Working-class mothers in the post-recession economy: Some sobering stats

[YoungDemCA]

The study focused on mothers ages 18 to 54 with household income between $30,000 and $49,000 – an amount that generally does not qualify for government assistance. Research included a survey, focus groups, in-home interviews, shop-alongs and analysis of secondary research.

snip:

Regardless of profession, as a group the demographic has been hit hard in recent years, C-K said, experiencing significant changes in employment during the last five years:

35% lost their job
35% had their pay cut
33% began working multiple jobs
19% went from full-time to part-time work

"Over half of the women we spoke to felt worse off financially than before the recession," C-K said in a statement. "These consumers consider themselves forever changed.

"Of those we spoke with, 84% said they wouldn’t go back to their old spending habits, even if the economy were to rebound or their circumstances were to change," according to the study.

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/business/207234501.html

[HiPointDem]

1. kr. a *real* feminist issue, but so little-discussed. equal pay for upper management!

Last edited Fri May 17, 2013, 10:54 PM - Edit history (1)

changing tables at starbucks!

as we can see by the number of responses, upper-class libs don't give a flying fuck.

[RainDog]

2. k&r

This is THE MOST IMPORTANT FEMINIST ISSUE.

[GiaGiovanni]

3. These women are raising children on these salaries

The true working poor often ignored by politicians because they don't have a lobbying group.

[redqueen]

6. What a fucked up thing to say.

I don't see many of the YAAAAAAAY FEMEN AND PORN AND PROSTITUTES! ANYONE WHO CRITICIZES FEMEN HATES TEH BOOBIES! crowd in here either. You ain't got shit to say to them, though, do you?

I wonder why that is.




And to think, I was just about to thank the person who kicked this.

[redqueen]

13. What's fucked up is you attacking OTHER WOMEN when you had NO FUCKING CALL TO DO SO.

But yeah, I'm used to it... from certain types.


And NO FUCKING SHIT it's about equal pay. So all those feminists who get all up in arms to say YAY FEMEN aren't here kicking this thread about equal pay, either, are they?

But you aren't attacking them, no. Just women you disagree with about a COMPLETELY UNRELATED ISSUE.

[HiPointDem]

20. those FEMEN 'feminists' aren't interested in lower-class women -- unless they work in the sex

trade and have nice boobs, in which case they come out in force to support their 'freedom' to sell their bodies.

[redqueen]

29. Apparently we can't discuss single moms without SOME women attacking feminists they don't like

over completely unrelated issues. For absolutely no reason. No matter that their own preferred brand of feminists aren't here in the thread, in droves, kicking it. No, no need to attack them. Because participation in this thread is not what it's fucking about.

That's real solidarity among women, right there. True online feminist activism.

[HiPointDem]

30. it's not unrelated.

[HiPointDem]

32. I don't think femen advances anything i care about, feminist or otherwise. On the contrary, I

see it as a reactionary, counter-productive force, and nothing I want to be in solidarity with.

I'm also suspicious of its motives and curious about its funders.

as for those 'feminists' found on threads loudly defending the right to bare boobs -- where the hell are they? half of them were gungeon types and trolls. a fourth were 'get yer middle eastern war on' types.

maybe a fourth were actually feminists in any real sense of the word. and they're not here; female poverty & poverty generally = not sexy & no one's going to do shit about it.

[Starry Messenger]

5. k&r

[redqueen]

7. Thanks for kicking this.

I'm about to take a second job. I'm in this demographic.

[Starry Messenger]

9. I'm pretty close to it myself.

If I had kids I'm not sure how I'd be making it. Good luck on the job hunt.

[redqueen]

12. Thanks, I have two young teens.

No child support. It's not easy.

[xmas74]

33. My child support was just cut in half.

It's not often that he pays it anyway but he just had it cut recently.

Personally, I thought they had to go to court for that but I guess not. The letter was from Child Support Enforcement.

It's interesting how I was recently brought back from a lay-off and now my support is suddenly cut. And I'm on the lowest end of the income line listed in the OP.

[socialist_n_TN]

10. Marx was right......

ALL of it boils down to economic status. Every social issue in capitalism, including feminist issues, is at it's base, an issue of capitalist oppression of the working class, men and women.

[RainDog]

11. And Engels rightly analyzed the origin of sexism

In the very root of capitalism.

And monotheism is the punitive structure in society that makes sexism "valid" for capitalists.

It's not coincidence that the right wing in the U.S. is bound up in punitive economic and religious beliefs that also enable sexism - they are co-morbid.

[redqueen]

14. Nope. nt

[socialist_n_TN]

17. Yep. I'm sure Penny Pritzker and Carly Fiorina......

are just as oppressed as these women. NOT.

[RainDog]

15. glad your post is getting some more attention

even if it's for the wrong reason.

...and now that it has, will delete the other side issue crap.

(although I have to admit it's funny to see someone who attacks other women and accuses them of shielding pedophiles take on the great cause of attacking women while refusing to see the historical evidence of sexism in structural issues of society.)

[Egalitarian Thug]

16. It's all about the plutocracy/plutonomy, as with all of the problems they've made for us.

It is no surprise at all that women are hit harder than some other groups by The Great Robbery, we love to use and abuse women in this culture.

Until we address the fundamental issue of dividing of proceeds or our product, we're just going to continue lurching from one clusterfuck to the next without accomplishing anything but delaying the inevitable.

[RainDog]

18. African-Americans were hard hit by the 2008 bank bail out

Both African-American men and women have been harder hit than white females.



In the cases of both race and gender, the legacy of slavery continues to impact people, whether the slavery was based upon race or gender.

The commonality between all African-Americans and all women is that both groups, in American society, were not simply considered second-class citizens, they were considered property.

[YoungDemCA]

22. Very true.

Good post!

[HiPointDem]

23. and they, as well as black males, continue to be hit harder in the 'recovery,' as well as by the

union-busting, education-deforming policies of this administration, since black workers are more likely to be union members/public workers than whites, & black teachers & workers have been disproportionately fired and laid off by education 'reform'.

[RainDog]

25. The For-Profit Prison Economy, with its racist basis

surely has an impact upon employment opportunities, beyond the basics of economic life, such as access to opportunities by who you know, the history of wealth accumulation among a very few, to the exclusion of everyone else, and laws that have worked to undo advances previously made in this nation to actually have a govt. that serves the people of this nation, not just the rich people of this nation.

From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the World population and has 25% of world prisoners.

From The Sentencing Project's "Prison Privatization and the Use of Incarceration" (2004) - the War on Drugs became the spur to create private prisons because of overcrowding in prisons from the laws enacted (Mandatory Minimums, Three Strikes, Stop and Frisk, sentencing disparities based upon race.)

The current for-profit prison system, begun in the 1980s, has made the U.S. more of a penal colony than China - that's the gift from conservatives that keeps on giving, year after year, with cumulative effects on earning power over a lifetimes, as well as effects on employment options.

http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

-African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population
-African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
-Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population.
-5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites
-African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months).

This isn't the first time various states have used prison to deny rights to African-Americans. During Reconstruction, whites could arrest blacks (mostly men) and put them on work gangs - and this was never challenged because of the racism that undergirded the practice among the powerful.

Another function of the for-profit prison system is to increase population numbers in rural, predominantly white areas of states, which gives more voting power to those who are elected from those areas - and this, as well, becomes a self-reinforcing form of racism because it is in the vested interests of politicians and certain members of the population to create economies built on imprisoning other members of society.

Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, noted that the war on drugs is really a war on African-Americans and Hispanics, since they are disproportionately singled out for arrest and because, when other avenues to create revenue are blocked, illegal activity is the way for someone to make money outside of the system in place for those who are either part of the elite or the few who get "elevated" to the elite to serve as a sop to everyone else of a particular race or gender so they can ignore the systemic dysfunction that comes from the racism and sexism that is part of the foundation of the history of property.

[Egalitarian Thug]

24. Which goes back to what I wrote. If you focus your attention where you are directed to,

it is easy to pit one group against another, which is the goal. I don't expect that many people will see how they're being manipulated until it is too late to do anything about it, after all, this is the same game they've been successfully playing here since the ink was dry on that very flawed document that we all love to enshrine as the Word of God, the U.S. Constitution.

Since long before the Declaration of Independence the owners have worked tirelessly to keep us divided and they have been almost completely successful in stealing everything important while we blame other groups of victims. Once we start down the road of "my injustice is greater than your injustice", they win. Look at what has been done to the Women's Movement over the last hundred and some years. And civil rights, equality, labor, etc., ad infinitum.

[RainDog]

26. Yes. I agree

yet, again, it's so odd that the biggest reaction in this thread to this reality only came after I mentioned those who spend their time here accusing others of bigotry, sexism, etc. rather than looking at the common concerns of every working adult... followed by a scathing analysis of the function of capitalism as a driver of sexism with the word, "nope." LOLOLOL. Yeah, brilliant.

Another issue that's "touchy" in American society is the knowledge that those who rail against prostitution, etc. should actually look at the economics that create this "service sector" in the economy. The break up of the Soviet Union provided a good example of the function of capitalism to create a class of women who could be bought and sold because their economic options were so bleak.

Not to say that no one exists who would choose to engage in sex work for various reasons - but if you look at ANY society with a huge number of poor people, you find women exploited for the one thing they "own" - their bodies.

Also, if you look at the issue of marriage (beyond questioning whether marriage as it exists is another structure that embeds sexism as a cultural norm), those women who are married to men who are part of the upper and middle classes are also the most rigidly fixed in traditional gender roles because their labor for a family is not paid for, but their spouses make enough money not to rock this boat.

Working-class women, on the other hand, do not have this disposable "income" to buy off someone else's labor cheaply - they have to do it all themselves, if they're single parents.

[socialist_n_TN]

27. Capitalism commodifies EVERYTHING, including sex......

But sex is not the only thing it commodifies. As I said, it makes a commodity out of EVERYTHING. That's systemic.

As to traditional feminism, I think that the heart of the individuals are in the right place (opposing oppression), BUT feminism IS a bourgeois social movement. Without a grounding in Marx, ultimately all it will do is SOLIDIFY THE OPPRESSION OF CAPITALISM. For all of us. Because traditional feminism doesn't call for abolishing the root of the problem.

Worker's Power has a VERY good pamphlet on women's issues with a lot of great historical analyses of what has led us to today. The US section has recently updated this very good pamphlet and it will soon be available. I learned a WHOLE lot during the editing process.

[RainDog]

28. There are varieties of feminism

Marxist feminism is one of those. That's what came out of the initial feminist movement of the 1960s counter culture. No one with any cred could claim to be a feminist without acknowledging the economic structures that enabled sexism.

But just as Reagan redefined many terms, so did some women who came along at the time with attacks on 1st amendment issues under the guise of feminism.

"Radical feminism" is a cover for misandry, and a failure to examine historical precedent. It really provides nothing worthwhile, imo, at least as it's presented here. It aligns with social conservatism and, thus, conservatism in general.

No respectable feminist today denies that Engels wrote THE most substantive history of the subjugation of women - and it still stands, even with some portions that reflect 19th c. understandings of various issues. I don't know that his predictions for changes would play out - in the same way that I don't think the state will fall away, ever, because once one group has power, they work to maintain it with the same sorts of structures - we have those examples among revolutions - and we also have the history of counter revolutions.

From my time in this world, what seems to work best for the most people is a balance of powers, across various structures and relating to various issues.

But I think that Marx and Engels have provided some of the best analyses of various structures. I suppose I'm too cynical to see these falling away - I'm not a utopian.

[HiPointDem]

31. "should actually look at the economics that create this "service sector" in the economy."

exactly. yelling about women's 'right' & 'choice' to display or sell their bodies without mentioning the economics surrounding that 'choice' is disingenuous &, dare i say, a right-wing/libertarian take on 'rights' and 'choice'.

[redqueen]

34. Hear fucking hear! nt

[smirkymonkey]

19. K&R, Thank You!

Interesting post.

[YoungDemCA]

21. It is important to discuss these issues....

...as they speak directly to the intersection of economic class and sexism.