Dering Harbor this week.(Credit: Adam Bundy)
Being a mother is demanding, challenging, and most of all, hard work. And as if they didn’t have enough to do, the pandemic added an extra burden of work for most mothers.
Coordinating and supervising their children’s education, working from home or worse, losing a job while keeping a household functioning on a daily basis has sent all mothers into a whirlwind of days and nights that start early and never stop.
This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and we’ll devote space here to pay them tribute. Fathers, you have to wait for June, but we won’t forget you, either.
ALEXIA FERNÃNDEZ CAMPBELL and JOE YERARDI
Already battered by long shifts and high infection rates, essential workers struggling through the pandemic face another hazard of hard times: employers who steal their wages.
When a recession hits, U.S. companies are more likely to stiff their lowest-wage workers. These businesses often pay less than the minimum wage, make employees work off the clock, or refuse to pay overtime rates. In the most egregious cases, bosses don’t pay their employees at all.
Companies that hire child care workers, gas station clerks, restaurant servers and security guards are among the businesses most likely to get caught cheating their employees, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of minimum wage and overtime violations from the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2019 alone, the agency cited about 8,500 employers including major corporations for taking about $287 million from workers.
School closures keep over 28,000 Illinois moms out of work States that have re-opened schools have also increased labor force participation of mothers, evidence suggests.
The COVID-19 economic shock disproportionately affected women, but the lack of action to get schools re-opened kept more than 28,000 Illinois moms out of the labor force, data from the Current Population Survey confirms.
At the onset of COVID-19 and the state’s public health measures, mothers with children in the household exited the labor force at a higher rate than women without children. The combination of occupations that were deemed non-essential by public health officials, school closures and rising child care costs hurt mothers more, especially those without college degrees and minorities. The decline in labor force participation was the worst among Black women with children.
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Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Now that President Joe Biden has been repeatedly compared to FDR, he’s high on “making history” as the most leftist occupant of the Oval Office since 1933. He s demanding, for the sake of prosperity, that massive federal programs be passed to overwhelm nearly every sector of the economy and that government be further inserted into the everyday lives of Americans. When government officials decided to shut down schools across the country during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic last spring, women bore the economic consequences.
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