A Mother's Day Gift: Health Insurance and More...
Flowers and chocolates and cards are nice gifts for Mother's Day. But how about a gift that lasts, like health insurance, flexible work hours, paid family leave, quality child and elder care, and a living wage?
Moms need all of these things, and disporportionately suffer from their absence. As a gauge, I compared moms to all other employees using the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce, and the figures suggest this Mothers’ Day will not be a cause for celebration.
Although many mothers are covered by their husband’s health insurance, the bonds of matrimony are all that stands between many mothers and the ranks of the insuranced – only 77.5 percent of mothers hold jobs where the employer even offers health insurance, compared to 84 percent of other workers (and even the latter figure suggests many people are being left out). Mothers are around two percent less likely to report holding jobs with flexible hours, are three percent less likely to report having a job where they can take time off for a sick child without loss of pay, and are three percent more likely than other workers to report that it is difficult to take off time during the workday to care for a sick child (regardless of pay). Further, poll after poll finds the vast majority of Americans favoring a system of paid family leave yet, aside from California, no such system yet exists.
When it comes to the child care centers where many mothers must place their children, there are endemic problems of quality and affordability. The National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends staffing ratios of one caregiver for no more than four infants, four or five toddlers, or 10 preschool children. Yet, according to the National Women’s Law Center, only a handful of states mandate these standards, a majority of centers are of mediocre or low quality, and our children’s education, health and safety are suffering as a result. On the other side of the equation, the Clinton administration’s welfare-to-work approach left many poor, single mothers scrambling for affordable child care. The Bush administration followed up by freezing federal funds such that subsidies are available to cover only one out of every seven eligible children, and the latest budget proposes to cut off child care subsidies for an additional 650,000 children by 2010. On average, families with young children and earning less than $1,200 a month pay a whopping 37 percent of their income for child care.
Of course, the promise of welfare reform for mothers was that they would become economically self-sufficient through good old-fashioned work. But work no longer pays what it once did, and moms have been hit particularly hard. Back in 1968, the minimum wage could purchase the equivalent of $8.30 per hour in today’s money, hardly enough to purchase a new SUV or a 4,000 square foot home, but a living wage for a 40-hour week nonetheless. So how are mother’s faring now compared to then? Over 27 percent of working mothers today earn less than $8.30. And they indeed have it bad: just over 18 percent of all other workers experience such low wages.
Things are no better for our mothers who’s children have grown. According to a recent California study, women, most of whom are presumably mothers, comprised over two-thirds of nursing home residents, and the figures are likely similar elsewhere in the U.S. So how are we treating these moms? Not well; in fact the vast majority of these facilities are dangerous. A December, 2001, report on the appropriateness of minimum nursing staff ratios, commissioned by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaide Services, found over 90 percent of nursing homes in the U.S. were so shortstaffed that patients were endangered. Patients were often subject to emergency hospitalization for causes that were easily preventable –if only enough qualified staff had been hired. And if it were not for the efforts of one of the report’s authors, the late Susan Eaton of Harvard University, I would never have even discovered this finding because it was buried by the Bush administration (the results are in Table 2.5, and not mentioned in the Executive Summary).
Moms in the U.S. will surely appreciate flowers, chocolates and cards, but our ill treatment of mothers speaks volumes about the true value we as a society place on motherhood. We can and should do better.
Recently, a group of academic activists came together in the Take Care Net, and wrote a Work and Family Bill of Rights. Like the original, the document is short, covering the rights that all Americans should have to paid family, medical and personal leave, negotiated flexibility over work hours and place, quality, affordable child and elder care, a living wage, and health insurance coverage. We currently have 40 organizations and over 300 individual signatories and, with sponsorship from the Progressive Caucus and the Democratic Women's WOrking Group in Congress, and released the Bill of Rights last Friday – just in time for Mothers’ Day. If you share our concerns with the nation’s shoddy treatment of mothers and many other Americans, please sign on and let your voice be heard.
It is perhaps somewhat unlikely that these rights will be granted by the Bush administration before Mothers’ Day of 2007. However, short of buying mom an airline ticket to Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Japan, or a host of other countries where most of these rights are already respected, signing on to the Work and Family Bill of Rights is at least a step in the right direction. We owe it to today’s moms, and to the mothers of future generations.
Robert Drago is Professor of Labor Studies and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, moderates the Workfam newsgroup, and is co-chair of the Take Care Net steering committee.
