Every Mother is a Working Mother Network

Caregivers Count, Value our Work in Welfare Policy!  
June 2002

Dear Friends:

As welfare “reform” reauthorization moves through its last stages in the Senate, those of us who are mothers and other carers are determined to continue to claim our right to welfare for the caring work we do.  We can’t afford to give up.  Our lives, the lives of those we care for, and the health and welfare of all our communities, are at stake.  With Bonnie Macri of JEDI for Women in Utah, and an ad hoc emergency coalition of Welfare Warriors, Welfare Made a Difference Campaign, Parents for Justice, Interfaith Coalition for the General Welfare, Flushing Greens and others, we are taking our case directly to Congress.  We refuse to accept the current premise of their debate: that mothers and other caregivers are non-workers.  We demand that the vital and essential work we do must be valued.  Our refusal has already had an impact: there are now proposals in the Senate that begin to value caring work.  But we urgently need your help to strengthen the power of our case.

We are calling for caring work to be valued and for this to be reflected in welfare policy.  We are asking you to endorse and circulate the enclosed petition and lobby letter, as well as to support our grassroots “pots and pans protest” in Washington DC on June 18.

We have witnessed with outrage how the care-giving work done by welfare mothers has been ignored or tokenized in the debate around reauthorization, perpetuating the lie that mothers on welfare contribute nothing and are “lazy scroungers.”  What work is harder than caring for children, and on next to nothing, especially if the child has a disability? And what work is more crucial to society – we raise the whole of the next generation, and nurse and care for the older one.

Every mother can feel what mothers on welfare face on a daily basis: being forced to leave your children against your will and often under questionable conditions, having less than half an hour a day of waking time with your infants.  Everyone can imagine the horror of having to face being laid off from a waged job while the pressure of the 60-month time clock builds.  All mothers know how it feels to be sick with worry and unable to focus when you leave your children alone, or have an ill child in the care of others, when you know you are what your child needs.  Who cannot understand the agony of knowing the benefits of breastfeeding but being prevented from providing them?  And though mothers are mandated to leave their children, they are then held accountable when something goes wrong in their absence. All of this traumatizes both mothers and children.

Lynda Brewer, a grandmother in inner city Los Angeles raising four grandchildren, has testified: “The social workers come around making home visits.  And when we complain about the bad treatment we are getting or they see we are not miracle workers and can’t make a dollar out of fifteen cents, we are told we have a bad attitude, or that we can’t properly care for our children and are threatened with having our kids taken from us.”  Bonnie Macri of JEDI for Women describes children being snatched from their mothers’ arms and placed in foster care or fast track adoption. 

Mothers won welfare 65 years ago when they made the government understand that single mothers make a contribution to society and need economic support.  In the 1960s, Black women on welfare led the movement for increases in and greater access to benefits. In so doing they established the right of all to money in recognition of the work of raising our children, a right to which women, not just those with low or no income, in every other industrialized country in the world are entitled.  

This movement made it possible for women to leave abusive relationships without being punished with the theft of their children.  It resulted in a rise in the minimum wage.  It took money from war-making to be put into care-taking.  It impacted us all.  Without the struggle mothers on welfare made for money for caregiving, all of us, in waged work or not, would not have the rights we have today.  This present attack on mothers on welfare will also impact us all.  It is time for all to stand with welfare mothers, and insist that their caring work is valued in welfare reform. 

The movement to value caring work is growing. Support comes from: The Women’s Committee of 100, including Frances Fox Piven, Gwendolyn Mink and others; NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund; The Quality Home Care Coalition (CA); IRAPS (CA) (a disability network); Jobs with Justice (Phila), & more.

We refuse to be penalized as irresponsible charity cases.  We insist on the recognition and resources we have earned. There is no excuse for the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world not to provide them.  To demand welfare – money for caring – is to demand the kind of society we want.  The lack of value placed on essential caring at every level is at the heart of priorities that increase military budgets and Enron profits and corporate welfare at the expense of food, health, housing and education for the hardest working communities.

We urge you to consider the following list of what you can do at this critical time. Please contact us for additional info.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Margaret Prescod & Lynda Brewer/ LA; Pat Albright & Marie Fitzpatrick/Phila; Rachel West/SF

Copy and distribute the enclosed lobby card and lobby letter to your elected official at home office.

Contact the press about this issue and/or send us press contacts that we can pursue.

Enclose the lobby letter and card as well as the petition in your mailers

Come to Washington DC to participate in a "Caregivers Count: Value our Work" Grassroots Action on the Hill on June 18 & 19 and/or organise for a contingent to come.

Help to sponsor mothers and grandmothers on welfare getting to Washington DC.

Make a donation to our network

Invite a speaker from our network to your group and include us on your platform of conferences etc.

Visit our website http://allwomencount.net, check the Every Mother is a Working Mother Homepage for more information. If you have a website, link it to ours.

Pass a resolution supporting Valuing Caring Work in Welfare Benefits in your trade union, student union or other organization.

Send us your own statement about why you are supporting valuing caring work.

Ask people you know to translate the Welfare Petition into another language and send us the translation so we can circulate it and put it on our webpage.

Help us with copying of materials.

Volunteer at the Crossroads Women's Centres in LA, Philadelphia and SF where EMWM is based.

Tell the men you know that Payday, a network of men, is coordinating men's support and to contact them at payday@paydaynet.org.

Lobby letter to Members of Congress to endorse (please print and circulate)

Submission to the Office of Family Assistance, Health and Human Services from the Every Mother Is a Working Mother Network, November 29, 2001

Value Caring Work in Welfare Benefits - Petition (please print and circulate)

Valorar el Trabajo de Cuidado en los Beneficios de Welfare

Mothers and other Carers Under Attack! Act Now!

Every Mother is a Working Mother Statement for the HHS protest

Grassroots Women Demand that Mothers’ Work Count in Welfare Reform, Article published in Poor Magazine, San Francisco

Every Mother is a Working Mother Statement given by Lynda Brewer, Town Hall Meeting, November 17, 2001, Los Angeles, CA

Caring Work Counts! Mothers Challenge Advocates & Poverty Lobby

Invest in Caring not Killing