Lee Standish is a quick-witted and likable family man. His best friend, Angel Ortiz, is a hotheaded ladies’ man with no filter. The two of them worked at Pontiac–Lee as a top salesman and Angel as head mechanic–until the company went out of business. Out of work for a year, their job prospects don’t look too bright. They’ve learned the hard way that the current recession is more of a “man-cession” and their skills aren’t in high demand. Then the almost-broke Lee finds out that Coreco Pharmaceuticals is looking to hire sales reps–female sales reps. He takes a chance and goes into the interview dressed in heels, a skirt and make-up. The transformed Lee gets hired–as a woman.

“Work It” is a network TV comedy, so it would be unreasonable to expect the plot to be plausible, let alone realistic. However, the term “man-cession” has been bandied about in earnest, and “Work It” has the potential to keep it in circulation. So I’d like to set the record straight about the current relationship between gender and unemployment.

“Man-cession” refers to the first few years of the recession, in which men lost 2.5 times as many jobs as women. But in February of 2010, the trend reversed, yielding what’s been called the “he-covery“: Men have since picked up 2 million jobs, while women have lost another 164,000.

Today, the jobless rate for adult men is 8.3 percent, vs. 7.8 percent for adult women. In keeping with the he-covery, unemployment fell for adult men in November by .05 percent. The jobless rate for adult women, teenagers (23.7 percent), blacks (15.5 percent), and Hispanics (11.4 percent) stayed the same.

As you can see, unemployment remains high across the board. However, with less than one percentage point separating men and women in the unemployment stats, claims of a “man-cession” are more fantasy than fact. If you want an awkward buzzword to sum up our complex economic reality, you’d be better off with “youth-cession” or “race-cession.” Times are tough for everyone, but youth and people of color are really bearing the brunt.

Where “Work It” goes from merely inaccurate to downright offensive is with the notion that Lee and Angel are so marginalized and put upon by our female-dominated society that they are forced to adopt an unconvincing drag act to get a job. The local pharmaceutical company is hiring, but not men. Why? According to one of the reps, it’s because, “The doctors don’t want to nail them.” In the world of “Work It,” medicine is the last preserve of male employability–in fact, all doctors are presumably men or lesbians. By that logic, Lee and Angel should have donned white coats instead of wigs.

The notion that artless and transparent drag is a golden ticket to upward mobility flies in the face of the very high unemployment rates in the transgender community. A survey [PDF] of 6,450 transgender people by the National Center for Transgender Equity found that respondents had double the unemployment rate of the population at large. An astonishing 90 percent of respondents reported either experiencing harassment or discrimination at work or taking careful steps to avoid it, such as hiding their gender identity. Twenty-six percent reported that they had lost jobs because of their gender presentation.

Advocates for transgender rights have called on ABC to pull “Work It” for disseminating negative stereotypes about transgender individuals. Defenders of the show disingenuously counter that “Work It” couldn’t possibly be trafficking in negative stereotypes about transgender people because Lee and Angel aren’t really transgender, they’re red-blooded cisgendered males who are forced to pretend to be women to get ahead in our man-hating, female-dominated society.

The premise of “Work It” is that men impersonating women have it easier in today’s job market. The reality for transgender people in the workplace is exactly the opposite.

You can sign here to ask that ABC pull “Work It”:

Read more from Lindsay Beyerstein on the race and gender impact of job creation strategies in the current issue of Ms–available on newsstands, or direct to your door if you join the Ms. community.

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An extension of benefits is a basic necessity for a country in the midst of a crisis of long-term unemployment: Rates have not been this high for this long since 1948. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis warned last week that the unemployment rate of 8.6 percent will rise by 2 percentage points if Congress fails to extend unemployment benefits and payroll tax cuts, also set to expire in January.

All Americans will benefit from a UI extension, not just those who are currently collecting UI. Unemployment benefits are among the most efficient form of economic stimulus in existence. Benefits stimulate the economy quickly because recipients spend the money right away on necessities like gas, food, and shelter.

Extending unemployment benefits is critical, but there’s much more that could be done to improve the UI system. President Obama’s jobs bill, which was rejected by Congress, set aside billions of dollars not only to extend UI benefits but also to modernize the system.

For example, the jobs bill would have enabled workers to retrain while continuing to collect benefits. This is critical for workers in sectors of the economy that are undergoing long term, or potentially permanent, contractions–such as the heavily female-dominated field of administrative and secretarial work.

Angela Richards is a 44-year-old African American administrative assistant from Tennessee with 18 years of experience in her field. She was laid off in June, after about a year and a half on the job.

After several weeks of unemployment, she landed an 11-month temporary assignment as an administrative assistant. Despite her years of experience, she has so far been unable to land a permanent job in the non-profit sector, like the one she had before. Like many Americans, she’s struggling to regain her professional footing even after finding work.

Angela would have liked to take advantage of her time out of work to retrain and improve her job prospects, but she couldn’t afford to do so. I asked her whether she would be interested in retraining if she could learn a new skill while continuing to collect UI benefits.

“Absolutely,” she said. Angela said she’d like to study accounting. “It seems like people always need an accountant.”

Indeed, the Department of Labor forecasts that accounting will be among the top ten fastest-growing occupations through 2018.

Congress is currently fighting over whether, and for how long, to extend the benefits, but aides to both parties predict that some kind of deal will be struck. As important as the extension will be to hundreds of thousands of Americans and the economy at large, it is still only a stopgap measure. Joblessness is the political issue of our era, and Congress’s narrow focus indicates a lack of vision. In addition to a UI benefits extension, we need major investments in retraining to prepare workers not only for more jobs, but for better ones.

Part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.

Read more from Lindsay Beyerstein on the race and gender impact of job creation strategies in the current issue of Ms–available on newsstands, or direct to your door if you join the Ms. community.

ABOVE: Waiting area at an unemployment office. Photo from Flickr user Bytemarks under Creative Commons 2.0.

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Though the recession and continuing economic downturn have been devastating to the American middle class as a whole, the two and a half years since the declared end of the recession have been singularly harmful to middle-class blacks in terms of layoffs and unemployment, according to economists and recent government data. About one in five black workers have public-sector jobs, and African-American workers are one-third more likely than white ones to be employed in the public sector.

“The reliance on these jobs has provided African-Americans a path upward,” said Robert H. Zieger, emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida, and the author of a book on race and labor. “But it is also a vulnerability.”

Public sector cuts also fall heavily on women. Overall, women are 50 percent more likely to work in the public sector than men.

That means, naturally, that black women are feeling public-sector cuts the most. Twenty-three percent of employed African American women work in the public sector,  compared to 19.8 percent of employed white women, 18 percent of employed black men and 14.2 percent of employed white men.

President Obama’s jobs bill would have provided help for unemployed public sector workers in the form of aid to state and local governments. That money would have help prevent the public sector layoffs that have devastated so many families and communities.

But so far, Congress has rejected the proposed legislation and the president is struggling to pass some of sub-components of the bill as separate pieces of legislation. Earlier this month, Congress approved Obama’s tax credit for veterans who want to start their own businesses.

Congressional Republicans are even fighting Obama on an extension of the payroll tax cut holiday, which would put an estimated $1,000 into the pockets of a typical family. This tax break targets working people, who are likely to spend the extra money quickly and stimulate the economy.

The payroll tax holiday extension would be a welcome boost for many American families, but, like the veterans tax credit, it would be a drop in the bucket. What’s really needed is major federal investment to support state and local governments coupled with direct job creation through spending on social and physical infrastructure.

For a more specific look at which kinds of legislation are necessary to help get women back to work, check out the author’s article “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” in the new issue of Ms.! To have this issue delivered straight to your door, join the Ms. community.

Photo from Flickr user Jdlasica under Creative Commons 2.0.

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Two other states, New Jersey and Washington, offer paid family leave and someday the U.S. may join the rest of the developed world with a national program. But parents and babies—particularly the most vulnerable ones—won’t benefit unless awareness increases.

Here are the facts outside of those states. Federal law requires only that women can take up to twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave without retaliation under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Beyond that, benefits are up to employers. And like awareness, access falls along class lines. Consider these three typical mothers:

The first mother has a college degree and works as a product manager for a large U.S. corporation. Lucky her, it’s one of those companies often listed as a “best place to work.” When she finally has her first child in her thirties, she uses her company’s six weeks of paid maternity leave policy to take time off to care for her baby and herself, plus the vacation and sick days she’s been hoarding.

The second mother has a high school diploma and is completing a business degree from a local community college while working as an office manager in an accounting firm. At age 25 she gives birth to her first baby and cobbles together her vacation days and sick leave to create four weeks of paid maternity leave. She stays home caring for her newborn for an additional four months, since her spouse has a job, certain that her own position is protected under the FMLA.

The third mother is 21, does not have a college degree, and maybe not a high school diploma either. She works in retail or food services or child care or home care. Her employer is a small business that cannot afford to offer paid leave of any type, and because it has fewer than 50 employees, she is not entitled to take any of the twelve weeks of unpaid leave provided by FMLA (not that she could go without the paycheck anyway).

See the pattern? Those mothers and families who most need paid leave following childbirth are the least likely to get it. This was confirmed last week by a new Census Bureau report [PDF]. The headlines heralded that a “majority” of U.S. moms now get paid maternity leave because 50.8 percent of working women receive some paid time off following the birth of a child. This is an improvement over the early 1980s, when only 37.3 percent had some paid leave. But submerged in the details of the report is the fact that older mothers with full-time jobs and college degrees are far more likely to have paid time off. Two-thirds of college graduate mothers took paid maternity leave but only 18 percent of mothers with no high school diploma could do so.

Though the disparity is understandable and explained by a mother’s place in the educational, organizational, and occupational hierarchy, it comes as a shock nonetheless to contemplate the differences between the “haves” and “have nots”—especially since we are talking about newborns here and our obligation as parents, friends, and citizens to ensure they are cared for in their earliest days of life.

And now, the California poll suggests that those with least employer access to paid leave are also least likely to know about state-level programs. So I asked the authors of the poll, Dr. Eileen Appelbaum and Dr. Ruth Milkman, what could be done to boost awareness in those states. They suggested the very sensible steps of requiring doctors and community health clinics in low income neighborhoods to distribute brochures in their offices explaining any paid family leave program. In addition, community-based organizations with direct links to immigrants, low-wage workers, and other disadvantaged people, as well as the WIC agencies that serve low-income mothers, should have paid family leave brochures to distribute to every client they see.

But there’s a need for activism here as well. At a time when socio-economic disparities and injustice top the news in the form of “Occupy Wall Street” movements around the country, this latest maternity leave news reminds us that even babies have a stake in the 99 percent movement.

How can even more mothers and fathers be reached? To “occupy” paid leave and reach parents on all rungs of the economic ladder, I asked Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director and co-founder of MomsRising.org, for some advice. She said:

Tell women about the policies on Facebook, Twitter, by email, phone, at work, and out in neighborhoods. This is something that we should all shout from the rooftops. MomsRising has grown from a handful of mothers in 2006 to over a million members today through women telling women using new communication tools. So we know that by using new communication tools–like the Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, and blogging– friends sharing information with friends can be an effective way to distribute information. We can do the same to spread the word about access to this important workplace policy.

Friend to friend, doctors to mothers, agency to clients: whether we shout from the rooftop or send texts to our sisters, we all need to make those Americans entitled to paid leave aware that they have it–and we need to support family-friendly programs like paid family leave for all Americans.

Photo from Flickr user Hugrakka under Creative Commons 2.0.

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A new Census Bureau report shows that, from 2001-2008, the percentage of first-time mothers receiving paid leave before and after childbirth leveled off at a mere 50 percent. As usual, the most vulnerable women–low-income women, women of color, young women and less-educated women–had the least access to paid leave.

By the numbers:

• 50.8 percent: From 2006-2008, the average percentage of working first-time mothers who took pregnancy or post-partum paid time off. This includes any paid comp time, including vacation and sick days as well as maternity leave.
• 18 percent: Proportion of first-time mothers without a high school diploma who received paid leave in 2008.
• 32 percent: Proportion of first-time mothers with just a high school diploma who received paid leave.
• 4:1: The gap between paid leave eligibility for women who hold college degrees and those who do not; the largest in the 50 years that this data has been tracked.
• 24 percent: Women under 22 who had access to paid leave. That number jumps to 66 percent for those over 25.
• 46.6 percent: Hispanic women who received paid leave, the lowest of any group. 

Women with higher birth rates in the U.S. are often younger, less-educated and Hispanic. So, under this system, the women likely to have the most children are also least likely to have paid maternity leave available to them.

Keep in mind, too, that these numbers are pre-recession. Many of the jobs lost [PDF] during the recession were middle-class jobs such as teachers and managers, which are relatively likely to provide paid leave for soon-to-be and new mothers. The jobs added during the recovery process have been largely low-wage, far less likely to offer such paid leave.

In these tough economic times, employers have even less incentive to offer working women paid time off to care for themselves and their newborns. And in these woman-hating political times, the United States has no federal family paid leave plan to compel employers to offer leave (and Congressional attempts to enact one have been shut down).

Read more from the report here.

Sign a petition to support a federal mandate for paid family and medical leave here.

Photo from Flickr user familymwr under Creative Commons 2.0

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National Nurses United (NNU) members will protest outside the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. Joined by the AFL-CIO and Occupy D.C. protesters, the union is calling on the Obama administration to adopt a meaningful financial transaction tax to spur economic recovery. Calling this the “Robin Hood Tax,” supporters say that it will have a minuscule impact on ordinary investors while generating hundreds of billions in annual government revenue. Another expected benefit is to discourage the kind of high-frequency trading that led to the recent crash and to bloated profits for financial institutions. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) have announced they will introduce such a bill in their respective houses of Congress today.

Ken Zinn, an NNU representative, told ThinkProgress:

We’ve been calling for a tax on Wall Street for several months now because our nurses are seeing on the job, each and every day in hospitals across the country patients who are suffering, patients who are in great need because they’re without a job and having to make a decision whether or not to buy food or pay for medicine, buy food or pay their rent. [...] We’re here because it’s time that Wall Street gave back to this country.

Nurses will be demonstrating at three other locations around the globe. In France, at the opening of the G-20 summit, nurses from four continents will demonstrate in favor of a financial transaction tax as a means to revive the ailing global economy. And back in the states, two rallies are planned on the West Coast in solidarity with the day of action. In Los Angeles, nurses will march from the Occupy LA first aid tent through the downtown financial district. In San Francisco, nurses will convene at the Federal Reserve Bank for a march to the Wells Fargo headquarters.

Photo of nurses’ G-20 protest in Cannes from National Nurses Union. All rights reserved.

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It requires work and dedication. Most Americans believe that America is on the wrong track, and, for the most part, our representatives have not been representing us. Dissatisfied Americans might also agree that voting is not enough action to break out of this profound cycle of injustice and world-wide destruction. … Change won’t come unless people demand it.

The group stands in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, of course, and like those East Coast folks holds a People’s General Assembly every evening (in front of L.A.‘s City Hall). Saturday’s Solidarity March through downtown Los Angeles brought out more women to the streets than have been there before.

One woman actually held a pitchfork, while the huge crowd yelled. “We need a new deal, not another raw deal” and “The banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”  As with sister protests being held in other major cities across the nation, the overall tone was angry, fed up and frustrated. Women have plenty of reason to be frustrated by the current economic situation in the U.S.; here are what some of them at OccupyLA had to say about their personal situations:

Katie Henderson, 28, is an aspiring graphic designer. After graduating from college in 2004, she has yet to hold a job in her field. Thus far, she has never had a job that required more than a GED. Hailing from Pennslyania, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue animation. But currently she works at a McDonald’s in the Glendale area; she’s concerned with paying off her college loans. Saturday was her first day joining OccupyLA. She says she might have come out sooner but her work schedule did not permit it. When asked why she feels compelled to march in the streets, she said,

Is it too much to ask for the standards of living to be a little better? I paid the equivalent of two brand new cars for my education and I work for peanuts. I should be earning $22,000 to $25,000 per year at entry level. But people want to pay minimum wage. They think $10 per hour is too much. I say to them: Do you know how to design and package ads?

Sara Pierce, who is almost 16, held a sign that read “Love Your Neighbor.” From her manner of dress, she might be mistaken for a neo-hippie, but her reason for being at OccupyLA was because of her mother:

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In fact, poverty among women is at the highest level in 17 years. Last year, 14.5 percent of American women were living in poverty, according to an analysis of the report by the National Women’s Law Center. The Center found that more than 17 million women now live in poverty and of those more than 7.5 million are surviving on less than half of the federal poverty level, which is defined as extreme poverty.

Female-headed families with children are doing the worst. In 2010, 40 percent lived in poverty. The rate increased among Hispanic female-headed families to over 50 percent and among black female-headed families it’s now almost that high. More than 20 percent of American children lived in poverty in 2010, and more than half of them were in female-headed families.

This increase in poverty is due to the collapse of the economy. Suggestions about how to revitalize the economy by raising revenue were met with a whining chorus of Republican leaders who demonized any measures to mitigate the damage as “entitlements” that need to be cut, and any resistance to their slash-and-burn economic policies as “class warfare.”

Their think tanks and pundit apologists entered the fray by releasing and trumpeting reports that describe the luxury that exists in poor households–refrigerators, ovens, stoves, microwaves, even computers! They breathlessly report that poor people have cars and air conditioning, cordless phones and coffeemakers. There is outrage that poor families “are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill as well as to put food on the table.”

The right-wing Heritage Foundation lambasted “activists and the mainstream media” for painting a false picture of the living conditions of the poor.

The nerve of those poor people to have cable television and air conditioning. The fact that so many of them had those things before they slid into poverty doesn’t seem to matter. This mean-spirited attitude implies that poor people who dare to have any modern conveniences are masking how well-off they really are. This is an attempt to deflect any discussion of the causes of the economic collapse and why there’s a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots.

The right often trivializes the plight of poor families by hyping the abundance of programs available to them. They point out that the Census Bureau ignores the resources available through the “welfare state” that conservatives are so hell-bent on dismantling.

Since the attack squads of the right are now accusing us progressives, liberals and feminists of engaging in class warfare, maybe it’s time to think about that option. But if we’re to wage war for the hearts and minds of the public, we need to be armed with facts.

I dug into several reports and analyses in order to understand what all the talk about poverty rates, levels and extreme poverty means. Unfortunately, the terminology reflects a complicated world that doesn’t lend itself to bumper stickers and glib posturing. I’m not an expert but I needed to break through the “bureaucratese” to find out what it means in terms I can understand: dollars.

I’ve come up with some facts all of us can use against the GOP’s budgetary chainsaw massacres:

Today, 46.4 million Americans–15.1 percent of us–live in poverty. That’s 15 million more since the 2000 Census. More than 2.5 million were added to the poverty roll in 2009 alone. Many of them may have possessed refrigerators, microwaves, cars and cordless phones before they found themselves slipping into poverty.

The Poverty Threshold for a family of four in 2010–the measurement the Census Bureau uses to determine poverty–was $22,113 annually. That’s $1,842.75 a month, or $60.58 a day, for the whole family. Imagine what kind of place you can rent, what sort of food you can buy, how you can clothe yourself and your children, and how you’ll pay for medication, toiletries, transportation, child care, school supplies and daily incidentals most of us take for granted. A family in extreme poverty is living on just $11,057 per year or $922.91 per month. This works out to $30.34 per day for 7.5 million families in the United States.

I decided to see what it would take to support a typical family of four living, as I do, in Los Angeles County. My mythical family consists of me, a loving partner and two well-behaved school-age kids. My mythical partner and I work full time at rewarding but low-paid jobs. To do the math, I used a calculator developed by the National Center for Children in Poverty. To eke out a bare-bones living in Los Angeles, based on what rent and such costs here, it turns out we’d need to earn $49,937 a year or $4,161 a month. That’s $27,824 over the national poverty threshold, and the two working adults would need to earn $12 an hour at their full-time jobs to hit this magic number.

But the minimum wage in California is only $8 an hour, or $320 per week. A combined minimum wage income brings in $33,280 annually before taxes. Without factoring in taxes, my mythical famliy would be at least $16,657 shy of earning what we’d need to support ourselves if we only earned the minimum wage.

It’s even worse for a different family of four–say, a single mother with three children. She would need to earn $55,869 a year and have a full-time job paying her $27 an hour in order to earn enough money to meet her family’s basic needs in Los Angeles. If she worked full-time at a minimum wage job, she’d earn, before taxes, $16,640 a year. She’d be short $39,229. She’d be eligible for some government support, but not enough to bridge that gap. This is the nightmare facing the working poor and the unemployed poor in this country today.

It’s unlikely that many people will be able to find jobs that will pay enough to meet their family’s needs. While wages are falling or stagnant, the gap between what people can earn and the cost of living continues to grow, even with minimal inflation.

Cutting benefits and cutting taxes is not the way to lift an ever-increasing number of people out of poverty. That’s not a plan; it’s the path to social upheaval. The debate is going to continue to rage in Washington, D.C. and across the country. It is class warfare, and it’s time to speak truth to power. Whether we’re poor or not, we’re each poorer if we remain quiet.

Photo from Flickr user Images_of_Money under Creative Commons 2.0.

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Well, ok, it didn’t say “gender washing.” I made up the term to convey the same meaning as “green washing” when it’s used to describe companies that try to look environmentally responsible–while doing little or nothing to actually change themselves or improve the environment.

Still, $20 billion is a lot of money. Or is it? According to The New York Times, the $4 billion a year that Wal-Mart will spend sourcing from women-owned U.S. businesses amounts to about 5 percent of the company’s annual operating expenses.

Besides, a more relevant question is why the company has only recently discovered women as a resource, both as customers and suppliers–not to mention the revelation by Leslie A. Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs, that “the majority of our associates [sales personnel] are women.” Duh. Could the answer be that a big portion of those associates sued the company for sex discrimination in pay and promotion, and then Wal-Mart spent countless millions and 11 years fighting the claim? Even though Wal-Mart prevailed with the contention that it is too big to be sued, it was a public relations black eye.

The majority of those female associates Dach talked about are still stuck at the lowest rung of the company and make less than the company men. Statistics cited in the court case show that women represent 70 percent of the hourly wage earners at the company, but only 33 percent of management. And female employees are paid less than men in every region, with the salary gap widening over the course of employment–even for men and women hired to perform the same job at the same time.

Curious, while the new initiative is heavy on training women in foreign countries who work for Wal-Mart suppliers, it doesn’t say anything about training managers in the U.S. on how to be fair in choosing folks for pay raises and promotions. (The Supremes essentially ruled [PDF] that giving such discretion to local managers did not constitute a company-wide discriminatory policy–a “pattern and practice” in legal parlance–that could be used by the plaintiffs to sue as a class. If the women want to sue now, they have to do so individually–a near impossibility for a low-wage worker.)

The Dukes v. Wal-Mart case has implications far beyond training programs and health education for female employees in Bangladesh (another “benefit” touted as part of the new initiative). According to Employment Law 360, a legal website that aggregates lawsuit news, in the three months since the decision corporations have gotten class actions thrown out in such areas as overtime pay, insurance overcharges and the release or toxins in a neighborhood. To read some of the reactions to Dukes from corporate lawyers, the decision was Christmas and the Fourth of July rolled into one. A virtual end to class actions as we know them. That’ll teach those uppity women.

Understand, I’m a big supporter of women-owned businesses, and I’m a big supporter of improving the lot of female workers worldwide. So any improvement is welcomed. I’d like to write more, but I need to catch a plane. I’m headed to Margaritaville to find my lost shaker of salt.

Photo of Walmart exterior from Wikimedia Commons.

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My second year at UCLA, I got my first union job at a deli/restaurant in West Hollywood. There were some differences that I noticed immediately: grownups worked here, I had enough money to buy my family Christmas presents that year, and after a probationary period I was eligible for health benefits. But most striking of all was the absence of fear. I wasn’t used to working in kitchens where the line cook could talk to the boss when he didn’t agree with a decision. He didn’t always win, but at least he wasn’t afraid to speak up. This made a big impression on me and made me a life-long supporter of unions.

Right now, unions are at the forefront of the movement demanding jobs. They have also been at the forefront of the movement for everything that makes jobs livable for working families: minimum wages, health care, the Family Medical Leave Act, Paid Family Leave in California and the most fundamental—the right to have a voice on the job.

There are Conservative politicians like Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker and Representative Ben Quayle of Arizona who seem to be intent on doing away with this most basic right. Representative Quayle is even trying to block a recent NLRB decision that would require employers to post information about employees’ right to join a union. The poster essentially outlines the 1935 National Labor Relations Act stating that employees have the right to “act together to improve wages and working conditions, to form, join and assist a union, to bargain collectively with their employer, and to refrain from any of these activities.”

We are stronger together. This is a basic union principal and it is one that we can lose if we don’t get active in its defense. Unions have a proud history of empowering and mobilizing working people to vote. Many women leaders first found their voices in their unions. And unions have fought for legislation that improves jobs for all workers.

We need jobs. But I worry that the call for “jobs, jobs, jobs” doesn’t get specific enough. The only things that made those first jobs I had doable were the free bed and roof over my head at my parents’ house. How can women—many of whom are single parents or heads of households—work a minimum-wage/no-benefits job (or even two) and support themselves and their families?

We don’t just need jobs. We need jobs that pay a living wage and allow parents to support their families AND be there to nurture them. We need to maintain our right to use our voices, to act together to improve our lives. We need unions.

This blog is part of the #HERvotes blog carnival. Read more HERvotes posts by Ms. and other women’s groups.

Photo from Flickr user Kheel Center, Cornell University under Creative Commons 2.0.

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