Opt-Out? by Heather Boushey (0)

Posted 29 April, 2007 in Uncategorized

Linda Hirshman claims (”Off to Work She Should Go,” April 25, 2007) that a new Labor Dept. report contradicts my research showing that married mothers are not leaving the labor force more frequently than other women. However, the government’s report didn’t even investigate this topic. The tables in the report only present data on employment rates of married mothers, not non-mothers. Looking at the job rates of all workers is necessary to determine whether the decline is due to other factors. 

Employment rates are lower for all U.S. workers, so how can this problem be attributable to motherhood? Unlike prior economic recoveries, over five years after the recession ended, the share of both mothers and non-mothers (and men) at work remains below its pre-recession peak. The question isn’t why won’t women get to work, but why hasn’t this recovery— with the slowest job creation on record—created good jobs for millions of women? 

Heather Boushey is a Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Back to Work? by Ellen Bravo (0)

Posted 28 April, 2007 in Uncategorized

Paid sick days and paid family leave will help the lowest-paid women, but they’ll help many other women — and men — as well (”Off to Work She Should Go,” April 25). Half the workforce has no paid sick days. Most women lack paid disability benefits and few men have paid paternity leave. Caring for a new infant or a parent with a stroke is not a vacation, yet that’s the “paid time” most employees use for caregiving. Establishing minimum benefits also helps higher-paid workers by challenging the corporate culture that says committedworkers are those willing to meet, move or travel at a moment’s notice. 

California and now Washington state won paid leave not as a gift from women in powerful positions but by organized efforts at the grassroots. Women will benefit from changes in the tax laws. But especially they’ll gain by working together for changes in public and workplace policy. Of course, men need to share work in the home. More will do so if they’re not punished for it in the workplace. 

Ellen Bravo is former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, and author of “Taking on the Big Boys, or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business and the Nation.” 

Care Talk by Nancy Folbre (5)

Posted 17 April, 2007 in Uncategorized

A sweet time for family policy in the print media. Don’t miss Ruth Rosen’s cover article on “The Care Crisis” in The Nation of March 12, 2007 OR the special report entitled “The Mother Load” in The American Prospect of March 2007, with contributions by Heather Boushey and Janet Gornick, among others. Both magazines insist that creative feminist family policy ideas should move to front and center-left of the Democratic party agenda.

Ruth Rosen, you rock. Your political diagnosis helps explain my own feelings of malaise: “The problem is that many Democrats, along with prominent liberal men in the media, don’t view women’s lives as part of the common good. Consciously or unconsciously, they have dismissed women as an “interest group” and treated women’s struggle for equality as “identity policies rather than part of a common national project.”

The American Prospect articles, while less passionate (and less pissed off) go into richer detail. As Heather Boushey puts it “Values Begin at Home, But Who’s Home?” She links the struggle to balance work and family to a larger effort to ask “what’s the economy, for, anyway?” Ellen Bravo explains why we need to “redesign the national household” and celebrates the achievements of the Multi-States Working Families Consortium. Kathleen Gerson describes a younger generation trying to renegotiate gender roles in the middle of a pressure-cooker economy. Joan Williams deconstructs the media’s misrepresentation of famous women “opt-outs” who quit cool jobs, Scott Coltrane weighs in for progressive men…

Now, could someone get more specific about how best to package the many proposals being dangled here? Paid family leave and more public support for child care, yes, and obviously we need to build a broad coalition. But if we keep adding things like public housing and mass transit to the train, the engine won’t make it up the hill.

For any given package, what’s the total cost and who should pay? Progressives still don’t like to talk about the T word, but without tax reform, what can we do? I say, tax wealth to help kids. Or, in the language of economics, which doesn’t fit on bumper stickers, “tax financial wealth to invest in human capital.”