Home, Work, and Homework

It feels strange to be blogging on workplace ethics.

First of all, I didn’t start my first full-time, non-seasonal, non-temporary, non-interim, non-intern, non-not-for-grown-ups, actual paying job until I was thirty-nine years old.  I’d been in lots of workplaces, but not as a full-time, permanent employee.

That’s a long time to be un-, under-, and self-but-not-really-employed.  My father had retired from his first full-time, twenty-year career by the time he was my age.

What do I know about work, right?

Second of all, only a very few of the jobs that I worked in those many years of cobbled-together employment involved work that happened exclusively at a workplace that was separable from home (mine or someone else’s).

Some of my friends and family go to work, work at work, and come home and do things that are entirely unrelated to their paying jobs.

I have no idea what that feels like.  I don’t think I’ve done that since the summer between my sophomore and junior year in college.  Or if I have, it has been as an added income stream while working at or studying for something else.  My paid work (when I’ve had it) has always come home with me.  Or I’ve made a little money on the side, doing things that homemakers do.  I’ve always had homework, and not just because I was a student (or a teacher) for most of my adult life.

Work may come home, but home may drag itself to work, too.  My office is filled with books and supplies that are my own, not provided by my employer, my children have come to class with me (not all at once, and not every day!), my parents have come to hear me preach, I use pictures of my home or family or garden as class illustrations, and my parishioners and students have always asked me to tell them what I do in my own home or family (as if that will somehow help them do or be better at anything).

Bringing home to work has been sometimes permitted, sometimes required.  Some of my employers have provided lactation accommodations at work, making space for my household needs to be met on the job.  Colleagues have graciously ignored the times I’ve had to bring a sick or out-of-school child to a meeting or class.  On the flip side, one of my churches expected my family to contribute to its ministries, and parishioners were disappointed when their lack of nursery accommodations meant that I never brought my children to worship.  If I had privately decided to conduct a discreet little affair in my free time, my ordination board would have been remiss if it didn’t connect that private behavior with my professional life.

So I’m not always sure what counts as the workplace, when my family may be “on the job” with me, or when I am as likely to talk with a student or colleague at my dining room table (even if only via the electrons) as in my office.

Oh.  Speaking of colleagues at the dinner table . . . there’s my husband.

We’ve attended or worked at the same schools for most of our marriage.  We’ve preached at each other’s churches.  We go to academic or church-related conferences together.  We read each other’s work, add to each other’s to-read lists, cover each other’s classes when the kids are sick.  We don’t just work together, or work for the same company.  We share vocations that make it hard to distinguish between work and family anyway, and then we go and get hired at the same place?

Let me tell you, it makes the boundaries between “workplace ethics” and just, like, figuring out how to get the laundry done a little fuzzy.

But we muddle through.  And so will this blog.

We’ll try and figure out what it might mean to do Christian ethics at work–to live with integrity as embodied disciples of the Crucified One while going about the business of working for pay.