Slave Nation - Serfdom in Modern America: traditional

Showing posts with label traditional. Show all posts

Friday, April 19, 2013

April 19, 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

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/

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/

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/

Saturday, April 13, 2013

April 13, 2013

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/

Friday, April 12, 2013

April 12, 2013

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/

Saturday, April 6, 2013

April 6, 2013

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/

Friday, April 5, 2013

April 5, 2013

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/

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

March 27, 2013

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/

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

March 20, 2013

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/

Sunday, March 17, 2013

March 17, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

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

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

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

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

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

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

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/