Work and Family

After reading Hoschild’s Emotional Geography and the Flight of Capitalism, I immediately began relating it my family’s professional experience, which is actually completely different from Amerco. From personal experience, the companies and places of employment my family works at seems to be in a warm modern category. My mother works for IBM, as did my father when I was born, and she was able to take a year off when my sister and I were born, and then for the first three months back at work, she was able to work part-time. Although my father didn’t take parental leave, the benefits awarded to my mother seemed to remedy this. As well, after my parents got divorced, my mother was able to take on the added responsibility of being a single parent (with my father only having custody every Wednesday and other weekend) by switching to part time work. Once my sister and I were able to get to and from school on our own, my mother was able to work full-time yet again.

My step-brother actually shared parental leave with his wife, each of them taking six months after their son was born. As well, my step-sister, after taking her full year of maternity leave for each of her two sons (her husband is a professor, so he was able to be around a lot to help with the kids), she re-entered the workforce by job-sharing with another young mother.

My father’s common-law partner works at a company called Lexis Nexis, essentially a huge publishing company, and there are in place many family friendly policies. First of all, in the summer, every Friday ends at noon, to equal one half day off. However, if you do not want to take this half day off, you can bank them, essentially saving all the half Fridays from the summer, and take a week long vacation. Interestingly, this same company is an example of “the new company town” where the employees can socialize and utilize many services even within the same building. They have movie nights (where they supply the drinks and popcorn), catered breakfast every morning, and a masseuse that comes in each week.

In all of the cases depicted above were from dual earner couples, which most definitely do not fall into the work-as-home and home-as-work model. I’m not sure if it is my living experience that is out of the norm, or is it Amerco that is? I’m just finding Hoschild’s utilization of one major company to depict the need for more family friendly policies in America a little troubling. After reading Becker and Moen’s article, I find it frustrating that Hoschild would depict the dual-earner couple as cold and work-obsessed when that is not the majority case.

As well, I recently stumbled across an interesting article from the New York Times, called the Opt-Out Revolution, in which women with high levels of education, on a track to high status of employment, choose to opt-out of work in order to be a full time mother” http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-opt-out-revolution.html?pagewanted=all . It is definitely an interesting read, and gives some insight as to why mothers may be perceived as less committed to their jobs as depicted by the Motherhood penalty article.

1. Am I the only one who has experience a warm modern category? Or in your experience does the workforce fall into a cool modern or traditional stance? Which way should it be?

2. In Becker et al. it is stated that women often fulfill the job category and not the career category in a dual earning couple. How could you justify the work constraints put on women in a dual earning couple? Is the breadwinner ideology following yet again? Is this why in a career/job couple women are more likely to hold the job?

3. To play devil’s advocate, do you think women are more attached to their children and therefore are less committed to their profession? How does the motherhood penalty fit into professions where salaries are set based on seniority (e.g. lawyers and teachers)?