‘90s FAMILY : Single Moms Get Blamed for Working and for Not

To many political leaders and their constituents, welfare reform sounds like a good idea: Scrap longstanding federal entitlements that guarantee support for the poor and shift responsibility to the states, which hope to be able to get mothers off the dole, take personal responsibility for their families and go to work.

But what does it really take today for a single mother without child support to make ends meet?

Ask Linda Giles, 40, a single mother of three for the past 14 years. She was on welfare when her children were young because she couldn’t earn enough to pay for child care. Now she’s working, but to stay afloat, Giles works 48 hours a week as an assistant firefighter in Wilmington, Mass.--two 10-hour days and two 14-hour nights. On her days off, she takes on other jobs. “I have done construction. I have worked in a lumber mill. Now I do staining and polyurethaning on people’s houses,” she said.

Ask another mother of three, Pam Kiger, a 34-year-old administrative assistant in Dunkirk, Md., who moonlights as a bartender and caterer. One full paycheck goes for the mortgage on her trailer, two-thirds of the other monthly paycheck goes for utility bills, car payment and insurance. “If I don’t have part-time work,” she said, “we have to not pay the car payment or mortgage in order to get groceries.”

The numbers of moonlighting women, single mothers or not, has exploded over the past two decades. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost as many women as men are now working extra jobs.

Observers have remarked the crunch was bound to happen with the rising number of single-parent families headed by women (who still do not earn as much as men), falling wages for the lowest wage earners and the insecurity of entry-level jobs that are increasingly part time, temporary and hold little hope for advancement.

Times have become worse for the working poor. People on welfare trying to enter the job market are doing so in the midst of the biggest gap in history between the haves and have-nots. In the last 20 years, the top 20% of wage earners have seen an 18% rise in their incomes while the bottom 20% have seen an equal drop.

Karen Nussbaum, director of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, said, “When you talk to clerical workers and other kinds of traditional female workers, as often as not they are working at Kmart on Thursday and Friday evenings to make ends meet. Very often, they are [working to] provide essentials for their children, to pay the baby-sitter or because they want to make sure their children get a chance to go to college.”

One woman, she said, was forced to leave three of her five children with friends or relatives when she left California for work in New Mexico. There she holds two full-time jobs, one as a firefighter, the other as a warehouse worker.

Vacations longer than three days are a fantasy for these women. They are exhausted, often sick and understandably grouchy. “Family and friends say, ‘Slow down,’ but I have to pay the bills,” Giles said.

They cannot monitor their children the way they would like, and they have little social life because they feel guilty about using up what little time they do have for family activities.

The current political climate is demoralizing to families, said Phyllis Owens of the Los Angeles chapter of 9 to 5, a national association of working women. “It’s angering to hear politicians spew out garbage about family values when we have an economic system that is so disrespectful of anything that comes close to promoting family,” she said.

Rather than abdicating responsibility, rather than blaming individuals who can’t seem to win whether they work or not, Owens said, “We have to come up with a whole new social contract, in which people have fair employment that will support family life with dignity.”