Bryce Covert | The Nation

Maria, a former domestic worker, talks about her experiences in San Francisco, Monday, May 5, 2008. Maria came to San Francisco to be a caregiver for a family from her hometown in southern Mexico. The family paid her way here, then kept her in a house for a year, where she cared for a 78-year-old wheelchair-bound woman. They paid her $300 a month but sent her check directly to her family, so she never had any money. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Fifty years ago on August 28, thousands of protesters descended on Washington, DC. The protest is colloquially known as the March on Washington, but it’s worth remembering its full name: “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” In fact, the economic repression people of color experienced played a central role in galvanizing the march and in the demands the marchers made.

The protesters laid out ten concrete demands, half of which had economic implications: legislation barring discrimination in public housing, a federal jobs training and employment program, an increase in the minimum wage, an act barring discrimination by governments and contractors, and an expansion of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) “to include all areas of employment which are presently excluded.”

Progress on these economic demands has been slow and bumpy. But that last bullet-point is a very concrete dream that has been denied. While the FLSA has been expanded since then, a whole category of workers—who are also disproportionately people of color—are still left out.

The Fair Labor Standards Act created a floor for wages and a ceiling on hours with overtime pay for extra work. But when it was crafted in the 1930s, certain workers were deliberately edged out of its protections. As Suzanne Mettler writes in Dividing Citizens, it was the first such bill to be written in gender-neutral terms, but it still defined which occupations fell under its purview in such a way that “the majority of low-paid women workers and non-white men, those who could have benefited most from national labor standards, were exempted from coverage.” Women’s retail and service jobs were mostly left out, as were agricultural jobs often held by people of color. Excluding the latter meant that “50 percent of southern African American employees, men and women,” were omitted. “The combined exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers also omitted near majorities of ‘Mexican American and American Indian women and men, as well as substantial numbers of Filipino-Americans and other Asian Americans’ from coverage,” Mettler writes.

These exclusions were driven by political considerations—Southern Democrats were staunchly against regulating agriculture—and constitutional considerations about the reach of the government’s ability to regulate commerce and the assumption that much of women’s domestic work was a different category altogether. President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself stated, “No law ever suggested intended a minimum wages and hours bill to apply to domestic help.” They weren’t considered to be workers but simply “help.”

Forty years later, Congress expanded the FLSA to cover domestic workers. But a carve-out was again included that still left many out. Those who provide “care and fellowship” to the elderly and disabled were omitted. This has since been dubbed the companionship exemption. While in theory this should only exclude those who simply provide some company to the homebound, it has been so widely interpreted that homecare workers who bathe, feed and intensively care for the elderly and disabled find themselves without minimum wage and overtime protections. In 2007, the Supreme Court told Evelyn Coke, a black homecare worker, that her employer was acting legally when it refused to pay her overtime despite her long hours.

Coke is the typical face of a homecare worker: women of color predominantly hold these jobs. More than 90 percent are female and half are people of color. And while they are a rapidly growing part of the workforce—nearly 2.5 million people are homecare workers, making up one of the largest occupations, and the number of jobs is expected to grow by 70 percent over the next decade—and the work can be incredibly physical and happen at any hour, they make just $9.70 per hour at the median, or $20,170 a year. Nearly 40 percent make so little that they have to rely on public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid to survive. Many report working extremely long hours yet being denied any overtime pay—and thanks to the companionship exemption, they have no legal recourse.

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The marchers who commemorated the 1963 event this past Saturday have some reason to feel optimistic about progress on this one aspect of the ten original demands: President Obama promised in December 2011 that the Department of Labor would undo this loophole, and he introduced a new rule that would extend the FLSA to homecare workers. Yet action is still stalled. The DOL extended the public comment period twice despite the fact that 80 percent of the comments received were in favor. A report from the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards notes that the change “remains stuck down the regulatory ‘rabbit hole’ with no certainty of when it may emerge.”

Ai-Jen Poo, the head of the National Domestic Workers Alliance who has been working tirelessly on changing this rule, recently told The Nation’s Josh Eidelson that she hopes to see the change come through by the end of this month. Homecare workers can’t wait any longer. They provide a vital service that will increasingly be in demand as the baby-boom generation ages and needs care. Including them in labor protections is one small part of following through on the demands for racial justice made a half-century ago.

Take Action: Tell the Obama Administration to Extend Labor Protections to Home Care Workers.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif. gestures during her weekly news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Those of us who have been pushing for better work/family policies know the story of how we almost had universal childcare all too well. In 1971, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act on a bipartisan vote. It would have meant the first step toward a universal childcare system, offering all parents a free, high-quality place to send their kids while they worked. As Nancy L. Cohen reports, Congress authorized five times what it currently spends on Head Start to finance the program.

Then, before President Nixon signed the bill, the evangelical right staged an intense backlash as part of the brand new culture wars, which wormed its way into Nixon’s ear through special assistant Pat Buchanan. Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, saying it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Thus the “family values” crowd was born and the bipartisan idea that the government should support working women by taking some of the parenting burden off their shoulders died.

That idea, though, is now seeing some surprising signs of life. First, President Obama took many by surprise in announcing a push for universal preschool in his most recent State of the Union address. His plan looks somewhat similar to the one proposed by Walter Mondale more than four decades ago in that it establishes a national system of childcare and preschools that would eventually be affordable to all families, covering kids from zero to when they enter kindergarten. Obama has been mostly promoting this on the solid research showing how beneficial this would be to the country’s children—and therefore society and the economy at large—but the impact on working parents is unmistakably a huge piece of this puzzle.

The ball kept rolling in a surprising way a few months later when Republicans decided to get in on the work/family game. They introduced and passed the Working Families Flexibility Act in the House. True, the bill did nothing that the name might promise. Rather than guaranteeing today’s workers more paid time off, it would simply allow employers the option of providing workers with “comp time” instead of overtime pay when they work more than forty hours a week. It came with few checks on employers’ ability to push their workers into this option and then decide that they can’t actually take requested time off. And true, it’s not an old idea—Republicans have surfaced this plan, which would essentially weaken overtime labor laws, in 1996, 1997 and 2003. But it’s telling to watch the opposition to workers’ rights and staunch defenders of the traditional family scramble to find a way to be relevant in the heating debate over work/family issues.

The most blatant effort in this growing political movement, however, was House Leader Pelosi’s new women’s agenda announced late last week. While the “Economic Agenda for Women and Families” being put forward by Pelosi, Representative Rosa DeLauro and a host of other House Democratic women strings together many bills that they have already introduced—the Paycheck Fairness Act, a minimum wage hike, paid sick leave and paid family leave among them—it does so under the guise of seeking to fix the broken work/family equation for women. This is an issue that had been deemed too politically dangerous for some time. President Obama tabled a bill guaranteeing paid sick leave in his first term, and while Michelle Obama was rumored to be interested in taking on these issues, she was steered toward less controversial issues.

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None of this means anything is going to pass anytime soon. Universal childcare and preschool will cost significant sums of government money, even if they will more than pay for themselves in the future—anathema to many in Congress, and not just Republicans. As paid sick leave bills inch forward at the city and state level, so too do pre-emption bills that block local governments from enacting that legislation. We now have three states with paid family leave programs—welcome to the fold, Rhode Island!—but that pace has been more than glacial.

What it does mean is that this is an issue we can no longer ignore. Women have for too long been told that their guilt, stress and sometimes failure at trying to be a super mom and a model worker is a personal issue that has to be worked out among families. But now lawmakers are acknowledging that we all have a responsibility to make the workplace adapt to the reality that women make up half the workforce. Our families and our workplaces look different today than they did a half-century ago. Politicians have finally woken up to that fact. Significant action may not be very far behind.

The struggle of balancing work with family is not just a women’s issue—men also want better balance between the two.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Americans pay far more for maternity care and delivery than our peers in the developed world, as described in a lengthy article The New York Times published yesterday. But while the stories of the women in the piece end with delivered babies and enormous bills, the costs of having a child in this country continue after the hospital. All along the way, this country has made the cost of having children nearly prohibitive.

The costs of pregnancy have spiraled out of control in the United States. Charges for delivery have nearly tripled since 1996. Out-of-pocket costs have risen fourfold. The total price tag for a pregnancy and newborn care with a vaginal delivery is about $30,000, while it comes to $50,000 for a C-section. Women with insurance pay an average of $3,400 out of pocket, a large sum as it is. Yet over 60 percent of women with private plans that aren’t through their employers lack maternity coverage. Not to mention that nearly one in five women between the ages of 18 and 64 are uninsured. As one woman paying for private insurance told the Times, “I know that a C-section could ruin us financially.”

Two decades ago, the article points out, women didn’t usually pay anything except a small fee if they wanted extras like a private room or television. That’s more in line with what women in developed countries across the pond pay. Ireland guarantees free maternity care at public hospitals with the option to pay a fee for private deliveries. The average price for a vaginal delivery comes to about $4,000 in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, but mothers are on the hook for little of that. Yet American women and European women have access to about the same care. One of the bigger contrasts? That more babies die in the United States in their first day of life than in sixty-eight other countries. The US ranks at number fifty in the world for maternal mortality.

The real difference driving costs is our healthcare system. Here at home, we pay for each individual test, procedure and medication, including a $20 splash of disinfectant on the umbilical cord, a bottle of which goes for $2.59 at Walgreens. In most other developed countries, by contrast, hospitals and doctors receive a flat fee for caring for a pregnant woman.

Unfortunately, the sky-high costs of giving birth to a new child don’t end when a woman leaves the hospital and pays the bill. As I reported last year, the lack of paid maternity leave in this country means dire financial straits for many new mothers. Workers are guaranteed only twelve weeks of unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act to take time off for a new child or to care for a sick family member, and while some get paid leave through their employers, more than 40 percent of new mothers only have access to unpaid leave. Even worse, less than half of private sector workers are even covered by the FMLA because of restrictions in the law.

The financial choices are very challenging for those who take unpaid leave. The Department of Labor came out with a new report on the FMLA and found that among those who received partial pay or no pay at all, 30 percent had to borrow money to get by, 35 percent dipped into savings meant for something else, the same percentage put off paying bills and nearly 85 percent had to limit their spending. 15 percent had to go on public assistance, and in fact, a quarter of all “poverty spells”—when someone falls into poverty for two months or more at a time—begin with the birth of a child. This struggle can also lead to bankruptcy: a 2006 study found that 7 percent of those filing cited the birth of a child as the cause.

Of course, the costs don’t even end there. Thanks to our lack of universal preschool and the little help we extend to parents who struggle to pay for childcare, finding a quality, affordable place to leave children when parents go off to work is nearly impossible for many families. And the cost of childcare here is pretty outrageous: full-time center care for an infant can reach as much as $15,000 a year. The cost for an infant and a 4-year-old is more than annual median rent in all fifty states.

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Our developed peers again best us when it comes to paid leave and childcare. The United States is actually an extreme outlier when it comes to paid maternity leave: we are one of just three countries out of a total 178 that doesn’t guarantee paid time off. Fifty countries offer paid paternity leave. Meanwhile, twenty-one other countries increased spending on childcare faster than the US over the past two decades, from .35 percent of GDP on average to .47 percent, while we’ve fallen far behind, just spending .11 percent today.

The rest of the developed world has figured out how to make having a child a reasonable expense. They control medical costs and have nationalized healthcare. They guarantee paid family leave. And they find ways to make quality childcare within reach for most families. By failing on all of these fronts, the US is putting an enormous financial burden on new families.

Should Texas State Senator Wendy Davis run for governor?

An unemployment line. (Credit: Reuters)

America’s social safety net, such as it is, has recently come under some scrutiny. Chana Joffe-Walt’s in-depth exploration of the increase in people getting Social Security Disability benefits at NPR got many listeners buzzing. Then in The Wall Street Journal, Damian Paletta and Caroline Porter looked at the increase in the use of food stamps, called SNAP. All three journalists look at the increasing dependence on these programs and come away puzzled: Why are so many people now getting disability and food stamp payments?

The answer is twofold. Recent trends give us the first part of the explanation. Yes, as Paletta and Porter note, the economy is recovering and the unemployment rate is falling. But, as they recognize, the poverty rate is also rising. And therein lies the rub: people are getting jobs but staying poor. The available jobs are increasingly low-wage and don’t pay enough to live off of. And the big profits in the private sector haven’t led to an increase in wages.

GDP and employment may be doing well, but that hasn’t done much for those at the bottom of the totem pole. As the WSJ article points out, 48.5 million people were living in poverty in 2011, up from 37.3 million in 2007, a 30 percent increase. This is despite an unemployment rate that’s fallen off its peak. Some of the fall in the unemployment rate has been driven by people simply giving up on looking for a job altogether. But those who do get jobs are likely trading their once middle-class employment for low-wage work. The National Employment Law Project has found that mid-wage jobs have been wiped out during the recovery in favor of low-wage work: low paying jobs grew nearly three times as fast as mid-wage or high-wage work.

But there’s a deeper explanation that goes beyond the current economic picture. Aren’t there other programs for the increasing ranks of people living in poverty to turn to? Unfortunately, we’ve worked hard to weaken key parts of the safety net by changing how programs operate and then cutting back on their funds. Consequently, the number of people who are reached by programs for the poor has shrunk. But when you take away someone’s lifeline, they don’t stop needing it. So they either suffer hardship or find support elsewhere. What disability insurance and SNAP have in common is that they are fully funded by the federal government, which also can set the eligibility requirements. While states narrow eligibility requirements for TANF or unemployment insurance, the federal government can leave them (relatively) more open for SNAP and disability. That leaves them absorbing those who we’ve thrown off the rolls of other programs.

Unemployment benefits are where people turn when they lose a job and need income before getting back to work. But due to financial and other requirements, not everyone gets them. These rules vary state by state because states are in almost complete control of the program. They set their own eligibility criteria and benefit levels and are also on the hook for most of the funding for the benefits. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, “the federal government pays only the administrative costs.”

Unlike the federal government, states have constrained budgets and most have to balance them every year. These budgets get even tighter in a downturn when people lose jobs and don’t pay as many taxes. On top of this, states have come under pressure from business groups during good times to reduce the contributions they use to fund the reserves that pay out benefits when things get tough. So many states have cut back on eligibility or benefit amounts in light of squeezed budgets. Given all of these constraints on benefits, only about a third of all children whose parents were unemployed at some point in 2011 actually saw any unemployment insurance benefits. They were far more likely to get food stamps, a federally funded program that has been much more flexible.

This story of a program financed by states that hasn’t been able to keep up with demand is the same for another huge part of the social safety net: welfare, or as we know it now, TANF. TANF does even worse than unemployment: it reaches just 10 percent of the children living with unemployment parents and just 30 percent of those living in poverty. The program used to do much better: in 1996, it reached 70 percent of poor families with children living in poverty. But then there was welfare reform, which turned it from a cost-sharing model to a block grant. Rather than the federal government sharing the costs with the states, the government now doles out lumps of cash and mostly lets states handle the rest. That lump doesn’t change even if the economy gets worse and more people live in poverty—and hasn’t even kept up with inflation.

While welfare reformers initially claimed victory as rolls fell during a booming 90s economy, the numbers have continued to fall even as jobs have disappeared. The poverty rate among families is back up to 1996 levels, but TANF’s caseload has fallen by 60 percent since then.

These families aren’t magically de-impoverished when they’re kicked off of government support programs. So they either go hungry or find other means of support. Enter SNAP and disability. SNAP has grown by 45 percent to meet increased need in the poor economy. The federal government was able to increase funding and waive some barriers to entering the program.

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The CBPP reports that the growth in the use of disability insurance, on the other hand, is in large part due to demographic factors—an aging population and women’s increased entrance into the workforce—which accounts for half its growth since 1990. The elderly are far more likely to be disabled than younger workers, and more women workers means more workers who might become disabled. Other factors that contributed to its growth include the economic downturn. Joffe-Walt reports on how disability has dovetailed with welfare pruning its rolls. As she shows in two graphs, the number of low-income people on disability rose just as the number of families on welfare declined. Disability receipts also rise as unemployment rises. To qualify for disability, an applicant must have, as CBPP puts it, “little or no income and few assets”—which means that if unemployment and poverty rise, more people will fit this description. As Harold Pollack points out, “If you have a bad back, and the only jobs available are manual labor, that’s a real limitation. You’re unable to work. So it very much matters that we’re in a deep recession and a lot of the opportunities people faced are limited.”

Other than elderly disabled workers, those who sign up for disability are those who can’t even dream of finding a job that doesn’t require physical exertion and have no other income—thus leaving them with no where to turn but disability. After all, unemployment only lasts so long and TANF now comes with strict work requirements. Disability steps in when those with low education levels who live in communities based around industry—hard manual labor—lose their jobs and fall into poverty.

This is what happens when you burn enormous holes in the fabric of the social safety net: people either fall through or cling to the remaining parts. We can certainly debate whether we want food stamps and disability to carry so much of the burden of supporting the poor and vulnerable. In fact, this all seems to point to the simplest answer, which is to just hand money to those in poverty rather than funnel it through these different programs that may or may not actually meet people’s needs. But what we shouldn’t do is assume that food stamps and disability are bloated programs because so many people rely on them and then jump to cutting them back. Poor people don’t disappear just because we slash the programs they rely on. They still struggle to get by. That’s the lesson we should have learned over the past two decades.

Chicago is planning to shut down 54 schools this year—mostly affecting students of color. Read Allison Kilkenny’s report on mass resistance to the closings.