Statement on Social Security from Ruth Todasco, mother and grandmother

My name is Ruth Todasco, and I am with the Global Women’s Strike/LA. The Strike is a multiracial grassroots network of women in over 60 countries demanding a complete change of priorities as reflected in our slogan “Invest in Caring Not Killing.” I want to start by honoring the memory of former Sunset Hall resident Irja Lloyd who was active with our network for many years before she passed on, the film Sunset Story ends with Irja speaking at a GWS event opposing the privatization of SS, we will hear Irja’s statement today.

The GWS is opposed to Bush’s plans to privatize SS, as well as his proposal to establish a means test for the amount recipients would receive. Bush’s proposals would not improve SS but make it worse, while enriching by the billions the Wall Street firms that will play roulette with our lives. Means testing SS would mean the program would no longer be an entitlement but a charity, which would make the program vulnerable like welfare, and would be the beginning of the end of SS.

Furthermore, we must also press for improvements in SS as it stands now. The $500 billion a year now going into the war and occupation must instead go to improve and expand Social Security, for resources for other social programs including welfare, for quality education, healthcare for all and other human needs.

We are outraged that SS does not give women any credit for our years raising children and taking care of our families, and in fact calls these “zero years”, as though we are doing or contributing nothing. How dare they! As mothers, grandmothers and caregivers we do one of the hardest jobs there is; we produce and reproduce all of the workers in this country and the world; without our work nothing could function. And those of us who are women of color do caregiving work in the face of a daily onslaught of racism against ourselves, our children and other family members. We do not accept that we should just do this work because it is our “natural function”. A recent study has estimated that the work of a mother is valued at $131,471 a year, that is money women and communities are not getting but money going into war and occupation.

In contrast, in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, Article 88 of the new Constitution, stipulates that housework and other caregiving work is productive work and that women are eligible for social security credits for that work. We want an Article 88 right here in the US. We here in the belly of the beast are dependent on our sisters in and from the global South, for their strength and leadership.

For immigrant women, many of who work as domestic workers and in illegal sweatshops, and who are the backbone of the economy of California, most get no social security at all.

As an older woman, I am part of the majority of elder women in this country who have wound up with a piddling Social Security income in our own right. Despite a lifetime of work both waged and unwaged, I don’t have enough Social Security myself to survive on, and am dependent on my husband’s income. And what about the women who don’t have a husband’s income to depend on, and what about the millions of women whose husbands social security payments are low due to earning low wages in factories and sweatshops when in the waged work force? No wonder you see older people in supermarkets buying cans of dog food, not for pets but to eat. How can this be allowed to continue in this the richest nation in the world? It should not happen anywhere we are on the globe.

But despite the problems with SS it is still a safety net, and Bush’s plan to privatize it would, according to analysts, cut that small amount almost in half. “Half the women over 65 would fall into poverty without Social Security income under the current system…. For one-third of all unmarried female seniors, Social Security is, in fact, their only source of income.”

In waged work, women in full-time work generally earn 73% of what men earn, Black women get 63%, and Latina women 53%. Women hold most part time, temporary and seasonal jobs and are less available for overtime. And non-profit corporations pay notoriously low wages. All of this cuts into what the women are then eligible for under social security.

But we are fighting to keep that benefit and to increase it, as grassroots women we are not only victims we are protagonists! We have a long history of struggleIn the 1980s we issued a petition to Congress for “a Social Security Wage for Housework for Every Woman” and showed how much the military takes. In 1995 at the UN World Conference on Women we won the UN decision in 1995 that governments measure and value all unwaged work in the home, on the land and in the community. That decision was considered to be one of the most far reaching that came out of the UN Women’s Decade and it was that UN decision that was the basis, with grassroots support, of article 88 in the Venezuela constitution. We also issued a Pay Equity Now Petition endorsed by hundreds of organizations and produced a fact sheet on pay equity.

We are part of a community of “invisible workers” : …mothers, grandmothers & other caregivers; grassroots activists; subsistence & family farmers & farmworkers; prisoners and ex-cons; those struggling on welfare, disability and other benefits, domestic & home-care workers; immigrants with or without papers; sex workers; refuseniks & veterans; students; rape survivors & others fighting for justice; community volunteers & more; whatever our sexual choice… all of whom have a right to social security.

We say that money for social security, for mothers and grandmothers, for welfare, for healthcare, for housing, for education, is money not going for training our children to be killers, is money not going for media propaganda, for politicians who sell out to multinational corporations, is money not going for all the apparatus required to wage war.

The Bush proposals must be defeated, SS benefits must be increased, caregivers must receive credit under social security. And Bush and his killers must end their attempts to destabilize the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, indigenous and other movements for change in the Americas and throughout the world, and the brutal cycle of war rape and occupation in Iraq, Haiti, Palestine, Afghanistan and everywhere.

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