Anti-Feminist Baby Bonuses?

Is maternity leave,  at full time pay, the same thing as EI maternity benefits? And there was the rider that it was a combination of both that negatively imapcted women.

Then we have the reality that EI  Mat benefits do not  always protect woman's employment, unless they are union, and indeed that the majority of women do not go back to work at the same job. They leave their original job thinking they will be stay at home moms, until the financial burden becomes to great and they go back to work elsewhere for less pay usually.

remind wrote:

Is maternity leave,  at full time pay, the same thing as EI maternity benefits? And there was the rider that it was a combination of both that negatively imapcted women.

Then we have the reality that EI  Mat benefits do not  always protect woman's employment, unless they are union, and indeed that the majority of women do not go back to work at the same job. They leave their original job thinking they will be stay at home moms, until the financial burden becomes to great and they go back to work elsewhere for less pay usually.

Don't know where you get that information, remind. The provinces generally follow the same rules as in the Canada Labour Code. It has nothing to do with EI benefits - it's a fundamental protection that the employer must grant mat leave and must reinstate the woman to employment after:

Quote:

209.1 (1) Every employee who takes or is required to take a leave of absence from employment under this Division is entitled to be reinstated in the position that the employee occupied when the leave of absence from employment commenced, and every employer of such an employee shall, on the expiration of any such leave, reinstate the employee in that position.

Comparable position

(2) Where for any valid reason an employer cannot reinstate an employee in the position referred to in subsection (1), the employer shall reinstate the employee in a comparable position with the same wages and benefits and in the same location.

Let's deal in the real world unionist, not the theoretical world.

Also, here is the breakdown of the report parameters of the snippets TB linked to. Not quite the reality  it appears to be from the snippet.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/studies-etudes/75-001/archive/e-pdf/4682-eng.pdf

What are you supposed to do though, call the police?  I was not hired back at the Shoppers Drug Mart where I worked for 6 years because the store changed hands, and the new boss decided he was going to work full-time in the pharmacy rather than being a hands-off manager like his predecessor.  As a new mum, I scrambled around and found another job myself; I had no time to launch any complaints.  (And the new job turned out to be better, anyway; better pay, better workmates, closer to where I lived.)

This law is abused because employers know that women often don't complain.  You worry you could end up looking like a trouble-maker and won't be able to get hired elsewhere.

Just one of the reasons I now work in a unionized workplace.

unionist

Did you note I excluded union sites? Apparently not. Did you read the links in post 57? Apparently not.

Women who work in the service industry are a much different story than union sector employment,  and those  sectors who have high educational standings, and if it is a small business with few employees it is also not a given your job will there when you return,  phased out jobs, different job descriptions and no other job positions available. All these actions get around "employment laws".

Assuming the system is fair for all women is wrong. In particular CAW's link, I believe, indicates only 60% of women actually go on extended mat leave, so when you start bandying numbers about you are already missing 40% of women. then when you consider those working part time jobs who do not qualify numbers get sketchier and when women take time off from those part time  service industry jobs, for mat leave, there is no job to go back to.

Also here are some links for the UK and the USA, as if it is happening there it is happening here too. As noted above about the Durham women.

http://www.in2town.co.uk/Free-Parenting-Advice/30000-Pregnant-Women-a-Ye...

http://womensissues.about.com/b/2009/03/30/women-who-lose-their-jobs-bec...

Then of course there is this which indicates your perceptions are skewed because you live in QC.

Report on the NAWL Pan-Canadian Workshop on
Improving Maternity and Parental Benefits outside Québec

http://www.nawl.ca/ns/en/documents/200707_Report_Mat_Parental_Benefits.pdf

Then read this from CAW, and we already start out with the short end of the stick with EI

http://www.caw.ca/assets/pdf/EN-ei.pdf

ETA: exactly sineed, and it pisses me off when people try to make it appears as if women have reached equality status and are treated fairly, in the work place supposedly because of laws being in place.

wow blaiming the victim sweet!

no unionist. I am done with you, I do not care if you do not believe me that most women who work outside of union and high educational requirement private work place settings  do not have jobs to go back to, or they are let go when it is found out they are pregnant for one reason or another.

ETA: Do you think this government is going to do a report on how badly women are treated in the work force, or  any of the mainstream media, like CanWest? They won't even report on the current situation but trumpet one 10 years ago, things have not gotten better they have gotten worse as my links do show.

ETA: that you have indicated that you have had to address this happening upon occasion in a union setting, indicates what it would be like outside of a union setting.

You could take you own advice, Unionist, ang go easy on allies who don't share your rosy view. Remind has documented her claim that mat leave legislation was not working as fine and dandy as you claimed it does; Sineed testified about her own mistreatment. You are dismissing these accounts. And solutions totally aren't as simple as "one minute for a phone call" or "unionize them". Your casual words stung me.

The "so we don't live as victims" comment is nauseating actually, martin, not just stinging.

Employers use excuses like what sineed detailed all the time because they believe a new mother is a liability, and the minute the new mother is out of sight, they hire someone else.

Timebandit, I linked  to the actual study that your post  linked to, which was just a Stats Can snippet and nothing more. Who are trying to kid?

In actual fact, Chris Charelton has a motion before the House,  for almost exactly what you are detailing in  your last paragraph.

remind wrote:

Timebandit, I linked  to the actual study that your post  linked to, which was just a Stats Can snippet and nothing more. Who are trying to kid?

 

In actual fact, Chris Charelton has a motion before the House,  for almost exactly what you are detailing in  your last paragraph.

 

[url=http://chrischarlton.ndp.ca/node/617] Here [/url] is a description of Charlton's motion (which was not passed by mother's day as intended. It does call for serious improvements, but does not seperate maternity benefits from the regular EI system as it should.

It also needs to protect not only temp workers and self-employed women, but unemployed women as well. There is no mention of these details in the motion.

It clearly should not be part of the EI program, but should be a seperate program dedicated to maternity benefits and based on women's needs as mothers regardless of their employment status.

I did, I linked to the actual exhaustive report of the snippet, you provided. Which in fact does NOT say what your linked snippet alleges it to. I see you did not bother reading it.

As for you personal attack words, it indicates just where you are at. So I will not bother with your comments concerning this, from this point on.

remind wrote:

I did, I linked to the actual exhaustive report of the snippet, you provided. Which in fact does NOT say what your linked snippet alleges it to. I see you did not bother reading it.

As for you personal attack words, it indicates just where you are at. So I will not bother with your comments concerning this, from this point on.

In other news, pot calls kettle black.

I did read it, and it did not contradict the summary I linked to.  Most women eligible for EI mat leave benefits return to work at the same job or very similar.  They do not opt to become SAHMs and go back to lesser positions for lesser pay. 

So again, could you back up your claim that a MAJORITY of women decide to be SAHMs and lose their jobs after mat leave with something more than anecdote? 

ETA:  Interesting, Unionist.  Thanks for sharing that.  I wish we'd had that sort of program here in Saskatchewan about 8 or 9 years ago - I was back to work when Ms T was two weeks old.

It has always bothered me that certain strands of "mainstream feminism" have devalued "women's work". So women go out and compete in the Man's World - a rigged system. So women have been emancipated from the household - great, but who steps in. Multinational corporations provide our food which makes us sick. Low wage workers take care of us during our formative years.

Perhaps most importantly, where is there any acknowledgment of the real work women do - loving their children, helping them grow emotionally. Who does this when mothers are working 8 hours a day and commuting for another 2 hours.

And yes what about this - Infosatured claims "the minimum 100,000 and much more that it takes to raise a child". How can nobody on this thread speak to this? This is absurd.

If "baby bonus" is responsible for turning women into baby machines isn't EI responsible for keeping us all "wage slaves".

Someone above noted that increased education and movement away from religion are the reasons women in the first world aren't having as many children. Maybe this needs to be looked into. The generation (within Canada at least) who were having children in the 1930's, the WASPs to be specific, averaged a very low birth rate. Serious education for women had not become the norm at that point, although there was a movement away from religion. My guess for the decline in birth rates during that period had something to do with the depression, i.e., money. The baby boom didn't happen until after WW2 when there was an economic upturn.

This is not too say money is the only reason for the decline in women having children.

Hellfire???

I am claiming that there are a number of feminisms - not some monolithic entity. I am not suggesting "real feminism" (your term not mine) is about raising children. I don't think there is such a thing as "real feminism". By all means let me know what "real feminism" is - according to you.

I am stating that the real work of women (in the first world) for a long time was raising children - a huge job. Look how many industries have sprung up to take up the slack while us women march off to work in the "real world". Why does the "real world" devalue having children? Who populates the "real world" - mothers. Maybe you would rather we contract out the productions of humans to cloning factories.

I also opt out of being fed by multinationals - but if you read the news or look at the profits made by these companies maybe you would realize the majority don't and we are all paying the cost for diabetes etc... My larger point is the economic system we live under has a set of values that results in more and more women not having children. Yes, for some the more educated the more money, but also more time spent making that money and less time for other things. For many, more education doesn't equal more money. Real wages down over last 30 years - education rates up. What is your point?

Well, you seem to be suggesting that the emancipation of women from the home has led to a negative effect on society, and to be illustrating a binary "man's world" (the workplace) vs "women's real work" (children) scenario. Further, you appear to be blaming women working for the rise of multinational domination, which is bizarre.

I don't believe in a monolithic vision of feminism either. I believe in choice. 

Nonsense.

well well well wrote:

 

 

I am not blaming women for the rise of the multinationals. What I was pointing out is that "traditional women's work" is/was devalued. My proof for that thought is that women used to feed the family (eating seems to be central to our existence) and now that they don't have as much time, we, as a socitey, have become sicker as a result of our diet. Now I am not saying that only women can or should do the work of feeding the family, but if it was truly a valued bit of work would it have been replaced by the fast food industry, by kraft and their ilk?

 This maybe should be a new thread, not sure.  I think I understand what you're trying to say but don't agree with the cause and effect links your making as some sort of overall proof.   Yes there is a connection between the growth in modern times of consuming and relying on more processed foods which yes likely results in poorer health overall but there are also other factors besides just food consumption. Physical activity is a huge factor for one.   Mainly though I don't think that there the move to these types of foods is only do to lack of time being a reason that people tend to eat that way, nor that it's connected with more women working outside of the home and thusly having less time. Perhaps one factor but not a main cause or proof of a connection with society getting sicker.   For instance I do know many women and men for that matter who do or could have the time to prepare good food, whether for just themselves or their families and they don't.

If anything the change in diet has as much to do with the marketing of these sorts of foodstuffs and a general devaluation of eating and cooking healthy food as a whole though that's a trend that appears to be slowly changing for a number of reasons.   An even bigger factor I think is cost which speaks more to a person or families income levels. The industrialization of our food system as a whole has led in many cases that junkier food and much processed food is actually much cheaper then healthier choices.  There isn't much difference in the time needed to pour a glass of something to drink but on a volume basis pop or a fruit based punch drink is a lot cheaper then a good bottle of juice. White bread whose ingredients are more processed then it's whole wheat whole grain counterparts is cheaper.  A peruse of the cereal aisle is another example of this happening. 

Another factor which is ever so slowly being realized now is industrializtion appears to be affecting the nutritional makeup of the base food themselves.  Recent studies have shown marked differences in the nutrional content of factory farmed eggs vs pastured eggs or eggs from chickens that eat and live more as chickens evolved to do.  Recent studies are showing differences in the nutrional makeup of grain fed beef (not natural for a cow) and beef that was raised on grass particularly in the ratios of fats such as omega 3's and 6's.   Same for dairy products.  The protein content in wheat has also changed due to the types of wheat now grown as well as how it is now grown.  How food is sweetened has changed along with industrializtion particularly with the widespread use of high fructose corn syrup and the recent concerns of it's health effects.  I could go on.  The point being is that this could be as much of a factor in an overall decrease in societal health then just people not having the time to cook like once might have been the case.  If there is indeed a connection with overall health and a change in the base nutritional makeup of common base foodstuffs then even someone who prepares and cooks like the olden days isn't necessarily eating in terms of health like they would of in the olden days.

Just popping in to note a few really strong biases and assumptions going on.

well well well wrote:

 I am stating that the real work of women (in the first world) for a long time was raising children - a huge job. Look how many industries have sprung up to take up the slack while us women march off to work in the "real world".  

Women in the first world include poor women, working class women, First Nations women and women of colour. All those groups of women did not, in any one particular historlcal moment, "march off to work in the 'real world' ".

Jabberwock wrote:

 women with more education have more money than women without, both because they are more likely to come from an economic background that allowed them educational opportunites, and because higher education often equal higher wages.

I completely agree. What is missing is that such women have tended to be white and non-immigrant women. 

When white women wonder why the feminist movement is still seen as a white middle class women's movement, it's because of characterizations like these, of "women".

These characterizations might be true for some middle class white women at some historical moments of the past 60 or 70 years, but when they are spoken as if they are the universal experiences of all women, they become ridiculous untruths.

Think about this: What have working class women done with their children, while they've worked for (crappy) wages? For the past 60 to 70 years? No mat leave or parental leave in minimum wage jobs, by the way. Or call centres, or their historical equivalent, which while not minimum wage are certainly crappy dead-end jobs, and are not anything like the careers of white middle class professional women.

The discourse of choice is flawed as a standard or guideline for the existence of feminism, as choice itself (of any kind) is defined by someone else not having that choice. Working for pay is not a choice for some women.

The issue of food is an important one, which I suggest is taken to a new thread. Even though this thread has drifted, that would be going too far.

I take exception to the idea that you're handing your children to someone else to raise when you put them in daycare.  There have been studies that show working parents spend as much quality time with their kids as stay-at-home parents do.  You're still the parent, and your children know it.  They just have more trusted adults in their lives and often do better socially anyway by the time they're school aged. 

I'd also venture to say that, given the vast majority of stay at home parents are mothers, there's a whole lot less co-parenting happening when Mom's there 24/7 and Dad has to put in long hours outside the home to support the family financially.  It seems a little out of balance to me.  It's difficult for women to be emancipated from their traditional roles if men aren't, and becoming a SAHM or suggesting more women should be isn't progress in this regard.  (Disclaimer:  That doesn't mean that individuals choosing to structure their family roles around the SAHM/breadwinner structure described above are bad people or making wrong choices.  If it works for you, bravo.  Just don't tell the rest of us it's the best/only/you're-a-bad-parent-if-you-don't way to live.)

So rather than decrying the loss of an unbalanced system, maybe we should be pushing for some other things.  Like flex time, where parents can structure their working hours to spend more time with their kids, telecommuting if at all possible, better daycares and access to them, businesses that have on-site daycares, more effective parental leaves and benefits.  Wouldn't that be better than promoting women staying out of the work force, which tends to short-circuit careers? 

To tie it back into the original post - This is one of the things that picks my butt about Maier's book and her general attitude:  The world is the way it is, just give up.  Don't have kids, it's an endless nightmare of meaningless suffering and nothing can be done about it.  Oh, the ennui.  It makes me want to kick her.

Maysie, my comment about educated women in general being economically more advantaged than uneducated women was specifically in response to Well Well Well's comment that it was not education but money that accounted for a declining birthrate. I was merely pointing out that there is often a correlation between the two.  I don't believe that I am negating the experience of POC in doing so.

Your point however, that the discourse of choice is real only, for the most part, for white middle class women, is well taken. As is the one that homemaking has been for the most part a middle class paradigm, and that poor women have always worked. 

I think the same is true for urban women whose husbands ran their own businesses - both my grandmothers worked, the maternal as co-manger of a series of small hotel/motel ventures and the paternal as support staff for the family business - either clerical for the contracting side, and as retail staff when they ran a small paint store.  This was in the '40s and '50s and on into the '60s.  It allowed the family to keep a larger share of the income by reducing overhead, in much the same way as women and children on farms contributed their labour. 

Come to think of it, I also worked in the family business when they needed me while I was growing up.

If poorer women were having less children would the government be concerned? I think we really need to identify what it is we are talking about. It is the fact that  middle class women (mostly white) are having less children. This is the issue and this is the reason for some claiming that "social policy" geared towards encouraging these women to have more children is racist and anti-immigration. I understand the logic behind certain claims.

maysie said
Think about this: What have working class women done with their children, while they've worked for (crappy) wages? For the past 60 to 70 years? No mat leave or parental leave in minimum wage jobs, by the way. Or call centres, or their historical equivalent, which while not minimum wage are certainly crappy dead-end jobs, and are not anything like the careers of white middle class professional women.

So what is your point - we shouldn't do anything and adopt the ways of working class women? You ask what working class women have done with their children. I would venture to say they had access to a larger familial network that they received support from - mothers, grandmothers, aunts, nieces, sisters (yes, all women). The middle class has rejected this for the nuclear family, suburban isolation. Their networks are practically non-existent.

Yes, women have done all kinds of work inside and outside the home. When it is outside the home they got paid as individuals, when it was inside the home the reward was collective (the whole family benefits). When a women worked outside the home and received money she gained a measure of independence; if her husband was abusive she might have enough money to be able to leave. When a women worked inside the home/farm/family business did she control the monetary resources which were the result of her labour? Most likely not, so if faced with the above scenario does she have the same independence?

Somebody mentioned that women did quite a bit of work inside the home, sewing, cooking, farming, etc. What I introduced above was the idea that yes, they did all this work and when they stopped doing it (so they could work outside the home) it became necessary to pay somebody else to do it. Women were also the sole providers of health care and emotional care - on this last responsibility, I would like to note the back breaking nature of the work needed to turn a baby into functioning a member of our society. So what happened when women stopped doing all this work and entered the world of wage labour? Well we needed to pay other people to do what the women did for free.
Nurses, teachers, day care attendants, waitresses, psychologists, molly maids, nannies etc...Whole new sectors sprang up - elder care, day care and yes the fast food industry and the crap food industry.

McDonalds didn't expand as aggressively as they did because there was limited demand for cheap restaurant meals. They identified and exploited a need, based on the fact that women were throwing off the domestic chains and nobody was picking up the slack.
I still meet women today who are proud of the fact that they don't know how to cook or sew or do anything else associated with the traditional work of women.

Let me ask this - did the early corporations who saw the trends - the decline of the family farm, movement towards cities and women working, did they put this all together and say to themselves "we could make a fortune if we took over food production, from start to finish, and use economies of scale to further increase profits". I think it is pretty safe to say that afer the success of Henry Ford corporations were thinking along these lines. Let's just remind ourselves that today Kraft is owned by RJ Reynolds. So the tobacco industry stopped being so lucrative - where did they turn to? Mass produced food.

To eliza who seems to be sceptical of the relation between diet and health - how can you, in 2009, try and deny this connection. Physical activity and environment contribue to overall health. Yes they do. I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's arguing with intelligent people who thought diet didn't contribute to overall health. I remeber thinking they were insane then.

About marketing. Early attempts to market certain timesaving food items to housewives failed - they didn't buy cause they felt guilty not cooking from scratch. The food companies reworked their products so you had to add an egg or some other ingredient. Then the women bought them. As more and more women started working it became easier to sell these products and it became more and more acceptable to show disdain for domestic skills. This strikes me as profoundly disturbing.

--

Here is an interesting excerpt

http://books.google.ca/books?id=896em9CtUSMC&lpg=PA219&ots=k_OnpDzXzc&dq...

Emotion at Home
Emotional labour is most easily recognized as part of the caring role women in the home. Althought the social regulation of emotions is brought about through emotional labour, as a form of labour it appears to be insulated from other forms of labour, and is poorly recorded and underexplored. It is my contention that this is precisely because it involves both women and "emotion" with thier negative connotations. Because emotional labour is seen as "natural", unskilled women's work, because it is unpaid and because it is obscured by the privacy of the domestic domain where much of it takes place, the significance of its contribution and value in social reproduction is ignored.

One of the results of the gender division of labour is that women carry the prime responsibilty for working with emotions. More than that though "emotional" becomes part of a major cluster of other adjectives by which "masculine" and "feminine" are differentiated and through which the emotiona/rational divide of female/male is perpetuated.