Toon: QwikBaby "Baby Plant" Seeds!
Click to enlarge
For a country that trumpets its "family values," the U.S. comes up laughably short on parental leave. We've been the worst industrialized country in that department for a while, as this piece in USA Today detailed in 2005:
Out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
The pitiful Family and Medical Leave Act only guarantees 12 UNPAID weeks of leave (for workers at larger companies.)
Companies have discretion to offer more leave (and pay for leave) if they choose to—but fewer and fewer make that choice. A recent study by the Families and Work Institute found that "far fewer employers provide full pay during the period of maternity-related disability, today at 16%, down from 27% in 1998."
It's part of a national trend towards cost-cutting and crappier workplace benefits (of course, these things should be provided by the GOVERNMENT, but gosh, that might be too SOCIALIST). More details here and here:
"I had my son on Thursday and, on Monday, I had to go back to work," said Selena Allen, a 30-year-old mother who was working at a non-profit agency near Seattle when she had a baby five years ago.No paid maternity leave for Allen meant leaving her premature son, Conor, in the hospital for weeks without being able to care for him.
"I was an emotional wreck, I was devastated, but in order to feed my family, I had no other option," Allen said.
P.S. On a feminist note, I of course support a good long period of paid parental leave for parents of any gender and sexual orientation (including adoptive parents!), not just maternity leave or leave for heterosexual couples. I certainly don't want to encourage any policy that implies childrearing should be women's work, or that only women should stay home with kids, etc. Just to be clear and all...
P.P.S. A reader on Flickr notes that my cartoon reminds him of a creepy-sounding Czech movie called Otesánek (Little Otik). Eeek! I'll have to check it out.
Labels: cwa, economic justice, feminism, toons
9 Comments:
Yes-- this country is ridiculous!
so much for family first!
A very funny way to hit on a very strong point.
I think you're dead-on when it comes to parental leave for childbirth.
"It's part of a national trend towards cost-cutting and crappier workplace benefits (of course, these things should be provided by the GOVERNMENT, but gosh, that might be too SOCIALIST)"
I say as long as we have to put up with the negatives of so-called capitalism, that laws be passed such that the companies themselves have to pay such benefits--just like now we make 'em pay unemployment insurance and the like. But I suppose that's thought of as 'socialism' too...
Oh, and Little Olek is a freaky movie, well worth watching. It's also partly stop-motion animation, so you might appreciate it as an cartoonist-artist as well.
Normally I'm 100% behind your cartoons but this one I have a wee problem with.
Granted, our country's culture is exceedingly hypocritical regarding valuing families and children on the one hand and refusing to provide a mechanism for dealing with new familial additions in a sane way.
On the other hand: having kids is a optional life choice. It's not like conception is a mystery. We know what causes this; we know how to prevent it; we know that not preventing it has consequences.
Or, looked at from another angle, when do I as a childless person get 12 weeks of leave to indulge one of my optional life choices (adopting a dog, traveling, doing volunteer work, writing a novel)?
So, it's not just the "we value families and children but no paid leave for you!" bit that's hypocritical.
Kids cost and if you choose to have them, shouldn't you be expected to bear the burden of that choice?
woodstock, I do understand where you're coming from, and I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, I don't believe that married people or families with children should in any way be considered better or superior to people who don't have children or choose not to have children. So there is certainly room for a whole other discussion on how workplaces should offer flexibility and different types of leave for workers with or without children.
But I also believe that health insurance and public colleges should be free and paid for by the government. Because like health insurance or free public education or the public library, parental leave is about creating a shared society--yes, it's true that people who don't get sick or have children or borrow books from the library have to help pay for those who do... but having that social safety net in place also gives everyone the ability to do those things, choice or no choice.
Besides, EVERYONE ages or needs a dental cleaning or gets sick eventually, and while not everyone has kids, everyone was ONCE a kid themselves--and wouldn't it be nice if kids of future generations got a great education and good healthcare and weren't burdened with giant piles of student loan debt?
And are parents really able to make a free choice to have children when they don't have access to prenatal care or don't even get a single paid week off?
This issue also does disproportionately affect women in the workplace, as women who do take leave are often "mommy-tracked" and treated as second-class office citizens after having children.
I completely agree with you, Mikhaela: we should be building a shared society and we really aren't. And I understand about the social safety net that causes people like me who will never have kids to contribute funds through taxation to help fund public schools that I'll never use, and I'm totally for those things.
What seems disproportionate to me is that there's no effort made in building that social safety net to include me. So...I'm expected to work late, put up with people leaving early and having to pick up their work because little Jimmy has soccer or little Suzy has field hockey but on the other end, when I'm old and there's no one to "take care of me" (ie: no kids) I'm expected to bear the entire burden of my choice not to reproduce? It's maddeningly unbalanced.
The healthcare situation in our country is a disgrace: no one should ever have to choose between food and medicine, and the fact that we don't offer free higher education to those who qualify for it academically when we're now requiring that the person who answers the phones and sorts the mail have a bachelor's degree is an absolute disgrace. And yes, lack of leave to care for children disproportionately affects women in the work place so it is quite rightly a feminist issue and that it's not being addressed with full vigor is yet another reason why 2nd wave feminism was an abject failure (wait, so I can have an abortion but I'm still making $.75 on the $1? Great!) but instead of crafting a plan that is incomplete because it only takes into account immediate needs - like parental leave - lets craft one that considers the rights, and general good health, of all workers even women like me without kids.
Again, I totally hear you on this, woodstock. It's a little bit like the marriage issue--some LGBT activists focus on marriage equality with a sad tunnel vision. (See the Beyond Marriage website for a good, detailed joint statement that encompasses a lot of the issues you bring up).
I even feel guilty of this in my own cartoons sometimes, since so often I'm reacting to bigoted anti-marriage-equality assholes in the news, I probably seem like much more of a marriage-focused cheerleader than I really am. As that Beyond Marriage statement puts it:
"We, the undersigned – lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers – seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families. In so doing, we hope to move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics as they exist in the United States today.
We seek access to a flexible set of economic benefits and options regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender/gender identity, class, or citizenship status.
We reflect and honor the diverse ways in which people find and practice love, form relationships, create communities and networks of caring and support, establish households, bring families into being, and build innovative structures to support and sustain community.
In offering this vision, we declare ourselves to be part of an interdependent, global community. We stand with people of every racial, gender and sexual identity, in the United States and throughout the world, who are working day-to-day – often in harsh political and economic circumstances – to resist the structural violence of poverty, racism, misogyny, war, and repression, and to build an unshakeable foundation of social and economic justice for all, from which authentic peace and recognition of global human rights can at long last emerge."
...etc. That sounds similar to what you're talking about, no?
The Beyond Marriage statement does sound something a lot like what I had in mind, Mikhaela, though I'd never thought about approaching the issue from that angle. I've always looked at it as a workers' rights issue (to give an example: I once worked at a place where the stated policy was that you could not take sabbatical (I know, a fabulous benefit, right? [g]) in the same year you took parental leave. Despite this, one of our unpartnered male employees takes his 6 week sabbatical comes back and then a month later announces that not only does he now have a partner she's pregnant and he'll need parental leave before the end of the year. *Of course* they have him the parental leave.) rather than a marriage-parity rights issue. Thank you very much for the link. Also, I found coincidentally that there is an illuminating article on this subject in the current Utne Reader (see: http://www.utne.com/2008-07-01/Politics/Its-Not-a-Gay-Thing.aspx) which opened my eyes even more to the problems that restricting certain rights to people in legally sanctioned sexual attraction-based pair bonds can cause.
As for your 'toons: you've got to respond to what is out there. When the world is as idiotic as it is sometimes, there's not much choice but the equivalent of the cartoon scream.
Don't know how I missed this one. That plant baby creeps me out. Which is awesome.
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