The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work

Immigration: Instant Adults

The United States has always relied on immigration for low-cost population growth. One U.S. pundit gleefully called immigrants “instant adults,” because the cost of raising them is borne by other societies. ⁶ However, in keeping with the desire not to spend anything to raise and educate their workforce, many employers oppose family reunification, where authorized immigrants can eventually bring members of their families. So too do politicians: While advocating for immigration, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican, writes,

Extended family members typically do not produce the economic benefits that work-based immigrants do, and they impose far greater costs. Many extended family immigrants are children, elderly people, or others who do not work[,] yet often consume . . . social services such as schooling and health care. ⁷

Lately, some pro-immigration conservatives are worried that sending countries like Mexico have seen birth rate declines, while recent immigrants have shown a tendency to organize for better conditions. The one thing employers and their political representatives all agree on is that they do not want immigrants to have rights on the job or in the community. This is why they favor crackdowns that terrorize immigrant communities at the same time supporting guestworker programs which deny workers most labor rights. President Donald Trump, while he sent troops to the border to block families fleeing violence in Central America, supported adding 30,000 slots to the H2B guest worker program.

Lower Birth Rates and the 99 Percent

For ordinary people, gently declining population is not a concern. While corporate think tanks decry low birth rates and warn that an aging population will be left destitute by a smaller working cohort, these warnings are largely an excuse to cut Social Security. In reality, there is plenty of production to support retirees, ⁸ but rampant inequality means that productivity gains have been stovepiped to the top in the form of unbelievable fortunes that allow multi-billionaires to buy islands and contemplate colonizing Mars. Because only earned income is taxed for Social Security, these unearned fortunes evade the system entirely. Meanwhile, if the $7.25 federal minimum wage had kept up with productivity increases, it would now be over $18. ⁹

Surveys indicate that potential parents are deterred by the costs of child care and housing, long or irregular work hours, low wages, unreliable health care, and student debt.

The 99 percent may not suffer from lower birth rates, but capitalism requires growth, and one element has always been population growth. From the inception of capitalism in Europe, populations grew steadily. Only this century is population projected to decline in many countries, a process that started in Japan in 2011. “Capitalism has never flourished except when accompanied by population growth,” writes Philip Longman of the New America Foundation, “and it is now languishing in those parts of the world (such as Japan, Europe, and the Great Plains of the United States) where population has become stagnant.” ¹⁰ So far, U.S. employers are avoiding the costs of reproduction of their workforce by blocking efforts to institute paid family leave and universal childcare, but the declining birth rate indicates this is not going to work much longer.

From Family Wage to Social Wage

How did we get to this point? The labor movement in the United States struggled to make family life tenable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by demanding a family wage which would allow one male worker to support a full-time female homemaker and caregiver, and their offspring. While it was sexist, it had one progressive element writes Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings, “It recognizes the employers’ obligation to pay something for the labor of family care, including the labor of replenishing and maintaining generations of the workforce.” ¹¹

The family wage came to include health care as a fringe benefit of employment. Spurred by World War II era labor shortages and wage controls, employers eager to attract workers established health care as a fringe benefit to employment. And after the war, while employers throughout Europe were giving in to demands for universal health care, here in the United States, employers—partly by redbaiting advocates of universal programs—retained the power to determine a worker’s health care access. For most women, that meant that health care coverage depended on marriage, and on the man’s employer, further extending the male supremacist power of the family wage.

The family wage, even in its stingiest form, was an excuse to pay women less, so it conflicted with another important union goal, equal pay. In light industrial jobs, the garment industry, communications, and food chain work, women’s lower pay has been used to ratchet down men’s pay. Over time, whole occupations switched from “male” to “female” to take advantage of women’s lower pay: telephone operators, bank clerks, teachers. ¹² As a result, equal pay has been regarded as a working-class priority, at least by the most forward-thinking portions of the labor movement. United Electrical Workers (UE) strikers at General Electric stayed out for four additional weeks in 1946 demanding that women receive the same raises as men. ¹³ Today, equal pay for men and women in the same job is basic to union contracts.

One U.S. pundit gleefully called immigrants “instant adults,” because the cost of raising them is borne by other societies.

While the family wage never covered all of the working class—many black families never got it—for unionized workers, the family wage did make it possible to support both a breadwinner and a homemaker, along with children, on one paycheck. In 1950, 20 percent of married white women worked outside the home, while 31 percent of married non-white women did. ¹⁴

As wages stagnated in the 1970s, families kept up their standard of living by sending both spouses to work. Sending out an additional worker stabilized household income, but at the cost of forty hours or more per week of family care time. In effect, where employers as a whole had been supporting two adults and their children in exchange for one forty-hour a week job, they were now getting eighty hours or more of work for essentially the same price. The care and homemaker job, meanwhile, was squeezed into the day after work, leading to the double day. Now, 68 percent of working-age women with children under six work, two thirds of them full time. ¹⁵

Labor governments in Europe resolved this contradiction between equal pay and family-supporting wages by mandating that employers provide, or pay into a government fund to provide, a substantial “social wage” to replace the family wage, including long paid maternal or parental leave, sick leave, and vacations, guaranteed child care and health care, and free schooling through college. These policies have endured despite changes in governments, even expanding in places, although in some countries, such as the United Kingdom, they are now under attack.

. . . [C]apitalism requires growth, and one element has always been population growth.

Leave time is guaranteed by law, and paid through a public insurance fund, making it independent of one’s particular employment situation. The costs are spread among employers, eliminating the financial incentive to discriminate against those of childrearing age. So, while employers in the United States have been avoiding the costs of raising successive generations of workers—putting the burden on women in the form of uncompensated labor—in countries with a substantial social wage, employers are compelled to contribute.

Countries in which sexist discrimination makes it difficult for women to work and have children, such as Japan and Italy, have not experienced higher birth rates, while those that make the combination inviting, such as Sweden and France, have. Steffen Kroehnert, a researcher for the Institute for Population and Development in Berlin, explains,

For a long time, politicians said that the high participation of women in the labor market is responsible for the low birth rate, because when women go into the labor market, they don’t have children anymore. But interestingly, when you look at . . . western European countries, the fertility rate is higher in countries with a higher labor market participation of women. ¹⁶

French demographer Laurent Toulemon contrasts France to Japan, where pregnant workers are regularly fired:

A [Japanese] woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible. ¹⁷

As U.S. journalist Stephanie Mencimer put it, “Conservatives thought that if they only made it harder for mothers to work, women would stay home. Instead, women stopped having kids.” ¹⁸

Panic in Sweden

Sweden’s family policies—480 days of parental leave, for example—are the envy of people in the United States, but few know that these policies started with a panic about low birth rates. ¹⁹ In 1900, Swedish women were having four children, on average. A growing industrial sector led to rapid urbanization, with cramped housing and harsh conditions for workers. By 1930 that figure had dropped below two, causing conservatives to call for a crackdown on contraceptives and a stop to women working outside the home. On the other side of the debate, the union-linked Social Democratic Workers’ Party—the dominant party in the Swedish parliament starting in 1932—was focused on improving working conditions and schools. They favored more birth control freedom and “on the whole they did not worry about the risk of depopulation.” ²⁰

Into the debate stepped a young Social Democratic couple, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, an economist and a social psychologist, respectively. They cowrote a controversial blockbuster, Crisis in the Population Question (1934), which forged a third path between conservatives and the Social Democrats. What they did with the two opposing positions “seemed to the public almost like magic,” writes the Myrdals’ daughter Sissela Bok. “They wholly accepted the conservative view regarding the great danger that depopulation posed to the country, but managed to draw the opposite conclusion, that this danger presented ‘the most forceful argument for the profound and radical reshaping of society.’” ²¹

. . . [W]hile employers in the U.S. have been avoiding the costs of raising successive generations of workers . . . in countries with a substantial social wage, employers are compelled to contribute.

Newly urbanized and with industrial jobs, Swedish women were resisting their traditional roles. A government commission found that women did not want to get married, “locking them in a cycle of child rearing and housekeeping” that “prevented them from participating in paid labor and higher education.” ²² The Myrdals prescribed free health care, free school lunches, housing subsidies for families with children, and laws protecting women from getting fired when they got pregnant. They also favored sex education in schools and complete access to contraception. Their book launched a furious debate, and resulted in discussion groups all over the country.

While the conservative population program consisted of banning contraception, the Myrdals suggested reforms that would benefit everyone, but especially women, who were engaging in what Alva Myrdal thought of, disapprovingly, as a “birth strike.” ²³ While she disliked the strike, it created the pressure that made possible her ideas for changing the condition of women. Gunnar Myrdal reflected in 1938 that the low birth rate “turns political opinions away from conservatism and toward radicalism . . . The population problem is utilized, as the conservative Swedish economist bitterly complains, as a ‘crow-bar for social reforms.’” ²⁴

Sweden’s family policies . . . are the envy of people in the U.S., but few know that these policies started with a panic about low birth rates.

The union-backed government took up many of the Myrdals’ suggestions, protecting pregnant women from firing and subsidizing hospital births. Universal child allowances were introduced in 1948, along with a system of health care for all which ramped up after World War II.

Of course, the Swedish “middle way” is not the only possible road to generous family policies, and it may not have been possible to win without the example of the Soviet Union and, after World War II, other eastern bloc countries. Across the socialist world, contraception and abortion were legalized before capitalist countries did so, with abortions provided free in most cases. Even with scarce resources, post-revolutionary Russia provided maternity hospitals, nurseries, and the socialization of housework through canteens and laundries. As they recovered after the war, Communist countries added paid leave, child care, and an enormous expansion of housing and health care systems. They served as an inspiration to workers’ movements in neighboring countries.

A Birth Strike

As with any important and undervalued job, the necessity of social reproduction is revealed when the work is not done. Sanitation workers are taken for granted until they strike and then everyone realizes that without them we would rapidly drown in garbage. So it is with having and rearing children. When the birth rate drops, suddenly the value of our unpaid labor becomes visible, accompanied by pleas and threats to return to work. While the birth rate discussion is not always open, the pleas and threats are now visible—from Ross Douthat asking for “More Babies Please” in a New York Times opinion piece in 2012, to Paul Ryan, as speaker of the House, remarking in a 2017 press conference, “We need to have higher birth rates in this country” or cuts to Social Security would surely follow. ²⁵ We also face the threat of abortion being outlawed.

This situation has been unclear to most feminists, perhaps because the second wave of feminism arose during the brief period (1955-1975) when the establishment was in full panic over high birth rates. While the panic subsided with the birth rate, most feminists have tended to suspect that government and corporations would prefer us to have fewer children, especially if we are poor or not white. Now, however, the evidence is in that even for women of color, reproductive coercion is now largely aimed at raising the birth rate. There’s a good reason for feminists to believe that lower birth rates were the goal. In the 1960s, as the cotton crop became mechanized, Mississippi was ground zero for forced sterilization of African-American women. The sterilization operation was so common it was sourly referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Now there is one embattled abortion clinic in the whole state, but thirty-eight “crisis pregnancy centers” aimed at pushing women to continue their unwanted pregnancies. ²⁶ In Texas, where restrictions and regulations closed eighty-two family planning clinics after 2011, birth control use went down and childbearing rose 27 percent for low-waged and unemployed women in the affected areas, compared to areas that still had birth control access. ²⁷

New Leverage?

Given our lowest-ever birth rate, can we leverage more of a social wage here? Knowing the history helps: The fact that employers used to contribute, through the family wage, and have now completely shed these costs explains how the rich have gotten so rich in the United States. Employers have been able to achieve this goal through the destruction of unions, who fought for the family wage in the first place. Now some, like the National Nurses United, are leading the fight for the social wage in the form of Medicare for All.

Given our lowest-ever birth rate, can we leverage more of a social wage here?

International comparisons are also a powerful tool. People in the United States have been bombarded for a century with the claim that wages and working conditions are the best in the United States. Recall the boosterism of the National Association of Manufacturers billboards captured by depression-era photographers, claiming “World’s Highest Wages—There’s no way like the American way.” Nowadays, health insurance company apologists insist we have the best health care system, though the World Health Organization in 2000 ranked our system number 37 in the world. ²⁸

The United States is nearly alone in the world in providing no paid maternity or parental leave. It is joined by Suriname, and Papua New Guinea and a few other Pacific Island nations. Fifty countries provide six months or more paid leave. ²⁹ Even today’s post-socialist countries do better: Russia, for example, provides 140 days of fully paid maternity leave, and up to eighteen months at 40 percent of the mother’s salary. You can leave your job for up to three years and keep your position.

Consciousness-Raising

Another building block is women’s liberation consciousness-raising, in which women compare their situations and draw conclusions about who benefits from the way things are. When women compare their individual strategies, they discover that no matter what choice they make, they still land in the same trap: the stress and misery that they are experiencing is not because of their own failings, and it cannot be fixed individually. Consciousness-raising reveals that we are up against a system that requires roughly eight hours a day of unpaid work, mostly from women, to raise upcoming generations.

When we investigate who benefits from our uncompensated labor, we start to understand that parenting is not a private affair, like the adoption of an expensive pet or hobby. The whole society is benefiting from our work, employers and the rich most of all. This is not obvious on its face. Many an anti-tax individual will ask why they should pay for schools when they have no children. These sentiments obscure the reality that in a complex society, everyone is dependent on everyone else. The bearing, rearing, and educating of successive generations is a necessary precondition for the continuation of society and every individual in it. Childbearing, childrearing, and care work is the uncounted economic output that makes the rest of the economy possible.

Feminist advance now requires a confrontation with the power of employers. The Women’s Liberation Movement made important strides starting in the 1960s, but in areas that did not cut too deeply into the prerogatives of capital and employers. We made progress on appearance and dress codes; integration of all-male spaces and workplaces; men doing child care and housework; better sex; and educational equality.

The areas where we are stuck or going backward are those that require capitalists to cede control or cough up resources. Into this second category fall equal pay, public child care, paid family leave, universal health care, and basic income guarantees that allow women economic independence from men, and workers independence from employers. Abortion and birth control are now firmly in the second category, as employers try to extract unpaid reproductive labor from women while avoiding its costs. Given these conditions, U.S. feminists will need to combine forces with other political movements that challenge the power of employers and the rich.