A while ago, I stopped linking to polling data that showed that X number of women would prefer to work full time or that X number of women would prefer to be home full time. It doesn't take much poking at the survey to find a leading question or a false option.
Most people would love not to work AND to have someone deal with their children when they are annoying or dirty (which would describe both of my children at the moment.) They would also love to have a job that gave them lots of accolades without any grief or annoying co-workers or pissy bosses. This fictional job would also pay really well, always have donuts in the breakroom, and would only expect someone in the office for about 100 days per year. And a pony, too!
I find it fascinating that Penelope Trunk is giving advice to women who want to drop out of the traditional workforce and work from home. She must think that this is a sizable demographic to exploit. Is there really a large number of people dropping out of the traditional workforce and working from home?
When I stopped working in academia a few years ago, I floundered around for a while figuring out how to manage a complicated family life with the need to keep my brain going. I liked employment, but I needed employment that conformed to my particular circumstances. I flitted around between various entrepreneurial ventures and finally settled into freelance writing. I'm making money, getting published, and having a ton of fun.
One of my best friends is making a living as a freelance editor. She chose to work at home, even though she is single and childless, because she needed greater control of her work life. Single people also don't want to spend 60 hours per week in an office.
But neither of us is getting rich at this. We both had rather unique skills to sell. The freelance market is very crowded right now and you're competing against 21-year olds who will work for free in order to put something on their resume. I'm not sure that anybody should be quitting their day jobs at this time.
At the same time, I can see why a freelance lifestyle is so desirable to people. I am extremely lucky to be doing something I love, while my punk kid is at the next computer designing a hotel on Minecraft. (My kids are home from school for the Jewish holidays.)
The topic du jour over the weekend was why are American companies doing so well right now, but individuals still seem to keep bleeding. The stock market is at a high point, but Steve's company will have another round of layoffs this fall. He hasn't gotten a raise or a bonus in years, and probably won't again this year. If the market is doing well, if companies are making profits, why isn't everyone's boats rising?
Steve's theory is that that companies are so profitable, because they have cut their workers down to the bone. Now, fewer people are doing more for the company. Fewer salaries and benefits + same output = great profit. I'm not sure who's buying all that stuff, when they are on unemployment, but supposedly businesses are doing well right now.
The fewer workers/same work model is not sustainable. People burn out. They stop producing quality work. They begin daydreaming about freelance work, which is what I think is really going on in the background of this polling data about workplace preferences.
(I was planning on writing out some tips and tricks for working from home, but sometimes my posts veer off into different directions. Sorry about that.)
Apt. 11d 
“The topic du jour over the weekend was why are American companies doing so well right now, but individuals still seem to keep bleeding.”
Are US companies doing well within the US or outside, because of the US market, or in spite of it? It’s a pretty tough question to define what is and is not a US company. GM, for instance, has an enormous global presence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_General_Motors_factories
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Penelope Trunk writes crazy stuff for hits. I know there will usually be a reasonable discussion of her stuff on your blog, although I hate that she probably gets traffic from your links. If she gives bad advice and a 20 yo follows it, it’s nothing to her.
The dumbest thing she wrote was that when you are 23, you have a pretty good idea if you will want to stay home with your kids. Maybe that’s true in one direction, but I know a ton of women (including me) who thought at that age that they would never have kids or stay home with then, but changed their minds.
Actually, I accidentally ended up arranging my work life in my 20s and was then able to stay home with kids for three years in my 30s. Work hard so you build up some credibility, save some money, don’t take out a mortgage that takes two incomes to pay for, choose parents who will help you financially (hey, this is better advice than hers to marry rich), and don’t stay out too long.
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Yes, people will burn out, but I think part of the goal of the new model of business is to have a very small number of essential employees (i.e. CEO’s + their minions) and to have the rest of the staff be discard-able. So, burned out people are replaced periodically. This in turn makes the employed but not consumed option an empty set. Either you’re an essential employee (which means you are on demand to the company when they want) or you’re a freelancer (who is hired when needed).
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There’s a difference between a company’s stock valuation being high and that company “doing well”. I’m not convinced the average American company is turning a huge profit right now. I’m unwilling to venture ideas about causation until I hear more on this.
IMO we’re in the middle of a change in the mode of production, and the chaos it’s wreaking in the economy makes everyone nervous. In that kind of climate employees are at a disadvantage because they’re unwilling to take on more personal risk. It can lead to some Bad Behavior on the part of employers … but it’s not necessarily the result of evil plotting.
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I’m actually not alleging evil plotting — I think people respond to incentives, and that the incentives (including, for example, historically low taxes on high incomes), global marketplaces, global labor, global competition, stock market efficiencies and investor incentives, the decrease in union power, deregulation, . . . are all leading to a concentration of reward and a less flat labor structure.
It’s not evil under such a structure to reap the rewards of being an essential employee. Take Romney & Buffett as two examples: we give Romney flack for streamlining companies in ways that decreased American labor demand but Buffett doesn’t that same flack (even though I think both did similar things with their investment companies).
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I have a friend whose kids are young and she works at home teaching a bunch of online courses. She told me that she would always go into a room and shut the door and tell her kids that “I have to talk to my students.” Sometimes she teleconference with her students, so apparently what her kids heard was Mommy in a room by herself lecturing, answering questions, etc.
She found out a couple of months ago that the kids had been assuming that her students were in the room with her but that they were invisible! (The kids were really little).
I love that story because on some level I had hoped that my kids might learn something about life, balance and employment from seeing me work at home — but now of course I wonder what sorts of bizarre lessons they’re actually learning. (I can just picture one of my kids at school telling her teachers — “My mom works at home and she wears her pajamas all day long.”)
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That story is downright hilarious. It always amazes me how wide the realm of possibility is for a child.
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In 2007, there was Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon. The book market was “struggling.” Then, Borders went out of business. It is dead. Also, Amazon is booming, and Barnes & Noble is slowly improving.
If Amazon’s and BN’s stock price is higher, and are both selling more books than they were, both companies can be riding high, and that can be perfectly consistent with the book market as a whole being in the dumps, because you also have to take into account that Borders is dead.
I think the rest of the economy is the same way. Profits are up and Goldman Sachs, but profits at Lehman Brothers are zero. The “Dow” is improving, but with the bankruptcy and bailout, GM was dropped from the Dow, so big losses there don’t count.
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“I think the rest of the economy is the same way. Profits are up and Goldman Sachs, but profits at Lehman Brothers are zero. The “Dow” is improving, but with the bankruptcy and bailout, GM was dropped from the Dow, so big losses there don’t count.”
That makes sense.
Another possibility is that with more quantitative easing underway, it makes sense to have money in the stock market, as the stock market offers some protection against the danger of inflation (at least compared to cash-in-the-mattress or money locked in to low interest rates).
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