Half Changed World

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“In a new term we will change outdated labor laws to offer comp-time and flex-time.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.

Hi. I did write a book review last night, about Helen Simpson’s “Getting a Life,” but then I did something wrong and the computer swallowed it. I’ll try again, maybe next week, maybe sooner. Right now I’m feeling like I need to spend a little more time on my own life, a little less time on this blog. Tracking down all the paperwork needed to get my son registered for preschool and for the speech services he gets from the public school is taking far too much energy.

Ok, blog ettiquette question. As soon as I posted Monday night, I had some more thoughts on the topic that I wanted to add — in particular, I realized that I blurred together not wanting to be on the high-stress grab the bronze ring track and not taking work seriously. What’s the etiquette on going back and revising, versus adding a new post with additional thoughts? I get the impression that someone receiving the blog over a RSS feed might never see the edits; is that right?

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.

I wasn’t sure I was going to post today, as I spent nap time watching the Olympic marathon instead of writing. (Hurrah for my TiVo, which lets me watch what I want during my extremely limited viewing time, and means that my son has probably seen less than 100 commercials in his life.)

I don’t run very much these days, but I’m still on a running email list. I’ve known these people for years, and consider them my friends. Recently, a few of them were commenting that they wished they had started running marathons when they were 30, so they could have seen what they could do before aging started catching up with them. Well, I still dream of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, but it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s not just the time that the training runs would take from the rest of my life, it’s the idea of spending a weekend chasing after my boys AFTER having done a 20 miler in the morning. I ran about 7 hilly trail miles last week and I was toast afterwards.

When I find myself getting frustrated at the things that I can’t do because of the commitments of parenting, I remind myself that the boys will only be in this very needy stage for a short period of time, a small fraction of my expected life. According to official statistics, I can expect to live almost another 50 years. As one of my friends likes to say, you can have it all, just not all at once.

And yet, there are doors that can’t be reopened once closed. Kids grow up. Taking 5 years out of the workforce shouldn’t totally change the options that are available for the next 45 years, but it all too often does. I hope that I’m still running 20 years from now, but my knees or something might not allow it. Or I could drop dead next week. So I’m not willing to totally postpone things that are important to me. This means I’m often overcommitted, often tired. But I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

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.

On an email list I used to be on, the rule was that you could only forward jokes to the list on Fridays — “bad joke day.” This email I received from a parenting list qualifies in my book:

Are your kids OUT OF CONTROL?
If so, GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK and contact NANNY 911!

FOX and Granada USA are looking for families that have a child or children who are out of control for the upcoming new unscripted series NANNY 911. Our “Nanny Specialists” will come to your home, assess the situation, and work their incredible “Mary Poppins”-like magic to transform your terrible tykes into perfect angels. To take part in this fun, family TV show, applicants must be legal residents of the U.S. with children between 2 and 9 years of age.

Oh fer cripes sake. That’s just what your messed up kids need — to be on a reality TV show.

*************

My weekend plans include installing XP SP2 onto my computer. If I don’t post again for a while, you’ll know why.

More later, but the official 2003 poverty data are out.

The child poverty rate in 2003 was 17.6 percent, up from 16.7 percent the year before (although, as my bosses are going to repeat endlessly today, lower than the 20.5 percent it was in 1996). The overall poverty rates are also up, but it’s all driven by the increase in child poverty — adult poverty was unchanged. Census says that the increase in child poverty is all driven by an increase in poverty among single-parent households — the poverty rate among married-couple households is unchanged.

Sigh.

Ok, it’s later. This data isn’t terribly surprising — the poverty rate typically goes up for a while after a recesssion, and everyone knows that this has been a particularly anemic recovery, especially on the job front. You can’t really blame it on welfare reform, as welfare never gave people enough money to get out of poverty. But it’s still depressing.

Here’s the graph that I like to show people when I talk about poverty and public policy.

[The image fit onto the blog on my computer, but I’ve heard that it’s being cut off on some — the link is http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/img/incpov03/fig10.jpg if it’s not showing up properly for you.]

What this tells me is that government really can make a difference — the huge improvements of the 1960s are driven by the War on Povery, including the expansion of Social Security to cover a much larger fraction of the elderly population. But there hasn’t been the willpower to fight child poverty in the same way.

Which leads me to the most important news story that you won’t read in your paper — The Incredible Shrinking Budget, by Gene Steuerle at the Urban Institute. It’s about the structural imbalance between Social Security and Medicare, which automatically grow to meet the need, and programs that serve kids, which have to compete for funding with everything else in the budget. And it’s about how those programs are going to get squeezed in the coming years between the Bush tax cuts (whose costs are back-loaded) and the needs of the retiring baby boomers. It’s only 8 pages, and everyone who cares about children should read 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.

I’ve got about a hundred and one books that I’d like to write about, so I think I’m going to have a weekly book review. Note that the "books I’m talking about" list will include books that ticked me off as well as ones I’d recommend, so check out the review before you treat the inclusion as an endorsement.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Flux. In brief, the author, Peggy Orenstein, interviewed dozens of women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s to see how their attitudes about work/family/life issues differed at different life stages. The synthesized findings are wrapped around portraits of individual women, and her own musings about whether to become a parent. This book is an easy, mostly enjoyable read. The women are portrayed sympathetically, and largely allowed to speak in their own words.

The sections on parenting largely cover ground that has been covered by other authors. What I hadn’t seen elsewhere (at the time) is the wledgment that by the time you’ve been in the workforce for 10 or so years, the bloom is often off the rose. Obviously, it depends on your career path, but in lots of jobs, you’re starting to hit the flat side of the learning curve, the excitement has worn off, and you’re starting to ask "is this really what I want to do with the next 30 years of my life?" For many of the women in their 30s in Orenstein’s book, becoming a mother was a socially acceptable opportunity to step back from their careers and to see their lives as a whole and to reflect on their priorities, a sabbatical of sorts.

The other part of Orenstein’s book that I liked is her recognition of what seems obvious to me — the main reason that many women postpone childbearing until their late 30s isn’t because they’re so focused on their careers, as Sylvia Ann Hewett suggests, but because they’d rather not go it alone, and they haven’t met a partner who is ready to parent.