Main Street

Word on the Street: In Honor of Working Mothers

Tara Sutton — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

This week marks my one year anniversary canvassing with Working America. As I reflect back on my year and the thousands of doors I have knocked on, I am reminded of the hard hitting reality of what initially attracted me to this organization.

The reality that all too often in our country the term “working family” is synonymous with single mother. 85% of custodial parents in our country are mothers and 79.5% of single mothers are gainfully employed. Only 5% are receiving TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) according to data released by the US Census Bureau in November 2009. We are not a country of welfare mothers. We are a country of hard working single moms who bear the responsibility of rearing the future of our society.

I watched my mother quit her job at the beginning of the Great Recession in order to care for my terminally ill grandmother. The corporation my mother worked for gave her no options or flexibility to balance the responsibilities that economics and culture caused her to bear. After struggling to find employment, she began working in childcare. Ironically, although prices from childcare are consistently rising at a much higher rate than inflation, she barely earns over minimum wage.

I had to juggle two jobs while helping my family care for my father when he became ill last summer and passed in October. Thankfully, through Working America I was able to take time to grieve and make arrangements. My sister on the other hand, was not so lucky. She works for a large retail corporation and was forced to return to work the same week that our dad died. Now my mother is a single mom raising a teenage boy and a five year old.

So what now? Our unemployment rate is teetering at 10% and state budgets are predominantly cutting services for women and children such as Headstart programs, family planning facilities, adoption services and rape crisis centers. When we take away these services that women and children depend on for their survival, we allow corporate greed to run our country. In PA alone, 70% of corporations don’t pay any income tax at all, while women watch services they depend on get cut, and proposals pass for raising their taxes. These women pay their taxes out of every pay check with much needed money that could be used for necessities such as school supplies, groceries or utility bills.

I have spoken with women who have no electricity in their homes because a home without power is better than no home at all. I have spoken with women who work three minimum wage jobs and still cannot make ends meet because of the sky rocketing prices of childcare. I have spoken with women who have been forced out of the workforce in order to care for ailing family members and cannot find any work to return to once they have lost their loved one.

I watch these injustices plague my mother and every night at the door, I talk to dozens of women dealing with the same issues. My message stays the same, “The solution is simple, strength in numbers. We need to hold our politicians accountable to vote in the best of interest of their constituency. They get to vote on these issues every day. We don’t.”

The working class, or what is left of it, is all too often pushed out of the political process in our country There is no time left in the day and questions of paying bills and buying groceries are more prevalent than what is happening on C-Span. So, I will get up tomorrow and the next day and the next and be proud to take knowledge and action to another mother’s door so she can regain her voice all while making dinner, checking homework and paying bills.