When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work

Those whose time is not compensated by money-housewives, children, the elderly-are held in lower regard than those whose time is compensated by money, everything else held equal. (This holds true only for jobs that are not subject to moral censure; a prostitute is not more highly valued than a housewife because she has a paying job in public life.) For many paid workers themselves, the trade of time for money can take on very different cultural meanings depending on the societal context. (Thanks to Deborah Davis for clarification on the relation between work for money and time.) See Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and the Postmodern Experience (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1994); and Staffan Under, The Harried Leisure Class (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1974).

Founded in 1986, Bright Horizons was named the nation's leading work-site childcare organization in 1991 by the Child Care Information Exchange. The company offers a range of services: drop-in care, weekend programs, and programs for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and school-age children. Bright Horizons pays its teachers 10 percent more than whatever the going rate may be at nearby childcare centers and has a rate of teacher turnover that averages only half of the industry-wide 40 to 50 percent a year.

Thirty-five percent of parents responded (9 percent were male and 90 percent female; 92 percent were married and 7 percent single). Percentages may not add up to 100 for some questions either because some respondents didn't answer that question or because the percentages that are reported were rounded to the nearest whole number.

Parents were asked how many hours they spent doing work they brought home from the office “on a typical weekday.” Eighteen percent didn't answer. Of those remaining, half said they did bring work home. The largest proportion-19 percent-brought home “between six and ten hours of work [per week].” They estimated even longer hours for their partners.

Diane S. Burden and Bradley Googins K. , “Boston University Balancing Job and Homelife Study: Managing Work and Family Stress in Corporations,” Boston University School of Social Work, Boston MA, 1987, p. 30.

Yet friends may not be a working parent's main source of social support. When asked which were the “three most important sources of support in your life,” nine out of ten men and women mentioned their spouses or partners. Second came their mothers, and third “other relatives.” So people turned for support to kin first. Among friendships, however, those at work proved more significant than those around home. As sources of emotional support, 10 percent of the respondents also mentioned “books and magazines,” the same percentage as mentioned “church or temple"; only 5 percent mentioned neighbors. Thirteen percent turned for support first to friends at work-as many as turned to their own fathers.

Jim Spring , “Seven Days of Play,” American Demography, 15 (March 1993): 50-54. According to another study, in the average American home, a television is on for almost half of all waking hours. Teenagers watch approximately twenty-two hours of television each week [Anne Walling, “Teenagers and Television,” American Family Physician, 42 (1990): 638-41], and children watch an average of two to three hours each day [Althea Huston, John Wright, Mabel Rice, and Dennis Kerk-man, “Developmental Perspective of Television Viewing Patterns,” Developmental Psychology, 26 (1990): 409-21].

William Julius Wilson , When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York, NY: Knopf, 1996).

Edwards W Deming, “Improvement of Quality and Productivity through Action by Management,” National Productivity Review (Winter 1981-82), pp. 2–12. See Mary Walton, The Deming Management Method (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986); Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, NY: Harper, 1911). While the Total Quality movement has come to many corporations, the influence of Frederick Taylor is hardly dead. Many low-skill workers are vulnerable to Taylorization of their jobs. In her book The Electronic Sweatshop (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1988), Barbara Garson describes a McDonald's hamburger cook whose every motion is simplified, preset, and monitored.

Hugh Mulligan , “Employers Foster Friendly Workplaces,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1991, [Associated Press release]. In some companies, such as Hudson Food Inc.'s processing plant in Noel, Missouri, the company hires chaplains as company counselors. As Barnaby Feder describes in his New York Times article, “As the workers chop and package the birds’ carcasses, others talk about their battles with drinking or drugs, marital tensions, sick parents, runaway children and housing crises. Such chats (with the chaplain) frequently lead to private counseling sessions, hospital visits and other forms of pastoral ministry.” Companies hiring chaplains are, in a sense, offering themselves as sources of the spiritual help that workers need to cope with problems at home. Barnaby J. Feder, “Ministers Who Work around the Flock,” New York Times, October 3, 1996.’

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a “self-report questionnaire designed to make Carl Jung's theory of psychological types understandable and useful in everyday life.” An Amerco manual states that, among many uses, understanding your type on the MBTI “enhances cooperation and productivity.” Types are based on various dimensions of personality-extroversion, introversion, sensing, intuition, thinking, feeling, judging, and perceiving. Each type is assumed to make a different kind of contribution to a work team and to need a different kind of support. See Isabel Myers-Briggs, Introduction to “Type": Guide A to Understanding Your Results on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1993), p. 1.

As Ella Taylor observes, over the years many television situation comedies have centered on “fun” family-like relationships between coworkers at a workplace. The Mary Tyler Moore Show featured a work-family that ran a television news operation; M*A*S*H depicted a work-family that operated an army medical unit during the Korean War; and the “familial” coworkers in Taxi worked at a cab company. See Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); see also Gerard Jones, Honey, I'm Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

Andrew J. Cherlin, ed., The Changing American Family and Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press). See Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade after Divorce (New York, NY: Tich-nor and Fields, 1989). The authors, unfortunately, do not compare the children from divorced families with those from intact marriages, so we do not know to what degree the children of intact families have comparable experiences. See also Bohannon P., Divorce and After: An Analysis of the Emotional and Social Problems of Divorce (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1971); and William Goode, World Revolution and Divorce (New York, NY: Free Press, 1956).

One partial sign of the devaluation of home life is the low status of the home-maker. A national 1981 Harris poll asked, “If you had to place a dollar value on the job of a homemaker, what do you feel fair wages for a year's work would be?” Men said $12,700, women $13,800. Those women who did paid work gave homemaking a higher dollar value ($24,000) than homemakers themselves ($13,400), and feminists gave it a higher value ($21,500) than traditionalist women ($19,600). In particular, the value of caring for children seems to have declined. Harris A poll asked adults and teenagers whether they agreed that “parents today don't seem as willing to sacrifice for their children as parents did in the past. “ Two-thirds of men and women forty years old and over agreed, as did half of those aged eighteen to thirty-nine. Louis Harris and Associates, The General Mills American Family Report 1980-81, conducted by Louis Harris and Associates Inc., Minneapolis MN, 1981.

Wendy Tanaka , “90s Trends Bite into Business Lunch,” San Francisco Examiner, October 9, 1994, p. A4.

Gary Cross , “If Not the Gift of Time, At Least Toys,” New York Times, December 3, 1995.