Critenden claims in her article that motherhood is currently the single greatest obstacle women face in their quest for employment and wage equality. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers under the age of 35 is much more significant than that between males and females in that same age gap, demonstrating the glaring employment discrimination and lack of parental support programs provided by the government. The "mommy tax," as she calls it accumulates from lost wages, additions to pension plans, bonuses, management positions, etc. and can be very steep, with some even pushing families in the lower income brackets pre-children into a state of poverty. This large sacrifice, economically, is not usually realized until many years after the child is born and the difficulties of reentering the work force become clear. The author used Daley, an employee of Aetna Life and Casualty, as an example of the mom-discrimination of modern times. Her requests for a compressed work week were denied and she was subsequently fired due to "poor performance." When she sued her company for wrongful firing, the judge and jury agreed with her firm, claiming she was "overextended," that no woman could be a full-time mother and fully functional employee. Many studies on the wage gap between men and women have presented misleading results, simply using women with traditionally-male work habits as their representative female sample, thereby showing an improvement in the gender wage gap. Reasons behind the difference in mother/non-mother pay have been hypothesized: lack of paid maternity leave, the heavy penalization of prolonged time off, a lack of part-time employees wage rights, and the popularity of owning a small businesses for mothers because of the schedule flexibility. Prolonged interruption in career paths at any point, have been found to seriously hinder advancement through the management roles. These suggested reasons can be boiled down to one glaring problem in the capitalist system, and that is that nurturing skills are seriously undervalued. Young women are convinced to postpone family responsibilities as long as possible, to ensure career advancement and earning improvements. Often, women begin to settle down only to realize that they waited too long biologically, or that having children later in life is not their desired life path. In order to improve this wage gap and support mothers and parents, the US needs to adopt welfare programs similar to France's programs for families and mothers and US veteran programs. Critenden claims that the government, employees, and/or husbands need to take a more active role and thus share the long term costs of child birth.
An issue that I had with Critenden's piece is regarding her claim that the mommy tax is a "high price to pay for the right thing to do." While I think it is fair to reflect on the economic costs of motherhood, she does not have the ability to objectively state which choice is best in terms of raising a child; there is a wide variety of family dynamics and it is highly unlikely that the right thing to do in all cases is homogenous. Additionally, she adds that taking time off to raise a child adds to the general good by adding another productive person to the nation. This then claims that not taking off work to raise a child does not result in a productive human addition to society and that a child's time spent interacting with one's stay-at-home parents rather than working parents is correlated with productivity. I don't think these assumptions are possible to make or appropriate given the material she's utilizing for this article. She also states that the mommy tax is highest for high-income, well educated individuals and lowest for poorly educated people who have less income to lose. She shows a prejudice in this statement regarding the correlation between education and income, assuming that those who are poorly educated are in the lower income bracket and are not as harmed by the mother discrimination. She did not seem to consider that, regardless of education, those in the lowest income bracket may be on the verge of losing access to basic necessities, and that a loss in income, even a small one, could push them past a threshold point and into a destitute state. This loss may then be greater than the larger loss if income experienced by those in the higher-income bracket.
Ehrenreich touches on a similar prejudice in her essay, addressing the divide created with an increase in outsourcing housekeeping between the laborers and the employers. The issue with the "maid" dynamic is not necessarily the work that is being done but the power relations that are created. She states that while one person can be a arrogant or indifferent, the other must work to mitigate such behavior; the former role is traditionally maintained by males while the latter is by females. The idea of a cleaning lady has been introduced as a marriage-saving technique, a way to increase the peacefulness in the home. The process of hiring and paying an independently contracted cleaning lady is relatively shady business, however, with only 10% of households reporting monetary exchanges to the IRS. These workers are most often associated with minority communities, and receive no health benefits, job security, or retirement benefits. In recent years, there has been a rise in corporate cleaning services who provide their workers with benefits and vacation time. Services, rather than a specific person, are hired, and the relationship between the specific workers and the homeowner remains somewhat anonymous. This has helped to reduce the odd interactions that often develop between maids and their employers, as the employee often fills a friendship role but can often deteriorate to more of a master/parent/instructor type of relationship. The atmosphere in this new cleaning environment is significantly more cut-throat, with employees receiving pay cuts, no tips, no breaks, and being forced to operate under a strictly choreographed, factory-like routine.
The increase in excess income has corresponded with an unmanageability of homes as they're continually upgraded. Unfortunately, the hiring of help means that people are separated from the suffering their actions, purchasing decisions, and rapidly-paced lifestyle cause. Children are presented with a class, employment, and wage hierarchy correlated with minority status from a very young age, and the resulting discrimination becomes ingrained. Ehrenreich's suggestion is that the work being done, the exhanges being made, the relationships being created need to become more transparent and visible to the public so that a connection can be reforged between actions and their consequences. This is very important if environmental and sustainability intiatives are going to be effective in reducing the rapid destruction of our planet that is taking place. Additionally the severe environmental degradation that occurs because of a nonchalance about pollution, extraction, and production efforts and the resulting serious health effects most often experienced by marginalized populations can be mitigated if politicians, elite income groups, and general decision and culture makers become more transparent and more receptive to the variety of their constituents.
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