(For my mom🥰😍🩷🥹)
What happens when society counts the wages but not the work?
My mother married at 19.
She had four children who survived to adulthood, and two miscarriages.
She and my dad were married for nearly 25 years, until he died by suicide.
I remember us receiving some survivor benefits afterward. I was young, but I remember that money mattered. Everything mattered then.
My dad was a very hardworking man. When BC Tel went on strike, he eventually started his own business.
My mom worked her ass off too.
She cooked. She waitressed. She raised children. She kept the household going.
There wasn't much time for supervision. We were in school, and when we weren't, we were outside on bicycles and wandering through the forest.
That was childhood.
Then Dad died.
We had to move because we had to go bankrupt.
And Mom had to keep working.
She had a heart attack.
And then she learned to drive.
👏👏👏👏
That part still makes me smile.
Because suddenly, after years of being a wife and mother and depending on someone else to drive, she had a little piece of freedom.
She could go places herself.
She had independence.
But independence can be lonely.
Eventually we kids grew up and left home.
Mom kept working.
She made terrible wages for much of her working life. She started around $3.50 an hour in the mid-1970s.
She also helped bring a union into her workplace and became a shop steward.
She fought for workers.
And yet, after all that work, she still ended up earning very little.
So here is the question I keep coming back to:
What happens when a society counts the wages but not the work?
Because my mother worked.
She just didn't get paid for all of it.
Raising children was work.
Cooking was work.
Keeping a family functioning was work.
Supporting a husband who was building a business was work.
Starting over after his death was work.
Working for low wages was work.
Fighting for better working conditions was work.
And yet a pension system largely measures a person's working life through their pensionable earnings and contributions.
That creates a problem for women who spent years doing unpaid caregiving or working in low-paid jobs.
CPP has changed over the decades. There are now protections such as the child-rearing provision, which can exclude certain low- or zero-earning years while raising young children. There are also rules around pension sharing after divorce and survivor benefits.
Those changes were important.
But they don't change the history.
My mother's generation lived much of its adult life under a system that was built when the economic model looked very different.
A man worked.
A woman raised children.
And if she worked outside the home, she was often earning much less.
But real families weren't that simple.
My mother wasn't sitting at home doing nothing.
She was holding an entire family together.
And when the family fell apart through tragedy, she picked up the pieces and went back to work.
She survived.
She organized.
She became a union shop steward.
She learned to drive.
She became independent.
And she kept going.
That's what I want people to remember when we talk about women's pensions.
Not just numbers.
Not just contribution rates.
Not just formulas.
Women.
Our mothers.
Our grandmothers.
The women who raised us while somehow trying to earn enough money to keep everyone fed.
The women who worked part-time.
The women who worked for $3.50 an hour.
The women who left paid employment to raise children.
The women who returned to work and started again.
The women who became widows and suddenly had to figure out everything themselves.
My mother would probably listen to all this and say:
“Yes. Yes. Write that.”
So Mom, I'm writing it.
Because somebody should.
Five questions to think about
- How should unpaid caregiving be reflected in retirement security?
- Can a pension system really measure someone's contribution to society only through their wages?
- How much did women of my mother's generation lose financially because they earned less than men?
- What would a truly fair pension system look like for someone who spent years raising children?
- When we talk about “working women,” are we remembering all the work that never came with a paycheque?
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