The Mothers Movement Online
www.mothersmovement.org

< back

2005 TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY

Why we need time to care

The gap in U.S. family policy

By Judith Stadtman Tucker

October 2005

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 hunt 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.

Fixing the time divide

Work-life experts and caregivers' advocates usually prescribe a comprehensive package of policy remedies for America's time conflict. These recommendations generally fall into three broad categories: caregiver supports, working time regulations, and job and earnings protections.

Since nearly all family-friendly policies intend to promote better integration of work and family life by reducing potential earnings loss and occupational costs associated with unpaid caregiving, most could be classified as "caregiver supports." However, I use the term more narrowly to describe benefits and regulations designed to improve the economic security and well-being of men and women who devote substantial time to unpaid carework and who may, or may not, also have paid employment. This group of policy solutions cuts across income and occupational groups and includes Social Security benefits and disability coverage for non-employed caregivers, welfare policies and regulations which provide for unpaid caring work as a social good, refundable tax credits for family caregivers, guaranteed child support for lone parents, low- or no-cost quality healthcare for all children and adults, living wages, affordable housing, top-notch public education plus continuing education and vocational training for adolescents and adults, respite care services for individuals caring for frail and disabled family members, full consideration of the value of the primary caregivers' contribution to a couples' earnings and assets when parents separate or divorce, adding unpaid carework to national productivity measurements, and excellent, affordable childcare for everyone who wants and needs it.

If we could implement any or all of these policies (which, to put it mildly, is something of long shot given the present political climate in the U.S.), it would definitely improve the quality of life and financial security of millions of individuals -- primarily women and mothers -- who sustain the nation's economy and social order with an invisible stream of unpaid carework. These types of policies have also been shown to reduce child poverty -- and of course, the United States has the dubious distinction of having highest rate of child poverty among very wealthy nations. However, caregiver supports alone won't resolve the conditions underlying our time crisis, even though they would make it less costly to women and families. Nor would these policies automatically resolve the gender divide, since caregiver supports typically aim to reduce the detrimental effects of the status quo on unpaid caregivers without interrupting the conventional organization of paid and family work.

The next layer of policies to mend America's time divide are family-friendly working time regulations, which include the elimination of compulsory overtime, caps on overtime hours for waged and salaried workers, the controversial proposal of making all but the top-earning 10 to 15 percent of professional and managerial workers eligible for overtime pay, guaranteeing the right of all employees to reduced and flexible work hours, establishing a minimum number of paid vacation days for all workers, and (my personal favorite) legislative enactment of a shorter standard workweek. It should also be noted that this package of regulations would benefit most workers throughout the life course, not just parents and other caregivers. And if we look at the practice of caregiving in the broadest possible sense, such as philosopher Joan Tronto's definition of care as an activity that "includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible," it's clear that workers other than parents and family caregivers potentially have many opportunities and obligations to give care.

But given the dominant narrative of winner-take-all individualism in America's popular and political culture, legal and lay interpretations of "at-will" employment, and well organized resistance to imposing additional restrictions and costs on business owners, proposals for more worker- and family-friendly working time regulations seem boldly utopian in their scope. In fact, despite an unprecedented number of public comments opposing proposed changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act that substantially redefine the categories of workers ineligible for overtime pay, the Bush administration recently pushed through the revisions in an effort to protect business owners from expensive lawsuits resulting from FSLA violations.

However, family-friendly working time regulations could have the greatest effect on correcting the existing disparities between "living to work" and "working to live," mothers and fathers, parents and non-parents, and more-educated and less-educated workers. Establishing and enforcing more stringent restrictions on working time would reduce employers' incentives to overwork salaried employees by making it more costly, and might ultimately contribute to a healthy shift toward a more qualitative, rather than quantitative, method of assessing on-the-job productivity. If most or all of these regulations were put in place, it could potentially -- but would not inevitably -- make men's average working hours, both in terms of paid work and caring work, much closer to those of women. But any way you slice it, setting more humane limits on employers' entitlement to their employees' time would free up more hours for all working people for caregiving, civic engagement, learning and fun.

The third critical group of worker and family supports are job and earnings protections, such as disability and unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, job-protected paid parental and medical leave, minimum paid sick leave for all U.S. workers with the guarantee that sick days can be used to care for an ill child, and regulations requiring employers to provide proportional pay and opportunities for advancement to workers who work less than full-time. Jacobs, Gerson and other work-life experts also recommended making it less cost effective to under-employ workers by requiring employers to provide all employees with the same level of benefits, regardless the number of hours they work. Included in this subset of policies are laws prohibiting sex and pregnancy discrimination in pay, promotion and hiring. Activist seeking legal remedies to work-life conflict have proposed petitioning state legislatures to add language barring discrimination against parents and family caregivers to their human rights statutes, which could be another critical step toward making the jobs and earnings of working parents more secure.

As dismal as the social policy outlook is for America's families -- especially compared to more generous family-friendly provisions available to workers and caregivers in most other economically developed countries -- job protections are one area where the United States has made minor progress. Although it took ten years and a number of significant compromises to pass, The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees workers who work a minimum number of hours in a 12-month period, and who work for a business with fifty or more employees, 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave for child birth and infant care, or for their own serious medical condition. Unfortunately, the FMLA presently covers only a little over half of all private sector workers in the U.S. And because it only provides unpaid leave, many workers can't afford to take leave when they need it, or can't afford to take the longer leave needed to recover from a serious illness or childbirth. The FMLA does allow fathers to take paternity leave, although new fathers are less likely to take family leave than mothers. Anecdotal reports and some qualitative studies suggest that men are still hesitant to use family-friendly policies offered by their employers because they fear pay and job-related penalties.

On the brighter side, California recently enacted a paid leave law and many paid leave advocates are confident more states will follow suit in the next decade. Still, with new studies indicating paid leaves longer than 12 weeks reduce infant mortality and improve children's developmental outcomes — but shorter and unpaid leaves do not — it's once again clear that the best thing the U.S. has to offer working parents is still too little, and too late.

According to recent, nationally representative surveys, a strong majority of American adults support implementing paid family and medical leave. Fewer than 10 percent of American mothers strongly agree that our society is doing "a good job" of meeting the needs of families, and an overwhelming majority feel that improving the quality and affordability of child care, enabling fathers to spend more time with their children, and promoting greater financial security for mothers should be a national priority. So it doesn't seem to be the drift of public opinion that drives the government's apathy toward the chronic time deficit of American workers and families.

We're then left with a question: When realistic policy solutions seem so far out of reach, what can the time and caregivers' movements do to heal the time divide? If you're at all familiar with books and studies by social researchers about the gap in U.S. family policy and its disastrous consequences for women and children (and I've read dozens), then you're probably aware that the experts tend to reach the same conclusion. America could look a lot more like Canada, or France, or Finland without sacrificing its commitment to the free market system and foundational ideals -- in fact, American families would undoubtedly be healthier and happier if we took a page or two from the playbook of peer nations who do more to protect workers' family time and enable maternal employment. It's not actually an aversion to increased social spending that makes America more work-friendly than family-friendly, these scholars argue, but our national leadership's astonishing lack of political imagination and will.

While it's patently clear that America can and must do a much better job of supporting its caregivers and families, I think it's essential to acknowledge the complex cultural and historical factors that make comprehensive family policy such a low political priority in the U.S. Let me go out on a limb here and suggest that in the big picture of world history, America is still a new nation. Our culture is characterized by a single-mindedness about doing things our own way -- sort of like a stubborn toddler, but we have more dangerous toys at our disposal and global clout. I believe the root of the contemporary time crisis is that America has not yet figured out what it means to be a caring society, or whether or not we want to be one.

So while we spread the word about the time it takes to be a caring society, we should also be mindful about the time it takes to build one. I find it both ironic and troubling that in our speeded-up culture, progressive activism has become intently focused on quick wins and the ephemeral solidarity gained by a click of the computer mouse. When we identify "time" and "care" as urgent social issues -- even when we focus our action agenda on a few straightforward policy solutions -- we're tapping into ideological currents which are powerfully resistant to change. We're challenging some of the most fundamental beliefs that underpin our social and economic order. Taking back our time -- time for life, time for care, time for community -- may take a little while.

I have great faith that we're already on the right track. After all, in the last 250 years, we've managed to establish, at the highest level of law, that all men and women have inalienable rights -- although considering the degree of racial, gender and economic inequality that still plagues our society, there is plenty of unfinished work that deserves our immediate attention. It only took 80 years to recognize women's right to vote, and a somewhat shorter period of time to acknowledge married women's right to their own earnings, property and children. It took about six decades, start to finish, to outlaw child labor, and since their was a strong national commitment to training up the future workforce, making publicly-funded education mandatory for all American children was actually accomplished with relative speed (although, clearly, we haven't worked out all the bumps in that road yet).

It wasn't until 1938 and the humanitarian crisis caused by the Great Depression that we began to implement basic work-hour protections and Social Security benefits to ensure that adults who could no longer work because of old age or disability would not spend the remainder of their lives in destitution and despair. It wasn't until 1978 that we caught up with the idea that it's not really fair to let employers fire a woman just because she's pregnant. Well, okay -- maybe America is slightly behind the curve compared to countries like Denmark and Sweden. And at this very moment, radical forces in our government are attempting to roll back much of the aforementioned progress. But as a society, you have to admit we've come a long way. If we persevere, surely we can keep plodding our way toward social justice -- and social justice ultimately requires that we recognize time to care as a fundamental human right.

mmo : october 2006

Judith Stadtman Tucker is the founder and editor of the Mothers Movement Online.

< back
Copyright 2003-2008 The Mothers Movement Online. All rights reserved. Permissions: editor@mothersmovement.org