Slave Nation - Serfdom in Modern America

Thursday, April 18, 2013

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/

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

April 17, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

As I began to refine my argument for why we should nurture a grass-roots social movement to return to our most functionally sustainable model of a family unit – the single wage earner/homekeeper model – I searched for discussion on the topic of homekeeping. Most discussions about homekeeping as an actual “job” were negative and rigidly focused on child-watching, as if the only real service a homekeeper performed was child-care, generally ignoring the plethora of other valuable but mostly invisible acts of service these women routinely provide.

Curiously, considering that the three eight-hour shifts of care needed for a child each day would be exorbitantly expensive by nearly anyone’s standards if purchased from a provider, these arguments didn't assign any greater value to that part of homekeeping than it did to scrubbing toilets, a service which can be purchased cheaply. Other than the media’s annual totaling up of the value for these services around Mother’s Day each year, the actual art of homekeeping is generally invisible in public discussion, probably because it suffers from a terrible image problem.

Occasionally I would find discussion about The “Second Shift,” the landmark research by U.C. Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild, which asserts that women who work outside the home labor an additional 720 hours per year in addition to their regulare paid employment. Discussion I found regarding the “Second Shift” never calculated the market value of those 720 hours of labor provided by these women, and were crafted more to point out how much less than their ‘share’ men contribute to homekeeping. Naturally these conversations ignored the fact that as a rule, men make more money in the market place, and that it is therefore more efficient for the family economy for them to spend their efforts there.

The main takeaway points from most discussions about the labor a homekeeper performs are that it is mindless, boring, unrewarding, repetitive, unappreciated work, and is beneath most women’s educational levels. Funny, that is exactly how I would describe my time spent in my last “real job,” at a large non-profit organization as a program director, whereas the time I spend at home is spent at my own direction (except for child care, which is 24/7, period), is spent improving my life and my family’s lives, is calming and rewarding and allows me to be able to feed my family healthy, low-cost meals, while providing a comfortable home from which we all can grow, achieve and prosper.

Nothing, including the level of income I earned, was better about that frankly horrible job than being at home. And of course, after I paid the costs related to working, direct and indirect, I came away having lost to the House.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

April 16, 2013

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

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

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

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Monday, April 15, 2013

April 15, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

At the time women entered the workforce it was morphing from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, and the demand for workers who were educated (enough), and cheap – a mere sixty cents on the dollar for what a man would have to be paid - cannot be overstated. The marketplace drooled for these production units and courted them ably with vast amounts of carefully orchestrated propaganda. The temporary solution for families became part of the new permanent problem - overall wages in society for all earners began to fall (wages are determined the same way other prices are – by supply and demand) and women who had planned to temporarily shore up the family’s economies now found themselves trapped like lobsters in a one-way trap. Employers no longer needed men to do the heavy, dirty, hard, and sometimes dangerous work of manufacturing, so women who had high literacy rates, and who fit easily into ‘customer service’ positions were the perfect fit for the new mostly part-time jobs in the mushrooming service industry (which would never pay them or their husbands a living wage again).

Now, in the 21^st century, even the addition of a wife’s income to the family budget is not enough. In most families, it is no longer enough to have two income earners, as families must additionally go into debt in order to maintain a family lifestyle that was previously managed on one income, only five decades ago. As I researched the phenomenon of vanishing income, I came to realize that Americans had been duped. Not just women, but Americans across the board. In the last five decades real wages have fallen dramatically, social protections have decreased, wages are perennially stagnant, debt-drowned young college graduates cannot find work in their fields, and we have lost a staggering amount of wealth in the financial melt-down that few of us participated in constructing. We are in shockingly bad condition, and in many more ways than just economically.

There is virtually no part of American life that has not been dramatically and negatively altered by the flood of women entering the labor market since the original Diaspora from the home to paid employment beginning between the 1960’s and 1970’s. As the result – direct and indirect - of that rush to paid female employment our American culture in the early 21^st century has hit nadir by any number of measurable indicators. From our physical and mental health, to our economy, to even our over-all intelligence, we are worse off than we have been at any point in our country’s history, in large part because we have lost our homekeeper–wage earner partnerships. http://livingwage.mit.edu/

Sunday, April 14, 2013

April 14, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

As I researched the composition of the female work force and the dynamics that surrounded the female flight into the workforce, I came to realize that ‘choice’ had little to nothing to do with most female labor force participation, and that ‘need’ was the true driver of most women’s choice to work. Despite Hirshman’s harsh criticism of “choice feminism,” true “choicers” are an avis raris in the female work force, regardless of how relentlessly those few that do exist are propagandized in media as ordinary, everyday female workers (Google "working mom," and every image that will come up depicts a woman in a suit; the majority of the female workforce is employed in the service sector, and is more likely to wear a maid's uniform than a business suit. True choicers have as much in common with ordinary female workers as Bill Gates has in common with ordinary male workers.

As I grappled to refine my premise (still rooted in my belief that this country has flown completely off the rails since women entered the work force), I realized how wrongly I had viewed the landscape of female employment, and how unfair it was to target women for the sin of wishing for “more,” at their families’ expense, when actually they were in an epic struggle just to keep what they had.

I have come to realize that the shifting labor patterns of the 1970’s which forced most women into the labor market were in fact driven by greed and outsourcing - the true culprits in the “who dunnit” I was trying to solve. Greed, outsourcing and globalization are the direct cause of the near-death of private sector unions and also for the loss of the manufacturing base that had once supported hard working Americans (who were not college educated) with a decent living wage to raise a family.

In my research I have found that the real reason women had been sent out to work in the 70’s and 80’s was to recapture the loss of real wages in their husband’s paychecks, not for “liberation.” The working class women who were dragged from their homekeeping by economic necessity must have had a very dim regard for “liberation” based on hours labored away from home for low wages. They knew better than to believe the old chestnut Arbeit macht frei (sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, which proclaims that ‘work will set you free’), and were rightly suspicious of the women’s lib (read gender feminists) propaganda glorifying work.

Shrinking male wages combined with the brutal inflation that characterized the era, and household purchasing power contracted to the point where wives’ earnings became necessary to cover the necessities. Enter Women’s Liberation with its ‘all women work all the time’ rhetoric, essentially giving men permission to quit supporting their families at exactly the point when they no longer could do so, conveniently drowning out conversation about where the wages went.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

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/