April 18, 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 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/

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/

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/