From the library: Under the Bus; How working women are being run over, by Caroline Fredrickson

Last updated on: March 26, 2016 at 4:11 pm by Jane the Actuary

From the library: Under the Bus; How working women are being run over, by Caroline Fredrickson 2016-03-26T16:11:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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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 “valuing care” more? I 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 “us” to “value care” involved serious boosts in government outlays to fund child care and elder care at high wages for providers and low costs for recipients. Nonetheless, Slaughter’s emphasis is that, in order to finish the “business” of her title, men and women, fathers and mothers, both, have to be a part of the solution.

And, in that respect, Frederickson, though she may think she has the same agenda, is really the anti-Slaughter.

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. It reminds me of that National Geographic Big Cat video 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. OK, so you probably haven’t seen it, but you can recognize the comparison: mothers trying to make their way and provide for their children in a world stacked against them.

She also makes generalizations, and any manner of claims not backed up by data or specific details. And I’d share a multitude of examples with you, but the book is due back at the library, I didn’t take any notes or flag any pages in my first read-through, and I don’t have time to re-read as I had intended.

But she does raise legitimate grievances/concerns, even if her solutions are rather limited (unionization! regulation!) and she ignores the complexity of the situations.

Problem 1: Small businesses are exempt from equal pay laws, and other barriers keep women from equal pay. She 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. And, 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 employees, there is no remedy. Now, since I’m not a frequent customer at such upscale restaurants, I admit to being unaware of such an issue, and I wouldn’t really know why it would be, except perhaps that their proprietors think that male waitstaff signals being high-end. But I’ll agree that, if true, this is a problem. She also supports laws ensuring that employees can share their pay with each other. But she says — without documentation — that the majority of the difference between men’s and women’s pay — the 77 cents or whichever figure it is that she cites — is due to discrimination, which, from what I’ve read elsewhere, isn’t credible.

Problem 2: domestic workers are exempt from overtime pay and minimum wage laws. Actually, the odd thing is that there’s 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 — only “companion care” 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’s choice. (See this post from March.) In order to bolster her claim (and perhaps to avoid rewriting material), she simply says, “yes, this is there, but I don’t believe it’ll be effectively implemented.” With respect for care for children, nannies are covered both with respect to minimum wage and overtime requirements, though they often don’t receive either (23% are paid below minimum wage, and 32% don’t receive overtime, according to two separate studies). But the problem here isn’t 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’t see how that’s a matter of insufficient government regulation. Especially 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’t really see what she imagines as a solution other than the sort of enforcement that would send her back home anyway.

Problem 3: Part-time, just-in-time, and overtime work. Agreed: the evolution of the workforce and employment practices make life a lot more difficult than it otherwise might be. Employers hire part-time workers to avoid paying benefits, especially now with the employer health insurance mandates — but her solution, mandating health insurance for all workers, regardless of hours worked, is wildly impractical. The combination of the availability of scheduling software, and the current job market leaving people with little negotiating power, has produced “just-in-time” schedules with unpredictable hours, and, while one would wish that we’d 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 — requiring a week’s 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 — that seem reasonable, as would, let’s face it, elimination of employer mandates that motivate employers to keep their employees to a 29 hour schedule in the first place. Overtime work, too, creates a burden on employees, but there’s not as obvious a solution, in jobs which are heavily seasonal. She cites a case of 9-11 workers being told they all had to work overtime on Mother’s Day, but with no explanation of why, except as a capricious, arbitrary demand by their employer — yet there must have been a situation in which higher levels of calls were expected than otherwise (did they have colleagues who didn’t show up for work? Is there something about Mother’s Day that creates high call volume?). And, 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’s 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. Of course, here’s where she starts to lose her “women are woefully oppressed” narrative, because these sorts of jobs impact both men and women.

Problem 4: independent contractors, workers for contract houses/temp agencies, and other contingent workers. Another result of our current world of work. I worked as an office temp, many years ago. My dad and sister both have experience in contract houses — it’s 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. What’s the harm? Of course, since she’d like a world with more unions, she laments that it’s more difficult to unionize in these sorts of situations. She further claims that these temp/contract employers somehow aren’t bound to follow OSHA safety regulations, but doesn’t back this up, and it seems dubious. Workers from temp employers are less likely to receive unemployment compensation, though they’re not wholly ineligible (my sister has) and unemployment compensation isn’t really reasonable for genuinely temporary work. It 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. As 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’t provide enough specifics to make her case.

Problem 5: lack of pregnancy accomodation, paid maternity leave, and subsidized child care. Remember 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? Her first demand is for all employers (regardless of size) to be required to accomodate all pregnant women’s 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. Her 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 — even a family which employs a nanny, she believes, should provide accomodations when she’s pregnant, and leave afterwards, rehiring her when she’s ready to come back to work. And her third demand is the same as we’ve been hearing repeatedly: heavily subsidized childcare — though what makes her a bit odder is that she praises Japan for increasing the number of “child care spots” available, as if she doesn’t recognize that in the United States, there is no shortage of day care spots available, if you’re 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. In any case, with demand number 3, she’s back to her old message that women are oppressed, disregarding the fact that children have mothers and fathers — and distinguishing herself from Ann-Marie Slaughter in her rhetoric, with an adversarial approach rather than encouraging men and women, fathers and mothers, to work together.

So where do you go from here? What do you keep, what do you discard, from her prescriptions? Or how do you fix the problems she identifies, if at all? Or have you read the book, and do you think I’m not giving her a fair shake?

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