Tuesday June 18
12:30 pm
Capitol Building, 1st & Independence Ave., NE
Protest theme: "Count care-giving as work and value it in welfare reform".
Welfare "reform" reauthorization is in its last stages in Congress.
The situation is urgent. Mothers are being forced to leave their children for
any job at any wage and/or face destitution, homelessness and criminalization.
The very heart of welfare "reform' is the denial of the right of mothers
to
care for their own children, and the denial that care-giving is work. Even the
UN has admitted that unwaged work of mothers, grandmothers and other caregivers
is valued at $11 trillion worldwide. This is money and resources, not coming
to women and children in welfare payments or for other needs but instead going
into military spending, environmental devastation, economic embargoes, and other
genocide-all to protect US multinational corporations. The welfare rights movement
led by Black women in the1960's was the first to establish that welfare is a
right. The demand for welfare has always been an anti-war demand. But the debate
in Congress has centered on how many hours to force mothers into low-waged work
outside the home. Politicians and the media have put forward the racist image
of the Black woman on welfare sitting around all day doing nothing. Yet we all
know that being a mother is one of the hardest jobs there is, a fact that even
George Bush had to recently acknowledge while at the same time promoting even
more mandated work for welfare mothers. When caregiving work is not valued inside
the home, when it is done outside the home it is low valued and low paid; a
stark example of this is LA County's denial of a living wage and benefits for
homecare workers. For info contact: The Every Mother is a Working Mother Network
at philly@crossroadswomen.net Call 215-848-1120 or 323-221-1698.