The Pandemic Drives MCH, or Maternal and Child Hell

"CL Society 408: Mother and child" by francisco_osorio is licensed under CC BY 2.0

During the years when I worked internationally on MCH—Maternal and Child Health—our mission was to save the lives of mothers and children in the so-called developing world through several primary health care practices. The twin engines driving child survival were immunization and diarrheal disease control. Family planning was the start point for women’s health.

Today, MCH takes on new meaning: Maternal and Child Hell. Its two driving engines are lack of childcare and mothers driven out of the workforce because of it. The crisis in childcare is not new, but it is exacerbated by the pandemic. Even affluent families who can afford reliable childcare are feeling the effect.

The Child Care Is Essential Act, introduced in the Senate in June, would help if Mitch McConnell and Republicans weren’t in the majority. Covid-driven, it provides for $50 billion in appropriations for a Child Care Stabilization Fund to award grants to childcare providers during the public health crisis. Without that Act many facilities will close.

If corporations, universities, and other workplaces don’t offer onsite daycare, who will fill the gap? It’s a difficult question for people who work freelance or who are unemployed but looking for work and, of course, for undocumented workers. 

According to the Department of Labor, thirty million people have lost their jobs since Covid-19 appeared. For working moms, already struggling with the work/home balance, this could have long-term negative consequences, including lost opportunities, less upward mobility in the workplace, lower incomes (impacting Social Security and pensions), and difficulty getting back into the job market.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, highlighting how women’s careers could be derailed because of the pandemic, noted that “juggling work and family life has never been easy.” For mothers, the pandemic makes coping especially exhausting as traditional gender roles and pay disparities re-emerge as issues. Without childcare, working moms are forfeiting or delaying careers because they are still prime caretakers of families and children.

As Joan Williams, head of the Center for Worklife Law at the University of California, said in the WSJ article, “Opening economics without childcare is a recipe for a generational wipeout of mother’s careers.”

Women who try to maintain careers or jobs often face situations like a woman in San Diego did when she was fired because the firm said her young children were interrupting Zoom meetings.  She sued. At Florida State University things didn’t go that far. Following an email to all employees that the university would “return to normal policy and [would] no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely,” the hue and cry forced FSU to back down and issue an apology.

Last March 2,000 mothers working for Amazon organized an advocacy campaign, urging the company to provide a backup child care benefit, as other big corporations like Apple and other corporate giants have done. They are not the only ones to organize like this, but in most cases the results are not yet clear.

What is clear is that the child care system in this country is broken. It has been since women rejected confining their role to marriage and motherhood and joined the growing ranks of working women. Our public policy has never caught up with that sociological change. Nor have we realized our obligation and co-responsibility for raising children, while committing to work/home balance for the good of American families.

There is an economic gain to seeing the light, however.  Child care allows parents to work, and their working contributes to economic growth. According to the Center for American Progress, American businesses lose more than $12 billion annually because of challenges workers face in seeking childcare and the cost of lost earnings, productivity, and revenue due to the childcare crisis totals an estimated $57 billion each year.

Along with businesses and other employers, states clearly have a role to play in establishing family friendly benefits for every family, but especially for low income families and families of color. Federal action is also needed, and that action is supported by voters across the political landscape.

With half of Americans living in so-called “child care deserts,” long term policy changes are imperative. In addition to including families at all levels of society in the national conversation, government must move beyond relying on disparate organizations to plug the holes. There needs to be a substantial shift in corporate culture such that universal childcare is the norm. Without that the very nature of “family” will favor only the affluent, as so much of American policy has done already. We need to understand and act on the “intersectionality” of race, gender, and economics, which are all part of the fabric of social justice.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

RBG Says It: A Demand for Pandemic Polls is Wrong!

Wisconsin Republicans have come out from under their rock to assert a truth: it’s to their party’s advantage when voting is suppressed, however you do it. Their latest methods are new and frightening.

Wisconsin’s governor, a Democrat, sought to move primaries to a safer summer deadline.; the vote would include a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, as conservative as the R-dominated statehouse, Republicans wanted to keep it that way. They took the Governor to a state district court, which upheld the Governor’s move, but then SCOTUS took up the case, and narrowly (along party lines) upheld the Republican move to vote at in-person polls today and to shorten the deadline for absentee voting.

They vote for judges in Wisconsin. So if you are a Wisconsin citizen who wants to replace a conservative judge with someone you prefer, all you have to do is risk your life. Oh, and put the old ladies at the polling desk at risk. And first find the place where you’re supposed to vote. In the interest of polling “safety,” numbers of sites for voting have been reduced. There are now four for the city of Milwaukee!

Meanwhile, requests for absentee ballots go unacknowledged and unsent, according to many. Not surprising. There’s a pandemic going on.

Is this a preview of Republican plans for November???

The great SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the dissenting opinion: “The majority of this Court declares that this case presents a ‘narrow, technical question, That is wrong. The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic. Under the District Court’s order, they would be able to do so. Even if they receive their absentee ballot in the days immediately following election day, they could return it. With the majority’s stay in place, that will not be possible. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety. Or they will lose their right to vote, though no fault of their own. That is a matter of utmost importance— to the constitutional rights of Wisconsin’s citizens, the integrity of the State’s election process, and in this most extraordinary time, the health of the Nation.”

Thanks to Alternet and Cody Fenwick for covering this story. And thanks to NPR for its reports of voters turning out in masks, and polls having plastic shields and more. Let’s see what happens! Tell your legislators you want paper votes and absentee votes for November.

Daddy Warbucks Is Not Coming to Save Us—But Women Economists Will

from Rickey Gard Diamond’s column in Ms. Magazine. See them all at msmagazine.com/tag/women-unscrewing-screwnomics-series/

You may have dreamed of a white Christmas—but events becoming whiter and more exclusively male in 2020 show signs of turning nightmarish.

In December 2019, there was reason for hope: Nancy Pelosi and the U.S. House impeached the president. The Democratic debates, although they grew whiter, still included two women. And the first ever female president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Thea Lee, appeared on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal—proving economists can be fully human and funny, and encouraging a whole flank of female economists, notably rare in this still whitest, mostly male and unfunniest realm. 

Economists at EPI, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on policies affecting middle- and low-income families, are more diverse than those at most economic think tanks in Washington, D.C. In late October 2019, Lee hosted a distinguished panel to discuss how the economic conversation changes when women enter the picture that included Janet Yellen, the first and only woman former head of the Federal Reserve, and Bucknell University professor Nina Banks, who described committee work seeking curriculum change at the National Economic Association. The youngest panelist, Harvard Research Scholar Kayla Jones described a new community of black women economists, named for Dr. Sadie Tanner Mosel Alexander, the first of her race to earn a Ph.D. in economics in 1921. (The Sadie Collective will hold its second national conference in Washington, D.C., Feb. 20-22, 2020.)

The life experiences of more diverse economists, Lee told Ms., promises a wider variety of perspectives and research into unique problems and solutions.

Lee’s own heritage is Jewish-Chinese. She started as a trade economist at EPI in the 1990s, and went on to work with the AFL-CIO, the largest labor organization in the country. Late in 2019, she told reporter Carly Stern at Ozy.com that men dominated the top ranks of both economics and labor during most of her career. “That’s made me feisty,” admitted the five-foot-two woman whose nickname at the AFL-CIO was “Big Labor.”

In December, she was appointed to the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission—created in 2000 to help oversee trade war details, another hopeful development. She already served on the board of the nonprofit Congressional Progressive Caucus Center, helping to nail down the details of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal on the horizon. 

Then, just as 2019 came to a close, The New York Times revealed the backside of Trump’s 2017 tax cut, a more skyrocketing federal deficit than had first been predicted.

Two tax reform measures, publicly proclaimed as a way to get corporations to bring their money back from overseas tax havens and invest in jobs here, had acronym names: BEAT and GILTI—yes, you read that last one right—stands for Base Erosion and Anti-abuse Tax and Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income. Clear as mud. 

These two changes, we’d been told with a straight face, would save the day and our jobs. But rewired by lobbyists with devilishly detailed new rules-making, these two measures became a booster rocket attached to our federal budget. Newly reinforced tax exclusions for the wealthiest sent our government’s revenues into an outer space void. 

Our government begins to look as bankrupt as Trump’s Atlantic City casino. In 2018, the U.S. had the biggest budget deficit of any of the 36 developed nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; our drop in national revenue in 2018 was also the biggest. 

Daddy Warbucks didn’t come to our rescue. Instead, we cut food stamps for our poorest families, a tiny drop in our federal deficit bucket. Middle East war-making has already cost us $6.9 trillion, according to a Brown University study cited by CNBC. Now thanks to a suspiciously timed “imminent threat,” an impeached president tweet-threats Iran with the Pentagon’s “brand new beautiful equipment.” 

More privately held profits for those who own financial tools and transnational corporations means more freedom to exploit labor around the world. This privatized white male solidarity among the one percent keeps our U.S. wages stuck in the 1970s. Some of EPI’s most important research, Lee told Ms., is its analysis of the ratio, or relationship, between U.S. productivity and U.S. wages over the long haul. 

For a little more than 30 years after WWII, from 1948 to 1979, and in a time when labor unions were more numerous, the two figures nearly matched. Overall productivity grew 108 percent, while hourly wages grew by 93 percent. In the nearly 40-year period from 1979 to 2018, productivity and wages parted ways. While production efficiency increased by another 69.6 percent, hourly compensation grew by only 11.6 percent. 

The promise of “trickle down” was betrayed by policies favoring larger corporate profits—like Trump’s latest tax cuts—while squelching labor organizing. The result is growing inequality for a labor force more productive than ever.  Thanks to additional rule-making magic by Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, EPI also reports that workers’ rights have been rolled back at an unprecedented rate, reversing an intended mission to protect them. 

Only Congress can enforce workers’ rights it once established by law. It’s the same Congress that needs to run a fair impeachment trial and curb presidents who go to war without counting the cost in lives, money or shame. The stock market is already rearranging investments to cash in on higher oil prices and armaments, but the resulting costs of commutes and taxes will come out of working family pockets.

Lee at the EPI helps make sure we can see clear details and add it up for ourselves. 

One Hundred and Eight Years of Marching

This photo shows a woman with a sign that mentions the Shirtwaist Factory, a reference to the deadly New York City fire that took the lives of 145 women seamstresses in 1911. But as early as 1908, working women were organizing and marching for better working conditions and pay, and still we’re waving signs in the streets, believing a better world with women’s say-so is not only possible, but essential.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, March 8, celebrated around the world. Do something special! Wear a big hat, go out with your girlfriends, negotiate for a raise, march for your rights! The date it commemorates marks its beginning in 1908, when 15,000 women marched in the streets of New York City, demanding shorter hours, better pay, and the right to vote.

 The following year, an enterprising Socialist Party of America organized a women’s conference and proposed there that March 8th become an annual commemoration of women. The next year, 1911, a working women’s conference in Copenhagen attended by 100 women from 17 countries proposed March 8th become an international day of recognition. This year marks the 108th International Women’s Day.

 So what do we American women have to show for it? Well, economist Heidi Hartmann, who founded the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington D.C., and who introduced us to the gender pay-gap and updates it every year, came out with a longer-term analysis with her colleague Stephen Rose in November 2018. They say that when looked at in 15-year increments, women make only 49 cents on a man’s dollar, not the more often cited 80 cents of Equal Pay Day that makes us feel as if we’re gaining a bit. 

It’s pretty simple why this is so: American women are still much more likely than men to cut back hours or take a break from the job market to have children or care for a sick family member. Without affordable child care or family leave time built into our American social contract, women workers and their families cannot help but come up short.

Meanwhile, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) just released an update on women’s educational debt. Going to college in greater numbers than men now, women also tend to borrow more money. They owe two-thirds of the nation’s $1.3 TRILLION in educational debt—and then the pay gap (see above) makes it harder for her to pay it back. The women most deeply in debt upon graduating are African American women—on average owing $33,000, compared to $22,000 for white women and $19,500 for white men. The educational benefit that exists for military veterans just doesn’t apply here—but it could, with adequate state and federal support.  

That apparently will take more women marching in the streets, and perhaps (gasp) more dread democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.