Moms At The Office
Martha Burk, Ph.D., Tompaine.com
Martha
Burk is author of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate
America and What Can Be Done About It, just released from
Scribner. She chairs the National Council of Women’s
Organizations.
Every
year on Mother’s Day we stop to thank our moms with gifts and
adoration. As individuals, we love our mothers dearly, but as a society
we don’t give much of a flip for motherhood. The state of mothers
in America is worse than it’s ever been.
Close to
three-quarters of all moms with children between the ages of 6 and 18
are in the labor force. Even though a large majority of mothers
in the country now work outside the home, we are lost in the ‘50s when
it comes to family policy. As a nation, we’ve got to grasp the fact
that working mothers are the norm, not the exception. Too much of
corporate America is still operating on the “organization man” model,
with the built-in assumption that someone else will take care of the
kids and household so dad can work unlimited hours. It’s the same
old mindset — men own the jobs, women own the kids. And Congress
isn’t helping. Despite the rhetoric of “no child left behind,”
plenty of children are left home alone, because we have no national
child care. It’s not even on the horizon.
When
President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in back in
1993, the United States lost the distinction of being one of the only
two industrialized countries in the world without some form of leave
for emergency care of sick children or elderly parents. Yet a
dozen years later, we’ve made no progress toward national paid leave.
And states, strapped for cash because of tax cuts, don’t want to fill
the void — even though it doesn’t cost that much. California alone offers
some paid time off — 55 percent of salary up to $728 per week — with the
tab being picked up by workers themselves at an average cost of only
$27 per year.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
Happy Mother's Day from the Blog for Iowa blog team – Trish, John, Molly, Chad, Caroline, and Linda.
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