If you’re a divorced mother residing in Massachusetts with children 7- and years old, don’t move to Vermont. Your child support payments could be cut in half. And relocating several hundred miles south to Virginia could reduce that support payment by almost two-thirds. As any divorced parent knows, child custody and support can be extremely arbitrary. Although guidelines exist, federal law allows each state to set its own rules, and quite often states measure support using a very different yardstick. Judges also have discretion. Another big factor in each equation for ultimately deciding who pays what to whom: which parent has custody and for how much time? Legislators hear from lobbyists.
The pay equity gap has been researched and debated for decades, with little real progress to show for it. But the reckoning may finally be here.
The bill to which Jensen is referring is the spending reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families law. Under that law, states have the option to keep the billions of dollars in child support they collect annually on behalf of welfare recipients or pass the money along to the custodial parent, 90 percent of whom are female. If the states keep the money, they use it to reimburse themselves for the cash assistance they extend those same families as straight welfare payments. If the states send the child support payments to the parents, they may cut back on welfare disbursements. Either way, say critics such as Jensen, the approach is not serving the long-term goal of helping poor, single-parent households climb out of poverty and stay there. Only one state—Wisconsin—provides an example of the type of child support system that Jensen and others would like to see other states emulate. Wisconsin passes along all the money it collects on behalf of single parents on public assistance without withholding other government benefits. Cancian and her colleagues found that under the new system, Wisconsin mothers were more likely to establish paternity when they received more child support, non-custodial parents were more likely to pay child support when the money went to the families and that mothers and fathers had fewer conflicts over child support payments when the payments went to the custodial parent rather than to the government. The act would eliminate federal requirement that families sign over rights to child support before going on welfare. It would require the federal government to waive the share of money it takes from child support collections. Many people involved in the welfare debate believe that the changes in the PRIDE act would mean that the majority of states that currently pass very little or none of the money they collect in child support onto families would become more generous.
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And, this, they say, will help many families get and stay off public assistance. Congress, however, has been deadlocked in the debate over reauthorization for two years. Much of the debate over welfare reauthorization stems from disagreements over whether welfare recipients should be required to work longer hours than current rules demand. In , Congress passed a law that provided federal funding to states to implement child support services, including locating absent parents, establishing paternity and getting and enforcing support orders. As a result, Jensen says that 68 percent of all families get partial or full child support payments today, compared to just 8 percent in Yet, under the law Title IV-D to the Social Security Act states can use the money they collect on behalf of single parents to reimburse themselves and the federal government for the cash benefits they provide low-income people. Department of Health and Human Services. Currently, states keep about 55 percent of the dollars they collect in child support for current TANF families and about 15 percent for families who have left TANF. Politicians, experts and advocates agree that the money states are keeping could go a long way to assist families and to further drive down the welfare rolls.
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February 15, — July 25, RS The primary purpose of this program was to reduce public expenditures for recipients of cash assistance by obtaining ongoing support from noncustodial parents that could be used to reimburse the state and federal governments for part of that assistance. Over the years, CSE has evolved into a multifaceted program. While welfare cost-recovery still remains an important function of the program, its other aspects include service delivery and promotion of self-sufficiency and parental responsibility.
New Act to Deliver More Support
Critics say using child support to repay welfare costs harms children instead of helping them, contradicting the national goal of strengthening families, and is a flaw in the generally lauded national campaign to increase collections. Karla Hart, a struggling mother of four here, held out her monthly statement from the county child-support office. Reflecting a growing, bipartisan sense that diverting child support money to government coffers is counterproductive, Congress, in the Deficit Reduction Act passed in early , took a modest step toward change. The Bush administration has set a goal of increasing the share of collections distributed to families and reducing the amount retained by the government. But the drive to reduce the budget deficit has gotten in the way. As part of last-minute budget crunching, the Republican-controlled Congress in that same act reduced by 20 percent the child-support enforcement money it gives to the states, starting this fall. Many states say the effort to force them to pay more of the enforcement costs will impede collections and prevent them from passing more money on to needy families. But that momentum has been stopped short, she said, by the financing change. Hart was luckier than most mothers in her position because for more than eight years, under a federally approved experiment, Wisconsin gave all money collected from noncustodial parents to the families.
NDL : McFarlane started her career in amid a flurry of public interest in and political promise for gender parity. Economic Calendar Tax Withholding Calculator. In addition, courts have vehemently opposed any attempt by «Non Custodial» parents to ensure «Child Support» is actually used for the child. In others, such as Canada , the responsibility to enforce child support orders rests with individual provinces, with financial and logistical assistance from the federal government. This article should include a summary of Fathers’ rights movement Child support. Retrieved 22 March In New York, continuous failure to provide child support is an E felony punishable by up to 4 years in prison. But their pay stubs tell two altogether different stories. Since then, the proportion of university-educated women has more than doubled in Canada, from 14 per cent to over 35 per cent. Women are getting angrier. For example, if the obligee is currently receiving a monthly check from the government, all current support collected during said month is paid to the government to reimburse the monies paid to the obligee.
Wisconsin Model
Archived from the original on May 29, Retrieved February 3, Validity of marriages. The New York Times. Many groups are demanding a more hands-off approach where government does not micromanage the family. Child support paid by a non-custodial parent or obligor, does not absolve maks obligor of the responsibility for costs associated with their child staying with the obligor in their home during visitation. Baked into the wage gap numbers are more slippery factors like sexual harassment and overt discrimination.
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The discrepancy bothered her, but the salary was comfortable, the work was rewarding and she wpmen glad to have the job. She bit her tongue. The salary depends on who gets the gig, but the role stays the. McFarlane rallied an association of civilian managers and specialists, collectively known as CAMS, to unpack what was happening.
READ: The key numbers that explain the wage gap. No matter how you crunch the numbers—regardless of sector, position or number of working hours—women continue to earn less than men. Overall in Canada, the earnings gap between men and women who work is about 31 per cent, according to the most recent Statistics Canada income numbers. Full-time working women, meanwhile, earn 26 per cent less than full-time working men. Comparing hourly wages, that number shrinks to 13 per cent, and after controlling for gender differences around factors like industry, occupation, education, job tenure, province of residence and union status, a mysterious eight per cent gap remains.
The reasons are many and complex. But there are signs the womn is turning. Something shifted when Donald Trump—who has admitted to sexual assault—was elected U. Getting dangerously close to slipping backwards, they dug in their picks.
For the women of CAMS, the movement helped validate their own cause. The legislation, which set Canada apart as a mony leader in pay equity, called on all federally regulated employers to evaluate workers based on skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions, and pay them accordingly.
Certainly, some things have changed for the better. According to Statistics Canada, women began outnumbering men on convocation stages in Since then, the proportion of university-educated women has more than doubled in Canada, from 14 per cent to over 35 per cent.
While the numbers are encouraging, it makes the persistent wage gap all the more outrageous. And more than half those polled believe maternity leave plays a major role in exacerbating wage inequality in Canada. More robust research shows there are kernels of truth in the arguments for the gap. In one study, for instance, researchers asked more than a hundred STEM professors in the United States to consider a candidate for a lab manager position.
Women of colour, Indigenous women and those with disabilities are even further. Indigenous women earn as little as 46 cents on the dollar. Baked into the wage gap numbers are more slippery factors like sexual harassment womfn overt discrimination. They lose opportunities for promotions, they lose opportunities to accrue seniority and experience. They may be driven out of careers altogether.
They smile, wave and go about their business. To passersby, the workers look like colleagues doing the same job. But their pay stubs tell two altogether different stories. At Canada Post, a Crown corporation, rural and suburban mail carriers earn about 30 per cent less than urban employees.
Regardless of geographic lines, though, the work is the. Women still make up the majority of rural mail carriers—about 70 per cent—while men account for 70 per cent of workers in cities. To some extent, pay and working conditions have improved for Anderson and nearly 9, of her colleagues since rural and suburban mail carriers joined the union that represents city postal workers. After years of union pressure, Canada Post agreed to undergo a pay equity evaluation, which began in January.
We agreed with the union on a process to study the matter further and have been working through that process. The process is ongoing with much constructive discussion and will soon include a third-party arbitrator to help bring resolution. The employees suupport question are performing not just similar work, but the same work—in unionized positions and under government employers.
What that says for private-sector employees, whose salaries are often kept private, is worrisome. And it inspires little hope that those doing different work of similar value can easily appeal for equal pay.
Midwives in Ontario offer one such example. And the more that work is associated with women, or stereotypically done by women, the lower it is paid. That tendency has played out for decades. In one notable study, researchers from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania examined U. Take recreation jobs, for instance: In the latter part of the 20th century, park and camp jobs shifted from being male- to female-dominated.
During that same period, wages dropped 57 per cent, adjusting for inflation. The reverse is also true: As men took over previously female-dominated jobs—like computer programming, for example—wages went up. Her father, a lawyer, MP and early feminist, raised her and her two sisters to do as much as, or more than, her brother. I had a background where I was able to do what Benig wanted to do as a woman. Of the graduates called to the bar that year, she was one of six women.
Marvelling at the progress, Hynna mnoey aloud how much the gender wage gap has narrowed since the days she helped draft legislation to close it. She pauses just long enough to muster a rallying.
Women are getting angrier. Many of those interviewed for this article expected the wpmen would have been solved by now—that as women became university educated and entered the workforce, particularly in high-paying sectors, the wage gap would spiral in on itself like a black hole.
The of previously said it would introduce legislation in spring Compliance could be expensive for companies. And in the face of widespread opposition to small-business tax changes across Canada and minimum-wage hikes in Ontario, pay equity reform may well inspire hostility among stretched employers. Even Trudeau, the self-professed feminist leader, has been conspicuously quiet on pay equity. McFarlane started her monfy in amid a flurry of public interest in and political promise for gender parity.
When she agreed to spearhead the CAMS pay equity case inmany colleagues assumed she was on her way. She was close to retirement, after all. Filed under: PayEquity Editor’s Picks gender wage gap pay equity pay gap wage gap.
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States generally use one of three models to determine the base child support amount due:. The Income Shares Model is based on the concept that the child should receive the same proportion of parental income that he or she would have received if the parents lived. In an intact household, the income of both parents is generally pooled and spent for the benefit of all household members, including any children. The Percentage of Income Model sets support as a percentage of only the noncustodial parent’s income; the custodial parent’s income is not considered.
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Four states Alaska, Mississippi, Nevada and Wisconsin use the flat percentage model while the other three states Arkansas, North Dakota and Texas use the varying percentage model. The Melson Formula is a more complicated version of the Income Shares Model, which incorporates several public policy judgments designed to ensure that each parent’s basic needs are met in addition to the children’s. Clanton, A. The District of Columbia uses a hybrid model that starts as a varying percentage of income model and is then reduced by a formula based on the custodial parent’s income. Use the links in the chart below to view these guidelines. All of the guideline models have certain aspects in common. First, most of the guidelines incorporate a «self-support» reserve for the obligor.
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