http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/print/20080606_nicholas_von_hoffman_on_the_big_squeeze/
The portion below is about family life, but this article also has a lot about general demeaning of workers, including when Northwest Airlines suggested that laid-off workers should take up dumpster diving.
During the last 30 years of stagnation and decline for working Americans, the political party associated with business has been unrelenting in going after its Democratic rivals as the anti-family, pro-abortion, smut and homosexual party. This has netted that political party much mileage and many an election win, but all the queers and all the flits and all the gays in history lumped together cannot have had the deleterious effects on modern family life that low compensation and long hours have had.
The numbers cited by Greenhouse explain why: “ ... 59 percent of mothers with children under six do paid work and so do 55 percent with children under one, about half of them full time. One reason for today’s increased time bind ... is that in the modern middle-class American household, both parents taken together work 540 more hours per year—13.5 more weeks per year—than parents did a generation ago. In two out of three American families with small children in which both parents work, the couples work more than 80 total hours per week.”
Beyond compensating staff too little to enable parents to have the time to care for their children properly, employers are rigidly indifferent to the unforeseen crises and nasty surprises which inevitably attend the economically forced separation of children from their parents. To drive the point home, Greenhouse says: “Many employers do surprisingly little to help workers juggle work and family. Some retailers post their worker’s weekly schedules only a few days in advance, making it hard to plan child care. Many businesses require employees to work overtime at a moment’s notice, leaving many workers in a bind when their baby sitter is scheduled to leave. Nearly half of American workers are not entitled to paid sick days ... many workers risk getting fired when they stay home to care for the sick children.”
How the forced absence of parents plays into the continuing downward slide of academic accomplishments by millions of schoolchildren is beyond the scope of this book but not beyond our thinking. Two-, three- and four-job families are not in good shape to supervise homework, meet with teachers or uphold their end of the PTA. Children left to their own devices in this country fall prey to the advertising which whisks them off to game, movie, music, sneaker, celebrity, cell phone etc. land, where fun and entertainment obliterate three-quarters of their lives and instill in them sets of preferences and beliefs which keep many of them in ox-brained thralldom the rest of their existences.
One would have assumed such questions would have been a burning political issue these past 30 years, but far from it. Discussions of them have been boxed out and labeled as a woman’s issue or, worse, a feminist issue. At the same time, business executives and trade associations complain with increasing vehemence about the untaught, ignorant and under-motivated young people coming out of our high schools and colleges, yet their part in the numbing of youth goes undiscussed for fear anyone who might bring it up will be accused of waging class warfare.
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