So remember when I wrote about Unfinished Business<\/a>, by Ann-Marie Slaughter, and her notion that the way for women\/mothers to move forward is by \u201cvaluing care\u201d more? \u00a0I agreed with some of what she had to say, the moral suasion part in which employers are prodded to accept men and women interested in spending time with their families, but her bottom line seemed to be that for \u201cus\u201d to \u201cvalue care\u201d involved serious boosts in government outlays to fund child care and elder care at high wages for providers and low costs for recipients. \u00a0 Nonetheless, Slaughter\u2019s emphasis is that, in order to finish the \u201cbusiness\u201d of her title, men and women, fathers and mothers, both, have to be a part of the solution.<\/p>\n And, in that respect, Frederickson, though she may think she has the same agenda, is really the anti-Slaughter.<\/p>\n In her telling, women are oppressed, unrelentingly, by villanous men, both because, they, not men, are exclusively burdened with caring for children, and simply because they are women. \u00a0It reminds me of that National Geographic Big Cat video<\/a> with the cheetah mother struggling to find enough food for her children while a trio of well-fed cheetah brothers in the same territory cause trouble. \u00a0OK, so you probably haven\u2019t seen it, but you can recognize the comparison: \u00a0mothers trying to make their way and provide for their children in a world stacked against them.<\/p>\n She also makes generalizations, and any manner of claims not backed up by data or specific details. \u00a0And I\u2019d share a multitude of examples with you, but the book is due back at the library, I didn\u2019t take any notes or flag any pages in my first read-through, and I don\u2019t have time to re-read as I had intended.<\/p>\n But she does raise legitimate grievances\/concerns, even if her solutions are rather limited (unionization! \u00a0regulation!) and she ignores the complexity of the situations.<\/p>\n Problem 1: \u00a0Small businesses are exempt from equal pay laws, and other barriers keep women from equal pay. \u00a0She discards as irrelevant the fact that small businesses are less able to manage the complexities of complying with equal pay laws and are often family companies of some sort or another. \u00a0And, to be fair, she points to occupations such as waiters, where the most upscale restaurants prefer to hire men as waitstaff, but since any individual restaurant is exempt due to the small number of\u00a0employees, there is no remedy. \u00a0Now, since I\u2019m not a frequent customer at such upscale restaurants, I admit to being unaware of such an issue, and I wouldn\u2019t really know why it would be, except perhaps that their proprietors think that male waitstaff signals being high-end. \u00a0But I\u2019ll agree that, if true, this is a problem. \u00a0She also supports laws ensuring that employees can share their pay with each other. \u00a0But she says \u2014 without documentation \u2014 that the majority of the difference between men\u2019s and women\u2019s pay \u2014 the 77 cents or whichever figure it is that she cites \u2014 is due to discrimination, which, from what I\u2019ve read elsewhere, isn\u2019t credible.<\/p>\n Problem 2: \u00a0domestic workers are exempt from overtime pay and minimum wage laws. \u00a0Actually, the odd thing is that there\u2019s a new Department of Labor regulation, effective 1\/1\/2015, which does remove most home care from this exemption, at least when it concerns care for the elderly \u2014 only \u201ccompanion care\u201d remains exempt, and that makes a certain amount of sense if the worker is really just resident in the household but able to do the activities of one\u2019s choice. \u00a0(See this post from March<\/a>.) \u00a0In order to bolster her claim (and perhaps to avoid rewriting material), she simply says, \u201cyes, this is there, but I don\u2019t believe it\u2019ll be effectively implemented.\u201d\u00a0With respect for care for children, nannies are covered both with respect to minimum wage<\/a> and overtime requirements<\/a>, though they often don\u2019t receive either (23% are paid below minimum wage, and 32% don\u2019t receive overtime, according to two separate studies). \u00a0But the problem here isn\u2019t an exemption, but the fact that the workers are working under the table, and are often illegally in the country, and, sorry, but I don\u2019t see how that\u2019s a matter of insufficient government regulation. \u00a0Especially when she tells her sad tales of illegal nannies thanklessly working countless hours a day in order to send money back to her children in her native country, I don\u2019t really see what she imagines as a solution other than the sort of enforcement that would send her back home anyway.<\/p>\n Problem 3: \u00a0Part-time, just-in-time, and overtime work. \u00a0Agreed: \u00a0the evolution of the workforce and employment practices make life a lot more difficult than it otherwise might be. \u00a0Employers hire part-time workers to avoid paying benefits, especially now with the employer health insurance mandates \u2014 but her solution, mandating health insurance for all workers, regardless of hours worked, is wildly impractical. \u00a0The combination of the availability of scheduling software, and the current job market leaving people with little negotiating power, has produced \u201cjust-in-time\u201d schedules with unpredictable hours, and, while one would wish that we\u2019d finally get a tight job market that gives employees more leverage in demands for predictability and stability of work hours, there are proposed legislative fixes \u2014 requiring a week\u2019s notice on a work schedule, or requiring a minimum of X hours of pay if an employee is sent home early or has a shift cancelled at the last minute, for instance \u2014 that seem reasonable, as would, let\u2019s face it, elimination of employer mandates that motivate employers to keep their employees to a 29 hour schedule in the first place. \u00a0Overtime work, too, creates a burden on employees, but there\u2019s not as obvious a solution, in jobs which are heavily seasonal. \u00a0She cites a case of 9-11 workers being told they all had to work overtime on Mother\u2019s Day, but with no explanation of why, except as a capricious, arbitrary demand by their employer \u2014 yet there must have been a situation in which higher levels of calls were expected than otherwise (did they have colleagues who didn\u2019t show up for work? \u00a0Is there something about Mother\u2019s Day that creates high call volume?). \u00a0And, yes, she cites the proposed rule to dramatically increase the pay level below which work above 40 hours automatically receives overtime, a topic about which there\u2019s a lot of grey in the question of how to set that pay level and how to properly enforce classifications for jobs where workers have more discretion to hang out at the water cooler during the day and make up the time later. \u00a0Of course, here\u2019s where she starts to lose her \u201cwomen are woefully oppressed\u201d narrative, because these sorts of jobs impact both men and women.<\/p>\n Problem 4: \u00a0independent contractors, workers for contract houses\/temp agencies, and other contingent workers. \u00a0Another result of our current world of work. \u00a0I worked as an office temp, many years ago. \u00a0My dad and sister both have experience in contract houses \u2014 it\u2019s how the auto companies get a sizeable share of their (non-factory) workforce, doing everything from secretarial work, to other sorts of administrative work, to engineering projects, though in the latter case they contract out a specific project and in the former case they bring workers into their facilities. \u00a0What\u2019s the harm? \u00a0Of course, since she\u2019d like a world with more unions, she laments that it\u2019s more difficult to unionize in these sorts of situations. \u00a0She further claims that these temp\/contract employers somehow aren\u2019t bound to follow OSHA safety regulations, but doesn\u2019t back this up, and it seems dubious. \u00a0Workers from temp employers are less likely to receive unemployment compensation, though they\u2019re not wholly ineligible (my sister has) and unemployment compensation isn\u2019t really reasonable for genuinely temporary work. \u00a0It seems to me that even workers hired on a regular basis directly still have to work for a minimum length of time to be eligible. \u00a0As for independent contractors, she seems to suggest that their independent contractor status prevents them from getting fairly paid, but, as with elsewhere too often in the book, she simply doesn\u2019t provide enough specifics to make her case.<\/p>\n Problem 5: \u00a0lack of pregnancy accomodation, paid maternity leave, and subsidized child care. \u00a0Remember the UPS worker who wanted reassignment to light duty during her pregnancy, but who had no legal provision because the law on accomodation only requires employers to provide the same degree of accomodation for pregnant workers as they do for similarly-situated workers with other temporary impairments, and UPS only accomodated those with on-the-job injuries? \u00a0Her first demand is for all employers (regardless of size) to be required to accomodate all pregnant women\u2019s requests for light duty, which is great in principle, but could end up with further issues down the road, at least at employers which tend to hire a lot of young women. \u00a0Her second demand is for paid maternity leave (presumably through a government program), and for all employers, regardless of size, to be required to offer it \u2014 even a family which employs a nanny, she believes, should provide accomodations when she\u2019s pregnant, and leave afterwards, rehiring her when she\u2019s ready to come back to work. \u00a0And her third demand is the same as we\u2019ve been hearing repeatedly: \u00a0heavily subsidized childcare \u2014 though what makes her a bit odder is that she praises Japan for increasing the number of \u201cchild care spots\u201d available, as if she doesn\u2019t recognize that in the United States, there is no shortage of day care spots available, if you\u2019re willing to pay, and that in Japan, the state-subsidized childcare is due to a desparate need to increase the birthrate, not an issue here. \u00a0 In any case, with demand number 3, she\u2019s back to her old message that women are oppressed, disregarding the fact that children have mothers and fathers \u2014 and distinguishing\u00a0herself from Ann-Marie Slaughter in her rhetoric, with an adversarial approach rather than encouraging men and women, fathers and mothers, to work together.<\/p>\n So where do you go from here? \u00a0What do you keep, what do you discard, from her prescriptions? \u00a0Or how do you fix the problems she identifies, if at all? \u00a0Or have you read the book, and do you think I\u2019m not giving her a fair shake?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So remember when I wrote about Unfinished Business, by Ann-Marie Slaughter, and her notion that the way for women\/mothers to move forward is by \u201cvaluing care\u201d more? \u00a0I agreed with some of what she had to say, the moral suasion part in which employers are prodded to accept men and women interested in spending time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,291,290,292,293],"class_list":["post-3757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-from-the-library","tag-child-care","tag-fair-pay","tag-maternity-leave","tag-part-time-work"],"yoast_head":"\n