What
America can learn from Europe and Canada
about supporting working families
According to a November 2004 research paper from the New
America Foundation (www.newamerica.net), “in
comparison with most of Europe and, to some extent, Canada, the U.S. provides
exceptionally meager help to children, their parents, and the workers – mostly
women – who care for other people’s children. And despite the current
concern with getting everyone, particularly low income mothers, into the work
force, the U.S. does much less than several other countries to remove employment
barriers for women with young children.”
The report’s
authors, Janet C. Gornick and Marcia
K. Meyers also note
that:
The reality is
that many parents in the U.S. have a much narrower range
of options than parents living elsewhere because many parents
lack paid family leave, access to affordable quality child
care, and opportunities for rewarding and remunerative
employment at fewer than 40 hours per week and 50 weeks
per year. In the absence of supportive public programs
and regulations, American parents are struggling to craft
private solutions that reconcile work and family responsibilities.
But, unfortunately, these private solutions often reinforce
gender divisions of labor, leave parents stressed and exhausted,
and/or expose their children to poor-quality child care
provided by poorly paid female workers.
Helping
America’s Working Parents: What Can We Learn From
Europe and Canada? is based on a cross-national
comparison of several key policy areas— paid parental
leave, working time regulations, and public early childhood
education and care. As anyone familiar with international
family policy might suspect, Gornick and Meyers’ found
that the Nordic countries offer the most generous supports
for working families and are more likely to adopt policies
that promote gender equality in both paid and unpaid
work, while continental European countries help secure
time for caring and family and economic stability but
do much less to enable or encourage gender equality— as
a result, the traditional division of paid and unpaid
labor between men and women is still prevalent in these
countries. In English-speaking countries (Canada and
the UK) policies are “far more limited.” The
U.S., as per usual, “is the extreme case even among
the English-speaking countries. Most American parents
are left to design private solutions to the dilemma of
supporting and caring for children. They are left to
negotiate, often unsuccessfully, with their employers
for paid family leave, reduced-hour options, and vacation
time.”
Helping
America’s
Working Parents is an exceptional resource for advocates
and activists— not only because it provides a clear
and concise overview of work-family reconciliation policies
in selected peer nations, but also because it offers information
about the social outcomes of various policy approaches
as well as an economic analysis of what it would take to
pay for universal parental leave and early childhood education
and care in the U.S. (about 1 to 1.5 percent of the GDP,
according to the author’s estimates). The section
addressing work time regulations is particularly informative.
Of course, political
resistance to adopting European-style social policies in
the U.S. is virtually insurmountable, but Gornick and Meyers
suggest such knee-jerk opposition may be misplaced:
Political debates
about family policy in the U.S. often turn on the issue
of “choice.” In a country in which consumers
expect to exercise choice in everything from athletic shoes
to their children’s schools, government interventions
are often characterized as imposing single solutions on
families that vary in their preferences regarding the care
of children, gender divisions of labor, and employment
arrangements. But leaving families on their own to devise
private solutions to work-family dilemmas does not promote “choice” if
options are limited, expensive, or unacceptable. Policies
that provide parental leave with wage replacement, set
limits on working hours, protect the right to work part
time, and provide high quality, affordable child care would
increase parents’ options for combining earning and
caring.
Helping America’s
Working Parents presents compelling evidence that
it’s not the economics that prevent America from
considering public policies that would substantially eliminate
work-family conflict for all working parents, but overconfidence
in the effectiveness of market-based solutions coupled
with a profound lack of political will. Which, dear readers,
is why we need to shift the grass-roots mothers’ movement
into full gear— sooner rather than later.
Helping
America’s Working Parents:
What Can We Learn From Europe and Canada?
Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers
The New America Foundation, November 2004
Full
report (15 pages, plus charts and bibliography)
in .pdf
Issue
Brief (4 pages) in .pdf
back
to top
New
Reports and Fact Sheets
Who
goes to preschool in the U.S.?
The National Institute for
Early Education Research (www.nieer.org)
has a new policy brief on preschool enrollment in the U.S.
The report, Who Goes to Preschool and Why Does
It Matter (Steven Barnett and Donald J. Yarosz,
August 2004) found that while preschool participation for
3- and 4-year olds has steadily increased over the last
decade, there are still significant gaps. The authors found
that:
- In 2002, 42 percent
of 3-year-olds and 67 percent of 4-year-olds spent regular
hours in preschool, with about one-third attending half-day
programs. Parents were more likely to enroll children in
preschool for its educational value rather than for child
care.
- 3- and 4-year
olds with mothers who have some college education were
more likely to attend preschool than those with mothers
who have a high school education or less. Children with
mothers in the paid workforce were also more likely to
be enrolled in preschool in 2002 (61 percent compared to
44 percent).
- Children from
families with modest incomes were less likely to attend
preschool than those in poor families. Overall, children
in non-poor families were more likely to participate in
preschool than children from poor families (58 percent
compared to 45 percent). However, families with slightly-below
average incomes ($40 to $50 k per year) were least likely
of all income groups enrolled their 3- and 4-year olds
in preschool in 2002.
- The NIEER study
also finds that government-supported programs such as Head
Start fail to serve a substantial number eligible children,
which is consistent with the findings of other recent studies.
The Who
Goes to Preschool report concludes
that despite increased enrollment over the last three
decades, preschool participation in the U.S. remains
highly unequal, “with many children starting out
behind before they begin kindergarten.” Furthermore, “The
children least likely to attend preschool are those whose
parents have the least education and least income, whose
mothers do not work outside the home… The rising
tide of preschool enrollment has not lifted all boats
equally and the factors that predicted inequality in
1991 still predicted inequality in 2001.”
New
Research Debunks Myths About Preschool
Press release from NIEER, October 21, 2004
Who
Attends Preschool and Why It Matters
Steven Barnett and Donald J. Yarosz, August 2004, in .pdf
Fact
sheets from NIEER:
Cost
of providing quality preschool education to America’s
3- and 4-year olds and Economic
benefits of quality preschool education for America’s
3- and 4-year olds
Providing universal quality preschool education for all 3- and 4-year olds
in the U.S. would cost $70 billion a year. However, NIEER estimates that the
economic benefits of universal preschool education would be approximately triple
its costs, based on reduced costs for “remedial education and justice
system expenditures, and in the increased earnings and projected tax revenues
for participants.”
---- ----
Exceptional
Returns:
Benefits of expanding early childhood development programs would far outweigh
the costs
A new publication from the Economic Policy Institute (www.epinet.org)
estimates that every dollar invested in providing high-quality early childhood
education for all poor children would generate a cost benefit of three dollars
in decreased public spending and increased tax revenues. Exceptional
Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood
Development (Robert G. Lynch, October 2004) demonstrates for
the first time “that providing all 20% of the nation’s three- and
four-year-old children who live in poverty with a high-quality ECD program
would have a substantial payoff for governments and taxpayers in the future.
As those children grow up, costs for remedial and special education, criminal
justice, and welfare benefits would decline. Once in the labor force, their
incomes would be higher, along with the taxes they would pay back to society.” While
providing a publicly-financed, comprehensive ECD program for all children from
low incomes families will cost billions of dollars a year, the EPI study projects
that if a nationwide program were started next year, it’s budget benefits
would exceed the cost by $31 billion dollars by the year 2030.
Furthermore, EPI’s Exceptional
Returns report notes that long-term studies
demonstrating the lasting benefits of ECD for children
in poverty are now available. Compared to non-participants,
participants in high-quality publicly-funded ECD programs
gained advantages in both early and later life, including
higher levels of verbal, mathematical, and intellectual
achievement; greater success at school, including less
grade retention and higher graduation rates; higher employment
and earnings; better health outcomes; less welfare dependency;
and lower rates of criminality and incarceration. While
these advantages benefit the participants and their families
directly, they also increase government revenues and
lower government expenditures.
Exceptional
Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment
in Early Childhood Development
Robert G. Lynch, The Economic Policy Institute, October 2004.
Executive
Summary and Introduction (in .html)
Full
report (in .pdf)
---- ----
Facts
on women and poverty
Legal Momentum (www.legalmomentum.org)— formerly
the NOW Legal and Education Fund— has published a
new fact sheet about women’s poverty. The report, Reading
Between the Lines: Women’s Poverty in the United
States 2003, uses data from the U.S. Census
Bureau to reveal the deep and persistent gender gap in
poverty in America. Among the findings of the analysis:
- Single parent
women are 86 percent more likely to live in poverty than
single parent men (35.5 percent compared to 19.1 percent).
- Women age 65
and over are 71 percent more likely to experience poverty
than men in the same age group (12.5 percent compared to
7.3 percent).
- Women with some
college but less than a four-year degree are 49 percent
more likely to live in poverty than men with the same level
of education.
- Women with a
four year college degree or higher were the only group
with the same or slightly lower poverty rates than those
of comparably educated men (4.7 percent as opposed to 4.8
percent).
- 60 percent of
adults who were extremely poor— those with incomes
less than half of the official poverty standard— were
women.
- Women who worked
outside the home were 41 percent more likely to be poor
than male workers (6.9 percent compared to 4.9 percent).
The report cites
a recent study showing that the United States has the highest
rates of poverty for female-headed households among 22 peer
nations (30.9 percent in the U.S. as opposed to a 10.5 percent
average for the comparison group).
Reading Between
the Lines suggests that while Census Bureau reports
often highlight differences in poverty rates based on categories
such as race and class, it has done little to publicize
the gender gap in poverty in the U.S.
Reading
Between the Lines:
Women’s Poverty in the United States 2003 (in .pdf)
---- ----
Domestic
violence and economic insecurity
The National Institute of
Justice (www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/)
the research, development, and evaluation agency of the
U.S. Department of Justice, has published a report on the
links between economic distress in the family and surrounding
neighborhood and domestic violence. The study, When
Violence Hits Home: How Economics and Neighborhood Play
a Role (Michael J. Benson and Greer Litton
Fox, September 2004) found that:
- Violence against
women in intimate relationships occurred more often and
was more severe in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods were more than
twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence than
women living more advantaged neighborhoods.
- Women whose male
partners experienced two or more periods of unemployment
over the 5-year study were almost three times as likely
to be victims of intimate violence as were women whose
partners were in stable jobs.
- Women who live
in economically disadvantaged communities and are struggling
with money in their own relationships suffer the greatest
risk of intimate violence.
- African-Americans
and whites with the same economic characteristics have
similar rates of intimate violence, but African-Americans
have a higher overall rate of intimate violence due in
part to higher levels of economic distress and location
in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
- Women in disadvantaged
neighborhoods were more likely to be victimized repeatedly
or to be injured by their domestic partners than were women
who lived in more advantaged neighborhoods.
The report’s
authors found that the highest rates of intimate violence
occurred among women who lived in disadvantaged neighborhoods
with men who have had high levels of job instability. In
comparison, the rate of intimate violence is lowest among
women whose intimate partners have stable employment and
live in advantaged neighborhoods. Being the eternal skeptic,
one wonders if the Bush administration’s dedication
to marriage promotion as an anti-poverty measure is likely
to improve conditions for poor women, particularly if no
concurrent programs are devoted to improving the quality
of the neighborhoods they live in and the job stability and
wages of the low-income men they are most likely to live
with. And this is as good a time as any to note that a disproportionate
number of women in the welfare-to-work system are victims
of domestic violence.
When
Violence Hits Home:
How Economics and Neighborhood Play a Role
Michael J. Benson and Greer Litton Fox, September 2004 (in .pdf)
---- ----
Work
supports for low-wage mothers
A new policy issue brief from the Institute
for Women’s Policy Research (www.iwpr.org)
suggests that greater access to employer-provided health insurance and affordable,
reliable child care— especially for mothers with children under age six— would
decrease the employment instability of low-income working women. Women’s
Work Supports, Job Retention, and Job Mobility: Child Care and Employer-Provided
Health Insurance Help Women Stay on Jobs (November 2004) found
that during the four year period examined in the study, low-wage working mothers
were almost twice as likely to change jobs as higher-earning mothers. The study
also found that when low-wage working mothers change jobs, only 40 percent
receive wages higher than the wages they earned in their previous job; 20 percent
receive roughly the same wages, but 40 percent a take a pay cut of 10 percent
or more when changing jobs. The report also found that low-income mothers whose
last job offered health insurance benefits were more likely to move to a new
job that offered wage increases of 25 percent or more.
On the relevance
of child care to job stability, the study’s author,
Sunhwa Lee, PhD, stated the obvious in a November 10 press
release: “It’s hard to earn a living if you have
a small child and don’t have any child care. It’s
hard to hold down a job or go find a job if you don’t
have anybody to look after your kids.” The IWPR found
that low-income mothers are more likely to rely on relatives,
parents or siblings for child care, or to have no child care
at all, compared to higher-income mothers. Higher-earning
mothers were much more likely to depend on organized, center-based
care and after school enrichment programs than low-wage working
mothers. Cost, access and flexibility (low-income workers
are far more likely to work non-standard hours than higher-income
workers) are cited as the determining factors in low-income
mothers’ child care arrangements.
Women’s
Work Supports also found that health-service jobs
are more conducive to low-income mothers steady employment
than sales, clerical or production jobs, and that low-income
mothers in food service jobs not only have a relatively
high rate of job turnover, but they are unlikely to move
up in pay when they change jobs.
While this new report
offers some valuable data on job retention and job mobility
for women of the working poor, what I found missing was an
assessment of qualitative data that might provide more insight
into why such a high proportion of low-wage working mothers
trade down in pay when they change jobs. It may be that employers
who provide health care coverage to their minimum- and low-wage
employees also offer other benefits— such as paid sick
leave and vacation time— that reduce job turnover due
to employee termination based on unapproved absences, or
that there is a correlation between low-wage jobs that include
health insurance benefits and those that offer better working
conditions overall. If that is in fact the case, policies
directed toward improving overall working conditions for
low-wage workers might be a more effective way to increase
job retention than expanding access to employer provided
health insurance alone.
Study
Finds Child Care, Health Insurance
Keys To Job Success For Low-Income Mothers
IWPR press release, November 10, 2004 (in .pdf)
Women’s
Work Supports, Job Retention, and Job Mobility:
Child Care and Employer-Provided Health Insurance
Help Women Stay on Jobs
By Sunhwa Lee, PhD, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, November 2004. (in .pdf)
back
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Child
care in the news
From the read-it-and-weep
department: the New Scotsman recently
reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair “promised
to take the burden off working parents by providing school-based
childcare for all children of primary school age” (“Blair
Promises School-Based Care for Primary Children” by
Neville Dean, November 11, 2004). According to the article,
Mr. Blair said “We have got the money set aside to
do this over the next four years. …It is building
on what is already there to make sure that between the
hours of 8am and 6pm there is universal affordable childcare
for children between the ages of five and eleven. …This
is about trying to take the burden off the parents.”
Meanwhile, America’s
neighbor to the north just earmarked $5 billion dollars to
a create a national child care program. On November 2, 2004, federal
and provincial ministers of Canada announced their agreement
to move forward on a nation-wide child care initiative;
the government is expected to phase in a contribution of
$5 billion dollars over the next five years to ensure that
all children have access to high-quality, affordable, government-regulated
childcare. The government’s announcement to build a
national system comes on the heels of an October
2004 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development (www.oecd.org)
describing Canada’s childcare system as a chronically
under-funded patchwork of programs. The study found that
there are only enough regulated childcare spaces for less
than 20 percent of children under the age of six with working
parents, and that Canada currently spends only half the average
OECD recommended level on child care (here’s
a similar OECD summary of the child care system in the U.S.— not
surprisingly, the study found there is considerable room
for improvement.)
Back in the USA, Wall
Street Journal Work and Family columnist Sue
Shellenbarger reports that child care
is more costly than college. According to Shellenbarger’s
October 25 column, “The cost of child care has
been rising at about 3% to 8% annually for several years,
outstripping overall inflation. The average annual cost
of a live-in nanny is now $27,664, according to the International
Nanny Association. Family child-care homes -- where people
take their kids to someone else’s home to be watched
-- average as high as $9,100 a year per child, based
on interviews with providers. And child-care centers
cost over one-third more than a public college, at an
average $7,020 a year, according to soon-to-be-released
data from Runzheimer International. That compares with
an average $5,132 for a year’s tuition at a public
college.”
“Parents are
going to extremes to cover the costs,” Shellenbarger
writes. “Interviews and e-mail exchanges with parents
suggest families are diverting money from college-savings
accounts into child care, asking for help from their parents,
taking out home-equity loans and starting sideline businesses
to pay child-care bills. Others are sharing a nanny, allowing
their nannies to bring their own kids to work, or bartering
use of a vacation home, a car or even the family riding horse
in order to lower salaries.”
Even if the plight
of the dual-professional nanny-hiring vacation-home-owning
set fails to evoke much sympathy, the hard truth is that
child care costs are out of control in the U.S. for families
at all income levels, and the quality of the child care that
is both available and affordable is erratic at best. Given
that resolving the child care problem in America is considered
political poison on Capitol Hill, it’s doubtful the
situation will improve anytime in the near future. Needless
to say, it would be career suicide for any elected official
in the U.S. to suggest it’s time to “take the
burden off the parents.”
Which is a shame,
because a September 2004 report issued by the National
Women’s Law Center (www.nwlc.org)
concludes that barriers to accessing childcare assistance
have increased since 2001.
Child
Care Assistance Policies 2001-2004: Families Struggling
to Move Forwards, States Going Backward states
that “help with child care costs is critical if
low-income families are to be able to work, remain self-sufficient,
and stay off welfare. However, a comparison of state
child care assistance policies in 2004 and 2001, based
on data provided by state child care administrators,
reveals that instead of finding more help, many families
now face increased barriers.” Child care policies
have suffered over the last four years under stagnant
federal funding and state budget crisis.
The NWLC report
found that:
- In three-fifths
of the states, income eligibility criteria to qualify for
childcare assistance decreased.
- Nearly half of
the states lack sufficient funds to service all eligible
families.
- In about half
the states, co-payments increased for families with incomes
at 150 percent of poverty; only the state of Maine allows
families to qualify with income up to 85 percent of the
state median income.
- Quality of childcare
suffers because nearly three-quarters of states fail reimburse
childcare providers at the rate recommended in federal
regulations.
The study concludes
that “Without additional investments in child care,
many more families will be left without the good quality
care parents need to keep a job and that children need to
promote their successful development and enable them to start
school ready to succeed. Families who desperately want to
work and move ahead, and want their children to move ahead,
will instead find themselves falling further behind.”
Child
Care Assistance Policies 2001-2004:
Families Struggling to Move Forward, States Going Backward
Karen Schulman and Helen Blank for the National Women’s Law Center,
September 17, 2004 (in .pdf)
How
Working Parents Cope With Rising Child-Care Costs,
WSJ Career Journal, October 25, 2004
Also by Sue Shellenbarger:
Shorter
Maternity Leaves Are A Danger to Working Mothers,
WSJ Career Journal, May 21, 2004
“Taking a long maternity leave helps stave off the postpartum blues, concludes
the study of 1,762 working mothers for the National Bureau of Economic Research,
Cambridge, Mass., a private nonprofit research organization. Mothers who take
at least three months off after childbirth show 15% fewer symptoms of depression
after they return to work, compared with women who take six weeks or less. Those
who take at least eight weeks show 11% fewer symptoms.”
The
Family Initiative for Better Child Care Preschool and After
School (www.familyinitiative.org)
is a project of Legal Momentum.
The Family Initiative offers updates and tools for citizens
interested in taking state and community action on child
care issues. Check out the State-by-State
Resources page, which provides
links to organizations working to improve the child care
situation in your area.
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Caitlin
Flanagan Watch
Several MMO readers have confided that they take special pleasure in my periodic
tirades about Caitlin
Flanagan’s provocative commentary on modern motherhood.
And I hate to disappoint, but I do not have a single snarky thing to say about
Flanagan’s latest piece for the New Yorker (“Bringing
Up Baby,” November 15, 2004). Flanagan wryly observes that having a baby
seems to transform average men and women into obsessed super shoppers who simply
must have one of everything when it comes to the newest, trendiest, most state-of-the-art
baby gear.
Other
writers and journalists have noted that middle-class parenting
circa 2004 seems to entail membership in a high-end and aggressively
marketed consumer culture, and Flanagan follows suit by suggesting
that a fair number of the gizmos and gadgets new parents
believe they cannot possibly live without are destined
to become so much yard sale fodder when all is said and done.
She also comments that companies manufacturing and marketing
baby products not only prey on the All-American shop-till-you-drop
acquisitiveness of parents and parents-to-be, but on their
primal fears as well. It’s not a pretty picture, but
I also wonder (as Flanagan does not) whether parents are
particularly vulnerable to frenetic over-consumption because
they’ve bought into the cruel fantasy that child-rearing
will be wonderfully fun and easy-as-can-be if they just have
all the right stuff to keep baby busy, safe and
dry. After all, the alternative— that parenting infants
and toddlers is rarely fun and never easy— is unthinkable.
Flanagan
does not express her yearning for the more gracious and uncomplicated
lifestyle of her mother’s generation even once in this
essay (well, maybe once), nor does she mix in the usual asides
that reveal her deep ambivalence about whether it’s
best for young children to have mothers who stay at home
full-time. Perhaps Flanagan has mellowed, or perhaps her
editors at the New Yorker are reigning in her oppositional
edge, but “Bringing Up Baby” is unlikely to create
much of a stir. If this keeps up, we may start missing the
old Caitlin and the controversy that follows in her wake. —JST
“Bringing
Up Baby” by Caitlin Flanagan, The New
Yorker, November 15, 2004. The New Yorker does
not archive content online, but Flanagan’s article
is worth reading if you happen to run across a copy of
the magazine.
On
a somewhat related note, 95
percent of respondents to an online poll
of 20,000 Parenting Magazine readers agreed that “kids
today are spoiled” (Parenting,
December/January 2004). That’s almost as sobering as Hedrick
Smith’s new documentary for PBS’s Frontline on
the high cost of the consumption-based market, “Is
Wal-Mart Good for America”.
Also
of interest: Philip Cushman’s pre-election
opinion piece on the politics of consumption from
the Common Dreams News Center (www.commondreams.org).
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Challenges
to reproductive rights
in the U.S. and Canada
New
report finds thirty states poised to make abortion illegal
if Roe v. Wade overturned
The Center for Reproductive Rights (www.crlp.org),
a center that protects and advances women’s reproductive rights
by collaborating nationally and internationally with organization to
secure legal protections, issued a detailed state-by-state analysis of
the impact of a reversal of Roe v. Wade. What If
Roe Fell? The State by State Consequences of Overturning Roe vs. Wade (September
2004), notes that a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe would
not by itself make abortion illegal in the United States. Instead, a
reversal of Roe would remove federal constitutional protection
for a woman’s right to choose and give the states the power to
set abortion policy. The report identifies thirty states at risk for
making abortion illegal within a year if the Supreme Court reverses Roe:
Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan,
Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia,
and Wisconsin are considered at high risk; Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are considered
at middle risk.
The CRR anticipates
that the Bush’s administration will pursue anti-choice
measures in the courts, congress, and the executive branch,
and will try to restrict access to safe abortion, access
to contraception, and speech about abortion.
What
If Roe Fell? The State by State Consequences
of Overturning Roe vs. Wade
Full
report in .pdf
------------
Challenges to reproductive rights in Canada
In 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favor of women’s
right to choose under the Charter of Rights and Freedom.
Current challenges for pro-choice
activists groups in Canada have less to do with court battles than about
funding, education, and awareness. Although abortion in
Canada is safe, legal, and publicly
funded, significant barriers to accessing an abortion exist across the
country. A study by the Canadian Abortion Rights Action
League (www.caral.ca)
concluded that four out of five hospitals do not perform abortions. Gestation
limits to abortion are inconsistent within and between hospitals, and in
the province of New Brunswick the approval of two doctors is required in
direct
violation of the law. The new pro-choice
group Canadians for Choice (www.canadiansforchoice.ca)
signals a new era in abortion-rights activism. The group
will raise funds to conduct medical, legal, social, and policy
research and provide public education and awareness. Information
from the research will be used to educate and train health
care practitioners and will be made available to the public
through a resource center and database.
Pro-choice challenges
could change in Canada if the Conservative Party is elected
into office in the future. Canada’s Conservative Party
includes a number of members who are anti-choice and have
said that they would allow legislation that included a third-party
opinion in women’s decision to have an abortion.
From
the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League:
Protecting
Abortion Rights in Canada, 2003 (in .pdf)
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Low-wage
workers forced to work off the clock
A November 19 news story by Steven Greenhouse for the New
York Times reports that it is not uncommon for managers to boost
profits by asking low-wage workers to put in unpaid hours “off the clock”.
According to the article, “Off-the-clock work can take many forms. Employees
are sometimes told that it is the way people advance in a company, and other
times they are forced to show up early or stay late under threat of losing
their jobs.” Greenhouse quotes Adam T. Klein, a lawyer who has brought
off-the-clock lawsuits against A&P and J. P. Morgan Chase, who suggests
that many companies push for such unpaid work because it is an easy way to
bolster the bottom line: “Corporate profits are derived from efficiency,
and every extra minute off the clock they can squeeze out of a worker generates
profits to the bottom line,” he said. “Some companies have even
institutionalized the notion that preshift and postshift work doesn't have
to be compensated.” As a result, the NY Times story reports
that “workers at hair salons, supermarkets, restaurants, discount stores,
call centers, car washes and other businesses who have murmured only to one
another about off-the-clock work are now speaking up and documenting the illegal
practice.”
Forced
to Work Off the Clock, Some Fight Back
By Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times,
November 19, 2004
Free content on the electronic version of the New York Times (www.nytimes.com)
expires after 14 days, but you can try to access the story here.
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Elsewhere
on the Web:
Essays
and commentary of note:
Scoldings
from Strangers
By Katy Read for Literal Latte (www.literal-latte.com)
“My scoldings have occurred in an era when scolding children themselves
has fallen out of fashion. Child-rearing experts caution against yelling or shaming,
especially in public. In years of hanging around playgrounds and swimming pools
frequented by parents who, like myself, read those experts’ books, I have
rarely heard children addressed with anything harsher than a firm but respectful
command. …Which is not to say that all of the villagers have given up on
raising the child. Some have simply redefined their role. Now they help out by
keeping an eye on the mother.”
My
Non-Abortion Era
By Sarah Buttenwieser for LiteraryMama (www.literarymama.com)
“What strikes me as ironic is that infertility treatments are on the rise
just as the right to abortion becomes ever more tenuous, ever more fragile. Without
access to abortion for all women, the euphemistic medical reduction, which the
infertility community relies upon increasingly as its technologies create greater
numbers of multiple pregnancies, might be the next form of abortion in peril.”
Children
of Privilege
by Meredith Michaels, The Nation (www.thenation.com)
“The moment I told my parents that I was pregnant (a story in itself),
it was clear that their goal was to undo what had been done as quickly as possible
so that I might retain my place in line. In the pre-Roe 1960s, if a
woman wanted an abortion, she had two ‘choices’: She could burrow
underground searching for an illegal abortion or she could present herself to
a hospital review board for a ‘therapeutic’ abortion. The former
was a terrifying and dangerous process. The latter was a carefully guarded and
cautiously administered policy, in which the patient was required to show that
carrying the pregnancy to term would endanger her mental or physical health.”
For
more about the history of reproductive “choice,” read
the MMO
interview with Rickie Solinger, author of Beggars
and Choosers.
------------ From
Women’s eNews (www.womensenews.org):
Women
Push to Change Family Courts’ Custody Rules
By Jennifer Friedlin, November 1, 2004
Across the country, women are backing legislation that calls for more protections
from an abusive parent being granted custody rights in family court. These
laws reverse what advocates say is a pervasive sexism.
Related
article:
Biased
Family Court System Hurts Mothers
By Garland Waller, September 9, 2001
Minnesota's
Family Cap on Welfare Draws Fire
By Jennifer Friedlin, October 19, 2004
Critics say “family cap” policies--designed to discourage single
parents receiving federal aid from having more children--harm children. They
criticize Minnesota's decision to adopt such a policy when other states have
already repealed it.
Jennifer
Friedlin’s full series on women and welfare “Moms
Without A Net,” is now available in a downloadable
.pdf version (cost: $6.00)
from Women’s eNews. The full text of the individual
articles is still available at no charge from the Women’s
eNews archive.
Large
Cuts in Federal Housing Aid Expected
By Melinda Tuhus, November 18, 2004
Single mothers and elderly women are the majority of the 2 million Americans
who depend on Section 8. As the federal rent-subsidy program faces funding
cuts of at least $1 billion, many of them worry about hanging on to their homes.
Laci
Peterson’s Murder Dramatizes Common Danger
By Gretchen Cook, November 16, 2004
Murder by an intimate partner is the leading cause of death for pregnant women.
Science
Reporting Skews Sex Differences
By Sheila Gibbons, November 17, 2004
Science reporting on sex differences comes out differently in conservative
and liberal newspapers. So depending on which you read, gender stereotypes
may be getting confirmed or challenged.
More
about science reporting and gender stereotypes:
Doing
Difference: Motherhood, gender and the stories we live by
by Judith Stadtman Tucker for
the MMO.
More
Women Seek Vaginal Plastic Surgery
By Sandy Kobrin, November 14, 2004
Surgery to reshape the labia and other areas of the vagina is picking up fast,
say plastic surgeons. While some women undergo the operations to improve comfort,
many want to conform to ideals set by the porn industry.
------------
From
AlterNet (www.alternet.org):
Desperately
Seeking Sanity
By Nina Burleigh, October 22, 2004
“ I’m a working mother who would rather fight than quit my job, and
I’m sick of hearing about the “complexities” of modern women's
lives. I’m tired of the very sound of the words, the earnest lexicon, the
endless lather over how we can “manage” to “juggle” our “choices”… I
have heard women say they actually prefer to stay home with their children. I
don’t personally know anyone who can say that believably. In fact, I’ve
always detected a whiff of scary depression inside the minivans and cozy homes
of stay-at-home mommies, starting with my own mother’s house in the 1960s.
I think I suffer from vicarious post-traumatic stress disorder – the lasting
psychological consequence of watching my mother trapped alone in the 1960s with
three children, including me.”
Double
Standard on Drugs
By Stephen Pizzo, November 17, 2004
“The Food and Drug Administration just issued a warning on RU-486 – the
drug used to cause medical abortions – after two women died from secondary
infections after taking the pill to end their pregnancies. But the FDA waited
until about 27,000 people had died from heart attacks and strokes while taking
arthritis drug Vioxx before pulling that drug. Why the discrepancy?”
------------
From
Ms. Magazine (www.msmagazine.com):
A
Family Affair
Gillian Kane reports on the 2004 conference
of the World Congress of Families. “The conference’s
theme —‘The Natural Family and the Future of
Nations: Growth, Development and Freedom’ — sounds
benign and uncontroversial; in reality, it’s a strategic
camouflage for a familiar set of favorite ultraconservative
causes: an intolerant version of heterosexuality and marriage
that precludes recognition of gay unions, is anti-abortion,
anti-contraception and anti-sex education. Speaker after
speaker warned that the survival of the family is imperiled.
The culprits are the usual suspects: “radical feminists,” single
mothers, divorcées and homosexuals… And the
solution? Government intervention, of course.”
Virgin
Territory
by Camille Hahn, Fall 2004
“The abstinence-only education movement is big business. Its product is
the promotion of chastity through speaking engagements and the selling of curricula
and promotional materials. There is underwear emblazoned with “No Sex” on
the crotch, T-shirts, pens and bookmarks — you name the tchotchke — but
the serious money involves large federal and state grants. The movement is growing
and gaining influence.”
------------
From
Salon.com (www.salon.com):
Breed
all about it
By Lynn Harris, November 11, 2004
“My urge to read Conceive under cover of the New York Times came from two
places. I worried that 1) people who see me reading it would think, If I can’t
conceive from one night with no birth control and plenty of Bailey’s --
i.e., if I have to resort to reading a magazine about it -- something's wrong
with me, and 2) people who see me reading it will think that I'm desperate, addled, “obsessed,” incapable
of “rational analysis,” about to strike up a conversation with a
stranger about folic acid, liable to run off with that lady’s stroller
when the doors open at Delancey -- and, worst of all, that I am caving in to
the very evil culture that wants me pregnant as badly as I do.”
— MMO,
November 2004
Shawna
Goodrich contributed to this month’s noteworthy.
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