Apt. 11D

No Working From Home for Mayer

A lot has been written about Marissa Mayer's decision to end the practice of letting Yahoo! workers work from home. I'll write about it tomorrow, but here are some links: Wired, Forbes, Buzzfeed, and Lisa Belkin. 

Maybe There is Hope

Where Do You Work?

One of the many rituals of torturing the special ed kids is the comprehensive tests that administered every three years. Yes, in addition to the week-long standardized tests that are given to all kids every spring, special ed kids are routinely poked at by professionals to make sure that are dumb enough to qualify for services. 

Ian just finished a battery of tests. He had six days of IQ testing, speech testing, handwriting testing, and educational testing. These aren't multiply choice, bubble filling tests. It's intense grilling by professionals who get in his face and demand answers to questions for hours. 

For the most part, his scores showed us exactly what we knew already. He has higher than average spacial skills. He has poor verbal skills. He has bad handwriting. His teachers and I already knew this and talked about this in the two hour meeting that was necessary to arrange for the tests. We have another two hour meeting in a few weeks to discuss the findings of these tests. 

The tests themselves are ridiculous. Kids with a speech and language disability are given verbal instructions to solve wordy problems. That makes sense. 

The reports were sent to my house in a brown envelope last week. I quickly flipped through them. The report by the teacher who assessed his educational level was particularly annoying. 

She explained that she asked Ian to give his full name, address, telephone number, and family members. He did that. She then reported that she asked Ian, "Where do your parents work?" Ian reported that Steve worked at X bank at home, and I worked at the New York Sports Club. 

Now there's nothing wrong with working at a gym. A good friend of mine is a spin teacher at that club, but walking two miles on a tread mill while watching Kardashian reruns on VH1 isn't really my job. 

Her question was poorly worded for testing a child with autism. She asked WHERE do your parents work. Ian was focused on the location part of that question. But thinking about it, I think lots of kids would have problems answering that question. People don't often work at one place anymore. Steve's employment situation is a little complicated right now and can't be discussed on the blog, but let me just say that he works for different companies at different locations. 

And then how do you explain to a kid what you do? A big part of my job is watching the kids and attending stupid special education meetings. I guess if she asked Ian, "what is your mother's job," he would say that her job is being a mom and that would be partially accurate. But then there's everything else that I do when the kids are in school - the writing, the blogging, the looking for topics, and all that. I don't really talk about it with the kids, because it sounds so boring. 

Jobs are pretty complicated these days. It's hard to describe a job that doesn't fit in neatly into the teacher, fireman, librarian category. It's basically impossible to describe Steve's job to people outside of the Investment Banking world. 

Do you have a job that can be easily explained to children and elderly relatives? 

Are Men Failing?

I haven't read Hanna Rosin's book yet, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, so I really shouldn't write about it or rely upon David Brooks' interpretation of it. But I am a blogger and, thus, have no integrity, so here goes.

Brooks praises Rosin's book. He says that she correctly shows that women are managing to keep their heads above this new economy, while men are struggling to find work and a purpose. Women are more flexible about what kinds of jobs they will take. They work harder in school and get better grades. Men, on the other hand, are clinging to old norms and failing to make some necessary changes. Thus, their salaries are dropping and their role as "breadwinner" has eroded. 

I would like to see this data fully broken down by income and by career. Men, who have traditionally worked in manufacturing and construction, have taken a huge hit in this economy. Many of those jobs are never coming back. Much blame can be laid at the demise of the unions. But upper income men in medicine, law, and business are doing just fine. Some men are in trouble, but it's not clear that all men are in trouble. 

Part of me questions whether this is really a crisis or evidence that men are failing. If men take up the slack in the homefront, while women bring home the paycheck, this is not a bad thing. Nobody is failing. There's just a switch in gender determinism about divisions of labor. Who cares, right? If my son becomes the full time parent and his partner earns a big salary as a NYC lawyer, why would I care? 

On the other hand, I want my sons, as much as my nieces, to work towards a goal and then later on negotiate with their partners about divisions of labor. We need to be preparing the boys for the new economy, so they have new skills to make a full range of decisions about their future. Sadly, there isn't much that we can do for older men who refuse to take the few jobs that are available, because they are traditional chick jobs. But, perhaps, we are making bad parenting decisions that end up hurting boys down the line.

I do think that boys, more than girls, are pushed to excel at sports at the expense of their education. Many parents think that sports are the key to getting into college and so don't get mad at them about C's in English class. Sports eat up time that could be spent reading. Now, you know that I love sports and support Jonah's soccer habit, but if he has a test, I don't send him to practice. Grades matter more than goals. So, even in upper income towns like ours, I see potential problems. 

There will have to be other adjustments. Men will have to learn to consider new kinds of employment. There are more options than stock trader or auto-mechanic. 

I do think that there's something else going on in these numbers. Something beyond a boy/girl thing. (It's not a competition, btw, and nobody should be celebrating these changes.) It's a decline of the one income family. Unions protected jobs and kept salaries high enough to allow for one person to support the family. Unions are gone, living wages are gone, whole professions are gone. Working class men do have to adjust, but let's give them a break. They haven't failed. Their entire way of life shifted in ten years. In time, new norms and, hopefully, new opportunities will arise. The former automotive worker might not be able to take the secretarial job, but his son will. 

The Benevolent Sexists

A recent study found,

"We found that employed husbands in traditional marriages, compared to those in modern marriages, tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) find organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny, more frequently, qualified female employees opportunities for promotion."

In an interview, one of the authors of the study said:

"One of the reasons why there aren't as many women at the top is perhaps men at the top tend to be benevolent sexists who tend to see women as people who should be shielded from danger and risks," says Desai. "They are probably thinking of women as fragile beings who need to be taken care of, that want to stay at home and raise kids and don't want to take risks and move to the top."

Comments? 

Who Works the Hardest?

Derek Thompson has a couple of very funny charts on the Atlantic. Chart One shows that every country in Europe thinks that Greece is the laziest country, while the Greeks think that they work the hardest.

Chart Two (on the left) shows that the Greeks are right. They do work a lot, but their work is less profitable than work in more industrialized nations. 

Union Wages, Union Pensions

Last week, we had a splendid discussion in a comment section about teacher salaries. For those who don't have time to wade through the comments, here are the highlights. Someone talked about poverty level wages of teachers. I looked up the salaries of teachers in my town and I found that the average salary was $90,000. The majority of high school teachers made over six figures. The superintendents in this area pull in over $200 grand and most are in charge of two or three little schools.

I was shocked by these numbers, but I admitted that my perspective was skewed by years of low pay. We briefly talked about whether or not these salaries were fair, but everyone has their own yardstick for determining fair pay. Some thought that instead of questioning union pay that everyone should demand the same benefits that union employees receive. I said that matters should at least be discussed and debated, and the failure to do so has resulted in the election of Christie-types.

David Brooks brings together this discussion with the failed tunnel project. Gov. Christie claims that New Jersey can't afford this investment in infrastructure, because so much of the budget goes towards the public sector and pension programs.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

Instead of responding to Brooks, I thought I would let you all take another shot at this.

Girly Jobs and Low Pay

My social security statements are an embarrassment. I've worked since I was 18, but my yearly income is poverty level. In college, I worked in the dishroom at the dining room and as a secretary in a valve company. I've had jobs in publishing, special education, academia, and journalism. I've also been an at-home mom, which is a job, FYI. 

Like many women, I was attracted to creative and caretaking jobs. I could have gone into finance (720 on the Math GREs and 750 on the analytic, baby), but I didn't. I wasn't interested. A great post by Nancy Folbre in the New York Times's Economix tells me that I'm not alone.

... Nicole Fortin, at economist at the University of British Columbia, finds that women tend to place less importance on money and more importance on people and family than men do...

Both biological and cultural factors can explain attitudinal differences between women and men. In our society, caring for others has long been considered an essential aspect of femininity (social psychologists devote considerable effort to measuring such things). And sometimes women don’t choose girly jobs, but end up in them because they face discrimination or harassment in other jobs.

Caring often entails commitments to dependents such as young children, adults with disabilities or the frail elderly who can’t afford to pay directly for the services provided. It doesn’t fit easily into the impersonal logic of fee for service or supply and demand.

We need caretakers in our society. Not everybody can be employed by the Bank of Evil. We really do need people who care for toddlers and old people. Educating children well has long term benefits for all of society. As Folbre says, "Good care helps create – and maintain – good people."

Instead of pushing women into lucrative jobs, caretaking work needs more respect and a bigger paycheck.

Office Space

I have a weakness for hipster office space. Check out these pictures of Gawker and Tumblr at TimeOut New York.

How Much Vacation Time?

The New York Times has an interesting "Room for Debate" series about vacation time in the United States v. Europe. Clearly, they get a lot more and at issue is whether or not this is a good thing.

(Chart and more information at EPI.)

Steve gets four weeks off a year, which is pretty good. His firm has to compete with European banks, so they have to offer their workers generous vacation time. Still, four weeks doesn't seem to be enough, because we only use a small portion of that time for actual vacation. When I was working full time, he had to use nearly all of that time to cover the kids during school breaks. There's all the hoopla at Christmas, which means he has to take off more time. With all the extended family and cooking and arranging, staying home during the holidays is actually more work than going into the office.

Still, it would be bitchy to complain. We actually have the money to go away this year, and four weeks is pretty good by American standards.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure I get any vacation time at all. If my full time job is parenting combined with putting together a new career, I never take a day off. Even when we're traveling next week, I'm going to be watching kids and composing blog posts. When does school start again?

<tangent> On Monday, I woke up with a terrible stomach virus. Blew chunks in the bathroom and then cleaned myself up, because Ian had an audiology test at a pediatric hospital. There was no way I was going to cancel that test. It takes months to get an appointment. So, I sat in a padded closet with him for TWO HOURS without moving. He had to listen to words and sounds with headphones that kept slipped to one side. Green faced and repressing the urge to heave, I kept sliding down in my chair. He did fine. He just can't hear anything with background sounds. </tangent>

That's why I need a vacation, too.

Do we need more vacation time in America? How much vacation time do you get per year?