Women and Social Security
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
UPDATING THE SYSTEM Wbmen and Social Security by steven v roberts Washington uppose a woman, call her Mary Jones, was married eight years W^ago. She had several children ami decided to stay home...
...Working wives get hurt in another way, too...
...The main stumbling block of Fraser-Keys is that a divorced woman would get more, a divorced man less, and that does not enhance its political appeal in Congress...
...Present Social Security laws are also outdated in their treatment of the two-earner family...
...former Representative Bella Abzug prefers using general revenues...
...Under this concept, women who stay home would get credits with the SSA as if they were earning an income...
...Two workers sometimes receive lower benefits than one, despite the fart that they paid the same taxes...
...Workers and dependents is not such a good way to divide up the world any more, and it's particularly crummy for women," notes Nancy M. Gordon, an economist at the Urban Institute...
...Jones got divorced today, she would have no right to any Social Security benefits based on her ex-husband's income...
...suggests that every housewife pay a tax...
...If Mrs...
...Women should not be required, or even encouraged, to abandon their homes...
...These figures are related to the skyrocketing divorce rate (it is predicted that one of every three new marriages will dissolve...
...and Martha Keys (D.-Kans...
...The root of the problem, they maintain, is that women and men play different roles in society, and therefore the solution is for women to go to work and earn their own Social Security benefits...
...One drawback of the scheme is that if the main wage earner is disabled, he would get less than under the current set up, since his wife would be credited with half his earnings...
...Women now live 10 years longer than they did when Social Security was introduced, but end their child bearing earlier...
...People now view it as an economic partnership, in which both partners are entitled to benefits," observes Anne Er-fle, an economist with the Social Security Administration (SSA...
...the husband would be the main, and probably only, breadwinner...
...The key problem here is how to finance the credits...
...The proposal further stipulates that couples making the same income would be entitled to the same benefits, no matter how the income was broken down...
...and women would devote themselves to homemaking...
...It's very hard to get them to believe what the world is like...
...This calls for the total earnings of a couple to be divided equally on their Social Security sheets...
...True, starting next year a divorced woman will need to have been married only 10 years instead of 20 to qualify for benefits, but that still leaves many ex-wives without any covSteven V. Roberts is a Washington reporter for the New York Times...
...She had several children ami decided to stay home and take care of them instead of going out to work...
...They can either receive a benefit as a dependent of their husband, or from their own income, whichever is higher: they cannot receive both...
...A divorced spouse would thus have an independent earnings record, regardless of how long she had been married or how much money she made...
...In other words, many working wives get no extra benefit from the Social Security taxes they pay...
...The failure to take such societal shifts into account has produced a number of anachronisms where Social Security is concerned...
...The system is not badly designed, it was just designed for a different era...
...Since they are increasingly able to support themselves, explains Gordon, working women are more likely to abandon unsatisfying matches...
...An alternative in the legislative hopper that would not decrease a divorced man's benefits features "homemaker's credits...
...erage...
...But as homemakers, they are full partners in the family's economic life, and should be entitled to full benefits for their contribution...
...Of all mothers with children under six, 39 per cent are working, as opposed to only 11 per cent in 1948...
...Representative Barbara Jordan (D.-Tex...
...Thus they have far more time on their hands after the kids leave home, and one result is that many are going back to work...
...According to Sara Kaltenborn of the Justice Department Task Force on Sex Discrimination, many people continue to believe that "homemaking is not worth very much, and anybody who wants benefits should go out and get a job...
...Meanwhile, several bills have already been introduced, and while no Congressional action is expected this session, as their ideas percolate through Washington they seem to be gaining support...
...In the current tax-cutting climate, neither notion is wildly popular...
...There is recognition that the homemaker role has economic value...
...The more women work," says Erfle, "the more they realize this happens, and they get very upset about it...
...A principal one involves the treatment of divorced homemakers...
...Today, 56 per cent of the women between ages 20-64 are in the labor force, a 21 per cent jump in 30 years...
...But there are administrative remedies that can be applied to both situations...
...The growing consensus seems to lie somewhere in the middle...
...For instance, if a husband and wife each made $6,000 a year, they would each get a benefit of$3,173, foratotal of $6,346...
...The evidence seems to support her claim...
...These inequities are currently being studied by groups ranging from the Civil Rights Commission to the Justice Department Task Force on Sex Discrimination...
...Former wives who get a job and build up their own credits with Social Security wind up living on far less than their husbands as well, for women generally have more erratic work histories than men, which shrinks their Social Security checks, and their income is only 60 per cent of the average male's...
...Further, by remaining out of the work force for eight years, she has damaged her ability to get a good-paying job after the divorce and build up enough credits to qualify for sizeable benefits on her own...
...Yet opposition to modernizing the Social Security system in a way that will make it fairer to women is not just a matter of economics...
...Born in the 1930s, the program was predicated on the assumption that: most couples would remain married...
...The people who are making the decision in Congress," says Gordon, "are still mainly white, middle-class males who are disproportionately better off...
...But if one of them alone made $12,000, the total family income from Social Security would be $7,640...
...Even if a divorcee is entitled to benefits, moreover, she can only receive them when her former mate retires, and then they can amount to no more than 50 per cent of the wage earner's total—hardly a liveable stipend...
...Similarly, if a man has a young wife and retires many years before her, the family income could be sliced...
...Probably the most popular approach is embodied in a bill introduced by Representatives Donald M. Fraser (D.Minn...
...One version would link the credits to the minimum wage, another to average national income...
...At the other end, some feminist groups have come to the same conclusion for radically different reasons...
...The experience of women like Mary Jones is causing many Congressmen, other public officials and academic experts to call for some fundamental revisions of the Social Security system...
...Perhaps the most important change in the last decade, though, has been the public perception of marriage...
...Last year, in addition, Congress mandated an analysis of the various plans put forth by the SSA, and that report should soon be ready...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 18
