Harry Brighouse recently attended a conference that explored solutions to the demands on families from the workplace and the gendered division of labor at home. One presenter “argues for a mix of improved daycare provision, labour market regulation and parental leave at generous replacement rates; and the argument is that this will improve the quality of family life and increase gender equality”.
Harry was disappointed with the discussion, because he found that a sizable group of people felt that changes in the workplace would lead to greater inequalities in the workplace. Women would get sidelined into “mommy track” jobs. They also felt that men would be highly unlikely to step up to the plate and do their share at home. Most felt that responsibilities at home fall under the category of “shit work,” rather than fulfilling work.
Harry and I are clearly in the other group. We believe that given the opportunity, more men would take the opportunity to jump into family life. If an equal number of men as women took advantage of workplace flexibility, then gender inequality wouldn’t be a problem in the workplace. More likely, there would be a greater chasm between childless and family workers, however. Workers with kids would be shuffled to less fulfilling and poorer paying positions. That doesn’t really bother me.
Do people find greater fulfillment in their work or with their kids? That question came up last year, when Linda Hirshman wrote that people find greater fulfillment at work. We pointed out the elitist notion to that claim. Clearly, people with higher level jobs have greater fulfillment from work. It is also dangerous to make assumptions about the preferences of all people; everybody’s different.
It’s interesting how one’s view of human nature can have such a large impact on public policy.
I find fulfillment in both work and kids. (I’m lucky that I have a cool job and that we can afford for me to do this job. There is often a trade off between cool jobs and good salaries.) I was willing to trade off a little time with the kids in order to work, however I am not willing to cut into that time too much. How many people fall into the camp of liking both equally? I’m not sure.
Like Harry, I think that parental involvement with the family is important; it’s good for child and parent alike. It’s important enough to use government incentives to gently guide work-centered parents to commit more time at home. I also believe that employment is a good thing. It protects individuals from risks — divorce, death, disability. It’s important enough to employ government incentives to gently guide family-centered parents to have some minor employment.
Whatever work-family policies are cooked up in the next few years have to take into account differing fulfillment measures and needed outcomes.
Apt. 11d 
i am fortunate to be able to work half-time at a job i like, and also to be able to engage in some volunteer positions that i absolutely love. i find that work & taking care of my baby are probably about equally fulfilling, but in such completely different ways that they are really apples and oranges.
my work is intellectually stimulating in a way that parenting just is not. of course, there is an emotional fulfillment that comes from parenting that can’t come from anywhere else. all in all, i’m happy for being able to achieve that balance. i have a friend who is a full-time SAHM (her choice) who is going bonkers for lack of brain stimulation.
of course, the down-side to all of this is that my husband works way too much. that is not because of my working part-time, but due to other factors, but still. that part of our family life is out of whack.
and since he works all the time, and i only work part-time, the drudgery of housework falls almost entirely on my shoulders. which is not fulfilling in any way, but it has to be done, and is all part of the compromise that is family life.
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I think you and Harry are wrong about the number of men who would take up family friendly options. I think the drive in society to be at the top of the game you’re playing (especially for men) is very very strong. To illustrate, I have a friend who said that he loves music, and he’d do that instead of what he does, if he were a better musician. I asked him if he’d quit his job and make music instead, if he had more money than he possibly knew what to do with. The answer: no, because he’s not a good enough musician. It’s important to him that he be recognized as being at the top of the field he’s practicing (even if this doesn’t correlate either with money earned, or money needed). I know many many men like this — some women, too, but more of them trade the combined joys and demands of family for the recognition of expertise in a field.
Finding family fulfilling, at this expense, means finding all your rewards from your own joy (and not public accolades).
bj
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My husband would love to quit his job and be a stay at home dad. He likes the accolades that he gets from his job, but he can’t stand the work and the hours. He would rather make sandwiches for the kids and read books in his spare time. We can’t afford that, but we spent three hours in a pub Friday night reviewing the other options.
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First, I want to say that I totally admire you for going back to work and for finding the balance and for struggling through the challenges that it takes to juggle these twin commitments of work and parenting. Really, you–and all the other women and their supportive partners who make this happen for themselves and their families–rock. Keep meeting at pubs to discuss all the options!
Yes, both work and parenting matter profoundly to me and equally, but only because I do them both. Only parenting would drive me crazy; only working would make me sad. Doing both is really fulfilling but also really really hard, and really exhausting, too.
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I think that this is one of those things that there is a tipping point – when enough men have and do take visible steps back at work for their family, it will suddenly become acceptable.
I work with three men who work at serious professional jobs part time. Whenever I talk about them, I get amazement – “really! men!”, so I try and talk about them a lot.
For me, I think I would be very happy and fulfilled with a four day a week job. I don’t think I’m cut out for at full time at home parenthood. If I could do my current job, and be paid 80%, then our family would be happy, too (my husband is a SAHD with an evening job), but unfortunately, I haven’t yet convinced my employer (or myself) that that’s possible.
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Four-day jobs are more common where I am, but they are often 100% of the time and/or commitment for only 80% of the pay. Be careful!
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I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: This isn’t just a “parents” issue. There are those of us who have no kids who still want some kind of work/life balance. I hate the idea that, in order to have a job that pays well and has benefits and chances for advancement, you have to “owe your soul to the company store.” It didn’t use to be that 40 hours a week was “part-time.”
The issue for me is, why do so many jobs demand crazy hours? Yes, I can see the fast-track, executive or corporate lawyer, etc. jobs doing just that. But what about those of us who don’t want to climb the ladder to the top, who just want work we can enjoy, with a good salary, and a company that will treat us kindly? The white-collar sweatshop trend disturbs me on behalf of parents and non-parents alike. Family – all kinds of family, not just the nuclear family – is important. Community is important.
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IMHO this is all about globalization in the white-collar sector. Unlike 20 years ago, white collar types like myself now are competing against lower-priced (relatively speaking) people outside the U.S. Our employers respond by trying to bring our relative cost down. If we were hourly, we’d be seeing wage cuts. But we’re mostly salaried, and so there is nothing but incentive for employers to ask for longer and longer hours.
I totally agree with Ailurophile — the workplace will not be fair to parents, or anyone with a large outside commitment, until *everyone* works a 40-hour week. And that will only happen when employer incentives to keep us working longer are removed.
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It’s very possible to find 40-hour per week jobs, especially if you don’t need or want to make six figures. I work 40 hours per week at a small private company; so do all of my coworkers who are Dads (the Moms are all part-time or work from home.) Even here in workaholic D.C., there are lots of government contrator positions that don’t allow you to work past 39 or 40 hours per week.
Huge commutes lead to work/personal life imbalance, and wear you down before you even get to work (or get home). Around here, people want ever-bigger houses and yards and top-rated public schools, and are living up to two hours away from their jobs to get them. That wasted commuting time doesn’t benefit the family or the employer.
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as the earlier Doug observed, a lot of so-called ‘part-time’ jobs are really full-time jobs, except with reduced pay and benefits.
“If an equal number of men as women took advantage of workplace flexibility, then gender inequality wouldn’t be a problem in the workplace.”
If only we had workplace flexibility.. it does not exist in corporate America.
My wife had a half-day professional job which she enjoyed and was good at. Of course when the layoffs came and the jobs went to Bulgaria, the part-timers were first to go. There are no part-time jobs available in information technology – or they are billed as ‘flexible’, but the flexibility benefits only the employer, as in requiring 80-hour weeks when the job needs it. My wife joins Laura and probably every other mother, in enjoying both exercising her intelligence for remuneration, and bringing up her children.
I agree with jen – this reduces to a globalization problem, as Jeff Faux points out at
http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp179.html
We need to globalize labor standards, not just the flow of capital.
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Doug K,
It’s a problem for Americans in technical jobs, but I wouldn’t call it a “globalization problem,” given that on the other side of the globe, there are huge benefits being reaped by hundreds of millions of people who had previously lived in grinding poverty.
As to labor standards, that’s a luxury that countries buy once they’re already rich. It’s not something that you start with. For example, consider what would happen to farmers in traditional societies if they worked a 9-5 40 hour week with six weeks of vacation starting in August. They wouldn’t manage to bring in all their crops, their livestock would die, and the farmers themselves would starve. (Even in our own society, farmers who followed that schedule wouldn’t actually starve, but they’d quickly lose their farms.)
Low wages and less labor regulation are the unique product that poor countries bring to the global market, and it’s the only thing that allows them to outcompete Western countries. To ask third world countries to abandon their only advantage would be the very opposite of “social justice.”
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Amy, you seem to be implying that indulging in a race to the bottom with third world countries *is* justice. Am I misunderstanding you?
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I don’t think it is a race to the bottom, since a number of those countries are on the way up. Likewise, I think the US has a lot of advantages on our side, many of which we aren’t making proper use of. Our educational system (K-12 and college, too) is expensive and very wasteful of talent. One huge advantage that developed countries have is the fact that we have legality and predictability. Contracts can be enforced, and riots and state confiscation are infrequent. It’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of those features of our society.
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Jen, AmyP, DougK, you are in an interesting discussion. Is there any way to isolate ourselves from the world labor market? If so, is this justice? AmyP talks about the jobs which are exported from developed countries to developing as the factor which raises millions from penury, starvation, early death, whoredom, obeisance to local satraps. People line up for those Nike jobs in Viet Nam. Bangladeshi girls have some value to their family when they can work as seamstresses, and can make better deals for themselves than they could fifteen years ago. This is a good thing, right? Galax, Virginia is in a huge slump because the mills went away, that’s a bad thing. On the other hand, thing in Galax have not gone down as far as things in Nha Trang have gone up.
DougK, if you require a $8/hour wage in Hanoi for the sneakers to come in, there will be no sneakers jobs there. Good for Galax, not good for Hanoi.
AmyP, our system is a huge advantage, but Switzerland coasted for years on having rule of law and good infrastructure. Companies located there rather than in neighboring, far cheaper France because Switzerland had dependable telephones and a predictable process. France beefed up their phones and clamped down on local corruption and the Swiss advantage (and higher wages they could demand) diminished. So this was in large part a levelling up, as you suggest, but in Switzerland there was a loss.
Jen, do you somehow think there is fairy dust we can sprinkle which will let us keep the jobs in Galax and to have things get better in Nha Trang, as well? Do you feel any value to things getting better in Nha Trang?
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There’s a recent documentary called “Born Into Brothels.” It was done by a young woman who befriended a group of Indian prostitutes’ children and gave them cheap cameras to document their world, and who tried (with a few successes) to get the kids out of the brothels and into local boarding schools. My husband and I showed it to a large group of undergraduates a year or so ago. My reaction to seeing the film was–get these people a Nike factory, stat!
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“We need to globalize labor standards, not just the flow of capital.”
excellent point, Doug K.
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Although there’s no fairy dust, I do think there are some things we can do.
It’s hard to compare the white collar world — where this thread began — and the blue-collar world of Galax vs. Hanoi. Different things are going on. But still, these are attackable problems.
On the white collar side, we’re all facing pressure on hours because of an uptick in global competition. I believe our tax and social service structure in the States is harming the ability of our white-collar workers to compete. We expect employers to take on enormous health care and pension (read: social security) burdens. At the same time, we expect individual workers to take on the full burden of their educations. This is not the case in the countries we’re competing with. In Bangalore, the famed center of Indian technological innovation, any kid with good enough grades can go to engineering school for free. Or what about Ireland, host of so many IT call centers? Do you think anyone there is stressing out about the cost of employees’ health care plans? No. The government covers it all — which is to say that the expense is spread out across all citizens.
On the blue-collar side, IMHO we as a country still have not adjusted to the modern world. Somewhere along the line we decided that since blue-collar jobs were moving overseas everyone needed to magically become white-collar. Well, hello, not everyone is cut out for white-collar work. But we all still force our kids into that model, which is why only 40% of American kids who start college actually finish. (Note they’re not relieved of their debts if they don’t graduate.) So when it comes to Galax, the problem is not that we need to make college free. It’s that we need to accept that someone who does blue-collar work is still successful. We need to revive programs we used to have that helped kids learn the trades, or get into some sort of steady, well-paying work. The UPS driver is essentially the modern version of the old factory worker. We need to *support* this trend, not blow off the UPS guy as a joke. If you’re getting training to become an electrician, you should be eligible for the same sorts of scholarships and support you get when attending college. And, you should be able to get affordable health coverage even if you’re self-employed or not salaried.
There’s more to say here but I’m out of time so I’ll leave it at that!
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On globalization, I can recommend the discussion currently going on at TPM Cafe, between Jeff Faux and a variety of assailants and supporters. Start at the home page,
http://www.tpmcafe.com/
AmyP’s position is much that of Brad deLong, and I think it can be comprehensively refuted. See for example David Sirota, at
http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=04E81C90-E0C3-F090-A1AD1849127340B7
The fundamental question, to my mind: why should capital enjoy the protection of “legality and predictability” in the USA (and worldwide), when labor does not ? Especially considering that it’s the taxes on labor’s work which pays for the government, police and army that provide the “legality and predictability”.
There is no longer a difference between blue-collar and white-collar work, in terms of globalization. Either job can be done as easily in other countries: in fact white-collar work is easier to move, since streams of bits can be moved more efficiently than actual sneakers. With oil prices steadily increasing, these immensely long supply chains may yet become untenable, and manufacturing move back to the US. But once the fibreoptic is laid, it costs very little to send a radiographic analysis, tax form, or computer program, between the US and anywhere.
“if you require a $8/hour wage in Hanoi for the sneakers to come in, there will be no sneakers jobs there”
Certainly: but that’s because the jobs will instead go to the Ivory Coast, where there are even fewer protections. That is exactly the point. A global labor standard, that enforced the same core protections in ‘free’ trade agreements that capital currently enjoys, would raise wages and living conditions globally.
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Although I agree with you, Jen, that a structure that privatizes the costs of pensions, health care, and education puts the USA at a disadvantage, it’s not true that “any kid in Bangalore with good grades can go to engineering college for free.” At least, it’s not any more true there than here. The kids who get to go to college for free in India are brilliant, easy to teach, rapid learners, who work phenomenally hard. They are the top 0.01% of a billion people (on a multi-dimensional scale that rewards the combination of enormous effort & enormous ability, as well as opportunity & access). That same crowd can get their education for free in the US (the top 0.01%), too. The kids who miss that cut in Bangalore have to pay. What we’re talking about here, too, is what happens to those who are not the best of the best, but just very good, or even only above average.
I sit on both sides of the fence in this discussion, because though I am an American-raised, US citizen, I have relatives in Bangalore. I believe that Microsoft’s campus in Bangalore is going to do more to aid the world’s poor than will the entire might of the Gates foundation. The Gates foundation might cure malaria (which will be just great). But, Microsoft’s campus is plugging a vast group of people into the world economy. It’s teaching folks to “fish,” empowering as well as practically remunerative.
But, yet, just this week, I sat next to someone at dinner who had lost his job because Microsoft moved his programming group to India. His sister told him that he should move to India with the job And that’s not going to be unthinkable some day; she actually lived in Indonesia for several years. He didn’t want to move across the globe, though, not at all, but especially to India. But, that’s the way the world is going.
I believe that it’s technically impossible to isolate the American work force, and that we have to start talking seriously about real ways to help people adjust to the global labor market, in both white & blue collar jobs.
But, in thinking about those solutions, I think we need to talk about a world that seems to be changing to reward only the very very top, and hoping that the rest stay in the game in hopes of winning the lottery (i.e. winner-take-all, tournament models). That’s aided by globalization, but the solutions I think, to the problem, are one’s that address the winner-take-all society, and what we can and should do about it, knowing that our society has grown to include the world.
bj
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Doug:
I actually started, yesterday, a comment saying that I think that the antidote to the race to the bottom is “freedom:” freedom of speech, of press, assembly, organization, freedom to work, or not work, and to choose your own work, and to choose the wages at which you work. And those freedoms need to be protected by a rule of law (where the enforcement arm of the state prevents factory owners from virtually enslaving people).
It, is, though, the freedom to decide whether you want to work for $8/hour or $2/hour, yourself, not to have it imposed by the organization of people who live 10,000 miles away.
My personal experience with globalization is India, which is free (imperfect– and frankly, I don’t know enough to get into the details, but free, by which I mean, I know people who live there, and say whatever they think and feel, and don’t worry that they’ll be arrested for it). China is not free (under my definition).
So I do think there should be standards, but they are the standards of freedom. I am deeply troubled, for example, by the coercive agreements google, yahoo, and cisco seem to have accepted as a condition of global access. I want to know how much money is being paid to the worker who makes my sweaters. But, I’m not willing to set a global minimum wage, a meaningless concept.
I also don’t think that enforcing the standards of freedom will bring jobs to America. In fact, it’s more likely to bring more Americans to India or China, just as those folks come here now.
bj
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bj, you said “a structure that privatizes the costs of pensions, health care, and education puts the USA at a disadvantage” – I want to think about that a bit. These things cost money however they are provided: if we do them by public provision, taxes go up, and the tax burden on starting and getting going in a new enterprise gets harder to meet. Maybe GM can keep going a bit longer in the war with Toyota if it doesn’t pay retiree health costs, but the biggest estimate I’ve seen for those costs is $1200 a car – not enough to make the difference, GM’s big problems are inflexible work rules and drab products which people don’t want.
A nice line I’ve heard is, “you like the Post Office? then you’ll love single payer health care!” and the stories I’ve heard about long waits for procedures in Canada and UK make me, as a person who is very well served by the USA system, dread single payer (I was the guy the Harry and Louise ads were aimed at, and they worked for me!)
We actually have a pretty high level of service provision for most people in the upper four quintiles in USA. There is a very big problem in service provision for the bottom quintile, but the statist solutions may well make it worse for most. The challenge for the Dems is to find some way to make it better for the worst off and which doesn’t make it much worse for the best off.
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Hey BJ, thanks for the clarification on the Indian educational system. Although I work in IT and also work with numerous folks from India and in India, I clearly did not understand the details properly.
Do you happen to know what the average college graduate’s indebtedness level is in India, relative to income?
Dave, the point about the privatized nature of American health care, at least when I made it, has to do with *payment*, not delivery. Because other countries use tax dollars to fund health care — and because those tax dollars are typically levied as a percent of your overall income — they even out the burden across all workers. We do not. And this puts us at a disadvantage.
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Here’s a question–we have a lot of undocumented workers in the “grey” economy in the US, who are not paying into the system (social security, workers comp, etc.), and who would not be very pleased to do so even if their immigration papers were in order. Don’t they continue to be a problem, even (or especially) under universal health care?
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I don’t want to set myself up as an expert on the indian higher education system. I don’t know all that much — I was raised in the US, and went to college in the US. But, college-educated indians, especially the ones who emmigrate to the US are the top of the top elite.
I would suspect that the overall level of indebtedness of Indian college graduates is relatively low (well, hard to say, because people take informal loans, like from other relatives). But, a very very small percent of Indians ever get to the point of getting a college degree. The US statistics are much different — there’s great access to college in the US, but at a price. In other countries, a far smaller percent go to college (and might be heavily subsidized in doing so).
bj
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British view: “Baby, this just isn’t working for me”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2023662,00.html
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I don’t think that we should continue to cast people into certain workplace flexibility programs – working moms, working dads, taking care of elderly parent, etc. The ideal workplace flexibility solution should be all encompassing. But it seems that only a few large corporations are catching on! I read about a concept called ROWE: Results-Only Work Environment in BusinessWeek a couple months ago. It sounds like a perfect solution for ANYONE. It’s all about accountability. You do your job, you can have flexibility. I hope CultureRx – http://www.culturerx.com, the creators of ROWE, roll this out to other companies. I definitely see it as the future of the workplace. I can’t wait for it to catch on in my organization!
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