quintiles of the population – 40% of Americans – own a miniscule, barely measurable 0.3% of all wealth. Even worse, many two-income families are going into actual consumer debt just to survive because they cannot earn a living wage that will cover the replacement of the lost services in a home when a homekeeper joins the labor force. 

In exchange for this impoverished lifestyle we work longer hours than ever, institutionalize our children from pre-school through high-school, push personal ‘productivity’ to ludicrous limits, eat a poisonous diet, and rush from task to task, fearful, harried, guilt-ridden, always behind, and always in a hurry. No other country in the world gives workers so little return for so much work, and we are a hot mess because of it. Unfortunately, current conditions clearly demonstrate that the movement that liberated women “to work,” actually enslaved them and impoverished their children.

A lowly paid female labor force based on the idea of liberation, of all things, has been a terrible failure with devastating consequences for all involved. While it may sound counter - intuitive in a weak economy to urge workers out of the market, and while I know full well that many women do not have the choice (irony of feminist ironies) to do something so radical, I propose that we still have to start somewhere, and the sooner the better. 

If those women (or their husbands, if that is what works best in their families, although it will be a very rare family where a woman can earn as much as her husband) who can stay home would, we believe there would be an immediate improvement in our economy. Wages would rise for those men and women who remained in the market, and possibly, just possibly, the persistent gap in wages between men and women would eventually narrow, leaving those women who do stay a little more to help their families. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

March 27, 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

We have lost ground in every way that matters. We are poorer, sicker, definitely more ignorant and credulous, and less protected than ever from financial instability in our home and national life. All of these losses are directly tied to the fact that we have too many people in the job market, not too few, as political candidates are so fond of telling us. 

By being over-represented in the market place, all male and female labor is devalued: the laws of supply and demand always rule in a ‘free’ market.  The illusion of the extra income that sent so many of our home front workers into the paid labor force is to blame for the decline in our health, in our quality of life, and for a government that has become our nemesis rather than our servant. 

The bottom line is that we are paying for our own enslavement - we are shooting ourselves in our collective foot by supplying employers with endless supplies of cheap labor and by over-consuming the goods they supply – the ‘two hands clapping’ part of this scenario, sadly, which is exactly what leaves us owing our souls to the company store.

Whether we can reach out of our boundaries of class, gender, race, and political persuasion (boundaries which are often predictable responses to blatant manipulation by interested parties), and join together in an intellectually rigorous national conversation about values and policies that would truly benefit families and strengthen society, will decide whether or not we can rebuild a strong, and healthy society. We must demand and receive truly family-friendly policies from government which reward rather than penalize homekeepers, and we must maintain a reasonable safety net for the vulnerable, and the only way to do that is at the ballot box. 

But in order to effectively do that, we have to remember something we clearly have forgotten (with help aplenty) – that all legitimacy of the government derives from the citizens – not from the government! To not do so will mean allowing the government to continue to ignore the needs of families in favor of moneyed interests, and will mean allowing women, children and the elderly among us to slip further and further into poverty – which is currently at the highest rates those groups have experienced in 90 years.

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/

March 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

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

In only fifty years, the United States has gone from being one of the healthiest countries in the world to one that is raising children who are currently projected to have shorter life expectancies than their parents, courtesy of a raging first world epidemic of obesity.  It is no coincidence that the explosion in the size of the snack and convenience food industry, including the ‘drive-thru’ restaurant, occurred precisely as women entered the labor market. The resultant obesity epidemic shows how poorly (and lethally) that attempt filled the vacuum. And if that weren’t dire enough, over a third of the people who live in the United States now exhibit clinical symptoms of diabetes and heart disease, another ticking bomb that will soon blow up in our faces, much the same as the financial crisis did in 2008.

Women’s health is declining rapidly in the United States, too, with women in some regions of the country losing an unprecedented two and a half years of life expectancy between 1997 and 2007, alone. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare, and setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.[1] It is also no coincidence that kindness, trustworthiness, empathy, civility, and the other attributes which make up the oeuvre of moral and civic behavior are missing in generations of increasingly impoverished children who ‘do time’ in stranger daycare, where every day begins with parental abandonment. These children exhibit more violent and antisocial behavior than children who are raised in the home setting, and are the weak links in our society, prone to violence and dangerous attention-seeking behavior which puts us all at risk.

Families lost an estimated 40% of their wealth in the financial meltdown of 2008 - and, it is not alarmist thinking to fear that another financial crisis may occur in the near future, possibly on an even larger and more devastating scale than we have seen to date, in which we could lose even more of our diminished resources.  The structural problems which led to the financial meltdown have not been corrected; no titans of Wall Street have been imprisoned to send even the faintest of messages to the rest that we will not tolerate their excess and thievery. This loss of wealth and uncertainty about the future is a calamity which we will show is attributable to a massive failing in our family and educational systems - both of which turn out citizens too ignorant to protect their interests from government and corporate theft, welfare and abuses. We are not educated enough to protect ourselves at the ballot box anymore, and we are turning out citizens who are too ignorant and credulous to understand the subtle ways that we are tricked into doing harm to ourselves when in that box. When they even make it to the box, that is.
 

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The two-earner employment game is rigged against families and women, and the average non-professional family is in fact going into debt by having a second wage-earner. The steady loss of income American families have experienced since the 1960’s, combined with the gender pay disparity between male and female wages (It takes until April 20 of the year for a woman to catch up to the earnings an equally qualified man in the same job had earned by the previous December 31^st), has resulted in a fundamentally unsustainable economic system for the family with two wage earners, unless both are highly paid professionals who can purchase services to replace the absent homekeeper (but this is certainly not the norm among American workers). This system has large hidden costs beyond discounted or lost earnings, including the very real loss to the family of needed services, services which are either not provided, or are provided at a non-discounted cost to the family by contracted service providers, and paid for with post-tax wages which can completely consume the discounted dollars a homekeeper can earn in the marketplace.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

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/

March 13, 2013

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/