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Good article on the crisis that US parental leave policy (or lack thereof) has created for American families, particularly women-lead single-parent households: http://inthesetimes.com/article/18151/the-real-war-on-families Sanders has called for and co-sponsored a bill that "would guarantee every employee twelve weeks of paid family and medical leave." But instead of forcing the capitalist class to share some of the costs of reproducing the workforce, Sanders and co's program would be funded through an insurance program, whereby the workers would pay into it with every paycheck like Social Security (https://berniesanders.com/issues/real-family-values/). While this is better than the status quo, it's still complete bullshit, since women are disproportionately affected by the lack of long-term parental leave. In fact, this is the reason why women's lifetime earnings are considerably less than men's (which should be the REAL focus of those wringing their hands about the lingering pay gap between men and women). As Mark Brenner and Stephanie Luce pointed out in an article for Monthly Review back in 2006 that examined the record of the feminist movement over the last 40 years (https://monthlyreview.org/2006/07/01/women-and-class-what-has-happened-in-forty-years/): [E]ven though some groups of women have been able to achieve much higher wages than the average, they still tend to lose significant income throughout their child-rearing years. A study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that women between ages 26 and 59 earned only $273,592 over fifteen years, whereas the average man of that age earned $722,693 (in 1999 dollars) in the same time period. This suggests that even while the hourly gender pay ratio may be 77 percent at any one time, the lifetime gender gap is much more substantial, 38 percent in this case. While recent numbers show that the hourly wage gap for younger workers is closing, with the average gender pay ratio up to eighty-four cents, it is not clear if this represents a generational change or simply a pattern in life-cycle earnings. As many feminist economists and activists have pointed out for many decades now, the costs of social and biological reproduction and their role in the capitalist economy are always ignored or even denied in conventional economic analyses. Moreover, the capitalist class constantly seeks to shift as much of these costs onto the workers that it can, which disproportionately impacts the well-being and economic fortunes of women given the prevailing gender hierarchies and heteropatriarchal norms of the family and society at large. As V. Spike Peterson observes in her A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Feminists...have for long studied the domestic and reproductive labor to analyze the relationship between unpaid work in the home and waged labor in the formal/productive economy. They argue that domestic labor, or social reproduction, produces labor power (workers) upon which the formal economy depends. One important effect is that this "free" (unpaid) labor benefits employers, who do not then have to pay the full costs of producing the labor force. Similarly, it hurts workers by placing downward pressure on wage demands because employers are not "expected" to pay for social reproduction. On this view, reproductive labor is key not only for production of workers but also for determining wages in the formal/productive economy; wage levels in turn affect resources available to families and shape the nature and extent of informal activities in support of family/household maintenance. Due to the effects of neoliberalism, work conditions in the formal economy are deteriorating and state welfare is decreasing. This increases the pressure on families/households, and especially women, to engage in informal activities to compensate for declining resources. (p. 87). _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
