WUNRN
UK - ECONOMIC AUSTERITY REALITY
ISSUES FOR WOMEN
As it is, she works 16 hours a week in a clerical job
at a local supermarket, and her earnings go to paying off loans she and her
fiancé are carrying. She would love to go full time, working days instead of
evenings and getting a handle on their spiraling debt.
But with three young sons and a fourth child on the
way, she cannot take on day work, at the supermarket or anywhere else, without
more child care.
That, said Ms. Bradshaw, 28, feels like an impossible
dream. She is dreading the phone call telling her she is about to lose the care
she already has.
“It would just be like losing a right arm,” she said.
“I’d have to drop that one day a week, just to be able to be at home with
Joshua,” her 2-year-old.
Manchester, where Ms. Bradshaw, her partner, Lee
Mellor, and their rambunctious blond boys live in a neighborhood of worn brown
row houses, announced last month it was shutting its day care centers, which
serve 800 children.
Like many cities and institutions around Britain, Manchester
is searching for savings to close the gap created by the national government’s
withdrawal of £3.5 billion, or about $5.6 billion, in support to localities
this year, a drop of nearly 12 percent under Prime Minister David Cameron’s
tough austerity program. Billions of pounds more are to vanish by 2015.
Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, has also lifted a
requirement that the municipal authorities fund and operate Sure Start
children’s centers, which offer services including prenatal checkups,
breast-feeding support and day care. Their creation was a flagship achievement
of the Labour government of the former prime minister Tony Blair; many strapped
local councils are now closing the centers or scaling them back.
Under pressure from local families, Manchester withdrew
a proposal to close its Sure Starts last month, but is planning to eliminate
their day care gradually over the next two years.
As Britain shaves public services and benefits,
advocates contend that women bear more than their fair share of the pain.
“The idea that what we should be doing is rolling back
the state, it has really important implications for women,” said Professor Sue
Himmelweit, an economist and policy coordinator of the Women’s Budget Group, an
advocacy group. “Women lose particularly from public sector cuts. First of all,
they lose their jobs.”
Women account for two-thirds of employees in the public
sector, where the government’s budget monitor says 710,000 jobs are to
disappear. They rely more heavily than men on public services and financial
assistance and are expected to lose 70 percent of the £18 billion being cut
from benefits like housing support and tax credits for the working poor, says
the Fawcett Society, a group pushing for greater gender equality.
Because they are poorer and live longer than men, women
will be disproportionately affected by reductions in services to the elderly.
Decades of progress toward greater equality with men
are at risk as the downsizing of government makes it harder for mothers,
particularly poor ones, to hold on to jobs, the advocates warn. A planned
welfare overhaul is likely to make the problem worse by weakening incentives
for second earners in poor families to work, they say.
Child care, and the tax credits that help the poorest
Britons pay for it, is central to the debate. Britain’s two-parent families
spend on average a third of their net incomes on child care, more than in any
other wealthy country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, an association of free-market democracies based in Paris.
Tax credit cuts will force some women to stop working,
said Celia Hannon, head of research and policy at the Family & Parenting
Institute. That is likely to reduce their skills, earning potential and
financial security later, she said.
Many of the Sure Start centers offer cheaper care than
the private sector, and parents say their quality is often higher.
Ms. Bradshaw says the commercial day care centers in her
part of Manchester are only slightly more costly than the £25 she pays for a
six-and-a-half-hour day at Sure Start. But she feels none are as good: Her
oldest son, Daniel, was expelled from a private center because of behavioral
problems that the Sure Start workers quickly resolved.
“The staff at the Sure Start center, they understand
the children so much more,” she says. “They treat them more like family, they
give them cuddles, they sit them on the knee.”
Both Daniel, 6, who is now in school, and Matthew, 3,
who goes to a school-based day care center, went to Sure Start. Two-year-old
Joshua is there now, and Ms. Bradshaw had hoped to send the baby she is now
carrying, too.
The center has given Ms. Bradshaw and Mr. Mellor extra
time to pay bills when they needed it, something she says private services
would never have done.
The couple have not made ends meet since Mr. Mellor, a
garbage collector, lost the £3,000 to £4,000 he used to make each year in
overtime. Reductions in the child care tax credit also hit them hard.
Ms. Bradshaw is warm and energetic, scolding the boys
for wearing muddy shoes into the house and hurrying Daniel into his karate
clothes after an early weekend lunch. But her voice tightens when she talks
about money.
Collection agencies demand payment of the family’s
credit card bills, and the thought of dropping a four-hour shift when the day
care closes terrifies her.
It is not just the money, she said. The weekday daytime
hours she would give up are her only chance to interact with colleagues and
learn the routine.
“I need to be with people who know the job,” she said.
“And when I’m at work, I can focus, I can do my job. I work with numbers. It’s
keeping my brain going.”
What keeps Irene Savage, a single mother in Leighton
Buzzard, a tidy commuter town northwest of London, awake at night is anxiety
about mounting debt and a nagging feeling that she is losing the middle class
existence she had assumed would always be hers.
The slide began when her marriage ended 12 years ago.
Until recently, she thought her job as an office manager in a public school
would see her sons through college. As the cost of food, fuel and other
necessities has spiked, her salary of £17,500 a year has not budged. Like 1.6
million local government workers around the country, she is facing a third year
without a cost-of-living raise. The GMB union, which represents many of those
workers, has said that in times of high inflation, that pay freeze will amount
to a 15 percent cut in real terms.
“It’s like I’m treading water in quicksand, if that
makes any sense,” Ms. Savage said.
Stylish in skinny jeans and a carefully pressed shirt,
Ms. Savage, 46, does not look desperate. But her well-groomed appearance “is a
facade, because it doesn’t stop me from not sleeping at night.”
She has £13,000 in bank loans and £8,000 in expensive
credit card debt. She tries to keep one of her cards just under its limit so
she has it for emergencies.
“The trouble is, I’ve got so many emergencies I’m
always using it,” she said.
Growing debt is a hidden effect of austerity and will
keep hitting women harder, again enhancing the effects on women’s progress, Ms.
Hannon said.
Ms. Savage sold all her good jewelry before Christmas,
when she saw the price of gold was high. Her son’s school shoes have holes in
them but she cannot afford new ones. Her mother sends her home with bags of
food — “quite embarrassing and horrible,” she said.
She could probably earn more in the private sector but
stays at her job because it gives her time off during school vacations and
summer. Her youngest son is 15, and she does not want to leave him alone
through those breaks.
Ms. Savage has a quick smile, but her eyes well up when
she talks about the stress on her boys.
“My eldest son — he has seen me in floods of tears many
a time,” she said. He had to defer his place at a London university to work for
a year, because her savings for his tuition were insufficient.
At 54, Elizabeth McNulty also struggles to help three
grown children. She said she was paying the price now for having taken time
away from work as a young mother.
As a teaching assistant at a school for special needs
children in West London, she has suffered the same pay freeze as Ms. Savage,
and now has to take a £2,000 pay cut, meaning her annual salary is just
£17,000.
Without a college degree, she said, she feels stuck in
a field she chose years ago so she could be with her children during school
holidays. Many colleagues are in the same position.
“We’re being penalized because we’re mums, and we
wanted to take better care of our children,” she said in the soft lilt of her
native west Ireland.
Now she fears the consequences will follow her into
retirement.
Public-sector pensions are a point of major contention.
Workers walked out of schools and hospitals in November in a nationwide strike
over plans to increase employees’ contributions and raise retirement age, while
reducing pension payments.
“I’m not going to be as independent when I’m older,”
she said. “It’s almost like we’re going back, women are becoming more dependent
on men now.”
Her co-worker Teresa Angeletta, 53, sees progress
slipping away.
“It’s like when my mum would wait for my dad — he’d come home with his wages and put them on the table,” she recalled. “She didn’t have money of her own.”