Labor Pains–What Obama Won’t Say In His Jobs Speech

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Sep 032011
 

A friend of mine called recently to tell me that her daughter was about to give birth. “She’s going into labor!” my friend said with much excitement. It occurred to me as I listened to her that while we might refer to the act of childbirth as ‘being in labor’, we almost never use the word ‘labor’ to describe the very hard work of caring for children or others.  So when we observe Labor Day, that work is all but invisible.

Today I heard yet another economist talk about why creating jobs is so important–workers need money so they can spend money and buy things, and that he said will make the economy recover. But the truth is,  that kind of thinking  is precisely why the economy is in such desperate shape, because it is predicated on the assumption that we need things. New, shiny things. Things that we buy on credit, things that are possibly made in sweatshop conditions, things made of who knows what that pollute our landfills when we throw them away to make way for yet more things.

It is that sort of thinking that has led us to a place where too many people have no job or have dead-end, low paying jobs doing things and making things that make absolutely no sense while at the same time, hunger is at epic levels in this country and elsewhere. If you’re a woman, so sorry, but you will not be achieving pay equity until 2109. Too many people have lost their homes and now the government owns most of the Monopoly mortgages and there is no one to buy them. It is expensive if not impossible to insure our own health and our children do not have the resources they need to learn and when they cannot find jobs, the only option for many is to join the military which is bleeding our coffers dry while sending our children off to bleed to death for faux reasons that make no sense at all.  The education system is so desperate, that moms can be convicted of the heinous crime of trying to send their child to a better school. Our air is barely breathable. Our roads are falling apart, our water system is barely functional, we power all the things that we buy with filthy, dangerous forms of energy. This isn’t an economy–it is what the death throes of human society looks like.

We do not need more jobs so we can spend more. We need work that makes sense and work that sustains us, not work that just feeds the cycle that is sucking us dry and de facto enslaving us.

I am excited when I see projects like Caring Across Generations that focuses on the exploding need for better models of how to care for the elderly.

I am excited when I see conferences like Reimagining Work which expects to be an “All Generation Conversation” about “news ways of living, surviving and growing our souls…”

And we need to read and re-read Riane Eisler’s seminal work about caring economies and Genevieve Vaughan’s work on Gift Economy.

This Labor Day we need to re-focus our goals to include not only just jobs, but also just work that values what sustains and enables us, and moves us away from work for the sake of economic ‘growth’ (which has become a hollow euphemism for lining corporate coffers) and that merely perpetuates the hamster wheel of what ails us.

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 Posted by Fempeace on September 3, 2011

My Mother’s Day Post–The Sandwich Generation Edition

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May 072010
 

Every year I write a post for Mother’s Day–it usually ends up being about children as much as about mothers, but I guess given the propensity of so many mothers, including myself to focus on their kids first and themselves second, that is not surprising.

This year however, I am suffering from major writer’s block due in no small part to being both a daughter and a mother.  My mother is recovering from a bout of assorted  ailments and has been at the front of my thoughts a lot lately. In the midst of this, not just one but both of my children are graduating in the next month–my eldest from college the day before Mother’s Day (who knew 22 years could go by so quickly) and then in a few weeks my youngest from high school after which he will be getting ready to leave for college and my nest will empty, a phase I feel ready for, but as the time is fast approaching, much to my chagrin I find my tear ducts somewhat unpredictable.  And so I am focusing on all of these life cycle events that happen to mothers and daughters and am thus a bit negligent with my writing time, all of which is to say my blogging will be a tad sporadic and unpredictable for the next few weeks.

Today, via Riane Eisler, I came upon a Time article  that talks about whether the GDP is an appropriate measure of economic progress.  As the article points out, the GDP does not measure a good many important things–something worth pondering as the DOW, at least until the last few days as I write this, has ‘recovered’ while so many people are still out of work and losing their homes and unable to get health care.

Since last summer the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has gone up — indeed, it grew at a surprising 5.7% rate in the 4th quarter — seeming to confirm what we’ve been hearing: the recession is officially over. But wait — foreclosure and unemployment rates remain high, and food banks are seeing record demand. Could it be that the GDP, that gold standard of economic data, might not be the best way to gauge a nation’s relative prosperity?

Since it became the prime economic indicator during the Second World War (to monitor war production) many have criticized policy-makers’ reliance on the GDP — and proposed substitute measures. For example, there is the Human Development Index (HDI), used by the UN’s Development Programme, which considers life expectancy and literacy as well as standard of living as determined by GDP. And the Genuine Progress Indicator, which incorporates aspects of social welfare such as income equity, pollution, and access to health care.

And as Eisler has pointed out many times, and why I am bringing it up now, the GDP does not measure caring work–the taking care of parents and children that so often mostly is the unpaid work of women.  And if we do not value that work, then we do not have an honest picture of our economic health and that is a detriment to all of us because there is real economic value to caring work and a real economic cost to that work not being attended to.  As we struggle to deal with current economic realities and find a path forward, we must revision our measurements of value to reflect what is truly important and the work that everyone does, not just how much was ‘produced’.

There is much more to be said on the subject of being a mother, a topic I’ve tackled elsewhere numerous times, but I will leave that to other writers this year.

And with that, whether you celebrate Mother’s Day as a child or as a mother, or both, there  are no more inspiring words on the subject of Mother’s Day than Julia Ward Howe’s immortal proclamation:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,

Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,

Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace,

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality

May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient

And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

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 Posted by Fempeace on May 7, 2010

The Girls’ Guide To The Economy Part 23–The Misogynist Commodification Of Women Is Not A Healthy Economic Construct

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Oct 192009
 

Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s new book, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance “challenges the way we think” by asking such pithy and sure to sell questions as, “How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?” Really. Econ 101 as if it was taught by ill-behaved 13 year old boys. What’s not to like about that? In a column in the Times Online (UK), the authors explain,

there is still a considerable economic price to pay for being a woman. The economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that women who went to Harvard earned less than half as much as the average Harvard man. Even when the analysis included only full-time employees and was controlled for other variables, Goldin and Katz found that the Harvard women still earned about 30% less.There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution. Its business model is built upon a simple premise. Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?

The right price for the commodification of women’s bodies?  Jennifer Drew points to the harms of this most unhealthy economic construct:

Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dunbar’s  latest work, promotes the claim prostitution is just economics. Or what is commonly termed demand and supply. Men demand innumerable women and girls be made available in order that they can sexually masturbate into the female body and then term it ‘sex.’

This is yet another article written from the male perspective, which views women and girls as men’s sexualized commodities and prostitution as simply an economic transaction between two individuals of equal societal power. Women and girls have ‘what men want’ and so it makes sense for ‘women and girls’ to profit from men’s sexual demands. Prostitution according
to Levitt and Dunbar is profitable business for women and girls because it has existed for centuries and the Johns are all ‘wonderful gentlemen’ who simply need regular sexual access to women and girls with no strings and no accountability. Odd how Levitt and Dunbar only interviewed women who work as ‘escorts’ and appear to be happy dealing with innumerable male strangers masturbating into their bodies, whilst telling the Johns their sexual prowess is amazing!! Ah prostitution is an excellent way
for women and girls to earn vast sums quickly with no negative impact on their physical and mental health. Missing from this narrative are the women and girls who are forced to seek out Johns on the streets and women who are enslaved by male pimps because they don’t exist in Levitt’s and Dunbar’s male-centered and male-fantasy world. Granted a minority of prostituted women are able to exert control and power over the Johns but they are a minority. Neither does it alter the fact reducing all women to men’s dehumanized sexualized commodities enforces and ‘naturalizes’ common perceptions women are ‘just sex’ whereas men are autonomous human beings who must never be held accountable for driving the demand in unlimited sexual access to women and girls. ‘Satyriasis’ meaning male sexual insatiability is never used to describe male sexual demand for women and girls.

Instead we are supposed to accept that prostitution is an economic
transaction totally divorced from how women and girls are devalued and dehumanized within our patriarchal society, because only the male perspective is ‘reality’ and women are men’s adjuncts not human being in their own right. Women’s bodies are never harmed by having to endure innumerable men forcing their penises into every part of a woman’s body and inflicting sexual torture on the woman is never violence, just enactment of men’s sexual rights over women. Transmission of HIV/Aids, STD’s from Johns to prostituted women is not an issue as long as the John wears a condom! Women’s bodies are naturally resistant to sexual
violence because hey – this what all women are – just men’s dehumanized sexualized commodities.

The male perspective claims even female monkeys are ‘prostitutes’ and this supposedly proves all females, whether they are mammals or female human beings are ‘just sex’ according to Levitt’s and Dunbar’s male-centered ‘fantasy world.’ Male power, male domination, male demand which drives prostitution is non-existent because women are apparently the ones controlling and profiting from men’s supposedly innate sex drives.

As Drew points out women are far more likely to be forced into prostitution than to choose it as a profession and most prostitutes  do not run their own business as the object of Levitt and Dubner’s economic fantasy does and their juvenile notion of successful economics is predicated on exploitive misogyny that treats women as property rather than valuing the work that they do.

Sickeningly, there is no doubt SuperFreakonomics will get far more attention than Riane Eisler’s phenomenal new project based on her book, “The Real Wealth of Nations” called The Real Wealth of America Public Policy Project which,

is designed to advance the real wealth of our nation: the health, well-being, and full development of our nation’s women,  men, and children. A major aim of the project is to change the present economic  perspective to one that not only recognizes the enormous “back-end” financial costs of  failing to invest in people, but also recognizes the direct economic benefits of investing in
human capacity building.

As Eisler states: “Rather than trying to just patch up a system that is not sustainable, let’s use our economic crisis to move to an economic system that really meets human needs. As Einstein said, we can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them. In our time of rapidly changing technological and social conditions, we must go deeper, to matters that conventional economic analyses and theories have ignored. We need a caring economics that no longer devalues the most important work: the work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and the work of caring for our Mother Earth.”

The indicators for the currently used Gross National Product were developed and adopted  during the depths of the Great Depression. They were only meant by their authors to be a beginning for measurements, not the be all and end all.

We urgently need new economic indicators. The RWA public policy project is a strategic step toward achieving this goal.

The governing values for measuring and promoting the Real Wealth of Nations are:

  • Recognizing that the contributions of people are the real wealth of a nation– and hence the need to invest in human capacity development, starting in early childhood.
  • Recognizing that, especially for the post-industrial knowledge-information economy, our most important capital is high quality human capital.
  • Recognizing the need to give greater visibility and value to the work of caregiving in both the market and non?market economies.
  • Recognizing the value of investing in our human infrastructure for our world’s families, communities, equality, democracy, and economic success.

This is the kind of transformative, challenging economic vision that we need to embrace, not the juvenile, exploitive and utterly uninformed drivel of SuperFreakanomics.

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 Posted by Fempeace on October 19, 2009