So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
Читать онлайн книгу.
Over the last half-century, talk of family has often focused on the working mother—her hours, her wages, her commute, the sympathies of her boss, the culture at her workplace. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the “mom is working, so how are the kids?” conversation. Later people spoke of “work-family balance,” but still held to the question: if she is working, how are they doing?
Over time, talk moved to an array of changes that a working mother would need to raise thriving children—partners who share the second shift, state-of-the-art childcare, a shorter workday, a three-day weekend, flextime, or flexplace, for example. Although some called for public programs such as European-style parental leaves and federally funded childcare, such calls were gradually abandoned in America as being hopeless pipe dreams. In the hallway at conferences, conversations on work-family balance through the 1990s and 2000s seldom mentioned tax policies that exacerbated a growing class gap, or the deregulation of advertising to children. Such issues seemed far beyond the scope of “mom is working, so how are the kids?”
Meanwhile, a separate but parallel conversation arose linking a free market to family values.1 Cuts to public services, deregulation, reduced corporate and individual taxes, privatization—such policies, its advocates claimed, strengthen both a free market and the family. In their talk of “family values,” conservative commentators generally exclude gays, oppose a woman’s right to abortion, and link the idea of a free market with that of a strong, loving home. The smaller and less active the civilian government, they propose, the stronger the family.
For the most part, these two conversations—“mom is working, so how are the kids?” and “free-market family values”—have moved along separate tracks. Even today, those who engage in the one do not engage in the other, or not at the same time. So what if we link the two conversations and ask: In an era of the working caregiver, how do free-market policies affect families? In search of the answer, we discover a surprisingly rich body of evidence.
But first a word about why this question matters. When American women moved en masse into the workforce, they were not alone. The female labor force participation rate increased 20 percent worldwide between 1993 and 2003, while the participation rate of men decreased in all regions but Southeast Asia.2 Over 70 percent of working-age women in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland are now in paid work, as are 53 percent in Spain and 46 percent in Italy.3 The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and most other states of the European Union fall in between.4 So the rise of the working woman in America is part of a global trend which shows no sign of reversing itself.
And there are many stakeholders in this trend. As Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, wrote in the preface to the 2012 Global Gender Gap report:
With talent shortages projected to become more severe in much of the developed and developing world, maximizing access to female talent is a strategic imperative for business. The World Economic Forum has been among the institutions at the forefront of engaging leaders to close global gender gaps as a key element of our mission to improve the state of the world.5
Indeed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) report links each nation’s ranking on an index of gender equality to its GDP and its score on the so-called Global Competitiveness Index.6 If women were to perform paid work at the rate men do, the authors state, the American GDP would rise “by as much as 9 percent, the euro-zone G.D.P. by as much as 13 percent . . . [and] the Japanese G.D.P. by as much as 16 percent.”7 When women work they also earn, of course; as they consume more goods and services, they push up the GDP.8
State officials have still other interests in the employment of women. Especially in Europe, women are encouraged to earn money and contribute to social security to help bankroll the state pensions currently drawn by retirees in a “graying” Europe.9 To sustain pension funds, some countries are raising the retirement age of public employees—from 65 to 67 years old in the United States, from 60 to 62 (and 67 for some workers) in France, and from 65 to 67 in Spain.10 Meanwhile, 2.1 children per woman are considered necessary to maintain a country’s population. But in some countries, the fertility rates have sunk lower—Italy and Greece are at 1.4, and the United Kingdom is at 1.9.11 So women are urged both to work more and to have more children.
Women themselves take jobs for many personal reasons, of course—to pay family bills, to develop talents, to be more autonomous, and to contribute to society. With two parents working full time, then, the call turned to “work-family balance”—both a balance between the contribution of one partner and the other, and a balance between the demands of home and work. In The Second Shift, I found that comparing the paid and unpaid work of women to the paid and unpaid work of men, husbands (all fathers of children aged 6 years and under) enjoyed an extra month a year of leisure compared with their full-time working wives. But from 1980 to 2005, this leisure gap between the sexes narrowed to between a half and a third of what it had been.12 At the same time, as the workday has lengthened for the middle class, jobs have become more insecure. So men, like women, are putting on shoes for a work-family shuffle that the comedian Tina Fey describes as a “tap dance recital in a minefield.”13
A call has also gone out for a new workplace. With flextime, workers can work at the kitchen table, or a nearby hub-office, saving time, gas, and space on traffic-clogged freeways, and fetch the children from school. But only 16 percent of workers actually telecommute in any given year.14 Job-sharing and good part-time work are also yet to become part of the normal scene. And in an era of insecure jobs, many workers are loath to ask too much of hidebound bosses who might lay them off. The “mom is working, so how are the kids?” and “work-family balance” conversations continue into the present, with less and less hopeful talk of help from the government.
FREE MARKETS AND FAMILY VALUES
Meanwhile, in a parallel conversation linking the free market to family values, proponents have called for a set of government policies: lower and less progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation of companies, and cuts to state services. These policies are said to free the market and, by so doing, to strengthen the family. Just as General Motors’ CEO once argued that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the American people,” so free-market advocates argue that what is good for the free market is good for the family. Lower and more regressive taxes may widen the class gap, they note, but it will not harm families because wealth will “trickle down” from top to bottom. Deregulation will also help by allowing companies more freedom and—although this is a less explicit part of the argument—inducing them to invest in the United States.15 Strong cuts in state services will make for a leaner, “less bloated” government, they say. Yet the U.S. government supports companies such as Wal-Mart, Boeing, and Target through offers of free or low-cost land, the building of free water and sewer lines, and low-cost financing and insurance. Companies also raise billions of dollars through tax-free bonds. So their call to reduce bloat refers only to cuts in public services, not to policies that benefit companies.16 The more America pursues these policies, they say, the freer the market and the stronger the family.
But is this true? One way to approach this question is to compare children in nations that have embraced free-market policies with children in nations that have not. A 2007 UNICEF “Report Card 7” does just that.17 Capitalist countries vary among themselves, of course. The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, and some now include Portugal—so-called neo-liberal regimes—do not favor publicly funded services such as paid childcare or family leave.18 They have weaker social safety nets for the poor, and they pursue tax policies permitting wider gaps between rich and poor. Thus, the Report Card scholars were able to compare countries that pursue free market policies more with those—such as Norway and Sweden—who pursue them less.
Conducted by an international team of scholars, the report draws from dozens of national surveys as well as from cross-national data gathered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. Focusing on the twenty-one richest countries in the world, and comparing the health, education, and material and emotional well-being of middle school children, the researchers asked such questions as whether the children had a quiet place to