March 19, 2003
Work and Families
Contemporary power distribution in families
Power and authority
Authority is legitimated power. Those who are being influenced acknowledge the right of someone to supervise and control their behavior.
The Family’s Internal Economy – the way in which income is allocated to meet the needs of each member of a household and whose preferences shape how income is spent.
Men’s power has exceeded women’s power in almost every historical setting.
In order to study the relationship between economy and power, we need to understand two economic concepts: production for exchange value and production for use value.
Exchange value – labor that can be exchanged for wages
Use value – labor that is useful to maintenance of the family but does not have exchange value.
Women’s work has always had use value but has not always had exchange value.
In a Family-based economy – all members of the family produced what they needed; this work had use value. Moreover, members of the family produced excess so that it could be exchanged – sometimes for services; sometimes for money.
Labor market mode of production briought about the concept of production for exchange.
Work that can be exchanged for money is the work that is tied to power.
Relationship-specific investment – time spent on activities such as childrearing that are valuable only in a person’s current relationship. This is usually the work of women. If a wife initiates a divorce, keeps custody of the children and wishes to remarry, she will likely find that the children in whom she has invested much time and effort lower her attractiveness to prospective husbands. Her efforts to nurture and support her first husband and her ties to his family won’t do her any good in the marriage market. Her income will probably be lower than before she divorced.
Husbands tend to invest time and effort in their jobs, accruing, seniority, promotions and wage and salary increases.
These job investments can more easily be transferred to another marriage, because prospective wives will value the increased earnings.
Even when wives do work for pay, they may be required to turn over their income to their husbands or fathers. But where wives have control over earnings from production for exchange, they have more power.
Contemporary changes in familial power
Balance of power has shiftedfor the following reasons:
Changes in attitudes: In 1977 66% of adults agreed with the statement, "Do you agree or disagree that it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and the family?" In 1996, only 38% agreed. In 1977, 42 percent of working mothers with preschool children agreed with the statement "a preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works." In 1996, 23% agreed with the statement.
Increase in dual-earner marriages/increase of married women in the workforce.
The percentage of married women who work outside the home has increased significantly. In 1998, 77% of all married women with school-age children were employed or looking for work. 64% for women with pre-school- age children. (63% for white women, 76% African-American women).
Expansion of service sector – workers who provide personal services such as education health café, communication, restaurant meals, legal representation, entertainment and so forth. Many of the jobs in the service sector had come to be stereotyped as women’s work.
Lower birthrates – As the population shifted from farms to cities, each generation (except for the parents of the baby boomers) had fewer children. Since children were no longer an asset, parents’ preferred strategy was to have fewer children and to invest more resources in each. This strategy freed married women sooner from childcare, the major responsibility that had kept women out of the labor force. Lower birth rates and longer adult lives have made child rearing, for most women, a temporary job. Rearing children occupies less of a mother's lifetime than it did in the past, so women are investing much more in developing careers. They are postponing marriage and using that time to get a foothold in the labor market.
Growth of women's incomes relative to men's
Discuss two concepts _
Formal sector – the part of the economy that consists of jobs that meet legal standards for minimum wages, are relatively long-lasting and secure, include fringe benefits such as contributions to Social security or health insurance, often have possibilities for advancement and are sometimes unionized.
Informal sector – the part of a national’s economy that consists of temporary or casual jobs that sometimes offer illegal sub minimum wags and that have little security, little possibility for advancement, and no fringe benefits.
These two types of sectors are sometimes referred to the primary and secondary sectors. Women more than men can be found in the informal or secondary sector.
From 1960 to about 1980, the average women who worked full-time, year round, earned about 60cents for each dollar earned by a comparable man. To be sure, women have worked outside the home less, on average, than men have during their adult lives, so they have accrued less seniority, on-the-job training, and so forth. Yet differences in job experience appear to account for only about one-fourth to one-half of the gap. The differences are mainly due to employer discrimination and occupational segregation (the type of work women do is different from the type of work men do).
Since 1980 women’s average earnings have increased faster than men’s reaching 74 cents for each dollar a man earned in 1996 before dropping to 72 cents in 1999. Black women earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by black men.
Women’s earning rose relative to men’s in the 1980s and 1990s because some women workers were doing better economically and some men were doing worse.
Earnings for women with college education rose; earnings for women without college education did not rise much. Likewise, earnings for men without college education declined.
The Stalled Revolution -
Cherlin notes that neither employers nor government nor many men recognize the inescapable consequence: working mothers need support if they are to balance their double burned of being a mother and being a worker outside the home.
How has the amount of housework and childcare done by husbands and wives changed over the past half-century?
Wives have moved into the labor force but husbands have not yet adjusted. Employed wives work a "second shift" of household tasks and childcare. In addition, to the burden this situation imposes on wives, the stalled revolution may hurt men, whose wives "cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands."
Gendered Labor in the Household – Domestic labor maintains families and sustains the economy. Numerous studies find that women do much more housework than men, even if both work full-time.
Over the past two decades, married mothers have experienced a decline in their hours of housework (from about 30 to about 20 hours per week). But “married fathers picked up only part of the slack, increasing their household work from about five hours a week to about ten hours.”
Family tasks are strongly gendered whether or not the wife is employed. Men work on cars and do yard work, home repairs, and household errands, while women almost exclusively do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, mending, and childcare. So women and men's work in the household is very different than men. Women's work is repetitive and daily more than men's.
Husbands of working wives spend about one-third as much time on housework as do their wives - about an hour and a half per day compared to four and half-hours for their wives.
Husbands do not share equally in the housework even if the wife works full time, even if the husband is unemployed, and even if the husband profess that spouses should share equally in domestic work.
Husbands tend to do relatively more housework if there is a child under the age of two, if they are better educated and if they are younger.
The general pattern of gendered household labor does not vary greatly by social class or race. Although some studies suggest that African-American men and Latino men contribute more to housework than white men do. There is some suggestion that middle-class men talk more about equality in household work and working-class men actually do more. Working class men might talk about “helping out” in women’s work – just as working class women may talk about “helping out her husband by working.” This may be related to the fact that they typically earn less.
Division of labor in household labor is somewhat tied to the relative earning power of wives. thatis, women who earn an income, may have more say in decision-making. However, there is not a linear correlation between earning power and division of labor because ideas about proper roles for women and men come into play.
Gender Ideologies – men and women come to the marriage with different ideologies of what are appropriate gender roles -
When there is cognitive dissonance (when our beliefs don't match our reality), the dissonance needs to be managed. Example: The Upstairs-Downstairs: A Family Myth as “Solution.” This is an example of mystification.
Other forms of family work – In addition to tasks commonly associated with housework, there are many formerly unrecognized aspects of family work:
interaction work – the work that women do to sustain communication with their mates.
Emotion work – the work of trying to find the right feeling to make and keep everything fine.
Kin work – the upkeep and ritual celebrations of cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls, presents and cards to kin, the organization of holiday gatherings; the creation and maintenance of quasi-kin relations and decisions to neglect or intensify particular ties.
Consumption work – Involves selecting goods and making purchases, Like housework, these other forms of family work are typically done by women.
Effects of power changes
Role overload - The state of having too many roles with conflicting demands. The growth of dual-earner families and employed single parents has raised concerns that parents may be performing too many roles with conflicting demands. However, research has not found a clear relationship between the numbers of roles a person must manage and the degree of distress she or he experiences. There is some indication that people with multiple roles have better mental health. But it could be that mentally healthy people are more active. Menaghan has suggested that a combination of roles may cause distress mainly when it differs from the normal, expected combination for a person of a particular gender and age. (For example, a working mother in the 1950s would find little social support for her several roles).
Cherlin says that rather than role overload some Americans may be suffering from too much paid work. Some Americans are overworked, others are under worked. College-educated people with professional and managerial jobs ere working longer hours in 1997 than in 197o. Most of these people received weekly salaries that remained the same no matter how many hours they worked. Consequently, employers have had an incentive to pressure them to work longer hours, especially given the downsizing of the workforce in many firms.
In contrast, workers without college educations were working fewer hours in 1997 than in 1970. These workers tended to receive hourly wages, which meant their employers had to pay them more for every extra hour worked.
At the top of the labor market workers are feeling overloaded but economically secure; at the lower end, they are feeling underemployed and economically insecure.
Spillover - the fact that stressful events in one part of a person's daily life often spill over into other parts of her or his life.
Joseph Pleck has argued that spillover involving work and family operates in opposite ways for employed men and employed women. The demands of family life are permitted to intrude into women's jobs more than into men's jobs because supervisors and coworkers expect that when a family emergency arises, mothers rather than fathers will be called upon to deal with it. In contrast the stresses of work are permitted to include on family life more for men than for women. Because men's jobs are often seen as more demanding and more central t the family's well-being.
The uneven relationships of men and women to work and family is conceptualized by Joseph Pleck as the “work-family role system.” Within this system, the traditional public and private division of labor is supported, and it is more difficult for women to fulfill career demands than men.
Men also appear more likely to withdraw from their families in reaction to a stressful day at work.
For many blue-collar workers, other causes of stress may be low pay, dirty or dangerous work, or dehumanizing treatment by superiors. Blue-collar men bring their troubles home in ways similar to middle-class men.
Childcare dilemmas - childcare is expensive and the work world has not been responsive to the needs of parents, nor has the government been responsive. How to care for children while parents work is seen as an individual not a societal problem. One increasingly common way for dual-earner couples to manage childcare is to work split shifts, a practice that provides children with parental care but can strain a marriage to the point of divorce. In a national sample of recently married couples with children who were followed for five years, divorce was six times more likely among husbands who worked a night schedule rather than a day schedule.
Single parents do not have the luxury of relying on a spouse.
Unemployment - Unemployment is more likely to cause marital problems among couples whose marriages are already shaky before the husband or wife lost a job. Economic strain leads husbands to behave in a hostile way toward their wives - as well as to reduce their warm, supportive behavior. The husbands' hostility and lack of warmth, in turn lead wives to feel less positively about their marriages. Studies suggest that it is not as much the absence of supportive behavior as the presence of angry, irritable, hostile behavior that triggers these declines in the quality of the marriage.
Solutions to contemporary work difficulties - What is the reality of a responsive workplace - a work setting in which job conditions are designed to allow employees to meet their family responsibilities more easily?
Family responsibilities are important to workers. In a 1992 survey, 605 said that the job's effect on personal and family life was very important. 46% said that family-supportive policies at the job were important.
62% of the new entrants to the labor force between 1998 and 2006 will be women, many of whom will have family responsibilities.
Small firms are much less likely to offer family-friendly policies for several reasons:
They typically do not invest as much time and money training new workers so they don't have as much to lose if employees quite because of family-related problems.
They don't have the volume of workers necessary to make services such as on-site childcare cost-effective.
Because of their lower sales revenues, they cannot pass along the costs of the policies to consumers as easily as large firms can.
Larger firms, which tend to have better-paying, steadier jobs and better-educated workforces, offer better policies to help workers achieve balance between the demands of work and family; smaller forms, which tend to have lower-paying, less-steady jobs and less-well-educated workforces, provide less help. So middle-class, well-educated mangers and professionals and better-paid blue-collar factory workers are much more likely to be offered assistance with family demands than are less-advantaged workers, such as the part-time and temporary workers or low-paid service workers.
Assistance is limited even among large firms - usually establishing information and referral offices. Sometimes cash benefits - salary reduction plans that allow workers not to pay taxes on the part of their earnings (up to a limit) they spend on childcare. Yet these plans are of more value to higher-paid employees - who can afford to have the extra earnings withheld from their paychecks by their employers and who pay a greater percentage of their incomes in taxes - than to working class employees. In 1995, only 8% of companies that had 100 or more workers provided any child-care assistance benefits.
Flextime - a policy that allows employees to choose, within limits, when they will begin and end their working hours. Flextime doesn't necessarily increase the amount of time parents can spend with their children, but it does allow them to avoid stressful conflicts between childcare and job responsibilities.
Other less common solutions - Job sharing and part-time work with benefits.
Parental leave - Family Leave Act (1993) requires companies with 50 or more employees to offer unpaid leaves of up to 12 weeks to employees with newborn babies or seriously ill children or other dependents (like parents). Employers must allow employees to return to their jobs at the end of the leave. There is also a New Jersey parental leave act. However, there are restrictions on these acts - like you may not return to the same job, they can deny you the leave if there is not someone in the organization with the skills to do your job and of course, it is unpaid.
The United States when compared to other industrialized nations is "stingy in its family benefits." It does not have a national policy requiring paid maternity leave. In addition, nearly every western European country has a child allowance - a flat payment to families for each child they have, whether the mother is employed or not, and regardless of income.
The best we do is a Child tax credit for families with children under 17. Cherlin reminds us that only families with income-tax liabilities will receive the credit; if you don't make enough money to pay any income tax, you are not eligible.
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