Nice Work

From our friend over at noapparentmotive.org: Here’s some info about the Domestic Workers United Celebration Campaign–because there are lots of ways to get it done but they should all involve respect and fair labor standards. Per noapparentmotive.org,

DWU is an organization of nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York working for respect and fair labor standards for domestic workers. In less than a decade, the DWU has built a membership of over 2,300 workers and won almost a half a million dollars in unpaid wages for domestic workers.

DWU has recently launched a campaign to recruit “donor members” to help sustain their work through these tough economic times. The donor campaign celebration will be held on October 29 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm at the offices of SEIU Local 32BJ, 101 Avenue of the Americas, 22nd Floor. (A flyer with full details here.) You can use the pledge form if you’d like to help, but can’t make it on the day.

A recent article in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (you can check out the abstract here) asks: “As the boundary between family and market changes to accommodate the entry of women into the labor market, who will assume these women’s family‐welfare work?” The authors use an analysis of labor in the US and Sweden to conclude, “Rather than blaming women who hire housecleaners, progressives should aim instead at elevating the status of this labor.” That’s nice work.

–Virginia Rutter

In The New Republic Online, “line of the day” post by Jonathan Cohn, see the “…back-and-forth at the Senate Finance hearings, between Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, and Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat. The subject is requirements that all insurance policies cover certain benefits.”

KYL: “I don’t need maternity care.”

STABENOW: “I think your mom probably did.”

Watch the video here.

As Jonathan Cohn comments on the exchange: “I’m hard-pressed to think of a single exchange that better captures the sensibilities of our two political parties–or the principle of shared risk upon which universal coverage is based.” (The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has taken note, as reported on TalkingPointsMemo, and has sent a fund raising letter to draw attention to the exchange–and how it reflects different values.)

Here, I’m stalled: I think Cohn’s excellent point is a kind of conversation stopper.
If we start from different principles, where do we go from here?

How about self interest and humanity? That’s where I’ll go. A very helpful article at Forbes.com reviews what health care reform means to women. In case you weren’t aware, most private insurance policies currently allow pregnancy as a pre-existing condition for exclusion from coverage. Most jurisdictions are able to have gender ratings that hike up charges for women over men.

Now lots of even the most pessmistic folks seem to think that health care reform at a minimum offers hope that we’ll make such “pre-existing condition” exclusions illegal and that we will establish community ratings that end subgroup ratings, like the gender one. That is the minimum, but I’m still holding out for Medicare for all, something that 65% of Americans favor, according to a recent Time/CBS poll. (yet we are still debating this because….?)

But there’s more: Columns like Adina Nack’s “HPM, Stress and the Inner Game” remind us about the important ways that health care is subjective–and those subjective aspects can cause negative (or positive) health outcomes. When we are disempowered, it wears us down, undermines the immune system. The overarching point of real health care reform is for us all to understand that, in the words of Deborah Lewis, “I do not believe that we earn our illnesses….” This suggests that women–and men too–should be empowered to seek and assert their need for care.

The dilemma is that in a world where it is “special treatment” to get preventative care, like mammograms (only 20 states require private insurance companies to cover these after age 40), or maternity care, or the like, such a personal empowerment view doesn’t get us all the way there. What gets us all the way there is health care for all. Maybe Macbeth would not care about it. But the rest of us, who have a mama, just might.

–Virginia Rutter

Are people really having less sex? Well, at the very least, it looks like they are having less sex outside of their committed relationships, according to a new study written up in Scientific American. But it also looks like people may be making up for having less sex outside of committed relationships by talking about it more. And that is good news for sex.

First the news: In each category surveyed—gay, lesbian, straight—people report fewer affairs now than in the 1970s. Everybody has changed in terms of monogamy: gay men do it (where do it means doing non-monogamy) 59% now versus 82% in the 1970s. Nowadays, straight men do it less—14%. Meanwhile, 13% of straight women and 8% of lesbians do it. As we keep seeing again and again in recent surveys on monogamy, women—lesbian and straight—still report fewer affairs than their male counterparts, but they are catching up with the boys, as UW psychologist David Atkins has shown. On the one hand, affairs overall may be on the decline because of STDS and the like; on the other hand, women may be catching up because they have greater autonomy and economic independence.

That is all interesting, but this is also potentially good news for wild, free-for-all sex. The investigators from Alliant International University in San Francisco showed that over the same period people have also increased how much they talk to their partners about the idea of sex outside of their relationship. (What’s happening in those conversations, report these psychologists, is that they are talking about outside liaisons, and deciding against them.)

But the other discovery here is about the talking. Increasingly, this study hints, people are talking about the notion of sex outside their relationship–talking about forbidden, off-the-approved-roster sex with someone who isn’t an official or legal sweetheart–even if in the end they decide against it. Conversations like that—no matter what the outcome—mean that more and more people are acknowledging, countenancing, and admitting that they and their partners are completely capable of having sexual fantasies about someone other than their official one. We all know that being in a committed relationship doesn’t change our brain structure and doesn’t stop a great, diverse sexual imagination about all manner of things, people, and situations. But when people don’t talk about it, they have to tell one another lies, and pretend like their fantasies don’t exist.

So, maybe people are saying no to the reality of sex with their hot new colleague, but if they are saying yes to a conversation about it with their partner, it might mean that those partners will be better at dreaming up their own edgier, more interesting sex. And, by the way, in a world where women have greater sexual freedom to have affairs, they also have greater freedom to acknowledge desire and have conversations about it that can lead to fewer affairs.

-Virginia Rutter

1. National Health Plan=Good for Small Businesses and Self Employment.
2. Small Businesses and Self Employment=Good for Women.
3. You do the math.

Allow me to explain:
Old news: The U.S. hasn’t been able to muster the will to get real health care reform, but we are leaders in entrepreneurship and small businesses. We have that going for us.

New news: Oops. The U.S. has one of the lowest rates of self-employment and small businesses of any comparable rich economy, per a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Check out “An International Comparison of Small Business Employment.”

“Conservatives and liberals see small business as a way for women to get ahead in the economy. It offers flexible employment–and takes away the glass ceiling because you are your own boss,” comments the report’s lead author and CEPR Senior Economist John Schmitt. “But the numbers on U.S. small business and self employment suggest that the U.S. lags far behind European counterparts.”

Uh, health care issue? The CEPR report explains that one big obvious reason for this surprising weakness might be our lack of availability of health insurance. As Schmitt and co-author Nathan Lane explain, “The undersized U.S. small business sector is consistent with the view that high health care costs discourage small business formation, since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded health care systems.”

So, for example, those considering their own business, women with pre-existing conditions or women of childbearing age can have a lot of trouble getting health insurance. Though insurance companies can’t treat pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, the loopholes make the situation look like gruyere cheese. I’m sure GWP readers have a story or two to tell.

All roads lead to health care reform. This is #87 of the 46 million reasons why Americans really do want health care reform. By really do, I mean, 72% of Americans (polled by NYTimes/CBS) support a public option. It gets framed as like “Medicare for All”–and there’s a bill in Congress to support it. Want to do something? Tell your member of Congress about the CEPR’s small business research. And tell your member of Congress that Medicare for All (H.R. 676) is a no-brainer.

-Virginia Rutter

After six decades Jimmy Carter has left the Southern Baptist Convention in protest of the leadership’s continued insistence on the subservience of women. Carter explains his decision:

It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

Read his article. This good man of deep faith denotes that such discrimination also appears in many other faiths, and has consequences for women’s leadership opportunities, but also for women’s control over our own bodies.

He goes on, blessedly (!), to link (some people’s) Bible-culture of discrimination to the secular culture of discrimination:

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

Amen. (And thanks Ann Austin!)

(For another principled examination of the role of religion in a different form of discrimination, make sure you check out For the Bible Tells Me So,  a documentary about gays, lesbians and Christianity; it includes the story of another southern gentleman, Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, and his faithful work for equality.)

-Virginia Rutter

Last month I went to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure at the National Mall in DC: friends, including one who had had breast cancer, were running. As I walked down to the Mall, I saw many many many shirts, signs, bags, and banners honoring the survivors. I was proud just to be going to watch my friends engage in the Race for the Cure and to honor these cancer survivors. I felt gratitude for the day, for this life, for all the lives. The mass of families was beautiful, moving, charming, and pink.

I secretly had another feeling, though. All the stuff of survivors made me think about two loved ones of my own who were not survivors. My friend Peggy died in April of lung cancer. And my husband Neil had died 10 years before–not of cancer, but anyway, on that walk I was taking it personally that he was not a “survivor.” I kind of felt like, f*#& you (world) with all your glorification of survivors. But that wasn’t what I really felt, because I was so joyful, too, for the survivors.

Writer–and cancer survivor–Deborah Lewis helped me out with these conflicting feelings with her remarkable column in the LA Times. She starts:

Somewhere along the way in our News You Can Use culture, good health has taken on the patina of virtue. Like good grades and job promotion, health is seen as bestowed upon those who work for it. There’s no excuse for not doing everything you can, not with all the lists of necessary practices in popular magazines, not with all the attention to disease prevention. The flip side of this is the judgment passed on those who get sick.

As I reflected beyond my survivor “issue,” she made me think of the many friends of mine who are facing, or have faced, fertility problems. As with judgments passed on those who get sick, those who struggle with fertility often have the two-problem problem: first, they have the problem getting pregnant or sustaining it. But second, they have the problem of feeling guilty, regretful, a whole host of internalized fears, often related to entrenched beliefs about how fertility is a such a necessary part of being a “good woman” (or a “good man”–I wrote about this a while back here) as well as with notion Deborah offered that health=virtue.

So, I wanted to share Deborah’s column with as many people as I could. One line in particular gripped me: “I do not believe we earn our illnesses, even the illnesses that are directly the result of personal habits.” Read it. It is good for what ails you.

-Virginia Rutter

When I was growing up I thought it was my Uncle Frank who said, “most of day’s work is done by people who don’t feel very well that day.” In my family’s lexicon, this meant “life is hard” and “deal with it.”  (Later I learned it was Eleanor Roosevelt; but maybe she was quoting Uncle Frank?)

Here’s what the saying means now: most of a day’s work is done by people who don’t have adequate paid sick leave (not to mention decent health insurance). Our buddies at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) just published a report, “Contagion Nation: A Comparison of Paid Sick Day Policies in 22 Countries,” that will, well, make you sick. Here’s the abstract:

This report finds that the U.S. is the only country among 22 countries ranked highly in terms of economic and human development that does not guarantee that workers receive paid sick days or paid sick leave. Under current U.S. labor law, employers are not required to provide short-term paid sick days or longer-term paid sick leave.  By relying solely on voluntary employer policies to provide paid sick days or leave to employees, tens of millions of U.S. workers are without paid sick days or leave. As a result, each year millions of American workers go to work sick, lowering productivity and potentially spreading illness to their coworkers and customers.

The report couldn’t be more timely, as our swine flu anxiety plateaus out into recession’s hot summer. Workers under increasingly enormous economic stress cannot afford to take off when they are ill. “The economic costs of a serious flu outbreak are potentially enormous,” said lead report author Jody Heymann, Director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University. Her sentiment, and the report’s, were reflected in a New York Times editorial supporting the report’s call to provide workers with paid sick days. Now.

I know, I know. We can’t afford it. Jeepers, ya’ll, we’d really like to help, but we just can’t afford it. Hard times, high unemployment. I hear ya’ out there, and thank goodness for you smart free marketeers who can help us sort out priorities rationally. I mean, heck of a job on that financial sector!

Oh wait, this just in: CEPR did a cool little follow up to “Contagion Nation.” The very title, “Paid Sick Days Don’t Cause Unemployment,” tells the story. But let me recap: The researchers had already shown that availability of sick days doesn’t give countries a higher unemployment rate, nor does it make countries less competitive. But this time, they asked, what about the amount of paid sick days? Does that make a difference? The answer is no. Paid sick days don’t hurt employment–and they don’t help. They have no influence one way or another on unemployment. But, as Dr. Heymann and colleagues explain in “Contagion Nation”:

A substantial body of research has shown that in addition to the obvious health and economic costs imposed on employees by the lack of paid sick days or leave, significant costs result as well for employers. Workers who go to work while sick stay sick longer, lower their productivity as well as that of their coworkers, and can spread their illnesses to coworkers and customers.

The way things are, I don’t feel so good. But reading papers like this is like a shot in the arm. Let’s make sure this work reaches legislators. The National Partnership for Women and Families can hook you up here with a variety of ways to take action, including urging your members of Congress to support the Healthy Families Act, which guarantees workers a minimum of seven days of paid sick leave. (And send them both CEPR papers!)

-Virginia Rutter

So, the latest issue of Business Week warns parents about the “Age of Anxiety” facing young kids in their first recession. According to the psychologists over at BW:

The long-term psychological effects may be most profound for young children, since they are growing up without any real memory of better times. They can pick up on parents’ anxiety about money and may see the world as an uncertain place where they have to struggle to succeed. Later this may make them cautious about career choices and financial decisions.

Does anyone else see this as absolutely hilarious…and infuriating? Hmmm. Who knew economic hard times could be tough on children?

Of course, this piece was written without irony. BW hasn’t seemed to recognize that the “new problem” of the trauma of economic bad times and uncertainty isn’t new for a lot of kids, kids whose parents were outside the charmed circle of opportunity of the past few decades, for whom there wasn’t ever going to be any “memory of better times” in their family.

As economist Nancy Folbre reminded us in her recent, and much more sensible, post “Hard Times for Kids,” the United States has long had one of the highest child poverty rates of industrialized countries. The main reason we do so poorly is that we make no effort to combat child poverty. Demographer Patrick Heuveline has demonstrated that other rich countries like England and France would have the same child poverty rate that we do if they didn’t provide social supports to prevent it.

Folbre makes an interesting point:

During this recession, many other problems, including huge bank bailouts, are competing for public attention and taxpayers’ money. Sometimes I wonder how closely the Child Well-Being Index would mirror an Adult Wrong-Doing Index.

If I were going to construct such a new index, financial malfeasance would rank high among the measurement domains. But in the composite, apathy among those who could do more to help poor children would receive at least an equal weight.

I don’t think that BW is any more interested in the Child Well-Being Index than they are in an Adult Wrong-Doing Index. But when we wring our hands about the children, let’s remember to wring our hands about all the children, including the children we have been neglecting in good times and bad.

-Virginia Rutter

That’s Peggy Schmitt: she’s my boyfriend’s mom. She died at age 68 on April 25, 2009, after a fierce yet sane battle with lung cancer. A remarkable thing happened last Sunday at her memorial service. Friends and family that spanned communities as diverse as an urban homeless (Protestant) ministry and a city Catholic parish outreach program along with teachers from Chestnut Hill independent schools, Philly public schools, and inner city academies, hipsters from the arts and culinary communities, some do-good doctors and one or two do-well lawyers, grieving friends from the very young to the much, much older, just hint at the kind of mind-boggling scope of her life.

Among the many ways in which Peggy was a force for good—for meaningful, substantial, public kinds of good, as well as the more intimate kind—was the discovery that she had been a feminist role model for women who are barely in their 30s, to those nearly in their 60s.

One after another, at our stylized Quaker meeting in Philadelphia, various women spoke at random, interspersed with men, interspersed with teenagers. The stories had thick resonance, as recollections of a life well and intensely lived often do.

The speakers, I started to notice, recalled crashing up against the heartbreak of being young, of wanting…something, everything, that-not-this-but-something-else….  We delicately avoided too many personal details, but the themes were about how to be kind to ourselves while doing big brave things in a world that wasn’t particularly on our side. We told our stories of Peggy’s compassion and confidence in the face of our pain, just as she had in the face of her own, right up until the until the very end.

Peggy did a lot of “empowering.” But the difference was her solidarity. This woman knew struggle; she recognized it without sentimentality, showed us how to respond without judgment of ourselves—or (and this was very important) others. She told us it was hard, but you can do it. And by telling and showing us what she did, she helped make it so.

Peggy herself had triumphed over hardship while creating a beautiful, beautiful life with four unusually wise, non-conforming, justice-loving children, and a life-long partnership with her soulful husband John. I met Peggy on Memorial Day 23 years ago, and her solidarity—from way back then—was a lasting resource, and helped me through hard times that inevitably were to come. And here at her memorial were all these other people from different worlds for whom this was also true.

I don’t think that Peggy would embrace the phrase “feminist role model” but I do think she would like the way so many women in her life felt her particular influence. She wouldn’t embrace the phrase because Peggy saw issues of justice as bigger than feminism, and saw people as much more than a reduction to a single or a few attributes. And that is precisely what, for me, makes Peggy one of my feminist heroes.

Thank you Peggy. Nice Work.

–Virginia Rutter

Can someone puh-lease get all the Wall Street shills like this one off my t.v.? As the economic horizons look darker and darker, economists at Janet Gornick and Pam Stone’s awesome work/family mini-conference at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting in Baltimore this weekend presented, by way of contrast, really nice work.

At the concluding panel, “Public Policy and Working Families: Providing, Supporting, and Equalizing Access,” Heather Boushey (Center for American Progress), Chai Feldblum (Workplace Flexibility 2010), Heidi Hartmann (Institute for Women’s Policy Research) and John Schmitt (Center for Economic and Policy Research) discussed horizons for work and family policy. And they really took Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never waste a perfectly good crisis” to heart. All four demonstrated that the particulars of the current downturn plus key demographic trends will help us to move work/family policy issues higher up on Obama’s and Congress’s priorities list, even in these hard times.

Here are some key points:

*Four out of five jobs lost since December 2007 are men’s. This means that women are increasingly sole breadwinners in partnered families as well as in single-mom families. As Heather Boushey argued in a recent paper for CAP, this shift in family relations and the workplace makes work/family issues more salient as the economic crisis deepens. Boushey encourages us to focus on the implications of a “woman, making 78 cents on the dollar, now supporting her family.” More than ever, we gotta have pay equity. And here’s the crisis-as-opportunity piece:
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