05/09/2026
To the Mothers of Northwest Indiana — Happy Mother’s Day
Today we celebrate all mothers across Northwest Indiana.
Those laboring in the home, in the factories, warehouses, hospitals, schools, offices, stores, and every workplace that keeps our communities alive.
Motherhood is defined through care, sacrifice, labor, and the daily work of sustaining human life. It belongs to all who take on that. The responsibility of raising, nurturing, protecting, and holding together families and communities in a world that too often takes this labor for granted.
Under capitalism, labor is only recognized when it produces profit for the wealthy. The labor that happens on the clock is measured in dollars. The labor that happens before and after, preparing meals, cleaning homes, raising children, offering care, maintaining households, supporting loved ones, and rebuilding exhausted bodies and spirits, is treated as invisible.
Yet this labor makes all other labor possible.
Without the work of care and social reproduction, no factory shift begins, no warehouse opens, no office runs, no product is produced, and no profit is extracted. The labor performed in the home sustains the labor performed outside it. The system depends on this work while refusing to fully recognize its value.
The labor of care, parenting, emotional support, and maintaining a household can and should be shared collectively. Yet throughout class society, women have disproportionately been pushed into these roles, expected to shoulder unpaid or underpaid labor while also participating in the productive workforce. Millions of mothers are forced to carry a double burden: one shift for survival under capitalism, and another shift at home sustaining everyday life itself.
This is no accident. The system separates the labor that produces profit from the labor that reproduces life, assigning one public recognition while rendering the other invisible. It depends on mothers and caregivers while denying them the dignity, support, and material conditions they deserve.
Here in Northwest Indiana, mothers are carrying entire communities through impossible pressures: rising costs of living, unstable housing, impossible childcare expenses, utility shutoffs, underfunded schools, and jobs that demand more while paying less. The same system that praises mothers with words abandons them in practice.
But mothers have never simply endured.
They have organized workplaces, led strikes, defended neighborhoods, built mutual aid networks, and raised generations with the courage to resist injustice. The strength of working-class communities has always rested in no small part on the labor, discipline, and determination of mothers.
This weekend and beyond, we want to celebrate mothers for what they truly are: part of the backbone of society itself.
Every meal prepared, every child raised, every hour worked, every home maintained, every act of care and sacrifice helps hold together communities in a system constantly trying to exhaust and divide working people.
Today we honor every mother: those on the line, on the late shift, behind the register, in the classroom, in the clinic, driving the trucks, stocking the shelves, organizing the home, raising children, caring for elders, and holding together the social fabric that capitalism tries to tear apart.
Your labor matters.Your sacrifice matters.Your dignity matters.
A society that depends on mothers while refusing to value their labor reveals its own injustice.
This Mother’s Day, we celebrate your strength and recognize the truth: the labor that sustains life is among the most essential labor of all.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers of Northwest Indiana.
— People’s Defense Committee NWI
Art: Proletariat Mother by David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1929
