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The following text
is from an August 6, 2005 presentation at the Second National Take
Back Your Time Conference in Seattle, Washington.
I'm
in town with my husband and children this week, and when
my older son heard I wouldn't be joining the family for breakfast
this morning, he said: "What kind of group would schedule a
mom to speak so early on a Saturday morning? They must think dad
is going to take us out for doughnuts."
I mention this not as
a criticism, but to draw attention to the often unseen and unacknowledged
work of care that makes our daily lives run. As much as my kids,
who are now 8 and 12, might like to be set loose to roam the streets
of Seattle -- ever since we arrived, they've been determined to
track down the former haunts of their grunge rock idols -- it's reassuring
to know my husband is keeping an eye on them. By caring for
our children, my husband is also caring for me -- in the same way
that I often care for him -- by supporting my work, which is the
work of social change.
I'm going to tell you
why we need time for care and what it will take to get it, but before
I launch into an overview of family-friendly public policy and the
barriers to enacting it in the United States, I ought to explain
that I've come to understand caregiving not only as a core social
and economic issue, but also as a deeply ethical practice. Not because
caring for others requires exceptional self-sacrifice -- under more equitable conditions, it would not -- but because caregiving
is one of the few activities of contemporary life that routinely
grounds us in our humanity. When we ask for more time to care, I
suspect what we most desire is the temporal freedom to enjoy a richer
connection with our loved ones, our communities and our world. I
also happen to believe that by making time to care a national
priority -- and by assuring that the work of care is more fairly apportioned
between men and women, and between more and less economically and
socially privileged groups of people -- we open the possibility
of creating a more humane and just society, and a more perfect democracy.
In their recent book
The Time Divide,
sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson show that America's
time crisis is not simply a product of escalating work hours across
the board. In fact, Jacobs and Gerson's comprehensive review of
historical data on working hours found the length of the average
work week of men and women in the United States has remained relatively
stable since 1960. But average hours of weekly work per household -- particularly in households headed by married couples with children
-- have skyrocketed in the last three decades. Jacobs and Gerson
also found that the "time squeeze" plays out very differently
for U.S. workers depending on their education, occupational status
and gender. While very educated workers, who are most likely to
work as salaried professionals, put in exceptionally long hours,
less educated workers -- who are more likely to work in the service
sector for hourly wages -- have fewer employer-provided benefits
and often have fewer hours of paid work than they need to earn a
living. Men invariably spend more time on the job than women, and
married fathers work and earn more than other men, while mothers
consistently work and earn less than other women. Proponents of
the emerging mothers' movement point out that the difference between
mothers and fathers work hours and earnings exacerbates gender inequality
at home and in the workplace, leaving mothers disproportionately
at risk for economic hardship over the life course.
Jacobs and Gerson's observations
about the bifurcation of American's working time led them to define
the contemporary time problem as the time divide. They
argue that the lopsided distribution of working time in the U.S.
creates or reinforces a structural divide between work and family,
men and women, and parents and non-parents. They also found that
for both workers who work too much and those who have too little
work to make ends meet, there is a significant gap between the hours
Americans would prefer to work and their actual hours of
work. Jacobs and Gerson emphasize that individual preferences for
longer or shorter work hours have little impact on the way we work:
"We cannot assume that workers’ choices are merely a
reflection of their own personal preferences," they write.
"In a myriad of ways, the world of work is organized and structured
by forces far beyond any worker’s control." I'm using
Jacobs and Gerson's analysis of the "time divide" as a
starting point because I believe their model is especially salient
to understanding why we need more and better family policy in the
U.S., and what it can -- and cannot -- accomplish. |
