Venezuela Leads the Way: Welfare Mothers and Grassroots Women are the Workers for Social Change
Written by Cory Fischer-Hoffman
Monday, 06 March 2006
...
Juanita Romero, also known as Madre, explains that President Hugo Chávez has just given the news that we have all been waiting for: the implementation of Article 88 of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution...
...Article 88 declares:The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work. The State recognizes work in the home as an economic activity that creates added values and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security...
...On February 2nd, in a speech delivered in the Teresa Careño theater in Caracas, Hugo Chávez proclaimed that on the first of May, International Worker’s Day, 100,000 Venezuelan female heads of house holds would receive 380,000 Venezuelan Bolivares per month ($185). This is about eighty percent of the Venezuelan minimum wage. In the following six months, another 100,000 women will begin to receive payments in recognition of their work...
How is this different from Welfare in the United States?
Welfare in the United States has not been designed to acknowledge and award the labor of mothering. It is based on the premise that work can only be done outside of the house, and that Women must enter the workforce in order to contribute to society. The US Welfare system in fact, does not award women who work in the home with social security, but rather gives mothers a small amount of cash assistance, while they are forced to search for paid work. The basic idea is that children who are born poor are innocent; and deserve some basic support, but once they grow up and become mothers (or fathers) themselves, they have no ‘excuses’ for being poor.
Women who have worked in the Welfare Rights movement have protested the oppressive cycle that forces women to place their children into under-funded childcare and themselves into low-wage work; instead women demand that the care that they provide for their children and communities be acknowledged, valued, and remunerated.
MORE:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/209/1/
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