The Future of Caretaking

ONE OF THE CASUALTIES OF UNFETTERED capitalism is caretaking. The needs of capital take precedence over the needs of children, the aged, and the disabled for sensitive and reliable care.

Conservatives say the family is crumbling and in crisis; feminists say the crisis is in the lack of caretaking provisions for working parents and lack of cash support for unemployed parents. Conservatives want a return to the male breadwinner type of family where men make the living and women stay home to care for their children. Irving Kristol believes that this would solve problems such as illegitimacy and male irresponsibility.¹ Francis Fukayama hopes that women will rediscover their biologically imprinted nurturing capacities and realize that taking a few years off work to stay with young children is best for their families. When this happens, he says, "day care will become the lot of the children of ‘working class or welfare mothers' only."²

Conservatives call for a moral regeneration to restore the nuclear family and the breadwinner father who earns the "family wage," yet they favor economic policies such as deregulation, weakened unions, and lowered wages which, along with rising expectations, create the need for both parents to work. Feminists, on the other hand, call for "family-friendly" state and employment policies that will make it possible for parents to combine work and child care without sacrificing their careers or neglecting their children, their aged parents, or disabled family members, and without requiring that the caregivers be female.

THE ONLY TIME IN THE HISTORY of the United States when men were expected to do caretaking was during colonial times when children were considered to be the property of their fathers, who had final say in what happened to children. The family, not the individual, was the building block of society and all family members worked to maintain the family as a self-sufficient economic unit. Fathers were in contact with even very young children all day and routinely performed domestic tasks. Mothers had exclusive care of infants because of the requirements of breast-feeding, but after that, power passed to the men. Male children were indentured to tradesmen for apprenticeships, and those children lived with the men who supervised their work.

With industrialization, there was less need for children to earn their keep. The family became less the center of the economic world and, at least for the middle and upper classes, women became more dependent on husbands' ability to earn cash. Mothers rather than fathers were entrusted with the moral lives of children, and were expected to devote themselves to their children.³

Since colonial times, women have done most of the caregiving, both paid and unpaid. They care for their own children and they care for other people's children. They are the primary caretakers of aged and disabled relatives, both their own and their husband's. And they are the primary caretakers of other people's aged and disabled relatives. Ninety-three percent of caregivers in long-term care facilities for the aged are women.

Almost one-quarter of American households provide home-based care to friends or relatives age 50 or older.⁴ Nearly three-quarters of these caretakers are women. They provide an average of 50 percent more hours per week of informal care than men.

The belief that women should be primary caregivers is deeply imbedded in custom and in people's psyches. The main thrust of the women's movement was to achieve equality in the work place, as well as to exercise choice in whether to have children. There was less success in achieving equality in caretaking and homemaking.

One of the reasons that mothers stay home to care for the children while fathers work outside the home is that men generally make more money than women, so it often makes economic sense for the woman to stay home. But has equal pay led to equal caretaking? Do highly paid dual-career couples share the caretaking and housework equally? The answer is "no," but a look at studies from the 1970s to the present shows gradual but slow progress in that direction. Rosanna Hertz compared her 1981 study⁵ of twenty-one dual career couples with one done over a decade before hers,⁶ which showed markedly less equality in terms of household chores, marital decision making, and career evaluation. Julia Wrigley's 1994 study of child care practices of 79 dual-career couples⁷ found more husbands were sharing in caretaking and housework, and a few were even taking the primary caretaking responsibility for children.

In her study of twelve dual-career couples between 1980 and 1988, Arlie Hochschild described women's caretaking work as "the second shift."⁸ She concluded that women worked roughly fifteen hours longer each week than men. "Over a year, they worked an extra month of twenty- four-hour days."⁹

Most of the women in Hochschild's study wanted more equality between men and women in housework and child care. Most of the men resisted this. This created tension in many of the marriages. (Hochschild points out that the rise in women's employment paralleled the rise in the divorce rate.) The second shift was not just women's problem. Women felt resentment when their husbands did not share in the work and sometimes expressed their frustration and rage by losing interest in sex and becoming overly absorbed with the children. The men had to steel themselves against their wives' resentment.

The women in this study talked more than the men did about being overtired, sick, and "emotionally drained." They talked about how much sleep they could "get by on." There was a speed-up in both work and family life. Children complained, "Mother is always rushing us."¹⁰ Hochschild's review of the research led her to conclude that working mothers have higher self-esteem and get less depressed than housewives, but compared to their husbands, they are more tired and get sick more often. More women than men questioned how good they were as parents. Two 1985 surveys, each of about a thousand women and men, found working mothers were more likely than any other group to be anxious.¹¹

A recent University of Maryland study found that among dual-career couples, the women did about 6 more hours of chores than men. In cohabiting couples, there was a more equal sharing, even though women still did quite a bit more. In fact, cohabiting couples were at greater risk of breaking up if they fell into traditional patterns and deviated from egalitarianism.¹²

Couples who cohabit rather than marry are slightly more egalitarian in their domestic arrangements than are married couples.¹³ Cohabitation doesn't involve the "good wife" image, so women aren't expected to carry most of the housework load. "Marriage still has a very powerful effect on people, even if they don't realize it," said Melissa Milkie, a University of Maryland sociologist. "When you marry, you get a list of expectations about the good wife and the good husband. When you cohabit, you're just sharing a household."¹⁴

One study of more than 7,000 married and cohabiting people found that women in dual- income married households had more strife in their relationship than cohabiting working couples. Married women took on roughly 71 percent of the total housework burden and generally had to effectively "buy" their way out of housework by earning more. Unmarried women who lived with men, however, took on slightly less housework -- 67 percent of the burden -- and did not have to earn more to shed chores.¹⁵ Couples who married after living together divided chores somewhat more equally than married couples who never lived together.

In her classic feminist book The Mermaid and the Minotaur,¹⁶ Dorothy Dinnerstein argues that the arrangement of giving the mother primary responsibility for child care has led to what she describes as our "human malaise." She stated that people's greed and rapacity toward each other and toward nature can be traced to "the early mother's apparent omnipotence . . . her ambivalent role as ultimate source of good and evil."¹⁷ The exploitation of women, which is linked to the acceptability of exploitation in general,

is rooted in our attitudes toward very early parental figures, and will go on until these figures are male as well as female. Only when this happens will society be forced to find ways to help its members handle the impulses of greed and rapacity that now make man "wolf to the man." It is at this point that the human projects of brotherhood, of peace with nature, and of sexual liberty interpenetrate.¹⁸ (Italics in the original.)

Dinnerstein argues that our ambivalent attitudes toward the body and pleasures of the flesh are caused by this early ambivalence toward the mother. We debase the flesh "because woman is available for the dirty-goddess role, and man can thus be relatively exempt . . . from the baseness that she carries."¹⁹ Women rein in their sexual nature because of this ambivalence, and men cannot express healthy sexuality because they split off lust from tenderness. When men are as directly involved as females "in the intensely carnal lives of infants and small children, the reality of the male body as a source of new creatures is bound to become substantial for us at an earlier age than it does now, and to remain emotionally more salient forever after."²⁰ Men and women must join as equal collaborators in order to overcome the split between male and female sensibility.

"This is a necessity that mother-raised men find it painfully hard to accept, and that mother-raised women find it intolerably bruising to urge upon them."²¹

The economist Marilyn Waring argues that we need to rethink basic economic concepts such as gross domestic product in ways that take community well-being into account. The current practice of considering activities valuable only if they are a market commodity or a market service devalues the unpaid work of women. Waring says that when governments shed their responsibility for services, it is women who have to take over those services, without pay.

When she was a member of the New Zealand Parliament, Waring became a proponent for determining economic policy based on time and use rather than on money. Economists consider women to be unemployed as unpaid workers. However, if the boundaries of what is considered production were extended to include unpaid household work, all people engaged in those activities would be considered self-employed. She said:

If unpaid labor were considered based on the equivalent pay scale of people who do that work for pay, unpaid household work would constitute the single largest service and production sector…. This work includes child-care and senior care. Expenses for these services are paid out of the workers' own pockets with no tax deductions and no incentives.²²

Waring helped to pressure the government of New Zealand to implement a national Time Use Survey in 1998. The survey was designed to "Show up which sex gets the menial, boring, low status and unpaid invisible work which in turn highlights oppression and subordination."²³

Rich people often hire nannies to look after their children.* Some of these nannies are from a similar social class and race as the employer, but most of them are not. Nannies who come from middle class homes can make a good salary. A UMass student tells me that she earned over $40,000 a year, plus benefits, as a nanny for a rich couple. Most nannies, however, are not so lucky. Many are poor women with children of their own. Many are of a different ethnicity than their employers. Many are immigrants, some of them undocumented.

Some high-level political figures have made the news because they hired undocumented immigrants. Perhaps the most publicized case occurred in January 1993 when incoming President Bill Clinton nominated Zoë Baird for attorney general. Baird, a highly successful corporate lawyer, and her husband, a Yale law professor, had hired an undocumented Peruvian couple to look after their three-year-old son. When they hired them they were aware that the couple were in the country illegally and they did not pay required taxes on them. After being grilled for days by senators, Baird became the first Cabinet nominee to withdraw in 120 years.²⁴

After the Baird incident, the public became interested in the women who cared for the children of rich dual-career couples, and the media began to cover the story. The dominant theme of the story was exploitation. A Wall Street Journal reporter wrote, "There is a dirty little secret in middle- and upper-middle-class America: Nannies are among the most exploited workers in the country."²⁵ Two young women recently published a fictionalized account of their experiences as nannies to rich New York City couples,²⁶ which featured narcissistic, materialistic parents who thoughtlessly, and sometimes cruelly, exploited their nannies and ignored their children.

Some employers rely on external pressures, such as labor market competition or worker vulnerability, to exert control over a worker's performance.²⁷ The most egregious form of this is to use an undocumented worker's illegal immigrant status to control her, which happens fairly often. One example of this is a woman from Uganda who had been imprisoned and beaten by military police in Uganda and who escaped by coming to the U.S. She ended up as a virtual slave in the home of a woman who lived in a Boston suburb, caring for the woman, her three children and four boarders, and constantly being yelled at by her employer. She never received any money for her work. She never left the house and one day, after living there for three months, she discovered her passport was missing. After five months, she left with the four boarders and is now being helped by a church to apply for asylum. She said, "I felt trapped, but I had to take it because I had no place to go."²⁸

The rich people whom Hertz studied did not want to place their children in franchise day care centers because they understood business practices and knew that the day care center would probably make a profit at the expense of their children. They would not consider public day care because they associated that with the stigma of poverty and welfare. Some would not put their children in day care because of worries inspired by highly publicized and controversial cases of alleged sexual abuse by day care workers. If their children went to a day care center at all, it was to a high status one where their children would get a "leg up" on admission to high status elementary and high schools and an Ivy League college.

And now, as Robert Kuttner puts it, "the Wall Street scandals have reached all the way into the nursery schools."²⁹ A stock analyst at Citicorp, Jack Grubman, apparently upgraded his rating of sagging AT&T stock to do his boss a favor, so that the boss, Citicorp chairman Sandy Weill, would use his influence to help Grubman get his twins into a prestigious nursery school. (AT&T's chairman served on Citicorp's board, and was a Citicorp client.) The nursery school, the 92^nd street Y in Manhattan, "has a terrific record at graduating its tots into elite private grammar schools, which in turn feed prestigious prep schools and then, of course, the Ivy League. But what about the rest of America?"³⁰

The larger story, Kuttner says, "is the absence of any decent pre-school or after-school places for millions of working Americans who aren't buddies of the chairman of Citicorp."³¹ The large scale influx of working women into paid labor has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in day care facilities or help with paying for day care. Welfare reform has pushed millions of low-income women out of the home into waged jobs, but neither the federal government nor the states have provided enough day care for these women. Massachusetts, one of the better states in providing day care, has 18,000 children on a waiting list for day care subsidies. The shortage of day care is so severe that four child-care providers in Boston were exempted from the city's 1998 living-wage ordinance, the first such exemption ever. Even the low $10.54 an hour mandated by the law is far more than day care teachers typically make. Child care workers frequently earn wages only slightly above minimum wage. The child care providers said that they would have to cut spaces in programs for children of low-income families if they were not granted an exemption from the law.³²

The lack of access to day care and after-school care has led to neglect of many children while mothers work, and sometimes to horror stories. A woman in Atlanta, Nakia Burgess, appeared in an Atlanta court on October 3, 2002, charged with murder. Her 3-year-old daughter, Ashante, died after being left in Burgess's sweltering car. Her attorney said Burgess left Ashante in the car because she couldn't find affordable day care.³³ In his movie Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore tells the story of a six year old child who shot and killed another six year old child at school. The child's mother, a welfare recipient, had been forced into a workfare program. She got up at 6:00 a.m. to take the workfare bus, which drove her 40 miles to her work. She left her son in the care of her brother, at whose home the child discovered a gun and took it to school. Moore interviewed several officials in the area who are indignant at the policy which forces a mother to be in a workfare program instead of caring for her son.

There is a global movement of caregivers from poor countries to industrialized countries. Large numbers of women from Ecuador go to Spain to care for children. In Italy, there is a large influx of women carers (called "badanti") from Eastern European countries such as Moldavia, Rumania, and the Ukraine. They are middle aged and leave their families behind. A priest is often the broker for them. They, along with couples living in as domestic servants from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, etc., got special treatment in recent immigration legislation, compared with other workers such as factory and building workers. However, as usual, this legislation purported to legalize their position with the employers paying the taxes, while in fact the employers often took it out of the immigrants' pay packet.³⁴

Historically, large numbers of women of color have gone into domestic work, including African-Americans in the North or South, Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, or Japanese- and Chinese-Americans on the Pacific coast. Very few African- American women now enter domestic work; most of those who do it are older women. One agency director who hires workers said, "I once asked a friend of mine who's black and she said that her mother did that already. American black people have been slaves and domestics for years. And after they scrub somebody's floor, they get up saying ‘My child will never do this.'"³⁵

Parents who employ caregivers seldom admit to racial prejudice, but owners of domestic employment agencies say that many parents refuse to accept black workers. If they do accept them, they expect to pay them less than white workers.³⁶ Since few African-Americans apply for domestic work, this prejudice mainly affects Caribbean women. Different parents have different prejudices. One mother said she would accept Salvadoran women, but not Guatemalans. These prejudices about class and race create tensions in the relationships between employer and employee, and instill elitist attitudes in the children who are cared for. Even employers with egalitarian ideologies worry that their own status as personal "dictators" cannot help influencing their children. Even an employer's egalitarian attitude cannot keep the children from growing more distant from the caregiver as they grow older. One Mexican caregiver said that the boy she looked after included her in the pictures of his family that he drew in kindergarten, but he stopped doing this when he went to first grade. She said, "The closeness he felt for me has grown cold. He sees me as an employee."³⁷ The child's distance led the caretaker to withdraw in turn, and to regard him as just another employer. Children whose parents do not enforce respect toward the caregiver develop even more callous attitudes. As children get older, they come to see caregivers as their personal servants and can become quite tyrannical toward them.³⁸

Caregivers work in conditions where they have no peer companionship. They are often given little or no autonomy by their employers, and work in "aching isolation and boredom."³⁹ These harsh working conditions can lead to depression. A substantial minority of the caregivers whom Julia Wrigley interviewed seemed sad.⁴⁰

Media discussions about the "supermom" who has it all -- a highly paid and satisfying career and well cared for children -- are almost always talking about white and at least middle class women. In reality, that supermom is having trouble juggling career and children. But the vast majority of working women cannot afford to pay for a nanny. Most of the maids and baby-sitters for the supermoms never advance to a well paid job. Forty-six percent of all working women earn less than $10,000 a year.⁴¹

MOST CORPORATIONS HAVE NOT CHANGED their expectations or structures to accommodate employees' caretaking responsibilities. "Thus, career women postpone childbearing until they have been promoted to higher ranks in their firms."⁴² Furthermore, the corporations prevent women from taking collective action against policies that impede their progress "by making individual deals and special arrangements with the few women who are seen as indispensable to the organization."⁴³ In order to advance in highly paid careers at large corporations, women often work 60 and 70 hours a week. They frequently complain of ulcers, fatigue, and stress.⁴⁴

It is a class system, with gender expectations, that forces the trade-off of a woman working or hiring another woman. After all, the child care could be done instead by stay-at-home husbands. As the system stands now, however, women in highly paid careers have to hire help in order to be freed to advance in their careers. Thus, progress for some women is bought at the expense of equal progress for other women. "Dual career couples have an indirect but material interest in maintaining an unstable, low-wage pool of labor."⁴⁵ There is a small boom in the employment market for unskilled labor due to the increasing numbers of career women.

When most workers take time off from work because of caretaking responsibilities, they feel the pinch. Three-quarters of caregivers for older people work full or part-time, and half of those who work are making some sort of work-related adjustment. The most frequent adjustment is to go to work late, leave early, or take time off from work. Other adjustments include: taking a leave of absence, dropping back to part-time or taking a less demanding job; losing job benefits; turning down a promotion, choosing early retirement, or giving up work entirely.⁴⁶

A substantial number of adults who provide care to a parent, age 65 or older, report symptoms of depression. Two out of three informal caregivers are in ill health. Routine caregiver tasks can cause acute and chronic physical strain, particularly when caregivers lack appropriate training. Although most caregiving is short-term, prolonged responsibilities take a toll on the emotional and physical health of caregivers. Caregivers worry about not having enough time to spend with their spouse, partner, or children, or by themselves.⁴⁷

Caregivers for older people in the United States spend an average of $171 a month on out-of-pocket expenses -- or approximately $1.5 billion nation-wide per month -- for groceries, medications, home modifications, and the like, for their family member. "This is the equivalent of an IRA each year for many women who may not have a pension through their workplace."⁴⁸ A MetLife study estimated that the cost to "intense" caregivers over the course of their work lives was nearly $600,000 in lost pensions, wage and Social Security.⁴⁹ "As a result of all this, women are more likely than men to face poverty in retirement: 12 percent vs. 7 percent. As the number of women who provide informal caregiving increases, the number of poor older women will inevitably increase."⁵⁰

The U.S. Department of Commerce estimated the value of housework in the U.S. at $1.5 trillion a year. And it is not only caretakers who lose money; corporations lose about $11 billion a year because of absenteeism, turnover, and lost productivity among full time employees who care for elderly people.⁵¹ On an international level, the UN Human Development Report of 1995 estimated the value of women's unwaged work worldwide at U.S. $11 trillion.⁵²

THE 1996 FEDERAL WELFARE REFORM ACT required most welfare recipients to do waged work or workfare and set a 5 year lifetime limit on receipt of welfare.** Some feminists opposed the law, including the leadership of NOW, but most feminists either did not oppose it or actively supported it. The women's movement was organized mainly by middle class women who were trying to enter the job market on an equal footing with men, and many of them assumed that it was good for welfare mothers to get into the job market. They did not look closely at what this involves for poor single mothers and did not take the trouble to ask welfare recipients what they themselves wanted. Most welfare mothers that I know want the same thing for themselves that middle class women want -- a college degree that will lead to a fulfilling career that pays well enough to support a family, and high quality day care for their children. But most welfare mothers can't afford to go to college and don't have careers -- they have jobs that don't pay enough to support a family. The TANF program won't allow them to attend more than one year of higher education, and that has to be vocational training.

Conservatives who talk about family values want middle class mothers to stay home and care for their children, but they don't apply those same family values to poor women. They do not view this as a contradiction because affluent women are not supported by the state, and they believe that the state is justified in requiring welfare recipients to do waged work, particularly since so many middle class women have entered the labor market and women now make up about half of the waged labor force. The percentage of mothers working full time rose from 40 percent in the early 1960s to 54 percent in the early 1990s, while the percentage of those who worked part time increased from 5 percent to 12 percent.⁵³ Those mothers who are working say, "I have to work. Why can't welfare mothers work too?"

Even though a majority of mothers are now in the work force, several polls have found that most Americans believe that women with children -- especially young children -- should stay home and rear them.⁵⁴ But the picture is different when it comes to welfare recipients. Although most Americans believe that welfare recipients should work, they also believe that welfare reform cannot be deemed a success if mothers are still in poverty, and they believe that women should be provided with the supports that enable them to work.

Polls show that the vast majority of Americans support government assistance for the poor and believe that the government has a responsibility to guarantee every citizen food to eat and a place to sleep. A recent poll showed that 92.7 percent of voters considered fighting hunger "an important issue."⁵⁵ The answers that pollsters get depend upon the questions they ask. When welfare reform is measured only in terms of making people less "dependent" and more "self-sufficient," then getting large numbers of people off the rolls looks like a success to people, regardless of how or why they left the rolls or what happens to them afterwards.⁵⁶ Government officials continue to trumpet this success and newspapers faithfully quote them, so most Americans do not know that large numbers of people who have left the rolls do not have food to eat or a place to sleep.

The present TANF law requires 30 hours of work a week from single mothers. President Bush has proposed extending that to 40 hours a week, and requiring a still larger percentage of recipients to work. However, he has not proposed additional funding for day care for the children of those mothers who work. The TANF bill was supposed to be reauthorized by October 1, 2002. However, Congress allowed the present bill to remain in force until March 31, 2003 and will consider reauthorization next year.

The House has approved a bill that includes the President's proposal. The proposals of the Senate Finance Committee were only marginally better. There is no reason to hope for a more humane bill from the new Republican controlled Congress. However, some big city mayors and state governors are concerned about the fact that the people left on the welfare rolls are harder to place in jobs. New York City officials report that more than half of their public assistance cases involve individuals who are capable of only limited work or no work at all because of addiction, depression and other disabilities, domestic violence, and AIDS.⁵⁷ They want the Congress and the President to accept rehabilitation as a work activity, but doubt that this will happen. The so-called "compassionate conservatives" are not that compassionate.

The TANF bill allowed states to require work of mothers of infants, and many states did this. Massachusetts got a waiver from federal requirements and does not force mothers to go to work until their children are school age, but both the governor and the legislator are trying to reduce the age.

The current feminist split over work and caretaking in welfare echoes the original feminist split about the nature of the original ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) program in 1935. Dorothy Roberts says that besides its misguided faith in the family wage, the welfare movement, initiated by the Progressive Party, "was flawed by the elitism of the privileged, white activist network that led it. As a result, a defining aspect of its welfare vision was the social control of poor immigrant families and the neglect of Black women."⁵⁸ The Progressives mistakenly believed that immigrant women made up a disproportionate share of deserted wives and illegitimate mothers. They used welfare programs to supervise and discipline recipients to conform to "American" family standards. Aid generally was conditioned on compliance with "suitable home" provisions and often administered by juvenile court judges who made punitive judgments. Black single mothers, on the other hand, were simply excluded, in keeping with the Progressives' support of racial segregation.

The virtual exclusion of Black women from welfare in the beginning resulted in the loss of valuable insights from the Black women's movement. Black women activists of the era also relied on motherhood as a political platform, but since they had not been able to rely on the male wage, they "eschewed the viability of the family wage and women's economic dependence on men. Instead, they accepted married women's employment as a necessity, advocating assistance for working mothers."⁵⁹ Black women's organizations also stressed the value of mothers' work in the home.

The New Deal excluded Blacks from social insurance by excluding agricultural workers and domestic servants, "in a deliberate effort to maintain a Black menial labor caste in the South. Whites feared that Social Security would make both recipients and those freed from the burden of supporting dependents less willing to accept low wages."⁶⁰

The War on Poverty gave rise to the National Welfare Rights Organization, a grassroots movement composed of welfare mothers and advocates. This movement secured entitlements to benefits, raised benefit levels, and increased accessibility to the program. As a result, by 1967 the welfare caseload that had once been eighty-six percent white had become forty-six percent nonwhite. However, it was a Pyrrhic victory because Blacks got themselves included in a stigmatized, means-tested program rather than the universal, non-stigmatized Social Security. "As AFDC became increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile, it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels."⁶¹

Over three million children and their parents receive benefits from Social Security because a working parent has died, retired, or is disabled. A disproportionate number of these are white because the areas that many black people worked in -- agriculture and domestic work --were not covered, or they did not have enough quarters of work to qualify them for Social Security. The AFDC program was always vulnerable because it was means tested. Conservatives would like to make Social Security a means tested program, as a way to cut back on the program. We need to be alert for that strategy and fight against it.

Since the welfare reform of 1996, whites have been leaving the rolls at a faster rate than Blacks, partly because Blacks are discriminated against in the job market, and partly because whites have had better educational advantages. Women of color now make up a majority of the welfare caseload, and this has subjected the program to even more racism.

President George W. Bush has proposed spending $300 million a year to encourage TANF recipients to marry, on the assumption that marriage will provide them with enough income to get off the welfare rolls, and will in addition be good for their moral character. His proposal reflects the "male breadwinner" model on which welfare was originally predicated, yet his proposal to require 40 hours a week work from welfare recipients violates that model.

WELFARE OFFICIALS SOMETIMES TELL recipients that they could get a job taking care of other people's children. Recipients often answer, "Why can't we care for our own children?" When people tell welfare mothers that waged work is good for them because it presumably leads to "self-sufficiency," eliminates "dependence," and provides a good role model for the children, I am reminded of Albert Camus' statement:

The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. It serves the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by saying to them, "If you want the welfare of the people, ask them what they want and what they don't want."⁶²

Waged work is good for mothers only if it is preferable to the alternatives. Many women in Stalinist countries would have preferred to stay home rather than work long hours in factories. Stalinist countries, which wanted women in the work force, glorified women workers while minimizing the importance of their child caring tasks. Hungary, for example, claimed to be liberating women by giving them equal status to men. Yet they not only expected full-time work of women; they also expected women to do all the caretaking work.⁶³ Women now had the right to engage in productive work, "but they must not make the mistake of losing themselves in the muscular, productionist, heroic (male) proletariat: to be a woman is to nurture children (and do housework)."⁶⁴ One of the reasons for the violent rejection of the Hungarian regime in 1956, in addition to material hardship and injustice, was resentment about the treatment of women and the demand to "give the mother back to the family."⁶⁵

Many women working in the sweat shops of Sri Lanka would prefer to have a generous dowry to buy a good marriage. Sri Lanka is one of the many Third World societies that adopted economic liberalization policies in the mid- to late-twentieth century. This has led to the global feminization of labor where factories have employed primarily female work forces. Sri Lanka set up free trade zones and hired mostly unmarried women migrants from villages. The free trade zone got the reputation of being a "city of easy women or easy virtue."⁶⁶

Women, particularly village women, are considered the mothers of the nation and the locus of tradition and culture. Politicians who opposed the policy of establishing two hundred export-oriented factories throughout the country tried to discredit the garment factories by claiming that "our innocent girls are sewing underwear for white women."⁶⁷ This claim had potent symbolic significance because most Sri Lankans consider underwear both sexual and dirty. White woman are considered sexually immoral in Sri Lanka.

The work itself is exhausting. Many women suffer physical pain such as weight loss, back pain, headaches and dizziness, respiratory problems from inhaling cotton dust, and other ailments. Factories are often stifling hot, especially during the warmer seasons, and women often complain of feeling faint, and sometimes faint. Mental pain is caused by the lack of social respect garment workers receive and the crude manner in which some managers treat workers. Many women agree to marriage matches they normally would refuse so they can quit and receive the state benefits women are entitled to if they stop working in order to marry. Some women probably marry men who hit and scold them.⁶⁸ (This is an example of how government policy can force women into abusive marriages. The regressive welfare policies of the U.S. government have also forced women who have no other economic alternative into abusive marriages.)

In Sri Lanka, women are expected to bring a dowry to their marriage. A large dowry can lead to a good marriage. Women sometimes choose garment factory jobs over alternatives because they need the money for their dowries. However, the very fact of working in a garment factory may prevent their making a good marriage because of the stigma of factory work. Sri Lanka newspaper marriage proposals sometimes disqualify garment workers with the phrase "no garment girls."

Jane Lewis points out that "even if good-quality, affordable child care were to be provided overnight, it is not clear that all women would want to work full-time."⁶⁹ A British Labor Force Survey found that ninety percent of women with children who work part-time do not want full- time work. This choice may of course be influenced by the lack of good child care provision relative to that of most other European countries. The Netherlands recently- initiated policy of treating single mothers as workers rather than as mothers failed at the local level because "neither social workers charged with its implementation nor the mothers themselves believed that they should be pushed into the labor market."⁷⁰

Some feminists believe that women who choose to stay home to care for their children rather than to build a career for themselves have not reached an optimal level of feminist consciousness. Ann Orloff, a professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, believes that the ideal goal for a welfare state is to make it possible for women to form autonomous households without having to marry or maintain other family relationships.⁷¹ Yet she believes that it is not a bad thing to require work of welfare recipients.⁷² Lucie White, Professor of Law at Harvard University, believes that a work-based safety net is preferable to cash grants to mothers because

Even low-wage work, has the potential to enhance a single mother's feelings of self-esteem, competency, and social connection. It can give her a bulwark of social and institutional support against the risk of intimate violence. It can provide positive role models for her children.⁷³

White does not believe that universal child care should be an entitlement, but should be provided by a mix of community groups and government facilities and subsidies. She does not like the "old, rigidly rights-based notion."⁷⁴ White's dislike of entitlements is similar to the conservative efforts to end entitlements and to end people's expectations of entitlements. David Stockman, President Reagan's budget director, said, "There are no entitlements, period!" White also advocates a means- tested income support program, as a back-up to a work program.

In defense of her support for forced work for welfare recipients, White calls up the memory of Johnnie Tillmon, an African-American woman who was one of the grassroots leaders of the National Welfare Rights Organization. She had always worked at low wage jobs since she was a child. Tillmon and the other welfare mothers in the NWRO wanted a welfare system that would allow them to be workers and mothers at the same time. "They wanted decent working conditions and decent pay, and they wanted some extra help when they got sick or could not find a good job or needed some time off of work to take care of their children."⁷⁵

White does not mention that in addition to the above demands, Johnnie Tillmon and her colleagues in the NWRO also wanted a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). The GAI they want would be universal, not means-tested. Johnnie Tillmon and her NWRO colleagues knew that means-tested programs almost always carry stigma since they do not have the political support of the middle class. Lucie White, on the other hand, calls for an income support program that is means tested.⁷⁶

Barbara Bergmann and Heidi Hartmann, Co-chairs of the Economists' Policy Group for Women's Issues, advocated a welfare program that encouraged job- holding for mothers who received AFDC.⁷⁷ They argued that mothers could support their families, even with a minimum-wage job, if they had health care, child care, Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and housing assistance. For unemployed parents, they proposed a fallback package , consisting mostly of vouchers for necessities. I argued against their proposal,⁷⁸ pointing out that the majority of welfare recipients would be consigned to low-wage jobs because of their low level of education and job skills, and the supports that Bergmann and Hartmann called for are not nearly enough to bring their families out of poverty. Child care, housing subsidies, food stamps, and medical care were never adequate to the need and they have been cut back since the 1980s. Further, I argued that their call for vouchers as a fallback program revealed their distrust of the poor. I said,

Since welfare began, there have always been policy-makers who believed that the poor couldn't be trusted to spend their own money and needed supervision. In fact, the vast majority of the poor are just as capable of spending their money wisely as are the vast majority of the affluent. The poor correctly perceive vouchers as an insult.⁷⁹

Bergmann and Hartmann later retracted their proposal for vouchers, admitting that it was not a good idea. But they still held to their belief that most welfare recipients should be forced to get into the job market. I believe, on the other hand, that mothers should be given opportunities for the education and training that would enable them to get a job that will support their families and they should be helped to enter the job market if they so choose, but they should not be forced to do so. Because employment is unpredictable and caretaking needs are various, a one-size-fits-all work policy should not be imposed.

Even before work became an enforced requirement, welfare recipients always did waged work, entering the labor market when they could find a job and arrange child care and leaving when they lost the job, got sick, or had child care responsibilities. Before the 1996 welfare reform, 56 percent of recipients left the rolls within a year, and only 18 percent stayed on continuously for more than five years.⁸⁰ Many welfare recipients cannot work because of disabilities, the need to care for a disabled child, or the need to recover from domestic violence. It is possible that the same proportion of welfare mothers are working since TANF as worked before. Schram and Soss speculate that the decline in welfare rolls since TANF may be due to fewer people entering the rolls because of stricter eligibility rules, harsher treatment of applicants, and increased stigma against even applying for help. In addition, legal immigrants were removed from the rolls.⁸¹

Those feminists who support a policy of expanded cash grants to mothers, sufficient to lift them out of poverty, define caregiving as work which should be compensated just as all other work is compensated. A group of feminists called the Women's Committee of One Hundred has called for a caregivers' income. Gwendolyn Mink gives the following rationale for this:

Far from a sign of dependence on government, a caregivers' income would provide mothers with economic means in their own right. This would promote equality in father-mother relations both because it would unmask the economic value of mothers' side of the sexual division of labor and because it would enable mothers to exit unhappy, subordinating, or violent relations with the fathers of their children. It also would nurture equality among citizens by establishing that it is not only market work that should earn a living wage but also the caring work upon which the market depends for workers. In turn, a caregivers' income would promote equality among women -- between middle-class married caregivers who enjoy social and political support when they choose to work in the home raising children and poor unmarried caregivers whom welfare policy now compels to choose wages over children.⁸²

Mink helped her mother, Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii (now deceased), to craft a bill that would improve the TANF program enormously when it was reauthorized. Welfare activists lobbied for the Mink bill in Congress, but it was far too progressive a bill to get majority support in that body.

NEITHER THE BUSINESS WORLD NOR THE government makes it easy for people to juggle work and caretaking. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), enacted in 1993, allows only 12 weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period for the birth and care of a new child (birth, adoption, or foster care) or for an immediate family member with a serious health condition, or to take medical leave. It applies to public agencies and to private sector employees in firms that employ 50 or more employees. The Bush Administration opposes an amendment to FMLA that would allow parents to attend school conferences or doctor's appointments.⁸³

The Bush Administration also wants to repeal a regulation that lets states provide unemployment pay to workers who take unpaid time off to care for a newborn child. Labor Department officials propose to repeal the Birth and Adoption Unemployment Rule in order to protect states' unemployment insurance trust funds for laid-off workers, even though no state has chosen to pay for leave with those funds.⁸⁴

California is the first and so far the only state in the country to pass a Paid Family Leave Act. Beginning July 1, 2004, California workers will receive up to 6 weeks of paid leave per year to care for a new child (birth, adoption, or foster care) or seriously ill family member (parent, child, spouse, or domestic partner). The benefit will replace up to 55 percent of wages, up to a maximum of $728 a week in 2004.⁸⁵

Twenty-six states offer tax credits to corporations to support on-site day care or child-care subsidies, but only a small number of U.S. companies cashed in these credits, largely because they already had so many tax write-offs that they didn't need the perk. The National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., says the tax credits should go directly to working parents, not to corporations who don't seem to need them.⁸⁶

Some large corporations have on-site child care centers, but most do not. Some company centers are available to employees only in emergencies as when a child is sick or when schools are closed. This is the policy of day care centers run by Citigroup, the company that pledged a million dollars to the 92^nd Street Y in exchange for helping Jack Grubman get his twins into the school. Commenting on the policy of emergency-only day care, Rebecca Mead says:

Backup child care is a fast-growing segment of the thirty-billion-dollar child care industry, which is no surprise, since it is the kind of parent-friendly policy a company can introduce without having to contemplate anything quite so parent-friendly as full-time child care.⁸⁷

A few large corporations have initiated some benefits for employees who care for aged relatives. About one-fifth of companies in the U.S. provide telephone resources and referral services on care for the elderly, up from 15 percent in 1998. Some companies have gone beyond this to offer full-time geriatric care managers to advise employees, and are providing in-home assessments by geriatric specialists.⁸⁸ The United Auto Workers and Ford Motor Company jointly set up an assessment program.

But these programs are only a drop in the bucket of what is needed to solve the problems that workers are having in juggling work and caretaking. Perhaps the heaviest burden falls on those people who are part of what has been dubbed "the sandwich generation" -- people who need to care for an elderly relative as well as children. With the combined effects of couples waiting longer to have children and a growing elderly population, "more than half of working Americans will find themselves in this situation in the next 10 years."⁸⁹ Perhaps the most severe problem in balancing jobs and caretaking is the lack of time. Juliet Schor talks of the overworked American.⁹⁰ Work time has been increasing for twenty years. Nationwide, people report their leisure time has declined by more than one third since the early 1970s. Parents are devoting less attention to their children. Stress is on the rise, as well as work-related illnesses. Increasing numbers of people are sleep-deprived, getting between 60 and 90 minutes a night less than they should for their health.⁹¹ This is particularly affecting women, who are coping with the double load of work and caretaking.

Many people are holding down two, or even three jobs because of low wages. Nearly one-third of all U.S. workers earn wages which, on a full-time schedule, are not enough to lift them out of poverty.⁹² An official of the Service Employees Union in New England said that nearly one-third of their nursing home employees now have two full- time jobs.⁹³ Schor estimates that the average employed person is now on the job an additional 163 hours -- or the equivalent of an extra month -- a year.⁹⁴ Weekly schedules are also getting longer, by about one hour a week.⁹⁵ People are working more overtime, partly because employers want to avoid hiring new people and giving them benefits. Companies are pressuring workers to work longer hours. "For the production and nonsupervisory employees who make up 80 percent of the labor force, these demands have been substantial. . . Just to reach their 1973 standard of living, they must work 245 more hours, or 6-plus extra weeks a year."⁹⁶

The United States stands out among rich countries in its failure to guarantee vacation time for workers. Few people in the U.S. have more than two weeks of vacation, and many workers have less. France, on the other hand, legally requires companies to give workers five weeks of vacation. France also has a legally-mandated 35 hour work week, although employers find ways to subvert it and the conservative Chirac government wants to rescind the law.

Ironically, at the same time that the majority of people are overworked, a substantial minority are working fewer hours than they want to or not working at all. Companies are hiring part-time workers to avoid paying benefits, and are hiring workers on a temporary contingent basis. This affects many welfare recipients who can only find part-time or temporary work and are not able to support their families. Those who have hit the five year time limit (and a shorter limit in some states) are without any job.

Although women have cut back on the time they spend on housework since entering the job market, housework is still far more difficult, labor-intensive, and inefficient than it needs to be. In a society that values individual solutions to problems, people do not devise or expect collective solutions. The government provides some household help to older people such as homemaker service, communal meals, and meals on wheels, but not to parents of young children.

THE UNITED STATES IS FAR BEHIND most European countries in its provisions for caretaking, and in alleviating poverty. Karen Christopher studied how tax and transfer systems and employment supports in nine Western nations affect the poverty rates of mothers.*** In all the countries she studied, mothers are more likely to live in poverty than fathers, but this is most pronounced in the United States, "where mothers' poverty rate is almost 60 percent higher than that of fathers."⁹⁷ The U.S. tax and transfer system is by far the least effective in reducing the poverty of married and single mothers, lowering their poverty rate by only 13 to 14 percent, as compared to Sweden (89 percent), France (86 percent), and the Netherlands (73 percent).⁹⁸ Both married and single mothers generally have the lowest poverty rates in Sweden, Finland, and France and those countries have by far the most generous employment supports for mothers.

Overall, Finland and Sweden are generally the most effective welfare states in reducing mothers' and single mothers' poverty using social transfers, tax credits, and employment supports.⁹⁹ Both countries have individualized their tax systems, eliminating tax differences based on family status.¹⁰⁰ Single mothers are often privileged in social programs such as subsidized child care programs, housing allowance, and child support advance payments (in which the state pays child support when the absent parent cannot or does not).¹⁰¹

FEMINIST SCHOLARS HAVE CREATED different typologies of welfare states with a focus on gender. The male-breadwinner or "caregiver" model is not considered to be ideal because it leads to women's dependence on men. It includes social policies such as entitlement based on the breadwinner/caretaker family and private, unpaid care labor. The caregiver model does little to facilitate women's employment but grants cash assistance to single mothers without requiring participation in waged work.

The model that fosters women's paid employment is called the "parent/worker" model. The countries which follow the parent/worker model provide generous supports to working parents and also provide single mothers with social assistance programs including cash and subsidized housing. Sweden gives both fathers and mothers parental leave of up to one and a half years from the birth of a child, and gives parents 60 days a year of leave in order to care for a sick child.¹⁰² Finland gives a paid maternity allowance to either the father or mother for 158 work days, and provides leave for parents to care for a sick child.¹⁰³

France provides universal child care. All French 4- and 5-year-olds are enrolled in the Ecole Maternelle system, as are more than 90 percent of 3-year-olds and 30 percent of 2-year-olds. This system is "widely regarded as the jewel of the French educational system."¹⁰⁴ France has attracted international attention for its system of early education.

France provides generous benefits to single mother families until the child is 3, after which it is assumed that the mother will enter employment.¹⁰⁵ It also pays part of the cost for hiring someone to care for young children in the home when the parents are working, and provides a parental child care allowance to a parent to care for a seriously ill or handicapped child.¹⁰⁶

The caregiver model is followed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. The United Kingdom is supportive of mothers' caregiving without labor force participation (as is Australia, but to a lesser extent). In these countries, single mothers can receive state support to engage in caregiving until their children are sixteen. However, this is beginning to change in the United Kingdom. In 1997 the Conservative government introduced an "obligation to work" in the social security system, accompanied by a plan to help mothers with job search and job training. The present Labor government has continued the emphasis on greater labor participation in its "welfare to work" program, modeled to some extent on the U.S. welfare reform.¹⁰⁷

In Germany, unmarried mothers are not expected to work until after their children are twelve, but German social assistance levels are low so some single mothers work for pay.¹⁰⁸ Traditional beliefs about women staying home to care for children are still strong in Germany. The German corporate world is heavily male-dominated, and male bosses routinely ask women whether and when they plan to bear children.¹⁰⁹

The Netherlands has traditionally believed in the male-breadwinner model and encouraged women to stay home to care for children. However, this has been changing recently and women are now encouraged to get into the paid work force. Sixty-six percent of women work part-time, but only six percent of mothers with children under ten work full- time.

The Netherlands provides a minimum income for everybody who has inadequate financial resources. People receiving National Assistance are obliged to look for work, but those responsible for the care of children aged under five can be exempted from a work requirement.¹¹⁰ Cash assistance in the Netherlands carries less stigma than in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. because the entire society is more supportive of caregiving.

Japan has traditionally put all of the burden for caretaking on to women's shoulders, with few government supports. That changed, however, when middle aged working women, severely burdened by the lack of facilities for care of the aged, mobilized and struck for their demands. This forced the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to introduce reforms in the 1990s, including long-term care insurance and support services for care of the aged. Younger women took a different path of resistance -- they postponed or avoided marriage and/or childbirth in order to pursue their careers and work. This resulted in a decline in fertility below what the government considers necessary to sustain further economic growth, prompting the government to increase child care facilities and other family support services.¹¹¹

Nancy Fraser has a vision of a more radical model of a welfare system, called the "dual-earner/dual-carer" model. In this system, women and men would share equally in both paid employment and caring labor. She argues that the so-called "mommy track" for women inevitably disadvantages women in building a career. Only when men share equally in caregiving will this disparity be abolished. She says, "the real free riders in the current system are not poor solo mothers . . . (but) men of all classes who shirk care work and domestic labor, and especially corporations who free ride on the labor of working people, both underpaid and unpaid.¹¹²

SOME COUNTRIES HAVE USED parental leave policies to encourage fathers to take a more active role in caretaking, but the fathers' response has not been enthusiastic. Sweden and Norway have paternal leave policies in which couples lose paid leave time when husbands do not take a portion of the leave time.¹¹³ Parental leave has been offered in Finland, France, Germany and Denmark, but few fathers have taken advantage of it.¹¹⁴

Welfare reform policies in the U.S. seek to bring fathers back into women's lives by forcing them to pay child-support and punishing them if they do not. TANF requires mothers to identify the fathers of their children and punishes them by reducing the welfare grant if they do not. In general a mother must file a support order against him, whether or not she wants him financially involved in her family's life. TANF law also pressures mothers to grant joint custody or visitation rights to biological fathers, and has encouraged states to set up programs to get fathers involved with the family and to promote marriage of the mothers. Gwendolyn Mink points out that these programs "force poor single mothers to compromise their independence and even to put their rights to their children at risk. . . [and they] invade recipients' sexual privacy."¹¹⁵

MANY DEVELOPED NATIONS have promoted part-time work as a strategy for reconciling mothers' increased labor force participation with their caretaking responsibilities. Almost one out of every three working women in the European Union has a part-time job, compared with only one out of twenty men.¹¹⁶ The Dutch government has promoted part-time work as the model for both women and men. According to this model, men as well as women should share paid work as well as unpaid care work. Despite the government's stated goal of equalizing men's and women's work, Kremer comments that "the rates fell far short of the government's utopian vision in which men would do half of the caring."¹¹⁷ Furthermore, 32 percent of women work less than 20 hours a week and many would like to work more hours and have better jobs with stable contracts.¹¹⁸

The Dutch might be on the right track in their utopian vision to have both men and women in part-time work and have them share domestic work equally. If both men and women worked shorter hours and part-time work was comparable to full-time work in pay and benefits, with a stable contract, then women and men could share caretaking equally. Jobs for Justice and the contingent work movement in the U.S. have addressed the issue of securing stability in part-time work, and the 1997 United Parcel Service strike was a significant beginning towards workers achieving this.

GLOBALIZATION HAS LED TO DEREGULATION, an emphasis on market forces, and cutbacks in welfare provisions around the world. European countries often point to the U.S. as the model for accomplishing such cutbacks. Not all countries, however, have fallen in line. Denmark and Sweden have largely resisted pressure to restructure, though coverage is thinner and lower in quality than before. France and Finland have cut back on some child care services, but have partly supplanted them with Home Care Allowances for parents of children under 3. The harshest cutbacks have been in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, although workfare and other neoliberal policies have met resistance from both mothers and welfare officials in the Netherlands.¹¹⁹

The countries that have had the fewest cutbacks are those with the most highly developed services and income supports. When people have high expectations of services from the government, they continue to demand them and governments cut them back at their peril. Social Security in the United States is an example of this; it is sometimes referred to as "the third rail" of politics -- touch it and you die.

Improving support for caretaking needs to proceed on several fronts. We need to: restructure work, have more vacation time; share domestic work equally between mother and father; and have more support services. We need to value caretaking more highly and to reward it, both for parents and for workers in institutions. We need to work for a shorter work week, a shorter work day, and more flexible work arrangements. We need a flexible family leave policy that allows for the exigencies of caretaking, and we need paid family leave because we can't afford to lose wages. We need more respite care so people who care for children, the aged, and disabled relatives can get some relief from the exhausting work. We need a universal guaranteed annual income. We need universal day care similar to the French system. We need single payer health care.

We also need tax and pension systems that do not discriminate against women. Housewives in the U.S. can draw pensions only as dependents of their husbands. Israel included housewives in their own right in its old age insurance program in the 1990s, in response to pressure from women's organizations and female legislators.¹²⁰

The International Wages for Housework Campaign (WFH), a network of women in Third World and industrialized countries, began organizing in the early 1970s. They demand that "the unwaged work that women do be recognized as work in official government statistics, and for this work to be paid."¹²¹ Their International Women Count Network includes more than 2,000 non-governmental organizations from the North and South. In 1995, the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing called on governments to calculate the value of women's unpaid work and include it in conventional measures of national output, such as the Gross Domestic Product. So far, only Trinidad and Tobago and Spain have passed legislation mandating the new accounting, but many other countries have undertaken surveys to determine how much time is spent on unpaid household work.¹²²

The countries with strong welfare provisions have strong unions. Improvements in this country's caretaking provisions will depend partly on union organizing, as well as on feminist organizations and other advocacy organizations such as the Children's Defense Fund, AARP, National Council on Aging, Family Caregiver Alliance, National Alliance for Caregiving, Grey Panthers, Older Women's League, and welfare rights organizations. There have been some promising beginnings. Some of the workers who have been successfully organized by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) recently include:

• Thousands of health care workers at Catholic Healthcare West, the largest hospital chain in California.¹²³

• 80,000 home care workers in Southern California.¹²⁴

• 604 people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin who care for their parents, employed by the nonprofit agency New Health Services (NHS). This was the first large-scale organizing in Milwaukee at the low end of the wage scale since the 1997 launch of "W-2," Wisconsin's welfare reform system initiated by then-governor Tommy Thompson (now director of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). Many former welfare recipients are employed by NHS. These workers were paid at the rate of $7.10 an hour, with no benefits of any kind. After their union was certified, they went on to negotiate a contract for higher wages, improved training, health insurance, and pension benefits.¹²⁵

The Labor Project for Working Families was founded in 1992 by the California Bay Area Labor Councils, AFL-CIO.¹²⁶ The Project brings unions and advocacy groups together to promote family-friendly legislation. They put out a newsletter which gives information about organizing projects for family-friendly policies all over the nation. They also maintain the nation's only database of information and contract language on labor and such work/family issues as child care, elder care, family leave, alternative work schedules, and other family friendly policies. They helped to win paid family leave for working Californians.

A review of Labor Project newsletters shows that unions are concerned about caretaking issues and active in negotiating benefits. Both the United Steelworkers of America and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners passed resolutions on family and work at their national conventions. Teachers' unions in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Philadelphia, California, and Seattle -- among other places -- have won family-friendly benefits. The California Council of Machinists won break time for lactation. State employees in California, Washington, and Ohio have won benefits, such as dependent care subsidies, paid parental leave, and including domestic partners in sick leave benefits.. The California Nurses Association and the Massachusetts Nurses Association won limits on mandatory overtime. And the Communication Workers of America won similar limits on mandatory overtime from Verizon.

We cannot expect much help with family-friendly policies from Congress, or from the Bush Administration. Conservative Republicans and Democrats, along with centrist Democrats, are more preoccupied with making war and squelching civil liberties than with meeting the real needs of families. Addressing these needs involves substantial challenges to the status quo: breaking down the sex roles of caregiving, forcing corporations to shorten work hours and pay living wages, and pressuring government to serve the interests of the vast majority of the population. We will have to continue the struggle for humane caretaking policies through grassroots pressure from below -- in our unions, in our cities and towns, and in our states. We must try to get the support of the millions of people who are working too hard and too long and earning too little and who need help with the care of their children and their parents.

* A 1991 survey found that over 40 percent of parents with family incomes over $75,000 hired caregivers to look after their children. (Julia Wrigley, Other People's Children, p. ix). return

** The Act was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and the program it created was called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). It replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children and gave states block grants to administer the TANF program. return

*** Her information is taken from the Luxembourg Income Study. The nations and the dates of the information are: Australia (1994); Canada (1994); Finland (1995); France (1994); Germany (1994); the Netherlands (1994); Sweden (1995); the United Kingdom (1995); and the United States (1994). return

1. Irving Kristol, "A Conservative Perspective on Public Policy and the Family." In The Family, Civil Society, and the State, ed. by C. Wolfe. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. return

2. Rosemary Crompton, "Gender Restructuring, Employment, and Caring," Social Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 2001, p. 269. Citing Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, London: Profile, 1999. return

3. Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in New York, Scribner, 1995, pp. 26-44. return

4. Laura Young, Executive Director, Older Women's League, "Women and Aging: Bearing the Burden of Long-term Care," Testimony at a Joint Hearing before the Special Committee on Aging and the Subcommittee on aging of the committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the U.S. Senate, February 6, 2002. Serial No. 107-17. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 37. return

5. Rosanna Hertz, More Equal Than Others: Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. return

6. Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, The Two-Career Family. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1973. return

7. Julia Wrigley, Other People's Children. New York: Basic Books, 1995. return

8. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1989. return

9. Hochschild, p. 3. return

10. Ibid., pp. 9-10. return

11. Ibid., p. 4, citing Peggy Thoits, "Multiple Identities: Examining Gender and Marital Status Differences in Distress." American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 259-72. return

12. Patricia Wen, "A couple's work," Boston Globe, November 9, 2002, p. B1. return

13. Ibid. return

14. Ibid. return

15. Ibid. return

16. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. return

17. Ibid., p. 100. return

18. Ibid., p. 102. return

19. Ibid., p. 148. return

20. Ibid., p. 150. return

21. Ibid., p. 272. return

22. "Marilyn Waring: What Really Counts." Teachers College, Columbia University. http://www.tc.columbia.edu/~newsbureau/insideTC/march99/399waring.htm. return

23. Ibid. return

24. Wrigley, p. 2. return

25. Joanne Lipman, "The Nanny Trap," Wall Street Journal, April 14, 1993, p. 1. return

26. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries. New York: St. Martin, 2002. return

27. Ibid., p. 179. return

28. Cindy Rodriguez, "Up from ‘slavery'," Boston Globe, November 18, 2002, p. B4 return

29. Robert Kuttner, "The rich-poor gap in decent preschools," Boston Globe, November 20, 2002, p. A19. return

30. Ibid. return

31. Ibid. return

32. Sarah Schweitzer, "City gives first-ever wage law waivers." Boston Globe, November 18, 2002, p. B7. return

33. Boston Globe, October 4, 2002, p. A3. return

34. Janet Kilkenny, personal communication. return

35. Ibid., p. 11. return

36. Ibid., p. 10. return

37. Ibid., p. 128. return

38. Ibid., p. 128-129. return

39. Ibid., p. 134. return

40. Ibid., p. 135. return

41. Hochschild, p. 25. return

42. Hertz, p. 206. return

43. Ibid. return

44. Ibid., p. 35. return

45. Ibid., p. 195. return

46. Gail Gibson Hunt, Executive Director, National Alliance for Caregiving. Testimony for a Joint Hearing of the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee on Aging, February 6, 2002, p. 51. return

47. Laura Young, p. 41. return

48. Ibid. return

49. Ibid. return

50. Laura Young, p. 36. return

51. MetLife, The MetLife Juggling Act Study: Balancing Caregiving with Work and the Costs Involved. Findings from a National Study by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the National Center on Women and Aging at Brandeis University, November 1999. return

52. International Wages for Housework Campaign. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/crossroadswomenscentre/WFH.html, September 20, 2002. return

53. Genaro C. Armas, "Childbirth and part-time work: a shift seen," Boston Globe, December 5, 2001. return

54. Lewin, Ibid. return

55. Mary McGrory, "Americans care about combating hunger," International Herald Tribune, August 2, 2002, p. 4. return

56. Sanford F. Schram and Joe Soss, "Success Stories: Welfare Reform, Policy Discourse, and the Politics of Research," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,: Reforming Welfare, Redefining Poverty, ed. by Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn, September 2001, pp. 49-65. return

57. Leslie Kaufman, "New York Says Those on Welfare Are Increasingly Hard to Employ," New York Times, , November 29, 2002. return

58. Dorothy E. Roberts, "Blacks and the History of Welfare," http://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/welfare01b.htm, p. 2. return

59. Ibid., p. 3. return

60. Ibid., p. 4. return

61. Ibid., p. 5. return

62. Albert Camus, return

63. Joanna Goven, "Gender and Modernism in a Stalinist State," Social Politics, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 8. return

64. Ibid. return

65. Ibid., p. 22. return

66. Ibid., p. 95. return

67. Ibid., p. 88. return

68. Ibid., pp. 110-111. return

69. Lewis, p. 158. return

70. Ibid. return

71. Karen Christopher, "Welfare State Regimes and Mothers' Poverty," Social Politics, Vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 2002, p. 62. return

72. Ann Orloff, speech at Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 11/6/98. return

73. Lucie E. White, "Closing the Care Gap That Welfare Reform Left Behind," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Reforming Welfare, Redefining Poverty, Ed. by Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn, September 2001, p. 133. return

74. Ibid., p. 140. return

75. White, p. 132. return

76. Ibid., p. 141. return

77. Barbara Bergmann and Heidi Hartmann, "A Welfare Reform Poposal Based on Help for Working Parents," Feminist Economics 1(2), 1995. return

78. Betty Reid Mandell, "Why Can't We Care for Our Own Children?" Feminist Economics 1(2), 1995, pp. 99-104. return

79. Ibid., p. 102. return

80. Schram and Soss, p. 58. return

81. Ibid., pp. 58-59. return

82. Gwendolyn Mink, "Violating Women: Rights Abuses in the Welfare Police State," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Reforming Welfare, Redefining Poverty, ed. by Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn, September 2001, pp. 90-91. return

83. Ellen Goodman, "Spinning Homeward," Boston Globe,May 2, 2002, p. A19. return

84. Leigh Strope, "U.S. targets a paid-leave provision," Boston Globe, December 4, 2002, p. A4. return

85. "California's Paid Family Leave - SB 1661 (Kuehl) Ten Quick Facts. http://www.caregiver.org/alerts/PaidFamilyLeaveAct_080102C.html return

86. Patricia Wen, "Tax break prompts few firms to offer child care," Boston Globe, November 20, 2002, p. A3. return

87. Rebecca Mead, ""Tales out of preschoool," The New Yorker, December 2, 2002, p. 41. return

88. Maggie Jackson, "Companies are adding benefits for care of the elderly," New York Times, July 7, 2002, p. BU8. return

89. Labor Project for Working Families, "The Sandwich Generation - Caring for Elders and Children." http://laborproject.berkeley,edu/newsletter/spring02.html, p. 2. return

90. Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basis Books, 1992. return

91. Ibid., p. 5 return

92. Ibid., p. 150 return

93. Ibid., p. 22. return

94. Ibid., p. 29. return

95. Ibid., p. 30. return

96. Ibid., p. 81. return

97. Karen Christopher, p. 71. return

98. Ibid., pp. 71-72. return

99. Ibid., p. 78. return

100. Ibid. return

101. Ibid., p. 65. return

102. International Labor Organization, "Equal Employment Opportunities for Women and Men." http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/gems/eco/law/sweden/l.plas.htm return

103. Kela, The Social Insurance Institution of Finland. http://193.209.217.5/in/internet/english.nsf/NET/081101130859EH return

104. Augusta Souza Kappner, "For pre-K children, the future is now." http://www.bnkst.edu/html/news/viewpoints/prek.html, December 2, 2002. return

105. Annemieke Van Drenth, Trudie Knijn and Jane Lewis, "Sources of income for lone mother families: Policy changes in Britain and the Netherlands and the Experiences of Divorced Women," Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 28, No. 4, October 1999, p. 620. return

106. Social Security Programs Throughout the World: Europe, 2002 - France. http://www.ssa.gov/statistics/ssptw/2002/europe/france.html, December 2, 2002. return

107. Van Drenth, Knijn, and Lewis, p. 620. return

108. Karen Christopher, p. 65. return

109. Elizabeth Wlilliamson, "German women face barriers on way to top," expatica jobs. http://www.expatica.com/www/marketplace/germanexe.asp return

110. European Social Welfare Information Network, The Netherlands Eswin Socia lWelfare Summary Fact Sheet. http://websrv1.nizw.nl/eswin/Nleswin/nlswfs.htm#sserv, December 2, 2002, Page 17. return

111. Ito Peng, "Women in the Middle: Welfare State Expansion and Devolution in Japan," Social Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer 2001, pp. 191-192. return

112. Nancy Fraser, "After the Family Wage." Political Theory 22, 1994, p. 613. return

113. Christopher, p. 65. return

114. Anette Borchorst, "Still Friendly: Danish Women and Welfare State Restructuring," Social Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer 2001, p. 204. return

115. Mink, p. 85. return

116. Ellen Mutari and Deborah M. Figart, "Europe at a Crossroads: Harmonization, Liberalization, and the Gender of Work Time," Social Politics, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 2001, p. 36. return

117. Kramer, p. 183. return

118. Ibid., pp. 183-184. return

119. Michel, pp. 148-149. return

120. Mimi Ajzenstadt and John Gal, "Appearance Can Be Deceptive: Gender in the Israeli Welfare State," Social Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 311. return

121. Lena Graber and John Miller, "Wages for Housework: The Movement and the Numbers." Dollars and Sense, September/October 2002, p. 45. return

122. Ibid. return

123. A. L. Stern, "Andrew L. Stern replies to ‘Changing to Organize.'" The Nation September 3/10, 2001, p. 23. return

124. J. Mancillas, "Jorge Mancillas replies to ‘Changing to Organize.'" The Nation, September 3/10, 2001, p. 24. return

125. D. Glenn, "I thought you said she worked full time," Dissent, Summer 2001, pp. 101-105. return

126. Their web site is: laborproject.berkeley.edu. return

 

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