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 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 16, 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 today.

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/

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 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/