http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0106.mencimer.html Remember the bad old days when Congress and the White House were at war over the Family and Medical Leave Act? It seems like ancient history now, that day in 1990 when George Bush vetoed the bill, arguing that business couldn't possibly afford to allow workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth of a child or to care for aging parents. The family leave act was a critical piece of legislation for women, 50 percent of whom were already in the workforce. Federal law had barred pregnancy discrimination, but it didn't mean much if women could still be fired or forced to quit after actually giving birth. But during the debate, Bush's press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, neatly summed up the Republican approach to dealing with such touchy work and family problems. If your job didn't offer maternity leave or let you attend to your dying mother, the solution was simple: "Look for other jobs," Fitzwater said.
The family leave act would languish another three years, as conservatives and right-wing pro-family groups argued that it would only encourage more women to abandon their God-given roles as mothers and seek the monetary rewards of the workplace. Opponents characterized the bill as an attempt by women to have their pursuit of pin money subsidized by the taxpayer. Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) dubbed the act "another example of yuppie empowerment."
In 1993, 10 years after the bill was originally introduced, Bill Clinton made it the first piece of legislation he signed as president. Since then, 20 million Americans have taken advantage of the law, and the economy, far from being dragged down, experienced the largest boom in U.S. history. Yet the family leave act was the first and last successful attempt in the past decade to drag this country into the modern era where the majority of women are in the paid workforce.
Nearly every national initiative since then has been met with similar resistance, as conservatives have both refused to pay for measures that might ease the strain of working families and insisted that any efforts that "encouraged" women with children to work were detrimental to the traditional family. As Richard Lowry explained last month in the conservative National Review, "Working moms are at the center of a variety of cultural ills."
But if conservatives had hoped that withholding public support for working mothers would bring back June Cleaver, they were badly mistaken. Instead, a growing number of American women have found another way around the problem: They've stopped having children.
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Those like my sister, stuck in the middle, could try the Marlin Fitzwater approach, and instead of finding different jobs, they could find a different country. Sweden would be a good choice. In the early 1980s, the country was facing a labor shortage and declining fertility rates. Rather than try coercive measures to increase birth rates (like banning abortion or restricting women's educational options) or massive immigration, Sweden chose to make the workplace more accommodating for parents. Swedish women are now guaranteed a year of paid leave after having a baby, the right to work six-hour days with full benefits until their child is in grade school, and subsidized child care.
Sweden's birth rate went from 1.7 in 1980 to 1.9 by 1996, even as the rest of Europe's was declining. Women and children were the clear winners. In Sweden, college-educated women now have almost the same workforce participation rates as men and close parity in earnings, even as more women (and men!) stay home during their children's early years than in the U.S. But relocating to Sweden seems a little unworkable. So here's another solution to help speed change a bit: Let's make the baby boycott official.
If politicians want babies to kiss on the campaign trail, they're going to have to ante up, starting with part-time jobs with full benefits, tax equity, paid maternity leave, Social Security benefits for stay-at-home parents, and subsidized child-care centers---with well-paid teachers. Even more important, they'll have to finally admit that the minivan does not qualify as a child-care center, and make the school day match the work day---complete with PE, music, sports, and other enriching activities on site.