Half Changed World

Thanks to Alison for the link to this essay from the Family and Home Network with another take on the problems with the official Census statistics on at-home parents. Together with RebelDad’s comments, it’s clear that there are a large number of parents who work some of the time, but not full-time year-round, and who share some or many of the characteristics of at-home parents.

One paragraph from the Family and Home Network summary of the issue jumped out at me:

“However, the most frightening result of misunderstanding the DOL statistics has been in the area of public policy, especially regarding child care. Although “working mothers” include women who participate in the labor force in a variety of ways, the notion persists that every working mother needs and desires substitute care for her children. This mistaken assumption has led many well-intentioned people to routinely misuse the DOL statistics as “proof” of the need for more institutional child care.”

Overall, this organization, whose mission is to support at-home parents and parents who have cut back on paid employment in order to spend more time with their families, is pretty hostile to public support for child care. I disagree with this point of view, but I think it should be taken seriously by advocates of increased support for child care, such as the Family Initiative, which I talked about yesterday, and not just dismissed as an anti-feminist impulse wrapped in pro-child language.

There are two different reasons why an organization of at-home parents might be opposed to public support for child care. One is simply a matter of money — they object to the idea that families who are sacrificing financially in order to enable a parent to stay at home should pay more taxes in order to support child care, especially for families who have higher income than they do. The other is a much more subjective complaint; they believe that public funding of child care is a value statement that child care is just as good as — or better than — parental care. I’m not sure how to respond to this.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t some common ground. Woolsey’s Balancing Act, which would expand child care funding, also includes provisions that would make it easier for parents to work part-time, as well as a provision that would allow states to provide stipends to parents caring for newborns. Both of these are priorities of the Family and Home Network.

Last week, a group of women from the DC Working Moms email list met with some people from Legal Momentum’s Family Initiative, which is trying to mobilize grassroots support for public investments in quality child care, preschool, and after-school care.

It was an interesting conversation — the repeated theme was highly educated, well-off women commenting on how difficult they found it to navigate the crazy child care system and wondering how people without those sorts of resources ever managed to do it. It sounds like DC has a particular problem with infant care — even if you have the money for a child care center, the waiting lists are incredible, and for some reason there’s not much regulated in-home care.

The legislation that encompasses all of the issues that they care about is the Balancing Act, introduced by Lynn Woolsey. This bill is a wish list — more money for child care, paid family leave, guaranteed benefits for part-time workers — rather than anything that’s likely to get passed into law anytime soon. But if you think that it’s a good idea, write your Representative and ask him or her to cosponsor it. Even better, go to a town meeting sometime this election season, and ask about it during the open question period. The idea is to convince elected officials that this is something that their constituents — that means you — care about.

Today’s Washington Post has a front-page article about the use of long-term “perma-temp” workers in manufacturing. It’s a well-written, thoughtful article about a serious problem. The temps make less money, get less benefits, and have less job security than the permanent workers they share the assembly line with.

It does annoy me, however, that this article, like the previous one in the Post’s series on the Vanishing Middle Class, exclusively talks about male workers, even though women are significantly more likely to be temps than men. It’s not like the authors couldn’t find any women workers — in each article, one of the men is maried to a woman who works or worked for the same company.

What the articles get right, I think, is the degree to which the “decline of the middle class” is not about income declines, but about the increase in insecurity.

The good blue collar jobs are gone or going fast, but even higher education isn’t a guarantee of a good lifetime job. The overall numbers on health insurance obscure the number of people who are uncovered for short periods of time, or who have to keep changing doctors because their insurance provider shifts. Divorce rates are high. Bankruptcy rates are high. Young people don’t believe that Social Security will still exist when they’re ready to retire. More retirement plans are “defined contribution” and fewer are “defined benefit.” People are afraid that the good life is going to slip out from under them.

The new issue of Working Mother hit my mailbox yesterday, containing their new list of the 100 best companies for working mothers. I’m more than a little dubious about these lists, because there’s often a big gap beween the official company policies that are captured in these formulas and practice on the ground, especially around part-time work and non-standard schedules.

My sense is that if you have a supportive boss, you can often get flexible arrangements even if they’re not company policy, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck, regardless of what the manual says. I’d love to see data on what fraction of the workforce is taking advantage of these policies, broken out by gender (are they just creating a mommy track?), and on the career outcomes for people who work part-time or take extended leaves. I work for the federal government, which is overall reasonably family-friendly (with the glaring exception of ZERO paid parental leave), but I know people’s experiences vary dramatically from department to department and even office to office.

If any of my readers work at one of these 100 best companies and want to comment on what it’s really like, I’d love to hear your point of view.

Amy pointed out that in my discussion of flexibility on Monday, I didn’t talk much about stable flexible arrangements, especially shifted schedules. She’s right, and that’s ironic, as such schedules are very common in the Federal government. People love them, especially people who drive to work and want to avoid the utter craziness of DC-area traffic during rush hour. Working Mother reports that flexible hours are among the most common family friendly benefits, with 57 percent of companies offering flextime, and 34 percent offering compressed workweeks.

Of the benefits discussed in the study, the most common offered nationwide are dependent care flexible spending accounts, offered by 73 percent of all companies and mental health insurance, offered by 72 percent. (These figures are attributed to a Society for Human Resource Management survey, which I think means that it’s mostly large companies who were asked.) The least commonly offered benefits are take-home meals (3 percent), business-travel child care reimbursement (3 percent) and emergency/backup elder care (2 percent).

I’d also like to call attention to Corporate Voices for Working Families’ efforts to increase flexible working options for low-wage and hourly workers.

Many companies — even those that have very enlighted policies for their professional workforces — offer much less flexibility to their production and support workforces. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that only 47 percent of private sector workers have ANY paid sick leave. At a conference I attended, one woman explained how her company, a large food industry corporation, had just changed their policies so it was possible for production line workers to take less than a WEEK of leave at a time (but only if they could find someone to substitute for them on the line). I’m embarassed to admit that such a possibility had never occurred to me in my privileged professional position.

I read a nice article last week about how writing the Portraits of Grief that the New York Times ran after September 11 affected one of the journalists. She wrote:

“The profiles were about love – not the usual subject of daily newspapers – and that is probably why the project is still remembered with such intensity and affection”

That sounds about right to me.

I ran a trail half-marathon this morning. It wasn’t one of my better races. I was undertrained for the extremely hilly course, I probably started a bit too fast, and I took a couple of nasty spills and more near-misses than I can count. By mile 10 or so, I was tired and hurting. At this point in races, I usually ask myself “ok, why exactly am I doing this?” But I knew why I was running this race. Because I’m alive and healthy and I can run is reason enough.

Listening to the Republican convention, I was stunned to hear the following in the middle of President Bush’s speech:

“The times in which we work and live are changing dramatically. The workers of our parents’ generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company that provided health care and a pension. And most of those workers were men.

BUSH: Today, workers change jobs, even careers, many times during their lives. And in one of the most dramatic shifts our society has seen, two-thirds of all moms also work outside the home.”

Remember, this is a carefully crafted speech, where every phrase was clearly vetted by the pollsters and focus groups. Are soccer moms still considered swing voters this election? And do soccer moms work for pay?

The domestic policies mentioned were pretty much a laundry list of the usual Republican proposals: private investment accounts for social security, check; tax credits for health insurance, check; beat-up on trial lawyers, check; tax cuts, check.

Two of the proposals did strike me as interesting, so I took a closer look:

“In this time of change, many workers want to go back to school to learn different or higher-level skills. So we will double the number of people served by our principal job training program and increase funding for community colleges.”

Is Bush really proposing to increase funding for the Workforce Investment Act? No, spending would continue to be cut, as it has been steadily over the Bush administration. He’s convinced that administrative efficiencies could squeeze more training out of the same dollars. And funds would be moved around from one program to another. No real increases.

“In a new term we will change outdated labor laws to offer comp-time and flex-time. Our laws should never stand in the way of a more family-friendly workplace.”

Here’s the deal on this one: Most hourly employees are required to be paid overtime — time and a half — if they work more than 40 hours in a week. The Republicans have been arguing that they should be able to provide workers with comp time instead — paid leave hours to be taken at a different time. As a federal worker, I can earn comp time; for example, I came in an hour early a couple of days last week so I can come in late on Wednesday, when my son starts preschool. It’s a popular benefit.

So what’s the catch? Labor unions and others have been adamently opposed to the comp-time proposals, because they’re convinced that employers will abuse them — requiring workers to take comp-time instead of overtime, but then only allowing them to use it at employers’ convenience (e.g. when there’s a quiet time at work), rather when the worker wants it (whether for a parent-teacher conference, or to get outdoors on a perfect spring afternoon). Particularly for temporary and seasonal workers, there’s a lot of potential for abuse — you could require holiday workers to work 60 or 70 hours weeks, let them earn comp time, and then tell them they have to use it all up in January because they’re being let go at the end of the month. Such workers would lose all the benefits they currently get from overtime, and wouldn’t gain at all.

The Republicans argue that it’s crazy to stop most workers from getting a benefit they want because of the potential for a few bad employers to abuse it, and say that there will be protections for workers in the law. And the unions say “oh right, the way you enforce protections in current law. Not a chance.” The problem is they’re both right.

Have a good Labor Day. Remember the bumper sticker: “The American Labor Movement: The People Who Brought You The Weekend.”

Tonight I’m praying for the safety of the hostages in Beslan, Russia. I keep looking at the photographs of their families, looking at the drawn faces of people who haven’t slept, who can’t do anything but wait, and imagining myself in their shoes. At work, I found myself repeatedly checking the news headlines to see if anything had changed.

I knew when I had children that I’d be letting myself in for sleepless nights worrying about them. I didn’t know how much I’d be worrying about all the children of the world. I have to shut myself away from the news some days in order to function.

I realized tonight that some of my recent stress and anxiety is probably related to the upcoming anniversary of September 11. I really hate that every cool sunny fall day makes me think of the attacks. It was such a beautiful day.

Reading the Washington Post on the train this morning, I noticed an interesting paragraph buried at the end of an otherwise dull article about a new magazine being launched.

“He [Hull] has been able to assemble a relatively cheap and highly-skilled workforce of former professionals who are now stay-at-home parents. ‘These are mostly women who aren’t in dire need of money and can make a choice to do something that is fun and interesting to them,’ said Beaman, a former editor and interior designer who has been at home raising two children and will continue to work at home.”

Or maybe they’re desperate for something that will help cover the hole in their resumes? Notwithstanding the claims of Ann Crittenden’s new book, it seems like taking a few years out of the workforce to raise children is still being penalized by employers much more than could be accounted for by erosion of skills — and at least some news accounts suggest that it’s worse for men than for women.

It seems that employers take the fact that you’ve taken some time out of the workforce as a signal that you’re not serious about working, that you don’t have the fire in the belly, that you might resist working 80 hours a week.

I’ve heard some suggestions that demographics will force employers to re-examine these prejudices, that they’ll be desperate for skilled workers as the baby boom generation moves into retirement and is replaced by a much smaller cohort of workers. I wish I were more convinced.

Whoo hooo. I installed XP SP2, and my computer and my wireless connection are both still functional.

Jen asked the darn good question of why the US doesn’t do more about child poverty. Is it just that children don’t vote (and old people do)?

I think that’s part of the story, but only a part. After all, children don’t vote in Europe either, and almost all European countries have a much more extensive safety net. And middle-class children are subsidized through the tax system, especially in the wake of the Bush tax cuts.

So what’s going on?

In particular, I wonder why there’s essentially no discussion in the US about a universal child stipend, available to upper income families as well as poor families, as many European countries have. Some liberal policy wonks have circulated a proposal for universal child credit through the tax system, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any serious public attention.

My cynical thought is that the countries that have more pro-child policies are less ethnically and racially diverse, and so there’s more of a willingness to subsidize other people’s kids, but I haven’t looked at the data to see if that’s true.

It’s also worth noting one major exception to the overall trend: Over the past 6 or so years, almost all low-income children have become eligible for public health insurance. Children are actually quite inexpensive to insure, so it didn’t cost a ton of money, and it’s such an obviously good idea that Congress was willing to do it, even without a huge public outcry demanding it.

Last fall, the New York Times magazine ran a long cover story called “The Opt-Out Revolution,” by Lisa Belkin which talks about the choices that some highly educated professional women have made to either leave paid employment entirely, or to leave the “career track.” Belkin suggests — while carefully noting both that this is an extremely selective sample, and that it is “dangerous and loaded” to suggest that women are inherently different from men — that “women are rejecting the workplace.”

Another day I’ll come back to this claim and look at the statistics more closely, but for today I want to talk about why this article was so controversial, especially among working mothers.

1) They’re worried that it will lead employers to be less likely to hire and promote women and mothers, because they’ll think that they’re not going to stay around after they have kids (what economists call “statistical discrimination.”) No matter how much Belkin tries to insert caveats, the fact that this was on the front cover of the Times magazine gives it much more than the usual anecdotal weight.

2) Where are the men? There’s absolutely no discussion of the husbands of these women — whether they were involved parents, whether they ever considered cutting back the hours they worked, what they thought about being totally responsible for the family’s income. Maybe they’d love to “reject the workplace” but don’t feel like it’s a viable option. Who knows? Not the reader of this article.

3) Almost in passing, through a quote from a single anthropologist, the article suggests that child care is bad for kids: “‘At this moment in Western civilization,’ [Sarah Blaffer] Hrdy says, “seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who’s just there for a year, or in inadequate day care.'” Excuse me? There’s plenty of inadequate child care out there, but the odds of kids whose parents earn this much being in it are pretty low. [Thanks to Salon’s Ann Marlowe for pointing out the dishonesty of “I Don’t Know How She Does It” in this regard.] Belkin doesn’t necessarily endorse this point of view, but she doesn’t offer any countervailing voices.

4) The article doesn’t offer any hope or advice for the large numbers of working men and women who agree that the workplace is ludicrously unfriendly to families, but who don’t have the luxury of choosing to just walk away. Maybe it’s possible, as Belkin suggests at the end of the article, that large numbers of women walking away from the workplace will change employers’ behavior, but I’m not holding my breath.

…….

A tip of my hat to Russ at the Daily Yak for noting my arrival in the blogosphere. This is a “journal” type blog, from the perspective of a SAHD. I wonder if SAHDs are more likely than SAHMs to blog, or if I’m just more aware of them…

…….

Tomorrow the Census Bureau will release the poverty statistics for 2003. I’ll kick off my weekly statistical report by checking in on them. They’re unlikely to be good news.