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 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 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 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/

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/