Petition to the US Congress: End poverty of mothers & children.
Recognize caregiving work. Support the WORK and the RISE Acts.

Statements from Payday

 

I'm Eric from Payday men's network, thanks to Global Women’s Strike and Every Mother is a Working Mother

A year ago my partner and I moved in with her mother and became her primary caregivers. We consider ourselves fortunate to be able to do this, but it is a daily struggle, and would not be possible without both of us working part-time as well as the supports of home health care twice a week and her senior day program 4 times a week, which her insurance covers, barely.

We need to be able to prioritize caring for our loved ones - whether our children, our parents, or others in our lives. This takes a great deal of time and dedicated attention, it's really hard work. But it's treated as something to be 'worked around'. Every day you have to confront a society and economy that just wants you to 'stick them in a home' if they're not able to care for themselves or have a disability. And that's the nice end of the scale. If you have less power and resources, if you're too young or too old or too Black or too poor, they will come in and take them by force and say that not only are you doing no work, but that you are a bad mother or caregiver and your loved ones would do so much better being "cared" by strangers and the medical establishment.

But for many people homecare has actually been shown to be better care, because it is one on one care, in a familiar environment, not isolated from family and friends who are such an important part of any healing process.

Every time our mother goes to the hospital and rehab, it's not LESS work for us but MORE: more worry, more travel, more struggle to get the staff to care, bringing her food to survive the crap that they feed her, more work to get her home as soon as she's well enough, where she can recover from the recovery.

So one of the reasons I'm out here today is to support the RISE and WORK Acts, which take a giant step forward towards recognizing the work that we do. The RISE Act has a provision that "Entitles family members caring fulltime for disabled children, parents or other relatives to benefits."

In 2010, the government spent $17 billion on TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

In the same year the Navy and Marines lost track of $22 billion!!* That is more money than is being spent on welfare assistance.

When they say there's no money, they are lying, and it's killing us. We must demand the money for the essential work of society: caring for our children and elders.  Invest in Caring Not Killing!

We men know that mothers are the primary carers. We have seen the work of our mothers in bringing us up and the work of our wives and the women in our lives.

Many men have seen the poverty in our homes, and the degradation and devaluation of mothers’ work, how they are blamed for everything that happen to them and us, especially if they are single mothers

An attack on mothers on welfare is an attack on us all, if the bottom fall off, we are all going down.

Elimination of poverty of women must become a priority, and is a step to eliminate poverty of men.

+  +  +

 

I’m Dean Kendall, a subsistence farmer and former farm worker living up near Reading, and I work with Payday, the multiracial international network of men that works with the GWS. 

 

First just let me note that The RISE Acts’ provision entitling “family members caring fulltime for disabled children, parents or other relatives to benefits” would have benefited me directly a few years ago when my elderly mother was disabled by severe illness and I was sole caregiver with little time for waged work, which left us scraping to make ends meet.

 

Which leads to the points I’d like to add to what others have said already: 

 

•             Re poverty:  it’s not only urban; there’s a lot in rural areas as well.  That’s especially so globally but also in the US.  Most of the people on welfare back when Reagan lead the attack on ‘lazy Black welfare scroungers’ were rural white women.  I don’t know the proportions now that the welfare roles have been slashed to a third of what they were then, but that gives some idea. 

 

•             Re workload:  in rural areas especially, but increasingly in inner cities with the spread of urban gardens, low-income mothers not only prepare the food families eat, they also, along with their children, grow and process it.  And fight to hold on or get access to the land on which they grow it.  That’s especially so in so-called Third World countries; for instance the UN figure that 80% of the food eaten by the people of Africa is grown unwaged by women.  But it’s becoming more so again in the industrialized West under the austerity imposed by the 1%.

 

Read at the Launch of the Petition in Philadelphia on Monday 15 October 2012

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