Mothers are the lowest paid workers

Times Online Letters, 31August 2007

Sir, We’re not surprised that Sure Start has had no effect on the vocabulary, ability to count or recognise letters, shapes and rhymes of preschool children. (“£3bn scheme to help preschool children learn has had no effect”, Aug 28). Its main intention, along with New Deal, the Child Support Agency and supposed free nursery care for all three-year-olds was to get mothers on benefits into work.

Where are the figures to show that dusk-to-dawn cleaning, working on supermarket cash tills, in sweatshops and factories, lifts mothers and children out of poverty? Mothers are the lowest paid of all workers, earning less than other women who receive only 82 per cent of men’s wages for full-time work, much less for part-time. Black women can expect 32 per cent less than white women.

Things are on course to get worse for children from toddlers to teenagers as 70 per cent of mothers on welfare are to be targeted by the Government for waged work by 2010. Instead of valuing mothers’ vital work of caring for and educating our children by giving us time, benefits and resources, we are forced to be available as cheap labour to maximise the profits of industry. Government advisers on this are investment bankers, after all.

Kim Sparrow
Single Mothers’ Self-Defence