Life Can Be Shit Economically For Women Living Alone

It's all part of a rigged economic system, something I have written about for years on this blog and elsewhere. It has been fodder of feminist writing since the 1960s, but it bears repeating:

Most women do NOT take time off from the labor force in any significant way these days. Who can afford "caregiving" unless you are well-to-do? Any policy proposal talking about giving "credit" to people who do not need it is missing the point, to say nothing of the fact we women who have worked all our lives are being required to subsidize people who can afford to drop out of the labor force to "care" for relatives. The real reason women, especially never-married women, fare so poorly in middle and old age has to do with the concept of the "family wage." It is the notion that men are breadwinners and women are dependents. Men are seen as needing the higher pay because they have families to support, while women are seen as not needing the money as much as men because they have a man to support them. Women's pay is denigrated regardless of occupation, with women-dominated occupations poorly paid as compared to male-dominated jobs of the same education and skills. When women begin to dominate a male field, the pay and prestige go down immediately. That is because women are seen as "secondary" wage earners, and employers feel they in good conscience can underpay women because the difference is supposedly made up by a husband's salary (never mind the reality of millions of women there is no man in the picture). Furthermore, underpaying women helps "encourage" them to jettison independent living in favor of marriage. It reeks of prostitution rather than real choice. Our economic system is heavily rigged against women, especially women alone. If anything happens in terms of a job, everything they have worked for is gone overnight. There is no buffer of a man's income to cushion that blow.

More women are falling through the cracks, especially if they are past 55, which is considered past their expiration date in terms of being in the labor force.

A book I have started reading is a book I overlooked when it came out. It is called The Sexual Contract, published in 1988 and written by a now-retired UCLA academic, Carole Pateman. She was born in Britain in 1940. She is less well-known than other writers or feminists who have covered much of the same ground. In this book she wrote about this concept of the "family wage." Of course, it forms the basis of sex discrimination in the workplace. It cannot be denied. Despite gains by women over the decades, women are still heavily disadvantaged in the labor market. In fact, they are perhaps more dependent on men than ever (and vice versa) for a decent lifestyle thanks to outsourcing and destroying of well-paid, unionized jobs as pushed by the poisonous neoliberal ideology.

Anyway, I started reading Pateman's book. The book is a little bit dry, as are most academic works, but she makes a lot of good points.

Nothing has changed in the 30 years since it was published.

On a similar note, I went to a retirement planning seminar the school district's investment outfit put on, and the presenters were talking about all of the various things people need in order to have a decent retirement. Of course, I started Oregon public employment, part-time regular employment, when I was 59, so I will not be vested in Oregon PERS until 2019, when I am 64 years old. Maybe some district will hire me on a part-time certificated basis, as I do not want to work full-time anymore, but those jobs are extremely hard to come by. My pension would be much higher and I would not have to work as many years to get the monthly payout. Under NO circumstances do I want to ever have a cash payout. I have a monthly pension through Nevada PERS that I started taking five years ago. It isn't much--$318 a month and subject to WEP when I get Social Security next year--but after the third year of getting it I got annual COLA increases. By the time I hit 71, the small amount will start to snowball significantly when the 5 percent annual increase kicks in, assuming I don't kick off first. Similarly Oregon's would increase, but since I am on the Tier 3 program, it won't be quite as good as those who got on Oregon public employment and qualified for Tier 1 and 2 (people are designated a "tier" depending on when they were hired).

Anyway, there wasn't a whole lot that was relevant to my case. At one point the presenters talked about how 33 percent of the average retiree's income comes from work. In other words, those who are "retired" on the average cannot ever retire. I don't believe that many people are so lacking in interests and hobbies they are masochistic enough they want to remain in the labor force in some way.

Most of these people work because they have to.

Just like me, and I will likely have to until I can't physically do the work anymore.

We Older Workers or Unemployed Workers Are Past Our Expiration Dates

This article is full of the same cliches and advice to "older" workers or older unemployed workers that we have been hearing forever.

Not a word about strengthening the age discrimination laws.

There was one commenter following this article who peddled the "self-employment" canard, and it about drove me up the goddamned wall when I read it.

I responded:

That is absolutely WORTHLESS advice. There is little DEMAND for goods and services, which is why the economy stinks. If there is no demand, you can't make money doing this on your own. Only married people or people with a trust fund can even attempt to go into self-employment. If women are the majority of small business owners, it's because there is a husband around to shore up the income. Single women cannot do this. Useless advice like this just makes me want to bang my head against the wall because of its stupidity.

Everybody else is walking dogs or mowing lawns. Good lord. What IS it with these people who seem to have no clue what the hell is going on out here?

I just hope in my situation that I get more hours next year and start toward earning an Oregon pension to at least offset the offset that I am going to get with Social Security thanks to having the giant 312 a month pension from Nevada PERS.

I am slowly trying to get the K-12 Oregon license.

More Cluelessness

Nobody gives a rat's ass about child care availability or much else when millions are living in complete and total poverty, regardless if those affected are male or female.

Tax and trade policies have created this sinkhole of an economy. Until there is a big change in D.C. politics, nothing is going to improve for workers and the unemployed.

Coontz is living in an insulated world and stuck in a time warp circa 1975.

The End Result of Neoliberal Economic Policies

Massive human misery on purpose, in order to enrich the greedy few even further.

Some food for thought:

That estimate is the end product of some complex data-crunching, and you can quibble with the details. Hey, maybe we’re only losing $800 billion a year. But the evidence is overwhelming that by failing to respond effectively to mass unemployment — by not even making unemployment a major policy priority — we’ve done ourselves immense long-term damage.

And it is, as I said, a bitter irony, because one main reason we’ve done so little about unemployment is the preaching of deficit scolds, who have wrapped themselves in the mantle of long-run responsibility — which they have managed to get identified in the public mind almost entirely with holding down government debt.

The reason neoliberals in both political parties won't address it is because they WANT America to be on the same level as the poorest of third world countries. Obama hasn't done shit about it, which tells you where his true loyalties are, and they aren't to traditional Democratic Party principles.

These people are evil sons of bitches.

Miscellaneous News

Obit: Muriel Siebert, 80, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, has died from complications from cancer.

It wasn't that long ago women weren't allowed there:

Siebert, who was born in Cleveland and moved to New York in 1954 at age 22, started her career as a trainee in research at Bache & Co. earning a $65 a week. She went on to become an industry specialist in airlines and aerospace and later became a partner at brokerages including Brimberg & Co.

She bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in December 1967 after months of struggling with the male-dominated business world that initially resisted her efforts to join. She established her investment firm the same year and transformed it into a discount brokerage house in 1975.

Her achievements at the time were something to be proud of.

These days, being a member of Wall Street is a sign of disgrace.
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When you don't have talent, you resort to raunchy nonsense.

Just so I don't sound too sexist, Robin Thicke is every bit as untalented as Miley.

Both of them prove connections have a lot to do with financial "success" rather than talent.
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While somebody like Miley Cyrus makes millions of dollars on the skimpiest of talent, millions upon millions of us who are considered "baby boomers," especially those of us unemployed or underemployed, are having our lives destroyed thanks to deliberate inaction by Congress.

I am still technically "employed," but I don't make enough money at this juncture to be able to get a place to live.

Here is the study mentioned by the blogger, but of course the situation now is even worse.

Sometimes I Just Want to Say Eff It All

because it seems like there is no end whatsoever to my financial hardship. I am one of millions, unfortunately.

It eats away at you. Technically I am "employed," but with trouble getting gas in the car, I think I am going to have a hard time working THIS year. And the next. And the next. Unless or until I can get regular work, there appears to be utterly NO light at the end of this tunnel.

Damn to hell those assholes who ruined me in Nevada. Damn them all. They aren't paying at all for their wrongdoing while I am sitting here with utterly no money to support myself. I have had to put the pawn payment on my mom's ring on hold for a week, but how in the hell I am going to come up with the money is going to be a mystery. I am trying to sell some items on eBay, but I will be a son of a bitch if I am going to give the stuff away like I was forced to do with my Kentucky Derby glasses. I paid perhaps 600 or 700 dollars for them, and those asshole dealers gave me a piddling 150 for the three of them. However, it was the only way I could pay my auto insurance. I can't be without a car and can't afford an SR22. I went through that shit in Nevada some twenty years ago and never want to go through that again.

If I can't get regular work in education this year, then I am going to try for OJT. I have GOT to work to get an adequate Social Security check thanks to not paying into it in Nevada public employment.

People who are working, and especially those who have a spouse, have utterly NO concept of how hard it is out here. Even the person depicted in the article has a spouse, and therefore she is not suffering as much as somebody like me who has no way to support myself after a lifetime of doing so, just forced to sleep on a goddamned couch living with my brother, and we are both driving ourselves crazy.

I don't know what in the hell to do at this point.

Instead of Working 2 1/2 Days a Week

and collecting six-figure salaries for it, those people who supposedly represent us need to quit farting around and actually DO something about the unemployment crisis in this country.

Burying one's head in the sand or spewing bullshit about "lazy" unemployed people isn't going to cut it:

As Washington begins to take on unemployment it needs to realize that the larger economic problem is that the demand for labor is too low. This lack of demand is not manifest in unemployment alone, but also in fewer hours worked, stagnant or falling wages, and the lack of job mobility. These are important economic problems, but they're also psychological troubles because work is a defining aspect of life.

When we hear that the unemployment rate is 9.8 percent and destined for 10 percent it can be hard to know just how bad this is. After all, a pop quiz would reveal few people accurately know how many Americas work. So picture it this way: 9.8 percent is more than 15 million people. In other words, as many people in America are unemployed as live in Illinois -- if Illinois added another Chicago to its population. The average worker of the 15 million has been out of a job for six months, and 5.4 million of them have been looking even longer.

Try a year-and-a-half here with absolutely NO prospects whatsoever.

Job creation programs need to be implemented, but nobody in Congress will suggest it. Bailing out Wall Street is more important.

That Sinking Economy

Detroit residents lined up for hours trying to get housing assistance. The unemployed are hurting there, just as everywhere else in the country.

Jalonda Terry, a former student and restaurant worker, said her unemployment had run out, and she has nowhere to turn, so she came to Cobo Hall for help. "They're talking about extending unemployment for another 13 weeks," she said, "but that's nothing. Most people out here have been unemployed for months and won't find any work soon."

"People are going to be starving and homeless," she added. "People are going to die. Why doesn't the president just give every family stimulus money. Why do we have to wait in the cold? Why do we have to fill out these stupid forms?"

Jalonda's mother, Kadeja, said, "There should be people helping to organize the line. There are kids here in the cold."

Angella Murphy, a former GM worker, related cutbacks in the city to concessions by workers at Chrysler. "They're closing all the schools down, and now they're cutting optical and dental benefits from the auto workers. Obama gave all that money to the banks and not to the people. Why doesn't he start a job-creation program?"

Why, indeed. Obama should have tackled joblessness the first thing.

It Used to Be

Nevada in general, and Las Vegas in particular, was recession-proof. Not anymore. More and more people are finding their new occupation is that of "unemployed."

And when you are in your fifties, you simply cannot start all over again and retrain from scratch.

Since

this is my last week on federal extended UI benefits, Congress better get on the goddamned stick and pass the extension.

While the unemployment rate continues to rise, it appears Congress and the White House don't really have a clue as to how to get people back to work. "Reforming" health care and blathering about "green jobs" will do little to reverse the trend:

To make matters worse, unemployment among men and women is proving relentless. Of the 15.1 million people who are now officially counted as unemployed, over a third have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, the highest percentage of long-term unemployment on record. By the end of the year, benefits will expire for more than one million unemployed workers. The House has passed a bare-bones extension of benefits; the Senate has a better bill, covering more long-term unemployed workers, and should pass it first thing this week.

The real work, however, lies ahead. Economic recovery will not automatically replace the jobs that have been lost so far in this recession. Nor will higher levels of learning and skill — necessary as they are — magically create jobs, especially in the numbers that are needed.

If successful, ambitious goals like health care reform and energy legislation may generate jobs, but officials have not persuasively linked them to job growth. Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs. That could be done with more stimulus to spur job creation, or a large federal jobs program, or tax credits for hiring, or all three. Or surprise us. Just don’t pretend that the deteriorating jobs picture will self-correct, or act as if it is tolerable.

Some Figures to Figure Out

now that our economy is in the ditch and there is little chance of it coming out of it in the foreseeable future.

DISMAL PROSPECTS:

26.2 weeks: The average duration that unemployed workers are out of a job, a record high since the Labor Department started tracking the figure in 1948. The figure is up from 19.8 weeks in January.

5.4 million: The number of people unemployed longer than 27 weeks, also at a post-World War II peak, though today's larger labor market is a contributing factor.

17 percent: The unemployment rate when it includes frustrated workers who have dropped out of the labor market, people forced into part-time work and those who want a job but haven't looked recently.

263,0000: The total number of jobs lost in September.

It's the Economy, Stupid,

but of course our elected officials haven't a goddamned clue what to do about it, even though I believe it is relatively easy to fix.

Just because Bernanke says there is a "recovery," it doesn't matter if huge numbers of people are unemployed, perhaps as many as twenty percent:

If measured according to the methodology used when I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%. Moreover, there is no obvious way of reducing it. There are no factories, with work forces temporarily laid off by high interest rates, waiting for a lower interest rate policy to call their workforces back into production.

The work has been moved abroad. In the bygone days of American prosperity, CEOs were inculcated with the view that they had equal responsibilities to customers, employees, and shareholders. This view has been exterminated. Pushed by Wall Street and the threat of takeovers promising “enhanced shareholder value,” and incentivized by “performance pay,” CEOs use every means to substitute cheaper foreign employees for Americans. Despite 20% unemployment and cum laude engineering graduates who cannot find jobs or even job interviews, Congress continues to support 65,000 annual H-1B work visas for foreigners.

In the midst of the highest unemployment since the Great Depression what kind of a fool do you need to be to think that there is a shortage of qualified US workers?

Congress really is the enemy. They are on the take, every last one of these people.

The Economy

Nevada's unemployment rate is at a record 13.2 percent, with no relief in sight.

Only Michigan has a higher unemployment rate. It is at 15.2 percent.

If Obama

can't or won't do anything to combat high unemployment, and he needs to put through jobs programs for all of us out here who can't find work, then he is NEVER going to be re-elected.

Some Thoughts for Labor Day

It may take five years before the job market looks halfway decent. So what will the unemployed do for the next half-decade, praytell?

And why don't the media care about the latest dismal job figures? It's because the elites in the media are also members of the financial class which isn't affected by the worsening economy.

If Unemployment is Up

and jobs are not being created, there can be NO recovery, and there isn't despite the piles of propaganda claiming it's on the way.

Nevada's Unemployment

is getting higher and higher and in July hit a record 12.5 percent.

I don't think any relief is in sight.

Despite Claims

the economy is getting "better," the misery index is actually increasing, with more and more people out of work and losing their benefits. The government is also playing games with the unemployment figures:

The official jobless rate of 9.5 percent excludes both those who have stopped looking for jobs because local conditions are so bleak and those obliged to accept part-time employment.

If these unemployed and underemployed were included, the real jobless rate in the country’s most populous state, California, for example, would be 20.3 percent, according to the Times. In Oregon it would be 23.5 percent, in Michigan and Rhode Island, 21.5 percent, and in South Carolina, 20.5 percent. The figure would be just below 20 percent in Tennessee, Nevada and a number of “states that have relied heavily on manufacturing and housing.”

Given that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national jobless rate is skewed, for political reasons, to minimize the actual conditions, various analysts step in and attempt to come up with a “real unemployment” number.

I find it hard to believe, however, employers are taking "experience" over youth; age discrimination is alive and well, as older employees are a bigger expense than younger workers.

Regardless, this is all a deliberate policy to destroy Americans' living standards to those of the Third World. Our politicians will do little about it, for they are on the take from those who want this country to descend into third worldom.

The Daily Outrage

Don't you get the feeling that sometimes the new boss is the same as the old boss?

Telling laid off auto workers they can go fuck off and die if they don't get retrained for jobs that don't exist doesn't help at all. It's like Obama just doesn't get it.

Forget careers like education, which are going into the ditch and blatantly discriminate against over-40 workers.

There are just NO jobs to be had. We need to bring the exported jobs BACK to this country, not keep pandering to the Wall Street crowd.

This poster from Democratic Underground says it well, I think:

Even today's MBA is soon becoming as valuable as yesterday's HS diploma. In this recent round of layoffs, the Bachelors and MBA holders were sent packing from corporations with the rest of the "unpositioned". Nowadays, so many people are getting their MBAs not simply for the purpose of bettering themselves, but merely as a requirement for remaining employable. There's going to come a time where a bachelors degree, which takes enough time and sacrifice to complete, simply isn't going to be enough. Frankly, it really isn't enough now. When does THAT stop?

What do you say to older workers in general, who still have to deal with the wet-carpet mountain known as "ageism"? To pretend it doesn't exist is patently naive at best and perilous at worst. There used to be a time that older workers and their leadership and skill set were valued. Now corporations want the candidates to be 25-34 years old, have 20 years experience and a master's degree, and be able to work for the same average $40,000 a year that they've been paying us for three decades running.

What do you say to older workers who took the GM/Ford buyouts but still don't have the money to retire? What does this administration say to people like my cousin, who in 2006 had to take a buyout from Packard Electric, which lasted him so long and to this day never recovered the wages he made and is still not gainfully employed? He has nothing other than a high school diploma. It's naive to think that at 37, he and his SO can just go to a community college and start over. What would they do? Where would they get the money for the education . . . go into more debt? Where would the experience come from?

They didn't used to have to worry about this sort of thing before. It used to be that we were able to gainfully employ people who aren't meant for college; these people were our industrial and manufacturing base and they built the quality products we used and bought.

A strong economy should be capable of employing EVERYone at a fair wage regardless of education level, and when you cannot do that, all the talking points in the world aint'a gonna mask the reality that you do NOT have any such economy on your watch.

So now we're again bringing up the "retraining" canard. While it was all too insignificant a bone thrown by the Bewsh administration, Obama seems to mean well because I believe he genuinely cares about workers and doesn't see them as economic losers as the previous admin did.

Regardless, it still remains the futile equivalent of plugging up a bursting dam with corks.

Say you get laid off of a career and have to go and re-train for a new one. Honestly, what career are you going to pick that can't be offshored/inshored?

Do you got a few years to put your life on hold while you GET this training, as in enough cash to pay the bills, put food on the table and a roof overhead?

Here's another thing they aren't seeing - how can you predict that the career you choose to retrain in won't be following it's predecessor overseas?

Not to mention that "retraining" only works if your competition cannot do the exact same thing. What do they think, that Indians and Chinese DON'T have access to the same universities and opportunities we have? They can get the same degrees we can get. They have THOUSANDS that already HAVE the same degrees we have to get. And they will always, always ALWAYS be cheaper. Gonna get your Ph.D in math? Guaranteed there's already 100 Indians or Chinese or whoever that have them and are vying for your position.

ALL offshoring and inshoring/visa abuse should be stopped until you have several new emerging technologies for the displaced to assimilate to. Oh wait, that TOO can't happen. Not only has nano-, bio- and whatever-o-tech already got the jumpstart over in Asia and India during the last administration (which was fervently anti-science to it's own detriment), but now were seeing reports of green jobs being shipped overseas as well . . . the jobs that were supposed to be leading US to a greater long-term economic foundation.

We cannot afford to follow the same path our predecessors have taken for the past 20 years.

If one was conspiritorial to the n-th degree, one would think this was all a foolproof plan by the wealthy, corporations and colleges to keep the middle class, poor and all of us 95%ers in "our station" for life. But I'm starting to go with a certain director who said "I don't believe in conspiracies, except the ones that are true".

A powerless, uneducated, fearful and divided work force is an OBEDIENT work force. It's simply sad beyond belief that Democratic administrations who saw the monumental damage caused by 28 years of Republican and Moderate free-trade follies are still falling for the same Republican and regressive way of conducting business.

I'm not one of those who believe they don't care. I just think this new administration cannot do anything to rein in ubiquitous corporate rule. These spoiled brat wealthmongers are going to learn soon enough just how cancerous their selfish ways will end up being the bullets through their own feet.

The people running this country are a bunch of morons who are on the take from wealthy individuals and corporations. The only way we will EVER get rid of this graft is by putting in true campaign finance reform. Given how Obama scuttled it in his run for the presidency, don't expect it to happen.

Obama needs to get serious about infrastructure, for one thing.

In 48 Out of 50 States

the unemployment rate increased, and there is no end in sight.

Of course it was deliberately designed to turn this country into a third world country. It's all about ideology and bribing our politicians in both political parties to keep things as they are.

Never mind people are suffering.