Had Enough? Working Women Urged to Stir the Pot

by Tula Connell, Sep 12, 2006

Among the more than 26,000 women who responded to the AFL-CIO 2006 Ask a Working Woman survey, Stacey from Brandon, Fla., sums up the economic concerns of many of America’s working women:

We are one accident away from homelessness. I own a home, I make decent pay, but if I am out of work for more than three months, my son and I are on the street. We shouldn’t have to live like this, especially when I work so hard.

The majority of survey respondents say they worry about such basic economic issues as paying for health care, not having retirement security and pay not keeping up with the cost of living. An incredible 97 percent say affordable health care tops their concerns, a figure that crosses age and race lines. (Read the full report here.)

But too many of the current crop of politicians running for election and re-election are purposefully ignoring working families’ calls to make economic security their priority.

Now, working women are doing something to take back the 2006 election campaign dialogue for working women and their families. On Oct. 10, working women across the nation will gather for hundreds of “Stirring the Pot” events—dinners and other small gatherings—where they will talk about how to get more women engaged and voting. At these events, they will take part in such actions as writing letters and postcards to other women to remind them to make their voices heard by voting.   

The events grew out of the powerful findings of the Ask a Working Woman survey—and it’s not too late to take part.

Hosting a dinner is easy: Invite friends, neighbors, co-workers or others for a potluck or to the local coffee shop for dessert. After signing up through the Stirring the Pot website to host an event, you will receive a guide to help get the discussion going and keep it on track around the issues most important to the lives of working women—the issues we talk about every day with our co-workers in the break room, at the kids’ playground or around our own dinner tables.

Still not sure if you’ve had enough? Here are a few recent facts illustrating how more and more working women are losing ground.

• Adult women are still the majority of those working for minimum wage, stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997, writes political psychologist and author Martha Burk.
• More women than men live below the poverty line, according to the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Women and people of color in the “new” communications sector are losing the path to the middle class, according to the Communications Workers of America (CWA). A report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, with supporting research by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, finds the shift to “new” digital media concentrates women and minorities in lower-paying jobs, for the most part without the benefit of union representation. (Click here for the full report.)
• The Bush Department of Labor is touting new Census Bureau data that show the gender pay gap for full-time, full-year workers is the lowest on record. But as the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports, this is not all good news. While women now earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men, EPI finds these declines were solely due to the fact that earnings have fallen for both men and women but have fallen more so for men.

Social Security keeps 42 percent of unmarried older women out of poverty. But one of the top priorities of the Bush administration after the Nov. 7 elections is moving to privatize Social Security. Social Security privatization will especially hurt women, who make up 60 percent of all Social Security recipients and are less likely than men to have pensions or substantial savings.

It’s up to us to make sure the Congress we elect this year does not back the Bush plan to gamble away our retirement.

And it’s up to us to make sure our children do not face a future without health coverage or work full-time and still get behind.

It’s up to us to say it’s time we had enough.

And time to start Stirring the Pot.

Get involved here.

This portion of this website is paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, 815 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006, with voluntary contributions from union members and their families, and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (0)