Overworked, Time Poor, and Abandoned by Uncle Sam: Why Don't American Parents Protest?

...Poor single mothers, of course, have long been exempted from this criticism, as they are expected to work for pay...

...Public supports also indemnify families against substantial fluctuations in disposable income when parents temporarily diminish their time in paid work, or take a break altogether, to concentrate on caregiving...

...It's also the case that Americans may work so hard that we are on the diminishing-returns portion of the productivity curve...

...As an example, in a recent New York Times column (January 4, 2005) David Brooks laid out the same cross-national portrait of working hours that I present to illustrate the work-family time bind in the United States...

...On top of that, Lindert argues, public investments in women's employment constitute a crucial pro-growth strategy...

...And, finally, we need to persuade Americans, on both the left and right, that a comprehensive package of work-family policies would be consistent with a more equitable distributional result— for women, for men, and for children— and with healthy macroeconomic outcomes as well...

...Relative to many other rich countries, American children are much more likely to be poor—no matter what their family's structure and their parents' employment status...

...In many families, parents reduce the labor market attachment of one parent—in practice, overwhelmingly, the mother...

...But they also exacerbate long-standing problems of gender inequality and create new social and economic problems...

...Why don't they object to the absence of paid family leave, the weak working-time protections, and the near total absence of public investment in child care...

...We need a new lexicon concerning "family values," one that includes the damaging consequences of time poverty, as well as income poverty, for American workers and their families...

...Their own empirical results—presented in The State of Working America 2004-2005— lead them to conclude that "although the U.S...

...As Marcia Meyers and I argue in our book—Families That Work—the American state provides much less to working parents than do many other countries, especially the high-income countries of northern and western Europe...

...THERE ARE NO easy answers...

...As for paid leave, only five states DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 65 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY offer mothers any wage replacement following childbirth or adoption (through public temporary disability insurance laws) and only one (California) offers benefits for fathers...

...That's a powerful claim, but, at the same time, average per capita income needs a second look...

...As Kathleen Gerson pointed out in these pages last year ("The Morality of Time: Women and the Expanding Work Week," Fall 2004), the common wisdom in the United States generally lays the responsibility for the work-family time bind on individuals and lets American institutional realities off the hook...

...So, American workers—on average—do take home a sizable chunk of income compared to average workers elsewhere, but for many American workers and their families, that economic payoff is compromised by the family time-poverty that enables it...

...Although much research establishes that public policies have a powerful direct effect on parents' working hours, and even on gendered labor market outcomes, it is much harder to establish that the U.S...

...model...

...In addition to these dispiriting—and largely persuasive—analyses I would point to two more barriers to work-family policy development that may ultimately be more malleable...

...But, for others, the out-of-pocket costs deplete family disposable income, and too many children end up in care of worrisome quality...

...Among parents with partners, U.S...

...The Problem of Private Solutions What do American parents do in the absence of public supports...

...The American national character," Madrick writes in Why Economies Grow, "has prevented the nation from adopting a new social contract to lead it forward...

...Why Don't U.S...

...Why was work-family policy nearly invisible in the last election cycle...

...We do not even speak in terms of the social contract anymore because, implicitly, we do not give government sufficient status to enter into a contract with the people...

...European workers may feel good about their DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 67 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY generous benefit packages but, in the end, so goes the argument, they and their families pay a considerable price...

...couples spend just over eighty hours a week (jointly) working for pay...

...How do they manage the work-family crunch...

...With the exception of the poorest workers, parents turn to consumer markets to purchase child care—or they manage with informal arrangements...

...American children, on average, are also more likely to die in infancy or in young childhood, to perform poorly on international math and science tests during their adolescent years, and to conceive or bear children as teenagers...

...While many workers— especially more highly educated, higherearning workers—secure workplace benefits, many others do not...

...We need to alert many more Americans to the extreme exceptionalism of U.S...

...The United States is one of five countries in the entire world without a national policy of paid maternity leave...

...Parents and Children Fare A mountain of research reveals that American working parents have a tougher job than their counterparts in other high-income countries...

...Every day, millions of American parents—single and partnered, low-income and affluent— scramble to coordinate the demands of employment with their children's need for care and supervision...

...Finally, leaving work-family benefits to labor and consumer markets deepens inequalities...

...American children also watch inordinate amounts of television, possibly because it serves as low-cost child care...

...Second, Americans remain remarkably unaware that generous work-family reconciliation policies operate successfully—and with widespread political support—in many other rich countries...

...Gender disparities in the American labor market spill over into the home: American working fathers spend forty-four minutes doing unpaid work at home for every hundred minutes invested by their working wives, a ratio that lags behind that reported in a handful of European countries...

...The weakness of unions in the United States, due in part to public policy, means that when American parents turn to their employers for work-family benefits, they commonly have a weak collective voice and little bargaining power...

...In fact, a mounting body of research challenges the claim that social spending is harmful to economic growth...

...In addition, working-time regulations limit the imposition of excessively long weekly work hours and effectively cap the number of days worked each year...

...JANET C. GORNICK is, with Marcia K. Meyers, coauthor of Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment, published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2003 and released in paperback in April 2005...

...It is not surprising that the stressed-out working parent is now a staple in multiple venues, from social science research to newspaper opinion columns to TV-land...

...Building a social consensus in the United States for more government support for working families will not be easy, but a few things are clear...

...labor market is only fair-to-middling, relative to more than half of ten European comparison countries and Canada...

...Several of my progressive colleagues sent me that column, adding "Unfortunately, he's right, isn't he...

...Other families choose a different 66 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 route, opting for what Harriet Presser has dubbed "split-shift parenting...

...Conservatives typically focus on mothers, protesting that many (middle-class and well-off) women are choosing paid work over family, indulging themselves while leaving their children and husbands unattended...

...Many workplaces are still designed for workers who have no competing responsibilities, and the paucity of public policies that support working families can hardly be overstated...

...Split-shift parents— or any pair of caregivers, more generally— arrange employment schedules so that they work opposite hours...

...In fact, gender equality in the U.S...

...Although there is much to argue with in What's the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank has surely awakened us to the larger possibility that a peculiar form of cultural alienation has pushed many Americans to vote against their own material interests...

...Clearly many U.S...

...Women with children often choose various forms of underemployment, opting for jobs that demand less of them than their skills would otherwise warrant...

...Among two-parent families, with two earners, U.S...

...Even more remarkable, nearly two-thirds of U.S...

...As Jason DeParle relates in heartbreaking detail in his book American Dream, many low-wage workers—especially those who are also solo parents—hold jobs with little in the way of workplace benefits, and high quality child care, especially for infants, remains largely out of reach...

...The standard work week remains set at forty hours, a level established more than six decades ago, and American working-time law is silent on equal treatment for part-time workers, on rights to part-time or flexible scheduling, and on the right to a minimum number of paid days off per year...

...Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Sylvia Allegretto concur that public social protections often bring macroeconomic benefits...

...Workers who get family-friendly leave and working-time options generally get them in the labor market, sometimes as part of a standard employee benefit package, sometimes via individualized negotiation...

...While the United States leads the world in gross domestic product per worker, we are ranked eighth among the OECD countries in GDP per worker-hour...

...As we argue in Families That Work, U.S...

...Workers in small enterprises and without substantial work experience in the prior year are not eligible...

...mothers take home about 28 percent of total parental earnings—substantially less than the share commanded by mothers in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, and Belgium...

...But, in fact, the American institutional landscape deserves much of the blame...

...As Lars Osberg, a Canadian economist has argued: "'Quality of life' or 'economic well-being' may be hard to define precisely, but most would agree that they depend on both an individual's income level and the discretionary time they have in which to enjoy it...

...Not surprisingly, more Americans than Europeans report dissatisfaction with their ability to balance work and family life...

...Yes, to some extent...

...economy saw increased productivity in the last few years, it under-performed relative to other OECD economies for most of the past 20 years...

...That means that, on average, Americans enjoy a relatively high standard of living—when standard of living is captured by this common measure— compared to our neighbors in other rich countries...

...And a growing number of countries grant full-time workers the right to temporarily downsize to part-time work and/or to alter the scheduling of their assigned hours...

...Peter Lindert's comprehensive new study on the impact of social spending, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century, concludes, "Contrary to the intuition of many economists and the ideology of many politicians, social spending has contributed to, rather than inhibited, economic growth...

...We need to recognize that we, as a nation, must invest in our children's care and education during the first five years of their lives—rather than waiting until they are old enough for kindergarten...

...And leaving child care to the market, especially with limited regulation, also means that many child care workers are very poorly paid, which places them and their own families at risk...

...Many argue that this result closes the case: despite some distributional concerns, it is argued, the American model, overall, remains the most economically advantageous...

...parents feel unbalanced, but how about our children...

...Although many highly educated, high-earning workers have ample workplace benefits—and excellent child care options—their less privileged counterparts typically have access to far less for themselves and their children...

...Likewise, intensive use of non-parental child care, even from early infancy, also works well for many families...

...As Jody Heymann's work has demonstrated, market-based work-family benefits are not only limited in the United States, their distribution is extremely regressive...

...That is most evident at the bottom of the income distribution...

...The meager Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 provides some parents limited rights to periods of unpaid leave to take care of infants and other family members...

...But average outcomes are none too great either...

...IN CONTRAST, American public policy leaves the vast majority of working parents high and dry...

...According to a recent national survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute, over half of American workers report that they experience conflict "in balancing work, personal life, and family life...

...Does our hard work at least benefit America's children...

...Even more starkly, where is the public outcry as the Bush administration chips away at the Family and Medical Leave Act and weakens the Fair Labor Standards Act...

...It is possible that, as a society, we could shift some hours from work to family and see a rise in our hourly output...

...What is clear is that the current workfamily arrangement—with its weak protections and limited benefits for working parents—is problematic on many fronts, and that large numbers of American parents and their children are poorly served...

...He praised the fact that Americans work "50 percent more than Germans, French, and Italians...

...Why do large 68 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 numbers of Americans tell pollsters that they want more help from government, specifically for working parents, and then fail to form an effective social movement calling for that help...

...These days, as large as government is, in the public mind it is an appendage and a burden, not a partner...

...POLITICS OF THE FAMILY How U.S...

...Unfortunately, it is not just conservatives, but often progressives as well, who have absorbed damaging misperceptions—in particular, that the European countries have cut work-family programs in recent years (not true), after concluding that these programs, along with the social safety net more generally, have negative macroeconomic consequences (also not true...

...There Is Some Good News—Sort Of Is there some good news...

...With all that hard work, surely the United States must be the world's leader in women's engagement in paid labor...

...While split-shift parenting works well for some families, and may strengthen fathers' ties to their children, other social consequences are problematic— including disproportionately high rates of marital dissolution and negative effects on children's well-being...

...Parents Protest...

...First of all, many Americans envision well-being so narrowly as to be counter-productive...

...Yet another group of families makes extensive use of non-parental care, with many placing their children in child care starting in early infancy...

...Long work hours may indeed produce a lot of output—and, of course, POLITICS OF THE FAMILY for many families, much-needed income—but they are also associated with an array of negative social consequences that aren't talked about enough, even on the left...

...And many progressives, Gerson argues, have not helped matters, too often attributing Americans' notoriously long work hours to their everexpanding desire for consumption or their preference for the effects-oriented workplace over the strains and uncertainties of life at home...

...For starters, parents in several European countries have access to multiple forms of paid family leave and to high-quality affordable child care...

...Brooks, however, told the mirror tale...

...These so-called work-family reconciliation measures are, of course, embedded in larger social protection systems that provide universal health insurance, among other crucial components...

...While Americans' long work hours may produce deleterious results for many parents and children, we do earn a lot...

...The United States ranks first among the thirty OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries in per capita income, using purchasing-power-adjusted exchange rates...

...All told, these comprehensive policy packages allow parents ample latitude in deciding how to allocate their time between paid work and care...

...Because of our industriousness, he argued, "American GDP per capita is about 30 percent higher than Europe's and the gap, if anything, is getting wider...

...Speaking more broadly, Jeff Madrick tells us that, in contemporary America, supporting government—even with a policy agenda that promises economic growth—is simply against our "national character...

...Why do American working parents accept the paltry public supports...

...The "one-parentchooses-partial-employment" option cements gender divisions of labor, because it is mothers, and rarely fathers, who cut back on paid work to care for children...

...couples work more than eighty hours each week jointly—a distribution that no European country even approaches...

...family policy offerings relative to the other rich countries of the world—and, increasingly, from a global perspective as well...

...The paucity of high-quality, remunerative work in the thirty-five- to thirtyninehour range leads many couples to end up with one long-hour worker and one part-time worker...

...In a number of other rich countries—including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—dual-earner couples with children average between seventythree and seventy-eight hours a week, whereas Dutch and Swedish dual-earners average between sixty-five and sixty-eight hours a week, or the equivalent of nearly two fewer days per week, relative to U.S...

...Why did so many who claim to want help for American working families pull the other lever...

...parents craft a range of private solutions to reconcile high rates of parental employment with their children's need for care...

...And equality at home...

...work-family policy configuration is the cause of our relatively poor child outcomes...

...This suggests that those formulating policy may benefit from looking beyond the U.S...

...Sadly, there is little evidence that it does—children in the United States are not doing especially well either...

...First of all, it doesn't account for many forms of non-market income, such as education, health care, child care, and the like—forms of income that we know lag (and are regressively distributed) in the United States...

...How about gender equality in the labor market...

...THESE PRIVATE solutions are adaptive and work well for many individual families...

...In a recent survey, when EU parents were asked, "In general, do your working hours fit in with your family or social commitments outside work very well, fairly well, not very well or not at all well?," a remarkable 80 percent of parents responded that their work hours and private commitments fit "very well" or "fairly well...

...In the majority of families in the United States, all the adults are in the workforce, more often than not working full time...

...others are employed part time and/or intermittently...

...DISSENT / Summer 2005 • 69...

...In the absence of public supports, Americans are left with the market...

...Second, some scholars argue that it is misleading to measure "standard of living" solely in monetary terms, without taking into account time investments...

...couples...

...Nevertheless, what we do know is that the "American model" for balancing work and family—essentially, leaving it to individuals and markets—is not associated with impressive outcomes for our children...

...If we want to spur change, we need a dramatically altered discourse about the role of government in the lives of American families...

...Furthermore, public measures in all European Union member countries require pay and benefit parity for part-time workers—making shorter-hour work a more feasible option...

...The public child care system in the United States is among the least developed in the industrialized world...

...one leaves for the workplace as the other comes home...