Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published by New York Times: July 22, 2008

Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.

Fewer Women at Work

They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped happening this decade, and as the nearly seven-year-old recovery gives way to hard times, the retreat is likely to accelerate.

Indeed, for the first time since the women’s movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007.

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.

“When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.”

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage.

Ms. Samson knows she will have to get another job at some point. She and her husband still have a teenage daughter to put through college, and his income as a truck driver is not enough. So Ms. Samson, now receiving unemployment benefits, is going to college full time — leaving the work force for more than two years — hoping that a bachelor’s degree will enable her to earn at least her old wage of $20 an hour.

“A lot of women I know, all they did was work at the Maytag factory,” said Ms. Samson, who joined Maytag’s assembly line 11 years ago. “They can’t find another job like it and they deal with this loss by dropping out.”

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.

“Women bring home about one-third of family income,” said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards.”

The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9 percent in early 2000 as the technology investment bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7 percent, a seemingly small decline, but those 2.2 percentage points erase more than 12 years of gains for women. Four million more in their prime years would be employed today if the old pattern had prevailed through the expansion now ending.

The pattern is roughly similar among the well-educated and the less educated, among the married and never married, among mothers with teenage children and those with children under 6, and among white women and black.

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.

“A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids,” Ms. Boushey said. “She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.”

The biggest retreat has been in manufacturing, where more than one million women have disappeared from payrolls since 2001. Like men, many have not returned to jobs in other sectors.

Wage stagnation often discourages them from pursuing new jobs, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “While pay was rising solidly in the 1990s, you had women continuing to move into the work force,” Mr. Katz said.

Pay is no longer rising smartly for women in the key 25-to-54 age group. Just the opposite, the median pay — the point where half make more and half less — has fallen in recent years, to $14.84 an hour in 2007 from $15.04 in 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (The similar wage for men today is two dollars more.)

Not since the 1970s has that happened to women for so long a stretch — and because this is a new experience for them, “women may be even more reluctant than men to accept declining wages,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts.

Joyce Call, 39, of Howell, Mich., near Detroit, certainly fits that description. She took an accounting job in January 2006 at Forming Technologies, which supplies plastic to auto companies.

The pay, $14 an hour — more than $25,000 a year — was acceptable, she said, but not the raises, which came to only 28 cents an hour over two years, or the Christmas bonus: $150 the first year and nothing the second.

“I was treated poorly,” she said, explaining her departure.

For the moment, Ms. Call is home-schooling one of her two sons, falling back on her husband’s $70,000 income as a plumber, and looking for another job, to return to a work force she has seldom left since finishing high school in 1988.

“People are just not hiring in Michigan,” she said. What’s more, she is reluctant because of the high cost of gasoline to commute more than an hour each way to the next job. “It would be a tough decision to accept a job that required me to go farther,” she said, adding that she and her husband were cutting back on discretionary spending until she is employed again.


What helped drive up the percentage of women in the work force were the thousands who came off welfare and took jobs in the 1990s, pushed to do so by the welfare-to-work legislation. A strong economy eased the way. So did tax credits and more subsidized child care. Now as the economy weakens and employers shrink their payrolls, many of these women struggle to find work.

Lisa Craig, 42, is among them. Raising three sons in her native Chicago, she had worked only occasionally since high school and started receiving welfare benefits in 1993. For the next seven years she took courses in office skills, was a volunteer in a day care center and served for a while as an unpaid intern for a college vice president.

And then in 2000 she went to work. For most of that year she earned $10 an hour as a salesclerk at a duty-free shop at O’Hare Airport, selling luxury items, but left the job to move to Milwaukee with her children to be near her sister.

“I was in a bad marriage,” she said, “and I was getting a divorce.”

Over the last eight years in Milwaukee she has worked only sporadically although, as she puts it, she has applied for hundreds of jobs, struggling to supplement a $628-a-month welfare check that goes almost entirely to rent, plus $500 a month in food vouchers. The longest tenure, 11 months, was as a salesclerk earning $7.75 an hour at a Goodwill Industries clothing store.

She lost that job last November, but is volunteering at the Milwaukee office of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, hoping to draw a modest salary soon as a community intern.

Ms. Samson, the former Maytag worker, says she can afford not to work because she qualified under the terms of the plant closing for two years of unemployment benefits as long as she is a full-time student. She lost health insurance but shifted to her husband’s policy.

His $40,000 income as a truck driver and her $360 a week in jobless benefits gets them by while she takes an accelerated program at a William Penn University campus near her home. Graduation is scheduled for January 2010.

“If I were a single parent or did not have benefits,” Ms. Samson said, “I would have had to find a job. I could not have gone back to school to get my degree and the promise it holds of a better job.”

That for Ms. Samson is a good reason to drop out. Just working, which she has done nearly all of her adult life, is unappealing, she says. Even interior design, for which she once earned an associate’s degree, does not excite her anymore, she says, mainly because people can no longer afford to fix up their homes.

“A business degree will put me in a position to work for any company,” Ms. Samson said, “and put me in a position to work up into a well-paid human resources job.”


copyright New York Times

Clean Elections Resolution Passed at State Convention

From Irene Miller:

A resolution urging New York State legislators to enact Clean Money Clean Elections passed overwhelmingly at the AAUW-NYS annual convention in Cooperstown---but not without a lot of drama!

Most of the drama took place in a caucus on whether the resolution should be forwarded for a delegate vote. The task for the caucus was to grapple with a system of campaign finance reform that many had never heard of before. But the play started even before the convention, when the scheduled resolution presenter, Rose Ann Palmer of the Garden City Branch, was unable to attend and Irene Miller of the Kingston Branch had to fill in for her at the last minute.

After Miller explained what Clean Elections is, the immediate response from some was that the effort for Clean Elections "would divert effort from the association's public policy goals." Others said enacting Clean Elections is "fundamental to gaining our goals because it would permit qualified women without access to deep pockets to run strong races for state office." In the end, the caucus decided that Clean Elections should be brought up for a delegate vote because it would go a long way toward achieving our goals of equity, education, health care, etc if those elected felt free work for us instead of contributors to their next campaign.

But before putting the resolution forward, the caucus called for two amendments, which were made by Kingston's Ruth Wahtera, Susan Holland, and Miller. The first said, "Clean Elections would enhance AAUW's ability to achieve our goals of equity for women and girls and increase the number of women able to run for elective office." The other added "President" to the officers charged with sending the resolution to the Governor, Senators, and Assembly members. (See the resolution below.)

The following day, convention delegates from branches all across the state overwhelmingly passed the resolution.

So what is Clean Elections and how does it work?
Clean Elections is full and equal public funding of all qualified candidates who refuse private contributions and abide by spending limits. In keeping with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Buckley vs Valeo, which basically says money is equal to speech, Clean Elections is a voluntary system. Those who choose not to participate are free to opt out. If they opt out, they cannot have any public funds. As has been shown in states with Clean Elections, "Clean" candidates have a distinct advantage over privately funded candidates because they can say, "I am beholden only to voters."

Clean Election candidates qualify for public funding by demonstrating community support before the primary. They do this by collecting a certain number of $5 contributions from individuals in their own district. Once qualified, they do not have to raise another cent. They can spend all their campaign time communicating with voters. Clean Elections would cost New Yorkers about $3 each per election cycle. In return, the billions that now go to tax breaks and subsidies for big corporate contributors could be available for healthcare, education, the environment, fire and police departments, and infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

It is important to note that full public funding of campaigns with Clean Elections is very different from partial public funding of campaigns, which matches tax dollars to private contributions. Corporations, which are the biggest contributors, like partial public funding because our tax dollars permit them to give less and still retain their political influence. Polls show that people who know the difference between full and public funding overwhelmingly reject partial funding because it wastes tax dollars.

Clean Elections bills have been introduced in both the NY Senate and Assembly, but few New Yorkers know this because most media owners do not want Clean Elections. That means passing Clean Elections must be a statewide grass-roots effort. Although there is a great deal more to be done, I'm glad to say we are succeeding. As "we the people" get our message out across the state, more and more New Yorkers are demanding Clean Elections because they already know that big campaign contributors trump the people's will. Learning that Clean Elections would make it easy for politicians to put people first flames a strong will to pass it.

What can you do?

The task for any AAUW member who thinks Clean Elections is worth fighting for is to help formulate and carry out strategies to inform and engage the public so that our legislators know we consider its passage fundamental to restoring democracy and reaching our organization's goals.

But we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Other organizations that have been working on this for years could be a tremendous resource. There is a lot to do and it is often a lot of fun. A big part of the job is making sure New Yorkers all over the state know about Clean Elections and how it would restore the democratic process. Things to do include hosting house parties with a Clean Elections speaker, having your branch and other organizations you belong to host a Clean Elections presentation, passing resolutions, helping with phone trees, tabling at flea markets or fairs, gathering petitions, and writing letters to newspapers, the Governor, and your state Senator and Assembly member. Whatever your talent and expertise, it is welcome and needed.

Governor Paterson introduced the Clean Elections bill in the senate before becoming Governor and is a strong supporter as are quite a few others legislators. But, as you can imagine, not all legislators are eager to change the current system. Our message to them is two fold: 1) New Yorkers want this. 2) It has been very successful with legislators and citizens in other states. In Maine and Arizona, two states that enacted Clean Elections more than 10 years ago, legislators who opposed its passage now say they will never go back to the old system because it frees them from onerous begging for dollars and lets them spend all their campaign time communicating with voters.

Connecticut passed Clean Elections in 2005 and will have its first election cycle using it this coming November. Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut's Clean Elections laws and New York's bill cover campaigns for Governor, the Senate, Assembly, Attorney General, and Comptroller. North Carolina, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Vermont also have Clean Elections, but for lesser offices.

There also are bills in the U.S. Congress. The House bill is called Clean Elections and the Senate bill is called Fair Elections.

You can read the AAUW-NYS resolution here.

Irene Miller is a member of the Kingston Branch of the AAUW, founder of New York Citizens for Clean Elections, and board member of Citizen Action of NY, a leading statewide grassroots organization devoted to passing Clean Elections in New York and on the national level. She lives in Palenville, NY, and can be reached at 518 678-3516 or imiller1@hvc.rr.com.