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Books: Reshaping the Work-Family Debate

December 5, 2010 | Books,Devra Renner,Economics,Education,Ethics,Family,Getting sick,Journalism,Leslie Bennetts,Linda Hirshman,Motherhood,Norway,Parenting,Politics,PR,Research,Sarah Palin,U.S. government,Vacation,Work,Working Mother

“Writ small, this book is about reframing debates about work and family. … Writ large, this book is about reframing American politics. Work-family issues have not been placed at the center of an analysis of U.S. politics, but it is time to rethink the assumption that they do not belong there.”

Wow. Joan C. Williams knows how to start off a book. She knows how to end it and fill the middle, too. But I’ll let you find that out by reading Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. (I highly recommend reading it. Williams is brilliant.)

It’s what she said in a Wilson Center discussion with Barbara Ehrenreich in September, though, that really gets to the heart of the matter of this book:

Litigation has accomplished a lot, but federal employment law cannot give us social subsidies or workers’ rights. The only way we can get those things is through legislation. The only way we can get that legislation is by very significantly shifting the political culture in the United States.

The only way to shift the political culture is to start a national conversation about gender pressures on men, she said. Until we do that, we won’t see much progress for women.

Devra Renner and Aviva Pflock, authors of Mommy Guilt, will understand this book. Even though their book is about mothers, most of the work they do is about parenting. They spend a lot of time reminding others that parenting is something both mothers and fathers do.

Statistics show that both mothers and fathers in the United States feel the scales overwhelmingly tip in favor of work and short-change their family lives.

When asked, American parents — 90% of American mothers and 95% of American fathers — say that they wish they had more time with their children. These levels are sharply lower in Europe. (p. 2, Introduction)

Why are these levels lower in Europe? Because European countries structure workplaces around their workforces, recognizing that everyone has a right to a personal life.

They have a saying in Norway, “We don’t live to work, we work to live.” It’s just the opposite in America, a Norwegian might say, as he straps his baby on his back for a mountain hike — one of many during his nine weeks of “pappa leave.” When the leave is over, he will return to his 35-hour workweek, which enables him to pick up his child from daycare in the afternoon and still have several hours of family time before bedtime. Every day.

A Swedish father wrote a guest post for me about his experience as a parent in Sweden. He asked three years ago, regarding non-existent benefits in the United States, “… how do we change the system to make it easier to combine children, family and work?”

He’s not the only one who’s been asking that question. Many have been asking how to get family-friendly legislation passed. Williams looks at why we haven’t been able to get it. To answer the first question, we must first have an answer to the second question.

For one, there’s a class culture gap that polarizes employees and keeps them from coming together on specific issues.

For another — and Williams doesn’t discuss this in her book — companies don’t want legislation. They want to handle “family-friendly benefits” on their own. That means offering very little with a big splash of advertising and PR to make some magazine’s “best companies” list.

In reality, most companies on that list don’t want to offer comprehensive benefits or even one guaranteed sick day for each employee, based on lobbying efforts on their behalf by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As the largest lobbying organiztion in the United States, the Chamber spent $91.7 million on lobbying in 2008 and $144.5 million in 2009. It — along with the companies it respresents — opposes any efforts to expand Family and Medical Leave Act leave or to mandate paid sick leave. It opposed a bill that would give employees seven paid sick days a year. It opposed SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) and the Employee Free Choice Act. It aggressively opposes union-backed proposals to increase minimum wage.

Some of these “listed” companies are multinational corporations with offices not only in the United States but also in Norway and Sweden. Benefits for white-collar American workers at these companies might be better than most: six weeks of paid maternity leave (and maybe up to a week of paternity leave for fathers), lactation rooms and maybe they can even buy vacation time. (Yes, that was touted as a “benefit.”)

Their employees in Norway and Sweden, however, get paid family leave of one to three years, the option of part-time work, shorter workweeks, paid sick leave and paid vacation. Why? Because all of that is legally required in those countries.

In Europe, … paid leaves are financed through social insurance, which leaves European employers more competitive than U.S. employers, for two reasons. First, European businesses do not have to pay the steep 30% ‘benefits load’ — the cost of a benefits package as a percentage of a worker’s salary — that many U.S. businesses pay. Second, because European employers are not responsible for covering the cost of paid leave themselves, they can afford to replace the worker on leave. In contrast, when U.S. employers pay the wages of workers on leave, often they simply heap leave-takers’ responsibilities onto their remaining workers, with no compensating increase in pay. This practice fuels workplace resentment. (p. 35)

In the United States, “The notion that having a child is a private frolic that does not deserve community support is implausible. There is no reason to expect that society should be able to privatize the costs of raising the next generation of citizens — from which all society will benefit — onto the backs of the women who bear them. This habit impoverishes women economically and men emotionally.” (p. 107)

Williams finally, finally, finally asks (and answers) the same question I’ve been asking for years. It’s not, “What’s wrong with women?” as Leslie Bennetts, Linda Hirshman and several others have asked. It’s, “What’s wrong with the workplace?”

Somewhat “coming full circle,” Williams starts with Lisa Belkin’s 2003 article, The Opt-Out Revolution, and I learned about Williams’ new book from Belkin’s more recent article, Calling Mr. Mom? and blog post of the same name.

In the first chapter, Williams expands on work she did in 2006 on a paper called “Opt Out” or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict, The Untold Story of Why Women Leave the Workforce, which debunked the “opt-out revolution” myth perpetuated by media reports.

Even better for me, at that time, was a journalist debunking the myth — which had been perpetuated by journalists — for an audience of journalists when E.J. Graff wrote The Opt-Out Myth essay for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007.

Graff explained: “Here’s why this matters: if journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But it’s a public policy issue if most women (and men) need to work to support their families, and if the economy needs women’s skills to remain competitive. It’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs, and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.”

And how are American institutions structured? With masculine workplace norms.

… although work-family conflict traditionally is associated with women, a prime mover of work-family conflict is masculinity. Inflexible workplaces have proved so hard to change, in significant part, because of the intertwining of masculinity with work schedules and current understandings of work commitment. (p. 33)

What do masculine workplace norms get us? No paid family leave. Long hours. Unequal pay. And motherhood as the strongest trigger for gender bias.

As a culture, we need to stop lying to ourselves, stop pretending that the ‘choices’ thrust on us by outmoded norms are actually choices made of free will. We need to stop ignoring the fact that the available choices are dismally inadequate. (p. 40)

I couldn’t help thinking of the movie 9 to 5 when reading this book. Didn’t Judy, Violet and Doralee take care of flexible work schedules and job sharing 30 years ago? Sure, they had to poison, hogtie and hold captive their sexist boss. But, hey, they got the job done, right?

Well, OK. Real life is much harsher. Many employees are “one sick child away from being fired.” They are often forced to make the impossible decision to choose between work or their children. When they pick their children (because they’re sick and daycare or school won’t take them or, worse, they’re headed to the emergency room), employees are often fired.

This is not just a working-mother issue. It affects fathers, too. Current research shows that this kind of inflexibility is not just an issue for women:

“Roughly 55% of the arbitration that WorkLife Law studied involved men.” (p. 56)

But it’s time to realize that the workplace is a “gender factory” constructed for “ideal workers” without family responsibilities.

Let’s begin with pregnancy. The only reason pregnancy represents a problem for employed women is because the ideal-worker norm is designed around someone with a man’s body (no time off for childbearing) and men’s traditional life patterns (no time off for child rearing or other care work). Once again, the issue is not whether men and women are really different; the issue is why this particular difference matters in this context. As Martha Minow pointed out long ago, men are as different from women as women are from men. What gives women’s difference salience in the workplace is the weight of unstated masculine norms. (p. 129)

“The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child.” (p. 103) Emphasis added.

Williams does a great job of breaking down the differences between classes and explaining the need to bridge those gaps and rebuild an alliance between progressives and “the Missing Middle.”

“The most refined fuel for class resentments is the culture of casual insults leveled by progressives toward the white working class. Changing U.S. politics will require an embargo on such insults.” (p. 152)

“As Theda Skocpol pointed out nearly a decade ago, progressives tend to focus so intently on poverty that they miss Americans in the middle of the income distribution. Skocpol finds it ‘puzzling’ that ‘our policy debates deal so little with the fate of working families of modest means.’ She recommended ‘a new family-oriented populism’ that offers supoprt for working families on the type that exists in Europe, namely, universal programs, rather than means-tested programs that are limited to the poor. Her analysis has been largely ignored.” (p. 161)

Maybe it’s time to stop ignoring this.

Williams challenges cultural fantasies about feminism (especially Sarah Palin‘s version of it — the five pages she spends deconstructing Palin alone is worth the price of the book), and she says she wants to start a national conversation about gender issues.

A conversation.

Is that enough? Who participates? Then what?

Posted by Becky @ 7:50 pm | 8 Comments  

Television: Sarah Palin’s Alaska

November 18, 2010 | Television

I have a confession to make. I watched Sarah Palin’s Alaska on Sunday night. I couldn’t help wondering, who’s footing the bill? TLC? Sarah Palin? Alaska tourism? Because, dang! It can’t be cheap to hire fishing guides to take you salmon fishing or rock-climbing guides to fly you to the “top of the world” (Denali National Park and Preserve).

In any case, it showcases the beauty of Alaska very well.

Something bothered me, though. There was a segment with Sarah at her home with her daughter, Willow, and Willow’s friend, Andy. They walked into the kitchen, and Sarah asked Andy if he was hungry. No, I just ate, he said. Then Sarah inexplicably said that maybe Willow should cook him something for lunch. (Hello? He said he just ate.) Andy put down Willow by saying he wasn’t sure he’d want to eat that.

Did Sarah get all mama grizzly on him and defend her daughter?

Nope.

She put down her daughter too. She said, yeah, you’re probably right.

Wow. She showed her own daughter absolutely no respect.

Respect? Pffft! I don’t need to respect my children!

Actually? Yeah, you do. So they know what being treated with love, dignity and respect feels like when they go out in the world and make friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, work colleagues, etc. Because if they’re raised with disdain and disrespect? That’s what they’ll know. And that’s what they’ll find.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s what happened next.

Willow went upstairs. Andy started to follow her. Sarah stepped in and told Andy he wasn’t allowed upstairs with Willow, that he’d have to wait for her downstairs. Sarah went back to work at her desk in the kitchen. Guess who snuck upstairs. Right under Sarah’s nose and for all the world to see.

That’s right. Andy showed Willow no respect, then he metaphorically thumbed his nose at her mother in her own house.

Some might say Sarah got what she deserved. Maybe. But Willow didn’t. A child deserves to be treated better than that.

Posted by Becky @ 6:00 am | 7 Comments  

Books: Game Change

November 16, 2010 | Books

I just finished reading Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. It’s part of TLC Book Tours November tour, and I received a review copy from the publisher, HarperCollins.

The book was written by two journalists to tell “the story behind the headlines” and give “an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses” who vied in 2008 to occupy the White House.

I didn’t want to like this book.

I mean, c’mon. It’s gossipy and tawdry, and we’re supposed to close our eyes and believe in their “omniscient voice” (I’d go for “omnipresent,” but we could argue all day about big words) without one single, solitary note or reference. Really? On pages 265, 266 and 267, there’s an extensive conversation between Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn. It’s all in direct quotes, which is not possible unless someone recorded it. I suppose that’s possible. Did Clinton record all of her conversations and then share this one with the authors? (Do you know how much she loathes the media?) Did she allow Penn to record it and then share it? Umm, yeah. That gets a 10 on my BS-o-meter.

They made up words or checked the Urban Dictionary to sound cool: buckraking, ripshit, stovepiping (I’m betting they used the Wikipedia definition and not the Urban Dictionary one), big mo, hoovering, agita, grille, grassrootsy, mano a womano, politico-industrial complex, given the high hat, liked the cut of Palin’s jib, undercard.

They abused the thesaurus: omertà, Hobson’s choice, putative priapism, j’accuses, ab initio, Mobius strip, panjandrums, sturm und drang, parlous, Houdini juju, imprimatur, rictus, pulchritudinous, dysphoria, semiotician’s fantasia, primogeniture, apostasies, chimera, confrères, calumny, sword of Damocles, comity, savvy of a Metternich, logorrhea, hectoring, outré, chary, equipoise, claque. (If you have to look any of those up, the “sexy” ones? They’re all about Bill Clinton.)

And really? Going from ripshit to imprimatur in darn near the same breath was indicative of the often bipolar craziness of politicians and the campaign trail. So, I say — whether it was intentional or not — well done.

And, oh, could they turn a phrase and paint a picture with their words.

When explaining how narcissistic and out of control John Edwards was when he was desperately trying to make deals with Clinton and Obama: “Then again, Rielle Hunter was only eight months pregnant. So Edwards still had another month to strike a bargain.” (p. 204)

“McCain had gone from a campaign bleeding internally to spilling its entrails all over the carpet.” (p. 285)

“Instead of the Cadillac campaign that his advisers once had in mind, he was driving around in the political equivalent of a Ford Pinto — with a hamster wheel for an engine, and Rick Davis sprinting furiously on the thing to keep it spinning.” (p. 301)

“Making matters worse, the lengthy Democratic nomination fight meant that the Obama forces had operations in nearly every state, firing on all cylinders — whereas McCainworld was sputtering along forever on the verge of needing roadside assistance.” (p. 328)

“On September 10, McCain and Palin appeared together in Fairfax, Virginia, a few miles from the campaign’s headquarters. Fifteen thousand people swarmed into Van Dyke Park — little girls wearing ‘STRONG WOMEN VOTE MCCAIN-PALIN’ T-shirts, their mothers chanting, ‘Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!’ Later that afternoon, Palin would board a flight to Alaska for her interview with Gibson. At the moment, though, she stood there on stage, perched atop a pair of ruby-red heels, looking less like Eliza Doolitle than Dorothy: the girl swept up in the cyclone, lifted out of her black-and-white world and deposited in a Technicolor Oz. Obama and his people certainly felt as though a house had been dropped on their heads.” (p. 373)

Pulchritudinous, no?

I followed the presidential campaign closely. I watched the debates. I shared my concerns, of which I had so, very many. I got the whole politicians-as-celebrities thing, with them showing up on late-night talk shows and Saturday Night Live.

So there wasn’t a whole lot of surprises for me in this book. But it was an entertaining read. And there’s nothing better than an entertaining read. Because when it comes to politics, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“We’ve come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up — this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback — and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you’re talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. … It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail [‘]72.

Posted by Becky @ 10:30 pm | 2 Comments  



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