Slave Nation - Serfdom in Modern America: globalization

Showing posts with label globalization. Show all posts

Thursday, April 25, 2013

April 25, 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 are more reasons I will develop further for why we need women to stay home (or men, if their wives earn more - there is no gender angle here except for the absolute fact that women earn less money than men and families should plan accordingly to maximize their efforts), and why there needs to be a revival movement for homekeeping in the United States. One incredibly important reason is the economy, and I will lay out my arguments and suggestions for reversing the two income earner per family trend to the single living wage model, in a conscious, volunteer, social policy implementation at a grass-roots' level. This grass-roots effort would help to stabilize the financial crises that we have suffered through for so many years now by strengthening individual family finances with the end goal being to achieve true sustainability, which cannot be achieved when it actually costs women to more to work than they truthfully bring back to their families.

For the last several years, as we moved further and further into the Second Great Depression which has gripped our economy, the talking heads have assured us that more jobs and more employment are the answers to all problems – the more people we can get earning paychecks, the better! Then we can keep the ball rolling by spending! Higher employment and consumption will save us! I say: nonsense. We need fewer workers, who make more pay and consume fewer things. We need as many people to leave the workforce as possible, leaving more opportunities for those who stay to be able to earn the lost, illusive, living wage that once existed, courtesy of our old friends, Supply and Demand. As mentioned before, this would decrease the amount of taxes available to government agencies, which would have the additional benefit of shrinking government.

What the United States needs is not more jobs, but fewer people competing for those jobs in the labor market. It is time for the country that is famous for “rugged individualism” to quit being so sheepishly obedient to their corporate masters, to reject the philosophy of consumerism, and to carve their own good life out of the morass that the politicians and the businessmen have created.

My final thought for this introduction is to remind my reader that in the United States, the number one predictor that a woman will have to declare bankruptcy at some point in her life is that she has children, so what does that say? This kind of degrading poverty was unknown prior to women entering the work force, and is one of the primary reasons they should reject it for the evil, soul-sucking trap that it is. In short, I disagree with, or would at least amend what Dostoyevsky said about judging a civilization: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” I think the degree of our civilization can be judged by our female and child poverty rates, by our broken families, by our 41% illegitimacy rate and by our abandoned elders.

In the following pages I will outline and prove how the loss of our homekeepers is crippling us, and then I will present my plans for a strategic female withdrawal from the workforce. This manifesto is a call to families and communities to return to the lifestyle and the quality of life that lifestyle afforded when we had designated homekeepers. That lifestyle has been taken from us to enrich others at our great expense, and it is time to stand up for ourselves by refusing to participate in our own enslavement any longer.

Monday, April 22, 2013

April 22, 2013 Special Edition - Why you should buy American made products whenever possible

The overall message of Slave Nation is that we had something (freedom to live reasonably comfortable lives with time for family, learning, hobbies and general well-being because most people in society had one wage earner who could earn an amount that would sustain their family) and we lost it in exchange for massive losses of good American jobs and we exchanged it for the right to be permanently enslaved by the debt that comes from working for less than a living wage, the new 'normal' in Americans' earnings, especially for women. That choice by American corporations to sell out their labor force, and by the American people to buy low-priced goods from their own competitors eventually has been one of the major factors leading to one of the most obscene income and wealth gaps known in any of the industrialized nations of the world.

Therefore, it is more important now than ever for Americans to buy American. At a fair price. Not for a third-world, human-rights ignoring price, but for a living wage, for what it would cost to live here. It is not too much to ask. It is not too much to demand for our children as they grow and replace us in the labor force.

In order to help promote this goal, and to be 'part of the solution,' I am going to begin listing great American-made products that I have found on a regular basis in this blog. I am not being reimbursed in any way for recommending these products; I am just sharing information. By buying American we can raise the living wage for all, and help toward the ultimate goal of Slave Nation, which is to help families be able to afford to have a homekeeper again. Buying American is an act of self-defense and should be a major priority in our purchasing decisions.

The first product I am recommending is "Up & Up Fresh Citrus Handwash" available at Target stores.

Pros: * very reasonably priced at or just under $1 * great product; works well, smells wonderful, attractive packaging, lasts quite a while * Does not make skin itchy or dry * Made in the U.S.

Cons: * There is no refill option making plastic use excessive * Some of the components are made out of the U.S. * Target is a large multi-national, non-unionized, non-local company

On the whole, I still feel like it is a great product and do recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good American handsoap.

April 22, 2913

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/

Sunday, April 21, 2013

April 21, 2013

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/

Friday, April 19, 2013

April 19, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

Because so many women (un-choicers) must leave their children in daycare because of true financial necessity this debate is guaranteed to ignite a firestorm of frustration and emotion whenever it rears its ugly head. Defensive about our choices (and frustrated due to our lack of choices) we commit to defending whichever “team” we belong to, be it working or stay at home mother, with the resulting nasty free for all that can be seen in the comments section of any online commentary on the topic.

Because of this one-dimensional angst-driven focus on the outcomes for children and inflammatory debates over the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our childcare or work choices we seem to entirely miss the forest for the trees – all of society is harmed by the loss of a traditional homekeeper, not just children. Men are harmed, women are harmed, elders and children are most certainly harmed – the entire family suffers, as do entire communities. Our stubborn, childish refusal to discuss the realities of this truth will only further delay the work we must eventually commit to doing to restore the health and wealth of our families and our country.

We have harmed ourselves from the bottom up for the past fifty-plus years in the wake of deep anti-marriage gender feminism that swept through American society in the late 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. The disdain for marriage, seen by a divorce rate that doubled in ten short years, coupled with the loss of working-class manufacturing jobs set us on an unsustainable social course. The present-day fruits of those anti-family choices and anti-family economics are now painfully clear, from the explosion of new “diagnoses” of children who “need” to be medicated for “attention” disorders, to the childhood obesity epidemic that plagues the children of even our middle income families, to the deepest child and female poverty ever known in America, and lastly to the unchecked greed and materialism which has become the signature of life in our times.

These are only a few of the many ways that I will prove that we have been harmed by our disintegrated division of labor tradition which draws heavily on shared and separate responsibilities of parents and an inherent frugality and self-reliance which allows for the one income earner model.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Thursday, April 18, 2013

April 18, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

I found that most discussions about mothers earning income outside the home focused on issues that never analyzed whether it was in the best interest of the woman or her family for her to work. Most of the discussion I found was focused rigidly and exclusively on strategies to get employers and government to provide more ‘family friendly’ policies and the provision of ever more and more low-cost ‘high quality’ daycare, carefully chosen buzz words which numb our consciousness into forgetting that we are dumping our children into stranger care, no matter how family friendly or high quality that daycare may supposedly be. Ironically, these magical solutions to all problems are framed against the actual reality that daycare workers are among the lowest paid, least educated and most transient workers in the labor force.

In bizarre contrast to these discussions were the ones I found centered on Linda Hirschman’s strident, anti-child, anti-woman, anti-man, anti-family platform aimed at highly-educated “choicers.” For their own good, Hirschman describes in painful detail the professional and financial toll that leaving a career long enough to care for young children would confer on a woman unwise enough to do such a reckless thing, including the potential for the unthinkable – that she might have to depend on her husband. In this choicer universe it is a disadvantage in the business world to have babies, leaving them to be born as unwelcome intrusions to be managed around, rather than seen as the tangible, joyful, proof that our species survives, and that there will be a generation after our own to care for us as we inevitably age and begin to need help.

The former discussions concerned with family friendly policy and ‘quality’ low cost daycare are unsurprisingly aimed at women who work for low wages, while the latter which darkly caution women against risky professional behavior such as childbearing or raising, are generally aimed at – quelle suprise – privileged, ultra-educated, ambitious women. These women who work for any reason other than that they must to survive, come mostly from the ranks of well educated ‘third basers,’ (born on third base and think they hit a triple), women such as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and would-be founder of a movement which will teach women to Lean In, a consciousness raising ‘movement’ designed to help women behave more like men in the workplace. Make that the Corporate workplace.

My search for thoughtful analysis about the need for women to stay home to raise their families and care for their homes generally went unrewarded. The few discussions I did find about the wisdom of a culture that embraces homekeepers were mostly driven by unhelpful ultra-religious or ultra-conservative political ideology that did not have the inclusiveness necessary for a true grassroots movement. Very few moderate discussions address the real great American tragedy of our times – the loss of the homekeeper, and the traditional division of labor in the family business of child-raising and survival.

Because this very real tragedy has been conflated with the tragedy of millions of children spending their very early years in daycare facilities the focus of any debate about homekeepers invariably centers on whether or not it is harmful for children to be raised by paid strangers during their earliest years, or whether or not that duty should only be carried out by parents and family members.

Unfortunately, that means that when these sporadic discussions occur, they only consider one facet of homekeeping - childcare - to the exclusion of thoughtful examination of most of the other significant losses we are suffering due to the loss of our homefront workforce. This myopic focus unfortunately has effectively short-circuited discussion and thoughtful analysis about the true nature of what we have lost, by diverting us with a cultural ‘shiny thing.’

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

April 17, 2013

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/

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

April 16, 2013

At the heart of our decline is the fundamental truth that we have willfully ignored and stubbornly denied, gripped as we are by a powerful collective cognitive dissonance: We foolishly deny the immutable connection between having a designated person who keeps the home fires burning – a homekeeper - and stable, healthy, and enduring families, economies and communities.

A corollary of that dissonance is seen in the complete lack of conversation about the damage that is done to labor markets when they are flooded with cheap labor (it bears repeating: wages are determined the same way as other prices are: by supply and demand), which of course ultimately wreaks havoc on families because it impacts both the husband’s and the wife’s income if both are in the wage market; however she will only earn a fraction of those lower wages because the gender gap predictably follows male earnings – when male earnings go down, female earnings correspond to retain the 20 – 30% gap. The loss of the homekeeper, combined with a cheapened labor force is a recipe for disaster, and we can see the results of the disaster everywhere we look.

Things have to change. We must seriously reconsider returning to the sustainable model of traditional labor division that has cradled human civilization since its birth. To that end I have come to the radical conclusion that what the United States needs is not more jobs, but fewer people competing for those jobs in the labor market. I am calling for a movement that culminates in a voluntary reduction in the American labor force, specifically, for women to stay home and operate their homefronts in a more logical and productive management of their assets - like the family business that the homefront is.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Monday, April 15, 2013

April 15, 2013

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/

Sunday, April 14, 2013

April 14, 2013

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/