Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart

while some psychological analysis or boosts may help, the problem of not being able to afford to live in America can’t be cured by self-help mantras.

motherhood is a disadvantage in the work world, with mothers statistically earning less than their male or childless peers.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world. It has the largest wealth inequality gap of the two hundred countries in the Global Wealth Report of 2015.

When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother’s high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm. Each day was concluded when my exhausted mother picked me up late at the very end of after-school and took me home for a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. Yet despite the evident effort they put in, my parents, college professors, had health insurance and the promise of pensions and Social Security. In their younger days, there were ample employment opportunities and cheaper rents in metropolitan areas. They could afford some extras that would strain a similar family today: out of their wages from teaching at a college, I received ice skating lessons. I was sent to a New York City private school, and we went on long vacations at the shore, where I could buy a kite in the shape of a butterfly and maybe collect wild plums on the dunes.

As these families struggle to preserve, or even simply to attain, a middle-class life, they do so in spite of, not because of, today’s America.

The way we treat expectant women is a symptom of how little American businesses and legislators care about care.

When you break it down, society’s attitude toward pregnancy and children is bizarre, surreal, and much like the disregard for so much of nature itself.

Yes, pregnant workers may be less profitable employees than women who aren’t gestating. And that’s okay. We can simply choose to value aspects of life beyond economic productivity.

If the insistence on “doing what you love” comes from a place of privilege, where risks are lower and failure is not the be-all and the end-all, what happens to those who don’t have that privilege?

In 2015, only an estimated 16 percent of women in the workforce, across all professions and the whole of the country, made $75,000 or more,

The extreme day cares of today reveal how treacherous and downright absurd work schedules can be in this country. We now need twenty-four-hour day care. Indeed, extreme day care represents the ways in which the hours we are asked to work now squeeze us.

It’s almost banal to state the terribly obvious: the day-care crisis is ultimately a structural problem. The high price of care is the result of government disinterest.

the formerly male-dominated professions that have become predominantly female are suddenly less desirable: once feminized, a profession’s pay stagnates.

As the journalist Tim Noah puts it, the top 10 percent of Americans are “sort of rich,” the top 1 percent is “rich,” and the 0.1 percent is “stinking rich.”

The attitude of some of the anti-immigrant affluent that seemed ever clearer in the Trump era is that they may be happy to have migrant workers doing their chores and minding their children but it simply won’t do to have laborers’ families coming to the United States to live.

Pairing upper-class aspirations with a low-income student body, sections of the school were named Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and Harvard, the very embodiments of educational luxury as well as harbingers of excellence to aim for.

The vacuuming, the warm bottles offered to children, the loving or punishing gazes dispensed—all these aspects of caregiving work are routinely devalued and usually underpaid or unpaid. For centuries and across the world, women’s domestic labor has usually not been compensated, there being a deep-seated belief that women “naturally” serve others gratis.

“‘Having it all’ is an ideologically distorted conception. What women are missing are autonomy and money of their own. They are also completely overworked.”

why isn’t every public school great or a top choice?”

Koopman highlighted for me that today no amount of education can guarantee that a person will sustain their chosen professional identity, or even an identity that fits.

This is a useful message for Uber, which has been working hard to push the idea that its 400,000 drivers are independent contractors, not employees of the company. As employees, they would be entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay, benefits, and basic employee protections—which would strike at the very engine of the Uber business model, costing the company billions of dollars. As independent contractors, they receive none of these benefits.

we have a makeover mentality about identity.

The second act that Miller was peddling differed from the career conjured by many for-profit colleges, graduate programs, and online MBA programs. Miller told his clients that a master’s degree was a waste of time. “All they’ve done,” he exclaimed, referring to these graduate students, “is accumulate student loan debt!” Miller favored instead the professional certificate.

Shouldn’t we always first and foremost defend people and their labor?

The “robot-chasers” tend to gloss over the impact of losing human jobs to our mechanical colleagues.

“The amount of unpaid care work that is going on right now is estimated worth $700 billion a year,” Santens told me, up from $691 billion in 2012, and roughly 4.3 percent of the U.S. GDP. That number includes day care for children, but also adult children taking care of their parents and older couples taking care of each other.

The feminist theorist Kathi Weeks thinks of basic income as not just a leftist or giddily disruptive answer, but rather as a fine response to our nation’s failure to financially support, or even notice, female labor in the home, from housework to child care.

Back when my daughter attempted to breast-feed in the manner of either an inconsolable alcoholic or a small (and very pretty) pig rooting for truffles, back when I devoted myself to understanding her basic needs, she liked the noise of showers with the lights off, her father’s voice with its soft radio lilt, bumblebee pictures, being cleaned with olive oil and lanolin and cotton balls, the word “world,” the phrase “beautiful girl.” She liked being over a shoulder, spying on an apartment because an apartment was the whole world to her. This “reading” of a nonverbal creature was all-consuming and exhausting labor. Caring for her was as full-time as it could get. And yet I needed to actually work too.

You just can’t do better, I’d want to say. There are larger reasons why your job is precarious and your parents’ jobs weren’t. You can’t help that you are being evicted from your apartment to make way for luxury condos. It’s a system failure. It’s bigger than you.