The Fight for Women in the Workplace

In an article published by CNN earlier this year, Maya L. Harris addresses the issue of economic justice for women in the United States today.  She starts the article by quoting Martin Luther King Jr., “What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”  She then starts to talk about how one of the major points of King’s Civil Rights Movement was the struggle many African Americans had with economic security.  This article is a very shocking realization for many Americans that the Civil Rights Movement is still active today, especially with women’s struggles. 

      Harris presents some humbling statistics in this article that cannot go unnoticed.  In America today, one out of three Americans are at or below the poverty line, and that seventy percent of this one third are women and children.  The majority of the women at or below the poverty line are either African American or Latina.  Women make up the majority of the minimum wage workforce, and are usually concentrated in jobs that require a large amount of labor.  Women are also earning less than male workers.  Finally, Harris states that almost half of the nation’s households with children are dependent on women as the main source of income. 

      Harris shows that we as a nation must be able to push past the way society has viewed women in the workplace in the past and we must realize that women have much larger roles in the home than they did sixty years ago.  Harris proposes that minimum wage be raised, and that affordable childcare be made more available to working mothers. 

      This issue can relate exactly to what we have discussed so far in class.  This article is highlighting a problem today, and suggesting ways to resolve or help the issue.  Women are demanding equal rights when it comes to the workplace.  Just as the quote from MLK said at the beginning of the article, this is exactly what African Americans were concerned with during this movement.  They wanted equality in all aspects of life, especially in the workplace.

      I believe that we as a nation need to all work together to be able to eradicate issues like this one in today’s society.  There is no excuse for there to still be discrimination in the workplace towards anyone.  As Harris stated, we as a nation need to accept the fact that the world around us is evolving, and it is up to us as a society to change the way people think, especially when it comes to this issue of civil rights. 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/opinion/harris-women-jobs-shriver-report/