Hahahahaha! I’d forgotten. Roycroftmom, this is how you made it work. You had a job that was safe as houses, next to most jobs in this country. Also, benefits!
OP, I left the private sector so that I could make it work. Others do the same; I knew dozens. And the fed doesn’t provide maternity leave. Seriously.
And many others can’t do the same because the jobs don’t exist where the rest of their family and supports are, or because they’re constrained custodially. You really have to think outside your own circle’s experience.
Have you done the same? Most American women with young children are actually employed. They make it work.
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What would possibly make you think you have more experience with the US than others on this forum?? You almost surely are not older than the average age, and may be quite younger. Lots of posters have seen the country try different policies in 1961-2021 and have opinions on their relative efficiency.
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It took me seven years of concerted effort to get a public-employee job with those kinds of protections and benefits. Those jobs are highly prized here. That’s because I don’t live in Virginia, which is lousy with public jobs, nor did I have the ability to move to Virginia. That’s because of child-custody laws, which they don’t let me rewrite to suit myself very often.
Before that, I worked more or less around the clock for low wages and no benefits as an intellectual gig worker. That’s what was available. That’s the best that’s available to many moms all over the country. That’s why they do those jobs instead of strolling into a readily-available public-servant job that might give them benefits, a world of job protections, a steady paycheck, and the ability to sleep at night now and then.
Also, I will thank you not to insult me with that “actually employed.” If you worked more than I did while raising children, I will send you my next paycheck. I’m not worried.
Very few mothers, or anyone for that matter, are employed as intellectual gig workers. Sounds like that is a good thing.
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Just before I got the job I have now, I got an email alerting me to a gig for the Discovery Channel. They had a Google spreadsheet up asking people to leave name, contact info, abbreviated resume. This was a job that would’ve had an effective wage below minimum. I watched in horror over the span of about ten minutes as it filled up with hundreds of entries from people with multiple advanced degrees, many of them in STEM, and years’ worth of experience in academia and relevant disciplines.
If you sent your kids to university in the last 20 years, I guarantee that some of the people who taught them were intellectual gig workers, and that some of them were mothers. They got very little of what you were laying out in tuition.
This is all part of why I say that thing about labor legislation.
A lot of people here are immigrants who arrived after 1990.
What I love here, btw – and you’re by no means alone in this, roycroftmom – is that you not only made your career with a tax-funded salary, you actually depended on that public job and its union or union-penumbra protections in order to raise your children. And yet when people here point to public supports that are necessary, and redistributive taxes, you’re all up in arms about it, insisting that everyone go out and whittle themselves some new bootstraps.
I really do hear this all over, including from people who’ve literally never worked in the private sector and have family responsibilities and/or ailments/conditions that would be incompatible with private-sector employment, and students who wouldn’t be going to college if not for the massive subsidies from local, state, and federal governments plus the obscene tuitions paid by OOS classmates. The rhetoric really works its way into people. You’d think they’d be very grateful for how well this publicly-funded system did by them, and want other people to be able to share in those benefits, but nope. Wild.
Academia is a tiny part of the US workforce. As a percentage of the workforce of American moms, it is miniscule. It has been oversaturated with applicants my entire life. That might suggest colleges should be supplying fewer, not more, people with doctorates
Yes, many well educated people wish to work at glamorous poorly paying jobs like the Discovery Channel. In my generation it was NYC publishing, particularly Vogue magazine. Such has always been the case, and most workers do not opt for such jobs.
Working parents definitely have a tough time in the US, and usually make personal choices which will ease the burden a bit. I am sorry that didn’t work out for you, and I hope the country does offer better childcare options for all in the future and focuses efforts on more rigorous K12 schools. I haven’t seen any sign of that yet.
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Would this be the new “only teenagers work fast food jobs”?
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Just so you know, OP, I did not make a career in the federal government, just a brief sojourn of 5 years in a career that spans 30. And no, my particular employment was neither unionized nor protected in any way; like all employees at that agency, we served at the discretion of the agency head.
If you were federal agency, then yes, your job had penumbra protections you were unaware of. The unions – AFSCME in particular is good at this – fight hard to make sure of that. There’s always the looming threat (not very realistic, but there) that if non-unionized workers are treated poorly, AFSCME will go for them, but mostly the unions don’t want that differential to develop because it makes it easier to negotiate their position down. It’s part of why the agencies use Kelly and other such gig hires as safety valves.
I am a lawyer, OP. I know exactly what my protections were as an intelligence employee. I represented the Agency in litigation with employees
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I’m sure you’re aware of every protection you had on paper. More than that goes on, though, which you find out about in more casual conversations. That’s also part of why my job’s as safe as it is, and why the non-union municipal job I had long ago was also far safer and better-benefitted than the equivalent corporate job would’ve been.
Hey, roycroftmom, I’m still part gig worker, and I gotta split. Public-employee salary just lays down the bass line, still got to fill in the rest of the band.
Enjoy your gig work.
Interesting…
Closing. Please refer to post 551. The thread has devolved into contentious debate.
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