Redistributing the work
A couple of people have pointed out to me Abigail Trafford’s column from this week’s Washington Post health section, where she proposes reshuffling the typical worklife so that people could receive government benefits and focus on childrearing (with some education and part-time work) while they were in their 20s and 30s, focus on work from 40 to 75, and then turn to community service at the end of their life. It’s part of her regular focus on what she calls "my time," the time after midlife (what used to be called old age).
Trafford’s analysis of the problem is on target:
"Our current system is irrational. We concentrate on work at a time in our lives when we are having children and our children need us the most. We tend to leave or be eased out of the workplace when we have completed the child-rearing tasks — about age 50 — and now have time and energy to devote to work. And in our later decades, we are stereotyped as useless."
I’ve often said that it’s nuts that, in a world where many of us are going to live to be 80 or more, taking a few years out of the workforce in order to focus on childrearing can cripple your earning potential for decades to come.
I don’t think Trifford’s actual proposal is serious, although her underlying point is. It’s certainly not feasible on a literal level. She says that "Researchers have found that among healthy people with a college education, there is no change in health status between 55 and 75." But the less educated — which largely means the poor — are far less likely to be in good health at an advanced age. And they’re also far more likely to have physically demanding jobs. Professionals who sit behind a computer all day may well be just as productive at 70 as at 40, but the same is far less likely to be true for people who have to stand on their feet, bending and lifting all day.
But the general point — that a system that expects continous work for 30 to 40 years and then continuous leisure for a period that may be almost as long doesn’t make sense — is dead on. It makes far more sense to let people distribute their free time more evenly throughout their lifetimes, whether that means working part-time for long stretches or moving in and out of the labor force. Parents asking for that kind of flexibility have made only modest progress, but the oncoming wave of baby boomers may reshape the landscape of work far more dramatically.
October 27th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
This is very interesting! It makes so much sense it’s almost ridiculous.
I often find myself envying the sorts of communal living experiences that other cultures have. Everyone lives in the family compound. When you’re a young adult and have few resources, you’re supported as you start your family. You’re having kids while you’re healthy and energetic enough to deal with it. Then later on you contribute to the family pot, so to speak, via work and money. I know, I know — I’m romanticizing it. But to this mom’s overworried and sleep-deprived mind it definitely has some drawing power.
One major barrier to the setup she’s discussing, I believe, is the concept that you do the work first and then reap the benefit. What’s to keep a person from having a billion kids and living the life of Riley, and then stiffing everyone else by not really contributing much when it’s their turn at the wheel? Right now we ensure hard work by essentially threatening people with abject poverty in their retirement. (And we all see how well that’s working out!)
October 27th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
I’m not sure I understand. Do you also think it’s “nuts” that in a world where many of us are going to live to be 80 or more, taking a few years out of making 401(k) contributions can drastically reduce what’s in your 401(k) account for decades to come? White collar careers aren’t terribly different.
Career tracks are more exponential that most people realize. Professional positions usually require a lot of hard, small-paying work early on. Think of the city beat journalist, lawyers trying to make partner, a first-time teacher, or physicians in residency.
Drop out for even a short period during these grunt years, and you very quickly fall behind. It may be possible to catch up with coworkers who have been fully employed, but you will have to work even harder than they have been. In all liklihood, the people who haven’t taken a break will become the editor, law-firm partner, school principal, or head surgeon before you do.
I think this is how it should be. If I don’t work for 3 or 5 or 10 years while on maternity leave, why should I still be neck-and-neck with someone who has been working the whole time? Like with the 401(k), I’ll have to make extra contributions if I really want to catch up.
A lot of family leave policies try to act as if the missing months and years don’t matter. But there need to be consequences for not doing as much work.
October 27th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Hey Mrs. Ewer — my interpretation of this wasn’t that you’re progressing even if you’re not working, but rather that perhaps the time to put in your grunt years doesn’t have to be when you’re 20. Maybe you can focus on family and then start your career at 35, or whenever.
Interestingly there are many professions right now that follow a “second career” model; they are specifically friendly to taking people who are a bit older and getting them into the field. Teachers clearly are often second-careerists. As another example, my dad worked for years at a seminary, where the vast majority of those entering the ministry were in their 40s or older. They were very successful in their new careers, typically, in no small part because they had often already raised their own kids and had learned much from it. (Something like 55% of these ministerial trainees were also women, FWIW.) But they were considered entry-level when they left sem at 45.
October 27th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
I’m not saying that if you’re 35 and have taken 5 years off, you should be at the same place that your peers who have worked continuously should be. But if you’re 35 and have taken 5 years off, you should be in the same place as someone who is 30 and has worked continuously (assuming that your technical skills are up to date). That’s not the case now.
October 27th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
jen said, “perhaps the time to put in your grunt years doesn’t have to be when you’re 20. Maybe you can focus on family and then start your career at 35, or whenever.”
Our prime childbearing years (your 20’s and 30’s) are also the time of greatest health and strength for manual labor and military service. Traditionally, women used these highest-energy years to bear children, while men used them to work and provide for the women and children.
As Elizabeth said, the modern workforce partially frees us from that paradigm because most of the work is non-manual, and can be continued well into old age. But I see a few problems:
1. The childbearing window is still pretty limited, even with new reproductive technology. And someone has to fund families during those early years. Who should it be? Trafford suggests the government. But it seems a little silly to say the government should be handing out money to able-bodied couples in the prime of life.
2. The military and professions that require physical labor (including a lot of low-income work) will still need lots of workers in their 20s and 30s. It seems like encouraging people to start a career at 35 could hurt poor and low-skilled people.
3. There’s going to be a sizable gap between education and career. A science or tech degree earned at 22 could be worthless by age 35, and students might not feel as motivated to finish school.
4. From what I’ve learned about compounding interest, $1,000 saved and invested at age 25 beats $10,000 saved and invested at age 35. That’s a big argument for working in your 20’s.
I do like the second career model. But it seems to work best for educated former SAH parents (who were previously supported by their working spouse) and for life-long workers who want a change of pace.
Thanks to Elizabeth for the explanation. I haven’t seen the data to know what the income difference between your 30 and 35-year old examples would be, but I wonder there’s a lingering effect of parenthood.
Is an employee who takes 5 years of family leave more likely to decline an overseas assignment, put in shorter hours, use more of their vacation time, or make other small choices that will mean more time for family and less time for work when they return to the workplace? I don’t know.
October 28th, 2006 at 7:30 am
I am not the brightest star in the firmament at my office: if they are choosing between me and the childless guy in the next cube for a time-critical assignment, they should and will choose him because he will stay late and get it done and I have to get the kids at Extended Day. In my workplace, there’s enough room for both of us and it’s okay. But he’s going to make Division Director and I’m not. Nor do I want to be scheming for preferment when I am 70 – I want to retire, and to, if fortunate, revel in grandchildren. Trafford seems to assume that there has to be some one model to which we can all shift and which will make it work – I will bring in one of Marjorie Williams’ very nicest lines, here: “On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away.”
Elizabeth notes thatTrafford says “Researchers have found that among healthy people with a college education, there is no change in health status between 55 and 75.” This is crap. I see a lot of people in this age cohort in my workplace: they get heart disease, they get arthritis, they get Type II diabetes, they get carpal tunnel syndrome, they get plantar fascitis. They go to the doctor a lot, far more than their younger coworkers. Some of their ailments interfere with their productive work, even if they are computer jockeys. I see the middle-aged ladies checking groceries – there’ve been some who have been there for the whole fifteen years I have been shopping there -at my local Giant Food, moving more slowly, having repetitive-motion problems putting the groceries in the cart, wearing wrist braces. If Trafford’s ‘researchers’ have found “no change in health status”, she needs to be paying attention to a different set of researchers.
October 28th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
dave s is right on about health problems in that age group. Last year my in-laws retired from their full-time careers because of new, serious health problems (lung cancer, Type 2 diabetes, and age-related retinal failure resulting in blindness). They were 62 and 63, and you can bet they’re thankful they started working and saving in their 20s.
October 30th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
I agree that people have more health problems as they get older and the “55 is the same as 75” thing is simply not true. I disagee, however, with the underlying assumption that because you’ll be going to the doctor more at 75 you’re a problematic employee. Well hello, we as a nation are going to pay for that person’s health care either way: either via their employer or via Medicare. At least if the person is working they’re active and contributing. (Yes, there are other ways to contribute, but my point is made.) Short-term benefit to a given employer is placed above long-term benefit on the part of the greater society.
The same logic is behind discussing colleagues who are deemed more deserving of certain assignments because they have no children. As an individual employer, this might make sense right now. But as a society it’s detrimental to ignore the benefit we all get from kids who are well-raised. Again the whole decision appears to be based upon what’s best for an employer in the short term.
It’s no surprise that the current stay-home-parent/massive-overtime-parent model works well economically right now. IMHO this setup is a specific response to the demands of employers. Employers pay far more per employee than the employee’s salary, between FICA/unemployment taxes and health care. It is in an employer’s interest to squeeze every hour they can out of that employee. And so the at-home parent pulls out of the paid work force to pick up the slack at home. In reality, it’s the *working spouse’s employer* who benefits from that stay-home parent. Years later, when the stay-home is done at home, the family is left with the full burden of re-educating the stay-home, getting them back into the paid workforce etc., and they have sacrificed thousands, sometimes millions, of personal income and social security benefits. Again, people are making huge decisions based upon the short-term needs of their employers.
Beyond simply talking about how compound interest leads to greater retirement savings, I’d like to see someone run the numbers. For simplicity, let’s stick to dollars for the moment, expressed in funds for education, or retirement, or health care costs. We know what saves employers money. But what is the true cost — for the employer, for the individual, for the government — of the stay-home/overtime model? The two-parents-working-part-time model? What about couples who have their kids young and both work, relying on relatives for care? What if parents delay and have their kids when their educational/financial resources are greater, but their health concerns are also greater?
You know, it’s striking me that the insurance actuaries probably know a lot this stuff … if only we could get one to chime in!
October 30th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Great post, Elizabeth! And great replies in the thread (especially from Jen).
While people do develop more health problems as they get older, and go to the doctor more, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are worse employees – as Jen points out, we’re subsidizing them either way, through employer insurance and salaries or Social Security and Medicare. At any rate, more and more chronic conditions are, if not curable, at least treatable and manageable. People’s working lives really are longer now. We *are* healthier at older ages, by and large. Plus, desk-jockey jobs do not require strength and stamina to the same degree that manual labor or factory labor did.
Besides, what should the disabled (of all ages) do – sit around on a government pittance and wait to die? That doesn’t sound like much of a life to me. Most disabled people want to work, and would work if they could. One of the solutions is more and better part-time jobs with benefits. I’ve heard parents say that this would be a godsend – it would be also for the disabled, who might not be able to work a full 40-hour week but could swing 25.
It’s ridiculous for the “ideal employee” to be a youngling in the pink of health. If we are lucky, that’s us until our forties or so. For some of us, that description never applies.
Given the social security crisis, it makes more sense for people to work longer if possible. And it also makes more sense for those of us who want children to have them young, when our reproductive systems are at their peak and so is our energy. Meanwhile, in the workplace, youthful energy is so much less important than the wisdom and judgment that (one hopes!) comes with age.
October 31st, 2006 at 7:02 am
Jen and Ailurophile, I think that to some extent you are looking for Marjorie Williams’ No-Fault Fairy. My impressions are colored by how things are for law firms and software designers, I guess, but I think much of the time businesses which adopt the kind of policies for which you are calling are going to get swamped by those which don’t.
There are a lot of projects – some kinds of law cases, software development efforts, airport insta-books about recent hideous sex-crazed murders, merger/acquisition projects, building design – where there are huge costs to being second. And being first in those projects will happen for firms/individuals who work huge hours. It’s enormously more efficient in getting the thing done on time to have fewer people working more – a lot less coordination overhead. You develop skills by doing something again and again and again – when my wife had breast cancer she looked for a surgeon who had done thousands of mastectomies, not for a 20-hour-a-week part-timer, even though someone could live perfectly well on a third of what her surgeon makes working 60.
There are other kinds of work which can be done perfectly well by part-timers – in law, wills and trusts, immigration work. Software maintenance for existing systems. Home handy-man (/woman). Bill Gates addressed the burnout/too many hours problem some in Microsoft by having people work hideous hours on development projects and once they were done, made them take real time off, go-to-Tahiti time off, and they came back seamlessly and valued into the organization two months later. Very smart for his group of employees, not so good for people with young children unless they were both on the system and could alternate.
As Jen notes, one reform which would help a great deal would be a switch from wholly employer-provided health care/pension, where the cost can be the same to the employer whether the employee is working 20 hours a week or 60, to some system which had less ‘squeeze-em’ incentives. Single-payer would change the incentives somewhat, though I haven’t heard that Canada or England is a paradise for part-timers, and I sure wouldn’t like to trade my Blue Cross/Blue Shield for the UK National Health Service. Maybe a pattern of paying a proportion of the health maintenance plan, and if a family had two part-timers they could pool their percentages?
October 31st, 2006 at 9:16 am
Dave, I also work in software, and I have a somewhat different impression. Yes, *short-term* and when you’re talking only about the costs to the employer, it’s better to have fewer individuals working high hours. But what about the IMHO pretty large numbers of people — men and women — driven out of the software industry completely because the hours are simply too long? What about the massive loss of educational ‘capital’ that we as a country squander when people make this choice? I’m sure you too have cringed and watched your best developer walk out the door because they’re just sick of the hours. And maybe like me you’ve worked on many software projects that are headed up by people who are simply too junior. They miss obvious stuff, they don’t have enough context, they make bad decisions. They put in tons of hours but are not as effective. And they’re in charge because the qualified people are not willing to sacrifice their home lives any more. I can’t even imagine how much this is costing everyone. More to Trafford’s original argument, software and law are exactly the kinds of work that you can do just as well when you’re 60 as you can when you’re 30.
My overall point is that there’s a very good chance our current setup actually costs *more* long-term when you include all costs to employers, government, and individuals. I just don’t see where the no-fault fairy comes into it.
One final point: there seems to be an unspoken assumption with the no-fault fairy comments that parents have to be able to cover the full expense of raising their kids. This is simply not feasible. Our society has always provided infrastructure for all kids — in terms of education, of baseline services like parks and playgrounds, in areas of safety such as Poison Centers and NTSB types of functions — and has not expected parents alone to pay for it. As a society we also pick up part of the expense of making the public sphere wheelchair-accessible, and we provide health care for the elderly.
It’s incredible that this has to be restated, but even just in terms of future dollars children are a direct contribution to our society. If anything I think there’s a no-fault fairy attitude on the part of those who believe the next generation of well-educated, healthy Americans is just going to appear out of thin air. Like, hmm, could it be all the childless folks at the same software development company who foster a family-hostile workplace but then b*tch to high heaven that they can’t find any good college grads to hire?
November 2nd, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Jen, I am not a software person, I am a midlevel bureaucrat. What I know about software is what I have heard from friends. I think we are talking past each other a little – you a bit about about how things oughta be if God were in His/er Heaven and all was right with the world, and me about whether Oracle is always going to eat PeopleSoft and whether a place with a family-friendly culture can survive a contest with one which is not.
Yes! we do things for folks who can’t do for themselves. And childless people should be grateful to me and my wife for raising three kids because how else are they going to get their asses wiped when they are old and grey. Their long-dead cats won’t do it, and neither will their old snapshots of their trips to Bermuda. But my No-Fault Fairy comments are a claim that I won’t be as good as the childless ones at getting product out fast. Or as good at mastectomies as my wife’s surgeon. It’s okay with me that there are several paths forward, and that we reward people for working big hours which are not compatible with both partners working them and raising several kids.
November 4th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Hi, all. Sorry to have been away so long, been doing the single-mom thing and wading through divorce. I’d had no idea how abominably people behave in divorce, btw. Not in mine, thank God. My off-the-rails no-planning divorce from a freaked-out guy with a disabling mental illness turns out to be a beautiful one. Crazy.
Anyway: I agree that the scheme sounds lovely but doesn’t take into account how real aging works, esp for those who haven’t got lucky genes and a gym habit. There’s something else, too, and it may just be me, but let’s call it the Jean Brodie factor. What I’m trying to do right now is nuts: I’m 38, working mad freelance hours, raising a child, writing, and have started up a putative academic career. It’s physically exhausting, but it’s all crazy enough to be fun. But I can’t imagine trying to hurl myself at three careers when I’m 60, unless I’m one fine 60.
Again, I don’t know how interested most people are in that kind of a life. But it just seems to me there’s something about early/midlife that’s good for working like a bat out of hell.
(Oh, and Shabbos becomes a real island this way. Often I’m working after candle-lighting time Fri nights, but Saturdays are for shul & spending time with Annelies and other families. I enjoy it now in a way I hadn’t before; it’s a real rest. Even if there’s a Sunday or Monday deadline, I usually know there’s not a hell of a lot I’m going to be able to do before Sat. eve, so I can just relax and take time slow. On rare occasions I’ve actually brought work to shul and sat in the library while my daughter ran around with other kids, gotten enough done to take the edge off, and then gone out to be with everyone else.)
November 11th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Hey, Elizabeth, did you catch the 20/20 piece on working moms last night? It was just so much fluff. A nice start, I guess, but without a lot of followup, I’m going to be extremely disappointed. I wrote more about it on my blog today — a toddler science blog, not a political blog — but wanted to email you and invite you to the conversation. Couldn’t find your email, so this will have to do! I’ve been thinking a lot about all of this lately, as the first flush of having a little one has passed and some of the craziness subsided. Would love to catch up with you someday!
February 14th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Here’s a clue: young lawyers would be willing to be paid less, if they could work fewer hours, and the old bulls in the firms aren’t willing to do it that way:
http://www.abanet.org/journal/redesign/02as.html
February 16th, 2007 at 11:02 am
more clues!
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21237494-23289,00.html
“Sixty to 70 per cent of our trainees are women, and women in their 30s have babies, and the men don’t want to be working the extra long hours my generation has done,” Tippett says. “People absolutely want more family time and that makes a difference to the number of people you train. The recommended training numbers have not been reviewed and we have not had sufficient increases.”
November 5th, 2008 at 10:21 am
This diabetes blogger is dead on in pointing out how much variance there is the ability of people to work into their 70s — and I think we need to think about the difference between hod carriers and receptionists in this context, as well:
http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2008/10/retirement-crisis-no-one-talks-about.html
November 5th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
It’s an excellent point. All the more reason to take care of yourself. Diabetes used to be relatively uncommon.