Women: Labor Pains

National Association of Manufacturers billboard in Memphis, Tennessee, 1937. (Edwin Locke/Library of Congress)

From New Labor Forum, vol. 29, issue #1, 2020

The U.S. birth rate is now the lowest it has ever been. Other countries, confronting low birth rates in the twentieth century, instituted supports to make raising children more appealing. They provided universal child care, health care, paid leave, child allowances, and shorter working hours. The United States, by contrast, has taken the low-cost route to raising new generations: poor access to birth control and abortion. But despite these obstacles, women are refusing. This article will explore what it would take for working people in the United States—and women in particular—to leverage our spontaneous birth slowdown into family-supporting policies.

Starting in the 1980s, while birth rates in most developed countries dropped, U.S. rates remained elevated. We had higher teen pregnancy rates, and higher unintended birth rates, about twice those of Sweden and France.¹ But more recently, the U.S. rate has declined, across ethnic groups, and is now considerably below the 2.1 “replacement rate” required for a stable population, reaching 1.72 in 2018 (see figure on following page). The women’s liberation group Redstockings in 2001 described this as a “birth strike,” a reaction to the difficult conditions women face having and raising children.²

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.³ In National Women’s Liberation (for which I am an organizer), women name these factors as reasons to stop at one child or have none at all. In consciousness-raising meetings, testifiers describe the stress and exhaustion of their “double day”—eight or more hours of paid work and then an additional eight hours a day of unpaid care work and housework. Others recount difficulty finding partners who are willing to take the plunge into parenthood, wary of the time commitment and costs. Some say they were deterred by memories of their mothers’ struggle to raise them.

As in other countries with modest birth rates, government and corporate planners from both sides of the aisle would like the U.S. birth rate to be higher. “Simply put, companies are running out of workers, customers or both,” the Wall Street Journal claimed in 2015. “In either case, economic growth suffers.”⁴

“Declining birth rates constitute a problem for the survival and security of nations . . . in the broadest existential sense of national security,” wrote Steven Philip Kramer of the National Defense University in his 2014 book, The Other Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do about Falling Birth Rates. “For several hundred years, economic growth has been tied to prosperity . . . Growth in population has increased the size of the domestic market and labor force.” While many scholars continue to worry about the effect on the environment of expanding global populations, in fact birth rates are now dropping in most of the world and total population is expected to be stable or declining by 2100. Among continents, Europe, Asia, North and South America are expected to have less population in 2100 than in 2050. Only Africa is expected to grow.⁵

Data from Jay Weinstein and Vijayan K. Pillai, Demography: The Science of Population (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 208, and National Center for Health Statistics Births, Final Data for 2016.

READ the rest in New Labor Forum. 

By Jenny Brown

From the fall 2019 issue of the Socialist Forum, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The U.S provides very little support for parents—no paid parental leave, expensive childcare and college, unreliable health care that can bankrupt you, pay that requires both parents to work, and long working hours. These conditions are contributing to the U.S.’s lowest-ever birth rate: 1.72 children per woman, well below the 2.1 rate required for a stable population.  But instead of taxing the rich to provide support for childrearing, as other countries have done, the U.S. employing class has been carefully avoiding the costs of reproduction of its workforce. These costs are instead pushed onto families, to be paid out of their strained wages. The level of exploitation has reached the point that U.S. parents, and women in particular, are having fewer kids. It’s an uncoordinated “birth strike” in response to all the unpaid work, stress, and exhaustion.  And now there’s evidence the low birth rate is freaking out establishment think tanks and policymakers.

Immigration has always been the U.S. employing class’s answer to lower birth rates, so why won’t it suffice now?  Immigrant workers arriving as adults substitute for the children U.S. women didn’t produce, and if they settle here permanently, may have children of their own. But now we’re seeing new levels of anti-immigrant fury while pundits and politicians plead with U.S. women to have more babies. This article will examine what is going on. Continue reading “Bosses, Birth Rates, and the Battle over U.S. Immigration Policy” →

Here I’m interviewed by Liza Featherstone at the Strand Bookstore in New York on October 10.

And here I am on a panel with Nona Willis Aronowitz, Lillian Cicerchia, Allison Guttu and Fahmida Azad, at the Verso Loft in Brooklyn on November 7.

Publisher’s Weekly calls Without Apology a “laser focused polemic.” Amelia Bonow of Shout Your Abortion says, “Without Apology manages to make perfect sense of the current political moment.” Nona Willis Aronowitz says, “Without Apology draws an exhilarating line in the sand between reformers and visionaries, between near-sighted regulation and true reproductive freedom.” Support the Kickstarter here, and get the book.

Book Review by Judy Ancel

More than 120 years ago the American Federationist, the newspaper of the American Federation of Labor, printed an editorial denouncing the entry of women into the trades. One of its many nuggets of misogyny was this: “The wholesale employment of women in the various handicrafts must gradually unsex them.”

That term was probably as unclear then as it is today, but if unsexed means women today are declining to pursue “nature’s dearest impulse” (another of the article’s nuggets), then we are indeed unsexed, because there’s a birth strike going on.

It seems the more we labor outside the home, the less we engage in that other form of labor—childbirth. Women may still be barely visible in the trades, but our wage work has become an essential part of the economy.

THE ECONOMICS OF REPRODUCTION

The political economy of our role in production and reproduction and our rejection of the double burden is the subject of Jenny Brown’s Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work (PM Press, 2019).

Brown, a former co-editor of Labor Notes, begins by citing the declining birth rate in the United States—currently 1.76 births for every two people. Population politics are an essential part of this book, and the U.S. has gone from panic about overpopulation in the 1970s to fear that we won’t replace ourselves now. Elite thinkers, says Brown, are concerned that shrinking population brings a shrinking economy, which is not good for business.

So are corporations and government encouraging women to have more babies? In a way. They’re making it hard not to have babies, by failing to cover birth control and restricting access to it and by making us run a gauntlet to get an abortion—in many places today abortion is impossible or prohibitively expensive. Forced pregnancy appears to be their policy.

But having children is increasingly difficult, with no mandated paid family leave, inadequate health coverage, and very expensive childcare. In fact, the high cost of raising kids on flat incomes is the main reason women are avoiding pregnancy in unprecedented numbers. That’s why Brown calls it a birth strike.

She contrasts the U.S. with the rest of the world, where most of the wealthier countries make it much easier to work and have kids. She zeroes in on Germany, France, and Sweden. There, punitive policies that made it difficult to avoid pregnancy failed, so governments incentivized childbirth by providing what they call a social wage. This includes free childcare, paid family leave and sick leave, paid vacations, pensions, and universal health care. So why doesn’t the U.S. do the same? ….

Rest at: https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2019/09/book-review-women-strike-birth-strike

National Women’s Liberation has developed a consciousness-raising study guide to go with Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work.  It can be downloaded here.

Here’s a sample:

Meeting 1

Read pages 1—59 of Birth Strike:

Introduction

Chapter 1. International Comparisons

Chapter 2. Small Government, Big Families

Chapter 3. Is it a Birth Strike?  Women Testify

Consciousness-Raising questions

a. What are your reasons for wanting children? For not wanting them?

b. Has your thinking on this changed? Are your parents’ lives a factor in

    your thinking?

c. Do you experience pressure from anyone on the subject?

Alternate question:

a. What care work do you do (child rearing, care for elderly family members,

    or others in your life needing care)?

b. What care work do the men in your life do?

c. Have you tried to get them to do more? What happened?

Study questions

1. Who is the power structure?  What are some terms people use to describe these   

    individuals? Which terms do you prefer?  Why?

2. To what do you attribute the continuing battle over abortion and birth control

    in the U.S.? Did the reading change your view?  How?

3. What caused other countries to develop universal programs such as childcare,     

    healthcare, paid family leave, and family allowances?

4. What do “pro-family” conservatives mean by family?  What is their ideal of family

    life?  Who would benefit from that?

Continues at:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/abortion-rights-strike-economic-battlefront-birth-rates

The birth rate in this country is plummeting for a very obvious reason: Women don’t want babies. But the reason women don’t want babies is something conservative Republicans hate to admit: Having children is expensive and burdensome, and the US government provides mothers with very, very little help. There’s no paid leave, many women lack healthcare, there’s no financial assistance for nurseries or childcare facilities. All the while, the work of maintaining a household and raising kids is just plain hard, especially when you consider that most mothers are working full time.

Faced with these obstacles, even women who desperately want children are saying no, or are only having one child. They’re discouraged, and it doesn’t help when they learn that the governments of approximately fifty countries around the world require that mothers receive six or more months of paid leave. The enlightened leaders in these countries realize that a healthy economy needs plenty of workers. That, and stable governments need a solid tax base, which is only possible with an adequate number of citizens paying taxes.

This week’s interview is with Jenny Brown, the author of Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work, one of the most thought provoking titles we’ve seen in years. In a nutshell, Jenny believes women have finally had enough: They’re refusing to have more babies until this country’s leadership recognizes the work they do is vitally important and worthy of government support.

Full article here: https://www.forewordreviews.com/articles/article/reviewer-matt-sutherland-talks-womens-work-with-jenny-brown-author-of-birth-strike/