From the federal legislation that ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), passed by the Republican majority in Congress and signed by Democratic president William Clinton in 1996, to the New Jersey state government's cynically named "Work First New Jersey," an entire category of working people--working women and their children--has been eliminated from the kind of protection that Social Security had guaranteed for children, women, workers injured or thrown out of a job, and others affected by the instabilities resulting from capitalism's normal functioning. In 2001, as the five-year lifetime cutoff point is reached, many will be pushed to the cliff's edge.

The drive to push working-class women off state versions of AFDC builds on the ideological drive by the capitalist rulers to portray women receiving supplemental income as "welfare mothers" who prefer the "good life" on government programs rather than working for a living. The dehumanizing interviews and intrusions into the personal life of a worker, done under the guise of preventing "welfare cheats," goes hand-in-hand with these assaults.

AFDC and related programs were part of a social safety net won through the mass labor upsurge in the 1930s and extended through the battles for civil rights and women's rights in the 1960s and 1970s. This marked a historic gain for the working class, providing a minimum of protection from economic devastation and inhuman suffering for working people.

The struggles that compelled the government to establish these entitlements pointed in the direction of expanding the social wage to include health care, education, unemployment and retirement benefits, elder-care facilities, child care, and other needed measures. These working-class struggles took the moral high ground, rejecting the idea of "looking out for number one" and instead started with looking out for the interests of broad layers of working people.

From the point of view of the capitalist class, the role of women is to be responsible within the individual family unit for what should be social tasks: education, care of the sick and elderly, and child-rearing. Women are supposed to see themselves as supplemental wage earners and, at best, temporary workers deserving lower pay than men. To give ground on either front means a shift in where surplus value created through the labor of workers goes. Progress in reducing wage differentiation between men and women and toward the socialization of the family's responsibility for the production and reproduction of labor power translates into a vast shift of wealth from the capitalist class to the working class.

The number of women working outside the home has grown from 5.3 million in 1900 to 18.4 million in 1950 and to 63 million in 1997. Women made up 29.6 percent of the workforce in 1950, a figure that grew to 46.2 percent in 1997. Of workers paid by temporary agencies, 55 percent are female, and a total of 70 percent of part-time workers are female.

Seventy percent of working women earned less than $25,000 in 1996, compared with 48 percent of men. Women who worked year-round, full-time jobs saw their inflation-adjusted median annual earnings fall between 1989 and 1996. Women accounted for 85 percent of the total increase between 1989 and 1995 in the number of workers with more than one job. In 1996, women who worked full-time, year-round, earned 74 cents for every dollar earned by men. Over a lifetime the average woman will earn $523,000 less than an average working man by age 65.

These figures speak for themselves about the central place women have in the labor force and the economic realities they face as well.

This situation is sharpened by the fact that a growing number of women are heading up households, which brings with it increased pressure on individual women and the seeds of social conflict with the onset of an economic crisis.

The labor movement needs to defend every single gain the working class has made as part of the fight against the devastating conditions being imposed by the employers, their government, and the normal workings of the capitalist system.
 
 
Related article:
Welfare cuts in New Jersey target women  
 
 
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