On "Forbes Newsroom", sociologist Jessica Calarco joins ForbesWomen Editor Maggie McGrath to discuss how women in the United States function as a social safety net.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Now, you have said somewhat famously in women's circles, or at least in my world, that other
00:06countries have social safety nets, the U.S. has women.
00:10And you argue that it's kind of intentional and systematic that women have become the
00:15social safety net in the U.S.
00:17Before we talk about the women's strike, can you break down that thesis?
00:21Why is it that you say this?
00:23Yeah, so essentially other countries have invested in social safety nets to help people
00:27manage risk.
00:28They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect
00:33people from falling into poverty and precarity, to give them a leg up in reaching economic
00:38opportunities, and also to ensure that everyone has the time and energy to help take care
00:43of their communities and their families and their homes, and even themselves.
00:47Whereas in the U.S., we've instead tried to DIY society.
00:51We've kept taxes low and slashed huge holes in the safety net that we do have.
00:55And we've told people that if they just make good choices, they won't actually need a
00:59social safety net at all.
01:01And the problem there is that people do need a social safety net.
01:04Forcing people to manage that much risk on their own has left many families and communities
01:09teetering on the edge of collapse.
01:11And yet we haven't, in part because we have women holding it together, filling in the
01:16gaps both in our economy and in our social safety net.
01:19So women are the default caregivers for the children, for the sick, for the elderly.
01:24They're also the ones who are disproportionately filling the lowest paid jobs in our economy.
01:29Jobs oftentimes in essential service sectors that are too labor intensive, but also too
01:34necessary to be both profitable and broadly accessible.
01:37You know, jobs in child care, jobs in home health care that other countries have funded as
01:41part of the safety net instead.
01:43And so what I show in the book is that women's unpaid and underpaid labor is helping to
01:48maintain this illusion of a DIY society and making it seem as though we can get by
01:53without investing in the kind of social safety net that many other countries take for
01:57granted. You've also written that billionaires and big corporations, for profit
02:03corporations, have effectively bought politicians that embrace their view of a DIY
02:09society. So how much blame do we have to give billionaires and big corporations for the
02:14state of affairs right now?
02:16I mean, I think we can trace it all the way back even a century.
02:19In the book, I trace this back to the 1930s and to the reaction of wealthy people and
02:24corporations to the New Deal, to Franklin Roosevelt's policies put in place in the wake of
02:29the Great Depression, which was where we first saw kind of increasing corporate tax rates as a
02:33way to fund this kind of stronger social safety net, things like Social Security and
02:37Medicare. And at the time, those wealthy people and kind of big business elites were
02:42looking for ways to persuade the American public that we didn't actually need a social
02:46safety net, that we could get by without one.
02:48And what they found at the time was essentially neoliberal philosophy, a group of
02:53economists in Austria who are developing this idea that countries don't actually need
02:58social safety nets and are actually better off without them because people without that
03:02protection will keep themselves safe from risk.
03:04And this idea has been widely debunked over time, but it was used to fuel decades long
03:11propaganda campaigns to shape decades of U.S.
03:14social and economic policy and to create this sort of perception that we didn't need a
03:19social safety net, which many people in the U.S.
03:21continue to believe today, despite the evidence that this is causing harm and
03:26particularly causing harm to the women who are trying to pick up the pieces and hold it
03:30together instead.