Women Need Real Economic Security

February 6, 2002

Statement of NOW President Kim Gandy

Instead of decisive action to help displaced workers and reinforce the economic safety net, ultra-conservatives in Washington wasted precious time in partisan jousting on behalf of moneyed interests. The House of Representatives passed a bill last year to hand out billions of dollars in corporate welfare, while giving laid-off workers and low-income families little more than lip service. I commend the Senate leaders who stood firm against this outrageous plundering of the nation's assets to help those who need it the least.

Help is still needed for many people affected by the September 11 terrorism and the economic downturn. But some of the initiatives put forth by the White House look like a cruel joke. Take the proposals for tax credits, supposedly to allow uninsured people to purchase health coverage. This is like saying to a hungry person "Here's a gift certificate to Safeway that you can use next year on April 15 — now I don't want to hear any more that you're hungry."

The last round of Republican proposals, including the one that passed the House, proposed millions and millions in tax refunds to big companies — like Enron, for example — without requiring that a SINGLE job be created. The White House budget isn't much better, and it would require cuts to everything from infant nutrition to job safety to protecting the environment.

Members of Congress need to hear that plundering the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and using the money to speed up tax cuts for the wealthy is a morally bankrupt proposition. Speeding up elimination of the estate tax is one of the most outrageous. The fact that they weren't satisfied with exempting the first million or so from taxes just proves that their point is to get more money into the hands of the extremely wealthy, while increasing the burden on low-income and laid-off workers. It's the usual Bush refrain — the more you have, the more you get — while those with nothing go begging, literally.

And while we're on Social Security, just recently our cautions about privatization were confirmed twice — once by the collapse of Enron, and a second time by none other than the Social Security Administration's chief actuary — who said that the three proposals put forward by the Bush Commission would cost the taxpayers somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion over the next 10 years, depending on which plan is chosen. To take money from this trust fund and use it for corporate welfare and rebates to the rich is very close to theft, and every bit as despicable.

More than 600,000 people lost their jobs in the weeks following September 11. Thousands more have been either laid off or lost their pensions as Enron crumbled. And still no relief in sight. Congress must act immediately to extend unemployment benefits — and extend them to part-time workers as well.

Low-income households — and most of these are headed by women — need unemployment protections that include all workers, especially part-time workers. Unemployment insurance in most states is limited or unavailable to part-time workers, and women make up more than two-thirds of the part-time work force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of people working part time despite their preference for full-time work rose over the last year, from 3.2 to 4.3 million. That's a whole lot of workers left high and dry by partisan politics.

Women represent the majority of laid-off employees in many of the industries hit hardest by the slump. And according to the AFL-CIO, the statistics may underestimate the real unemployment rate because workers in industries such as hospitality are often not formally laid off — instead their hours are cut back to next to nothing.

Can you believe that only 34 percent of unemployed women in 2000 were eligible to receive unemployment benefits? Only 40 percent of unemployed men were eligible. And because of the wage gap, the benefits for the few women who qualified for unemployment received an average of just $194 per week, while men's weekly benefits averaged $241.

And you know what else? That 60-month time limit imposed by the welfare "reform" law of 1996 has already meant disaster for many poor families, while job opportunities are becoming more scarce. Allowing poor families to be punished by the 5-year welfare time clock when jobs simply aren't available is more than just cruel, it's bad economic policy. With the 5.8 percent unemployment rate in December 2001 the highest in nearly a decade, the strong U.S. labor market of only a year ago has quickly become history, and our lawmakers need to take that into account before punishing poor children for a situation not of their making.

The good ol' boys will boast about how welfare caseloads have declined dramatically since 1996 and how former recipients who still have jobs are earning an average of $7 per hour — hardly a livable wage. In fact, for most families the move off the welfare rolls hasn't translated to moving out of poverty and into economic stability, in part because educational opportunities are so limited. But instead of helping poor women get an education, the Bush administration just wants them to get married — as if that were a solution to women's poverty. For these families and for those who became victims of this recession, a weakened, inadequate safety net is their only protection. And that's nothing for the White House to brag about.

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