Pm not unemployed — just not working

Press, 7 February 1985, Page 16

Pm not unemployed — just not working

By

ATHOLEA RAMSAY

Early last year I put my foot down. I informed the family that after due consideration I was going to give up my job and begin 1985 by staying at home. “Retiring?” they asked, secure in their interesting jobs and steady incomes and confident that they had outgrown their need for me as a lending agency. “Not retiring at all,” I said. “I am merely ceasing to work.”

Retirement smacks of old age and National Super — a Golden Oldie making the most of her declining years — so I did not retire, I merely resigned from my job. And that action has landed me in limbo. I can’t be categorised as unemployed, redundant, incapable or housebound, so I don’t fit anywhere. Having a label makes understanding easy. Redundancy and unemployment are comprehensible, although regrettable, and the Labour Department does wonders within its limits. Social Welfare copes with illness and accident, and

having dependent children is always a socially approved reason for not being employed outside the house. But what can I put on my fishing licence where it has space for “occupation”? I won’t put unemployed; I do not want to write housewife, and when I print “No” they ask me to be more specific. From now on I shall print “Yes” and dare them to enquire further.

Sp what do you say to a middle-aged, capable, wilful non-worker?

“Lucky you!” is the usual response to an explanation of why I am at large during working hours, with thoughts unspoken on those who can afford to leave the workforce.

“Are you still well?" is another sympathetic murmur, designed to lead to confidences on breakdown, menopause, or prospective physical decay. “Whatever will you do?” is one common question that I enjoy as I point out that so many interests and activities have had to give

way to the demands of work that having nothing to do is no problem at all. “I left mainly because I want to do more,” I explain, and comprehension comes — she wants to do her own thing. The social swing within the last 30 years has been wide. The supposition that women ought to work devel-

oped from the earlier one that women wanted to work outside the home and a better balance would be achieved when women would work or not as they chose, without praise or criticism for doing one or the other.

My reasons for staying at home are an amalgam of a lot of ideas. I was enjoying my job less; it was one that could be done by a younger person who might otherwise remain unemployed; financial pressure was less than it had been 10 years before. Readjustment to domestic life, even after the summer holiday break, has called for effort. I know I will miss pay-days and the discretionary money that can be

spent so indiscreetly on occasion. And when everyone else went back to work I spent the first day feeling as though there were a party on and I had not been invited to it. Twenty years conditioning takes a lot of active resistance.

Should I decide that I need paid employment

again, I can put myself on the Labour Departent O.E. list. The department is as . concerned to help those wanting to change jobs and seek other employment as it is to help those in search of a job for the first time, it tells me. And there are some exciting alternatives. The first came as a surprise when someone confidentially checked on whether or not I was leaving my husband. Then I heard that I was taking a year in another city to do some full-time study. Neither is right for I am, in fact, rather relying on that husband to remember his promises of 25 years ago to love, honour and support me.

I will forgo the first two, but I am depending on the third. If he demurs I can threaten the Matrimonial Properties Act. Moreover, if the two voluntary societies and the school reminiscences committee that have already been knocking on my door fail to absorb the nudges from the Protestant work ethic that will prod me from time to time, I have a cause ready to hand.

Fiona McEwan, in “The Press” the other day, wrote that she would like to know how a person with no job and no income, not even a benefit, is expected to survive in a system based on materialistic values. If I find I can’t survive, I’ll enlist her aid and we will lead a campaign for the institution of payment for those who stay at home. Some of the groundwork has been done already. Farmers have had their s.m.p.’s, mothers their family benefit, Women Alone their allowances, and there is precedent and opportunity for a Stay Out Of The Workforce Wage.

I’ll do it when I am not too busy not working.