Single Mums Business Network [SMBN] [CIC]

As part of my journey in establishing the SMBN and what it stands for, I have spent a significant amount of time researching what support is out there, for women who have been locked out of their careers, since making the very selfish decision of keeping the conveyor belt of life going..

Gone are the days where we can rely on a partner to fully financially support the family and the cost of living. Without the stress of childcare throughout school closure times, because the carried woman is always at home, to cook, clean and provide childcare. We need to work. We all need to work. And that is okay, but when one salary is swallowed up in childcare, you are left in the position of needing to draw some sort of income support to enable you to manage as a family.

Consequently many women (and some men) – decide that one parent needs to be home to cover the childcare, as a single parent family this is no different, but you don’t want to be carried, (or withdraw contributions), and so you set-up a business or work on a self-employed basis, so that you can work, and be the parent that your child needs. When you spend years in education, work, and paying taxes, the last thing you want is to be in need of them, when you are perfectly capable of being self-sufficient.

Ideally, it would be quite normal, and quite easy, for the parent to work in sync with school, with pay in sync with inflation (see my previous blogs about how this is massively dissproportionate in real terms), that way, there would not be a requirement for state assistance. It should be perfectly easy for one adult, to earn £100 per day, to enable them to cover the cost of living and live a ‘relatively’ normal life, i.e, not in ‘relative’ poverty.

Instead we have these barriers, that should not be there, because we are fixated on 9-5, and paying what the national average for support staff (and key workers) is. We are so obsessed with the phone being picked up at 9:02 or 16:58 that we are locking millions out of work and creating a massive bill for the tax payer, money that could be spent on public sector wage increases. We are so fixated on capitalism, large CEO salaries and bonuses, that we are leaving the essential cogs of the wheel, the support staff, to live their lives, never able to eat out or enjoy holidays with their children, or Christmas with presents under the tree and an abundance of food, because we convince ourselves that that is the pecking order, and we blame them for not being senior management, and therefore working in a role that ‘does not really matter’ and justify reasonable pay. Of course it matters, what would you do if they all left, and lived in relative poverty outside of work instead of inside of work.

As with rape, we always make this the victims problem. We tell people what to dress and offer counselling after the event, instead of tackling the route cause, the rapist. Wherby education on respect and consent is needed from a very early age, so that this act is stopped before it happens. This could be the same with the workforce. Offering people the correct pay, and correct working hours, will mean that we do not have barriers to work, and we will not need to suffer destitution as a result of procreation.

As it stands the support out there for women returners to work is ‘upskilling’ ‘educating’ and ‘training’. Perhaps the issue is not us (the abused) but the abusers who disregard us, with our current skillsets, due to childcare barriers.

We don’t need no education, we just need less time control.

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