This week, a wide-ranging economic chat with the president of the nation's most influential
women's group.
The women always end up being the second class citizen in the job market.
Sequestration, austerity cuts, and looking for women leaders.
I'm Susan Barnett, and this is 51% the women's perspective.
The political pundits say the austerity cuts that kicked in in April are likely to be permanent,
with just a few band-aid fixes like the quick congressional response to outrage over flight
delays after cuts to the FAA.
Tariots on wheels head start, unemployment, food safety, they're all facing similar cuts.
Tariot Neal, the president of the national organization for women, now argues many of
those cuts target women and families, and she warns that cuts without job stimulation
is a recipe for disaster.
Tari, let's talk about the impact of the huge budget cuts that are being put into place
because it looks at this point like they are going to stick.
They really are step by step going to be harsher and harsher, frankly, on women.
What's most upsetting about this whole sequestration thing is that Paul Ryan, an extremist, he really
is an extreme right-wing thinker on economic issues, has long wanted to decimate the very
programs that disproportionately serve women after school programs, head start, training
programs for occupations that are not traditional for women, assistance to go to college, and
by the way, it's far more important economically for a woman to get either a two-year or a four-year
college degree than a man because her earning capacity is very much dependent on that degree
unlike men.
All of these programs that help women either stay in the middle class and avoid falling into
poverty or to come out of poverty and get into the middle class.
This is a program that right-wingers like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and the Republican
leadership really want to cut.
Those programs are being cut right across the board by sequestration.
Something that people I think don't focus on enough is that those are the same programs
that very disproportionately employ women as teachers, as nurses, as health care providers,
social workers, and peace managers.
As we cut these programs, we are going to be laying off very disproportionately women.
So it's a double whammy against our women.
Whenever you raise objections to cuts, the first thing people will say is then what would
you do instead?
Do you have any ideas?
Absolutely.
There's an easy way to go.
And all we need is the political will to stare down the non-evidence-based, ideological
people who say we have to cut, cut, cut.
Now, now, now.
That's just wrong.
What's actually correct is, if we were to engage in an aggressive, massive jobs program,
Representative Jan Shakowski from Illinois has made a proposal that is excellent.
Representative John Connures from Michigan has made another proposal that is excellent.
It would involve direct job creation by the federal government, not tax incentives in
the kind of sort of hope that maybe some private business would use the tax incentive to hire
people.
Actual job creation.
One of the things that feminist economists suggested be done, and which was in President
Obama's budget last Congress, but is not there now, was, for example, a $200 million cash
transfer to state and local government for the specific purpose of hiring back the teachers
that were laid off as states cut back because they faced these budget crises because of
Wall Street's cratering of our economy in 2008.
So, what we need is a jobs program.
If you have a jobs program, you will have employed people.
Employed people pay taxes.
They pay income taxes into federal and state treasuries.
They pay payroll taxes into the social security system and into the Medicare system.
Employed people also start buying things again.
If we got unemployment down from where it is now, between 7 and 8 percent and got it down
to say between right around 4 percent, maybe between 4 and 4 and a half percent, you would
see governments being able to provide the basic services that are currently being squeezed.
So, a massive jobs program coupled with, once we get the economy going again, then you
can take austerity measures, but not in the form of social program cuts.
Instead, those measures have to be in the form of increased taxes on the very wealthiest.
The wealthiest have been sucking off the increases in gross domestic products for 30 years.
It's time for them to start paying their fair share.
And so, if we had a progressive, sensible tax policy that required the wealthiest to pay
their fair share, we would really all be better off.
And if you look at the international headlines, you can see what austerity cuts are resulting
in in other countries.
In fact, it's failing.
As governments cut back their services, in a time when the private sector simply is not
hiring, then everybody cuts back their spending.
In a community, if I stop spending on your products that you're selling, you don't
sell.
And then if you're not selling products, you cut back your spending on things that our
neighbor Nancy might sell.
Right?
So, everybody sales go down.
That means everybody's income goes down.
It's like a downward spiral.
That's what austerity does when you've been hit with the kind of deep recession, near
depression, that both Europe and the United States are facing.
The only way to get out of it is for government to step in and do a massive jobs program.
Gen up, economic activity again.
Once economic activity is going full guns, then the government can pull back.
That's the time for the government to pull back and start getting a deficit under control
and so forth.
But trying to balance the budget now is wrong headed.
I think one of the things we need to be careful about when we're talking about government
deficit and balancing the budget.
And it's something that's happening in Ohio right now.
John K. Sitch, a couple of years ago, he's the governor of Ohio, was facing a budget deficit
of, I believe, about $8 billion.
He flashed spending on schools and other social programs and other things as well.
Today, the Ohio State budget is not only balanced, it is facing a surplus.
And what is Mr. K. Sitch doing with that surplus?
He is not putting the money back into the schools so that teachers can have teachers aid.
Teachers will not be faced with 40 children in the classroom with just one adult to try
to teach them.
Instead, John K. Sitch is taking that money and siphoning it up for the wealthiest in his
state.
And he wants to provide yet another tax break for wealthy people in Ohio.
So one of the things we have to be careful about is it's good to have a sensible conversation
about balanced budgets.
But let's be a little skeptical of ideologues who's real motive here is to redistribute
the country's gross domestic product, redistribute wealth away from middle class families
and up to the wealthiest.
There are a number of reports showing that the divide between the rich and the rest
of us is growing wider in this country and that the middle class is disappearing.
And there are other studies that indicate that women suffer the most from that gap.
It's really a problem.
I have a few factoids that I think really should just raise the hairs on the back of
our neck.
So in the 1990s and the early 1990s, the security and exchange commission was becoming concerned
about the growing ratio between CEO pay and the pay of ordinary workers and median pay
for workers that were not in management.
At that time, the ratio was 30.
The CEOs were being paid about 30 times what their ordinary workers were being paid.
And the SEC was frankly concerned about it from a competitive point of view because in
Japan and Germany, those ratios were much lower.
In Japan, it was more like 10 or 12.
In Germany, it was about 15.
Well, what happened was the rest of the world began to look more like the United States
until 2010.
There was a report released that the ratio today of CEO salaries to ordinary worker salaries
in 2010 was 364.
CEO is being paid 364 times what their ordinary workers are paid.
And I haven't seen the most recent study.
I don't know if it's out yet, but somebody told me that it was now, it's even worse,
it's closer to 400 times.
That is absolutely why the middle class is being squeezed.
Now, you put that statistic together with the fact that roughly two-thirds of minimum
wage workers in the United States are women.
You can really see how this dramatic wage inequality is very much harming women in the
class.
We live in a country where workplaces are severely sex-segregated.
Walk into any hotel, any hotel in the United States and look at who's parked in the cars
and look at who's making the beds.
It is that way, in factories, it's that way, in offices, it's that way across the board.
Over the past 30 years, the federal courts have become increasingly hostile to enforcement
of non-discrimination laws that we have both for race and for sex.
And as a result, we have this severe sex segregation in the workplace.
And once you have segregation, you've got first-class citizens and second-class citizens,
and the women always end up being the second-class citizens in the job market.
So you have pressure on middle-class wages.
But landish, sort of sucking off, as I said, of increased productivity is all going to
the top 0.01 percent of income earners in this country.
And the people who become the most vulnerable to any kind of economic dislocation are the
women.
It's simple to see, and it's simple to fix.
But we have leaders in this country who are completely out of touch with what ordinary
Americans want.
People after poll after poll shows that people want sensible tax policies so that the rich
pay their fair share.
The elite decision makers in this country are resistant to that.
But that's what the voters actually want.
Poll after poll shows that voters by 70 percent want rovers' way to remain the law of the
land.
But the decision makers in states, and even in the United States Congress, are consistently
trying to stop women from accessing basic reproductive health care.
Not just abortion, but contraception and mammograms and cervical cancer screenings and all
the rest.
Poll after poll shows that what people want in this country more than anything is jobs.
But the elites in our country are so focused on austerity, cutting jobs, laying people
off that they just don't seem to be in touch with the perceptions and understandings of
the very people they're supposed to represent.
Coming up, now President Tarioniel explains why you ought to be running for office.
And we'll take you to a very special New England Garden Party.
If you missed part of this show or want to hear it again, visit the 51 percent archives
at wamc.org.
This week's show is number 1244.
We've heard what National Organization for Women President Tarioniel has to say about
the impacts of austerity measures on the nation's women.
She discussed the growing divide between rich and poor, the disappearing middle class, and
the fact that women carry a disproportionate share of the load, both through cuts to social
programs aimed at helping women and families, and cuts to jobs where women predominate,
teaching, and social services.
As we continued our conversation, O'Neill talked about grooming a new group of women leaders
and encouraging more women to get involved.
Women leaders face real obstacles today, but I think that the 2010 elections were a
real wake-up call to the women's rights community.
What I mean by that is that in 2010, for the first time in 30 something years, the number
of women in the United States Congress actually went down.
It hadn't happened for 30 years.
Kirsten Gillibrand stepped up with a project called the Ophoside Lines, and her goal with
this organization, she's a senator from New York, is to bring women off the sidelines and
into the political process, bring them into participating in our democracy, and bringing
more women on board.
By the way, there were many other things cropping up.
I myself am engaged with a number of women leaders on a political parity project to double
the number of women in the United States Congress by 2022.
So there are many of us that are working on getting more women into leadership, and in
fact, in 2012, against all the odds, we elected Women's Senate candidates so that today we
have 20 women in the United States Senate.
Now I have to tell you, my friend Sam Bennett, who is the president of the Women's Campaign
Fund.
He was a poll.
She said, 20, 20, that's lousy.
That's not anywhere near 50 percent.
We were all celebrating, and then we all said, well, yeah, you're right, Sam.
That's kind of true.
But it was progress against various defauds.
One of the things that the Women's Community I think is recognizing is that when women run,
women actually win races at roughly the same rate that men do, but it takes an extra
effort to convince women to run for office, and it takes an extra effort to convince women
to run for office the second time.
Many women very likely to lose the first time out, much more likely to win the second
time out.
So we know we have our work cut out for us.
We know a lot about what we need to do, and we're determined to work on it.
The other thing that we've learned from studies that have been done is that there are very
specific things for women candidates that can undermine their candidacy.
In particular, comments about their, what they're wearing, comments about women's appearance,
just differential treatment between women and men candidates can undermine them.
So a number of organizations are absolutely determined to spot sexist and misogynist
comments, call it out immediately, not wait for the candidate herself to decide whether
am I going to pick my battles, am I going to pick this insult, or that insult.
We're the advocates.
I think it's our job to call it out, say what it is, it's sexist, misogynist, it's got
to stop.
And I think that can be very helpful.
So if you are a woman who feels like she'd like to run for office, she'd like to get
involved.
This is something she's interested in.
How do you begin?
There are a number of organizations that you can reach out to.
Women's Campaign Fund is one.
The National Organization for Women is another.
The National Women's Political Caucus is another.
Contact these organizations.
There are trainings that are run both in educational institutions and at a local level by now chapters,
by caucus chapters.
There are a number of ways to begin gathering information about what's involved in running
for office.
And then once you decide do you want to do that, obviously the first thing is to become
engaged in campaigns.
You need to see up close what a campaign looks like.
The reality is, campaigning for office is not nearly as scary or arduous as I think a
lot of women believe it is.
I myself did not get engaged in political activism until I was near 40.
It was a wonderful experience.
What they told me was, okay, you live in this neighborhood in New Orleans.
I was actually on the Tulane Law faculty at the time.
They said, we want you to go to your neighbors.
Just go to your neighbors.
Here's your talking points.
Here's your information about the two candidates.
Talk to them about why you're supporting David Duke's opponent and what ours and why you
need them to get them out to vote.
I found very overwhelmingly my neighbors thanked me for being involved.
They thanked me for doing what I was doing.
They were gracious and kind and I got to know people in my own neighborhood that I wouldn't
have known otherwise.
Losing elections is not such a terrible thing.
You get to know people.
You might run again and win the next time.
You've made a contribution of your own thoughts and ideas and people really do appreciate it.
I have the sense that perhaps there is more time for mature women, women who are well
into their careers or whose children have grown and this is an opportunity for them to pursue
public service.
Absolutely.
You know one of the most unfortunate aspects of the economic collapse is this phenomenon
of long-term unemployment and it has really hit men as well as women over the age of 55.
Very hard.
It's scary.
But on the other hand, more women who have their kids are grown, they have some time.
Maybe they're working part time.
Maybe they'd prefer to be working full time, but they are working part time.
They have time to go and get involved.
You know who else has time to get involved and again this is not such a great, the reason
for it is very bad.
It's the long-term unemployment if younger people.
Long-women coming out of college who are finding a very hard time getting employment,
there are opportunities for volunteering in their community, becoming active in their
community that can strengthen their ties and give them a view of the world.
I think that is very, very important and I think it would give them an optimistic sense
that actually change is possible.
Actually, if you show up to the meetings, if you go and call your neighbors, if you talk
to people, go canvass door to door and talk to people about something you believe in,
that is an extraordinary training ground for making a contribution throughout the rest
of your career.
Tariot Neal is the president of NOW, the National Organization for Women.
Now, let's mix a little high society and springtime planting.
If you're anywhere near Northwest Connecticut and you love to garden, there's an event
coming up that you'll find hard to resist.
Interior designer bunny Williams and her gardening pal Naomi Blumendal started trade secrets
11 years ago.
It's now known as the Garden Party event of the year.
It's much more than a plant sale and it's become an annual event that draws the likes
of Martha Stewart.
It's a chance to rub elbows with the rich and famous and help a worthy cause at the same
time.
It's done for the benefit of women's support services known as Wess.
Naomi was on the board of Wess, which 11 years ago was really almost a hotline of concerned
people who would help families in need, particularly women if there were abusive relationships
or had problem children.
Because of trade secrets, it's grown so much.
They now have a building and they offer counseling.
They offer psychiatric counseling, getting people to the right place and also can connect
them with lawyers if they need be.
It's really a service organization that started out primarily to help women in difficult
situations.
It's grown and helps men too.
I have never been, but since Martha Stewart recommends this, I picture the garden version
of a Saratoga polo match.
These in lovely dresses and gentlemen and seersucker suits and great big hats, all of them
wandering around looking at flowers and plants.
Well, picture people in blue jeans, rubber boots, coat scarves, very serious, not glamorous.
They don't even want to talk to each other because they're cruising for the, so they don't
miss the, I mean, the, you know, the Tirella dealer or the PNE dealer or whatever.
Early in the morning, at 8 o'clock in the morning, it's rather cut throat because nobody
wants to talk to anybody.
They just want to rush to their favorite nursery or pick up their favorite antique.
And it's very, I mean, everybody, it's very casual because it's outside and you never
know what the rain, what the weather is going to be.
We've had snow.
We've had rain.
We've had, you know, over 11 years we've had every weather condition.
So it's pretty much a serious endeavor.
It's really, it's a country version of the Chelsea flower show in a way.
I mean, it's at the outside of it.
I mean, there are people buying plants and, you know, buying tarot cot of pots and garden
benches and statuary, but it's very, very, it's pretty casual.
And over the years, have you seen a difference in the kind of plants that people are battling
over at this event?
Well, I think people are, you know, gardening is changing.
There are more grasses.
There's more wildflowers or, you know, there, you know, people want wonderful shrubs that
they don't have to take care of as much as they would a perennial border.
I think people love the idea of a more natural garden.
So, you know, there's, as I say, there's one dealer that just sells teorella as well,
you know, everybody rushes to them because they're wonderful in a woodland space.
You know, I think people are, you know, they're realizing the difficulty of maintaining
gardens and the expanse and having a hard time finding gardens and gardeners.
So they still want a garden, but they want to do it maybe in a little bit more natural
way.
Bunny Williams is an interior designer and founder of Trade Secrets, a charity plant and garden
sale that's coming up the weekend of May 18th in Sharon, Connecticut.
Find out more at tradesecretsct.com.
That's our show for this week.
Thanks to Katie Britton for production assistance.
Our theme music is by Kevin Bartlett.
This show is a national production of Northeast public radio.
Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Shartock.
If you'd like to hear this show again or visit the 51% archives, go to our website at wamc.org.
Thanks so much for joining us.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 51% the women's perspective.
