"Ms. Hong has been in the garment business for 22 years. She earns the equivalent of about $230 a month and supports her father, her sister, her brother (who is on disability) and her 12-year-old son."
Her sister does the unpaid but no less crucial work of tending to her father and brother, the oxen, and their subsistence rice plants.
Hong and her sister are definitely working, one with pay, the other without. They have, as she says, no choice.
Catherine Gamet, who makes handbags in France for Louis Vuitton, is also presumably working to support herself. But hers is an entirely different experience from Hong's. She loves what she's been doing for the last 23 years. Interviewed in the same article, she told the Times, "To be able to build bags and all, and to be able to sew behind the machine, to do hand-sewn products, it is my passion." For Gamet, "The time flies by."
Both these women have been paid to make bags for more than 20 years, but they've experienced their jobs very differently, undoubtedly thanks to the circumstances surrounding their work, rather than the work itself: how much they earn; the time they spend traveling to and from their jobs; the extent to which the "decision" to do a certain kind of work is coerced by fear of poverty. We don't learn from Hong's interview how she feels about the work itself. Perhaps she takes pride in what she does. Most people find a way to do that. But we know that making bags is Gamet's passion. Her work is not merely exhausting, but in Young's phrase "satisfying and expansive." The hours she spends on it are lived, not just endured as the price of survival.
Pandemic Relief and Its DiscontentsJoe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived at the White House with a commitment to getting a new pandemic relief package through Congress as soon as possible. It appears that they'll succeed, thanks to the Senate's budget reconciliation process a maneuver that bypasses the possibility of a Republican filibuster. Sadly, because resetting the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour doesn't directly involve taxation or spending, the Senate's parliamentarian ruled that the reconciliation bill can't include it.
Several measures contained in the package have aroused conservative mistrust, from the extension of unemployment benefits to new income supplements for families with children. Such measures provoke a Republican fear that somebody, somewhere, might not be working hard enough to "deserve" the benefits Congress is offering or that those benefits might make some workers think twice about sacrificing their time caring for children to earn $7.25 an hour at a soul-deadening job.
As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently observed, Republicans are concerned that such measures might erode respect for the "natural dignity" of work. In an incisive piece, he rebuked Republican senators like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio for responding negatively to proposals to give federal dollars to people raising children. Such a program, they insisted, smacked of the horror! "welfare," while in their view, "an essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work." Of course, for Lee and Rubio "work" doesn't include changing diapers, planning and preparing meals, doing laundry, or helping children learn to count, tell time, and tie their shoelaces unless, of course, the person doing those things is employed by someone else's family and being paid for it. In that case it qualifies as "work." Otherwise, it's merely a form of government-subsidized laziness.
There is, however, one group of people that "pro-family" conservatives have long believed are naturally suited to such activities and who supposedly threaten the well-being of their families if they choose to work for pay instead. I mean, of course, women whose male partners earn enough to guarantee food, clothing, and shelter with a single income. I remember well a 1993 article by Pat Gowens, a founder of Milwaukee's Welfare Warriors, in the magazine Lesbian Contradiction. She wondered why conservative anti-feminists of that time thought it good if a woman with children had a man to provide those things, but an outrage if she turned to "The Man" for the same aid. In the first case, the woman's work is considered dignified, sacred, and in tune with the divine plan. Among conservatives, then or now, the second could hardly be dignified with the term "work."
The distinction they make between private and public paymasters, when it comes to domestic labor contains at least a tacit, though sometimes explicit, racial element. When the program that would come to be known as "welfare" was created as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, it was originally designed to assist respectable white mothers who, through no fault of their own, had lost their husbands to death or desertion. It wasn't until the 1960s that African American women decided to secure their right to coverage under the same program and built the National Welfare Rights Organization to do so.
The word "welfare" refers, as in the preamble to the Constitution, to human wellbeing. But when Black women started claiming those rights, it suddenly came to signify undeserved handouts. You could say that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House in 1980 in a Cadillac driven by the mythical Black "welfare queen" he continually invoked in his campaign. It would be nice to think that the white resentment harnessed by Reagan culminated (as in "reached its zenith and will now decline") with Trump's 2016 election, but, given recent events, that would be unrealistically optimistic.
Reagan began the movement to undermine the access of poor Americans to welfare programs. Ever since, starving the entitlement beast has been the Republican lodestar. In the same period, of course, the wealthier compatriots of those welfare mothers have continued to receive ever more generous "welfare" from the government. Those would include subsidies to giant agriculture, oil-depletion allowances and other subsidies for fossil-fuel companies, the mortgage-interest tax deduction for people with enough money to buy rather than rent their homes, and the massive tax cuts for billionaires of the Trump era. However, it took a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to achieve what Reagan couldn't, and, as he put it, "end welfare as we know it."
The Clinton administration used the same Senate reconciliation process in play today for the Biden administration's Covid-19 relief bill to push through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was more commonly known as "welfare reform." That act imposed a 32-hour-per-week work or training requirement on mothers who received what came to be known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It also gave "temporary" its deeper meaning by setting a lifetime benefits cap of five years. Meanwhile, that same act proved a bonanza for non-profits and Private Industry Councils that got contracts to administer "job training" programs and were paid to teach women how to wear skirts and apply makeup to impress future employers. In the process, a significant number of unionized city and county workers nationwide were replaced with welfare recipients "earning" their welfare checks by sweeping streets or staffing county offices, often for less than the minimum wage.
In 1997, I was working with Californians for Justice (CFJ), then a new statewide organization dedicated to building political power in poor communities, especially those of color. Given the high unemployment rates in just such communities, our response to Clinton's welfare reforms was to demand that those affected by them at least be offered state-funded jobs at a living wage. If the government was going to make people work for pay, we reasoned, then it should help provide real well-paying jobs, not bogus "job readiness" programs. We secured sponsors in the state legislature, but I'm sure you won't be shocked to learn that our billion-dollar jobs bill never got out of committee in Sacramento.
CFJ's project led me into an argument with one of my mentors, the founder of the Center for Third World Organizing, Gary Delgado. Why on earth, he asked me, would you campaign to get people jobs? "Jobs are horrible. They're boring: they waste people's lives and destroy their bodies." In other words, Gary was no believer in the inherent dignity of paid work. So, I had to ask myself, why was I?
Among those who have inspired me, Gary wasn't alone in holding such a low opinion of jobs. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for instance, had been convinced that those whose economic condition forced them to work for a living would have neither the time nor space necessary to live a life of "excellence" (his requirement for human happiness). Economic coercion and a happy life were, in his view, mutually exclusive.
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