In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Some Work/Life Facts to Piss You Off

Rachel

From the good people at Fem2.0. Considering this is my first full day back to work after last week’s back-to-back blizzards, I’ll let this list of U.S. statistics speak for itself…

1. 48% of workers do not have paid sick days; 76% of low-wage workers and 80% of part-time workers do not have paid sick days.

2. In 1960 only 10% of mothers worked and only 10% were unmarried. Today 70% of mothers work and 40% of mothers are unmarried.

3. 70% of American children live in households where all adults are employed.

4. Single mothers earning less then $20,000 are twice as likely as other workers to have nonstandard hours, and have the highest rate of nonstandard hours of all U.S. workers.

5. 41% of working parents say they had missed medical appointments or delayed treatments for their children because they could not get away from work.

6. Nearly 40% of employees say they have missed work due to elder care responsibilities.

7. The US, along with only three other countries-Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland-have no paid maternity leave.

8. Of the world’s 15 most competitive countries, 14 provide paid sick leave, 13 provide paid leave for new mothers, and 12 provide paid leave for new fathers.

9. 40% of low-wage workers work nonstandard hours, defined as anything other than 9-to-5, five days/week.

10. Workers coming to work when they are ill cost $180 billion annually in lost productivity.

11. Employers with family friendly policies improve their bottom line by reducing attrition and absenteeism and increasing employee performance.

Update: I regret adopting fem2.0’s original word choice uncritically (see comments) and have edited the post accordingly.

47 thoughts on Some Work/Life Facts to Piss You Off

  1. These facts are going to “make me crazy”? They will induce in me a mental illness? They will cause me to meet diagnostic criteria for specific mental health disorders? I suspect not. Rather, they will likely annoy me, make me frustrated at the ongoing inability to balance work and non-work aspects of my life, make me marvel at the frustrating policies in place in most workplaces, etc.

    Please be mindful of how using ableist language can alienate and exclude readers like myself with existing mental health concerns who don’t appreciate the implicating that one’s mental state after reading this list will be equivalent to having an actual disability.

  2. I wish we’d start taxing corporations/businesses for paying any employees less than a living wage, for not providing sick leave to their employees, for not having a transparent across-the-board policy of what job gets paid what.

    Because we end up paying for their cheapskateness. We pay for programs to help full-time workers who can’t afford the basic necessities of life on their full-time wages. We pay for their food, their lodging, their health care because their employers can’t be bothered to provide sufficient pay for this in exchange for their 40+ hours of labor.

    We pay in risk and inconvenience when our coworkers come to work sick because they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t. We pay in our children’s risk when their children have to go to school sick because they can’t stay home to care for them, or take them to the doctor, because they’ll lose their jobs if they do.

    We pay, in poverty and lost opportunities and setbacks to equality, when they pay some people less than others for the same work and rely on a secretive culture to keep those workers ignorant of what is fair compensation.

    At best, it’ll make for a deterrent. At worst, it’ll at least net us some tax revenue.

  4. These kinds of stats really make me angry. Politicians love to talk about families being important, but to actually do some of these important things to help them? Noooo! Might upset their supporters, AKA big businesses.

  5. I wish we’d start taxing corporations/businesses…for not providing sick leave to their employees

    My company doesn’t provide paid sick leave, it just gives me three extra paid vacation days, which I can use to be sick, or, if I am not sick, I can use to go on vacation. I like this solution, and I don’t think they deserve to be taxed or fined for it.

  6. My job works like Tom’s. The university I work for does not provide sick leave; they used to, but then decided to roll together sick leave and vacation time; we get a total of 5 weeks a year to use for our own illnesses, a family member’s illness, or vacation time.

  8. I have a chronic physical illness. And I’m mentally ill and it’s active right now so yes I am crazy too. In the ten years since I was diagnosed with my chronic physical illness I have had all of a week of actual vacation. When I had a job that had paid leave all of it went to being sick: sick time, vacation time, everything and then some. Now I just don’t get paid when I’m sick, which is often, or when I go to one of the many doctors, which is often.

    Those of you who have jobs where you have paid leave that you can use for whatever, that’s great. Just… We need your support so we can go from having nothing at all to having a little something. “I’ve got mine” isn’t real helpful. Please?

  9. I really support raising issues of work, and workplace rights in feminist spaces.

    But you know what – where I live 100% of workers have paid sick days, because it’s the law. Chally just posted her piece about acting as the USA legal framework was the world legal framework yesterday and now the very first thing of this post is clearly only talk about the USA, but doesn’t acknowledge that.

  10. Agreed to the ableism in “make you crazy”.

    Agreed to the US-centrism on display here.

    I’m interested in the info presented, but I wish it had been presented in a less exclusionary way.

  11. 8. Of the world’s 15 most competitive countries, 14 provide paid sick leave, 13 provide paid leave for new mothers, and 12 provide paid leave for new fathers.

    Stupid question, perhaps, but what does “most competitive countries” mean? Fastest growing, happiest, largest GNP…?

    11. Employers with family friendly policies improve their bottom line by reducing attrition and absenteeism and increasing employee performance.

    Is this true?

    It would obviously be true overall if everyone did it. But I didn’t think it was shown to be true if viewed from the current status of an employer using FF policies and competing in a market where few do.

    It’s actually a bit like unionization: if everyone got the same benefits as union workers, then working conditions would be generally improved. We would all benefit. But because everyone isn’t unionized, then people have a significant incentive to hire non-union shops, because they are generally cheaper.

    Oddly enough, it is the rights of the employees which make it difficult to get the appropriate incentives in place. Employers can’t guarantee that an employee will work in the best interest of the company, so investing additional funds in the employee represents a risk that isn’t practical for smaller employers.

  12. The work divide is a feminist issue that deserves more attention, IMO. There is a certain blogger I may solicit to write more on this if she’s available.

  13. My company doesn’t provide paid sick leave, it just gives me three extra paid vacation days, which I can use to be sick, or, if I am not sick, I can use to go on vacation. I like this solution, and I don’t think they deserve to be taxed or fined for it.

    Semantics. Either you have the ability to stay home from work when you get sick without losing your job for not showing up, or you don’t.

    I really don’t care if you’ve got the added luxury of using your sick days for (even more!) vacation if you’re healthy. That doesn’t help the people who don’t have sick leave of any sort, let alone vacation days.

  14. I really don’t care if you’ve got the added luxury of using your sick days for (even more!) vacation if you’re healthy. That doesn’t help the people who don’t have sick leave of any sort, let alone vacation days.

    Not trying to derail, but there is also a case to be made for caring about things like paid vacation days as well as sick days for all workers. It’s not always trivial or superficial.

  15. I know there weren’t any cites on the Fem2.0 post either, but do you maybe know where these purported facts come from?

    April – Kyra didn’t say that.

  16. @Maia where do you live, may I ask? Because as far as I know there isn’t a country where all workers get paid sick leave, not with the rise in casualisation that is happening.. and the degree to which workers are otherwise compensated for no paid sick leave or choose to be employed in that fashion varies greatly.

    Being unable to access proper sick leave provisions is a truly global issue.

  17. @blue milk

    Sorry to butt in, but iirc, in the UK we do have sick pay for all workers. If the company doesn’t cover you when you’re sick you get statutory sick pay from the government (which may be less than your salary, but there is monetary support there). Some of the companies that I have worked for have given the option of 26 weeks in one year with full pay for serious illnesses.

    N

  19. Are there citations anywhere for these statistics? I am not saying that these statistics are not true (for the U.S.), but I can’t see how I can possibly accept and spread them without any knowledge of where they came from (as also addressed by the commenters at Fem2.0).

  20. Abbyjean: I think you are right to call out abelism. I do want to say that I have personally suffered depression, anxiety, and a wonderful bout of psychosis due to the structure of my jobs. I have long just felt it was a personality flaw on my part; an inability to cope with what everyone else seems to be coping with. So, from where I’m standing, I would call out the use of “crazy” in the thread title but leave the door open for folks to talk about the negative effects of such employment strategies.

  21. @blue milk

    I know for a fact that temporary and agency workers are entitled to sick pay. As are those that are on fixed term contracts. I am unsure what you mean by seasonal workers, but any employee that shows up on the ‘books’ (i.e. not paid cash in hand to avoid income tax) is entitled to the statutory sick pay (this is the link to all things statutory sick pay, if you’re interested http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/BenefitsTaxCreditsAndOtherSupport/Illorinjured/DG_10018786). It looks like you have to be sick for 4 days to claim though. But it is covered for 28 weeks at £79.15 a week. Not huge amounts but better than nothing.

    N

  22. I’d also like to add a bitter word or two on behalf of workers who technically have scheduled sick time and vacation days and even weekends, but who are expected to ALWAYS BE AVAILABLE in the event of crisis.

    And I’ve had friends in jobs that have been seven days a week, year-round, ten hours a day, minimum, because the employer won’t hire additional and/or more capable workers.

  23. Are you guys really not going to get rid of the word “crazy” in the title? It seems like a small, easy gesture, really. You could say “Facts to Drive You Up the Wall” or “Facts to Make you Want to kick a wall” or anything. There are lots of things these facts make me, personally, want to do. Like move to Norway, for one, where women get something like 9 month maternity leave, men have to take some part of it (I don’t remember the exact numbers right now) in order to, you know, actually participate in the care of a newborn, and vacation and sick days are guaranteed by the government.

    I HATE this commercial they’re running on TV in NYC right now where they say something like “see what happens when a child goes to school sick?” They spread all of their sick child koodies around, so keep them home. Without a second thought as to the structural set-up of our society that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for people to keep their children home from school even if they wanted to. It’s scream inducing. (“Facts that will make you want to scream”)

  24. I actually received some very unexpected and bad news yesterday that kept me from the computer. I wasn’t trying to evade the issue. (Okay, maybe I was last night, just a little. It was a very, very long day.) I do regret the original word choice, ever more so because it’s not like I’m unaware of the issues surrounding a word like “crazy.” I hope you’ll accept my apology and understand I am usually better than that.

  25. Rachel, hope you’re okay. I know, rooting out these abelist words is tough, at least, it’s hard for me. I have to be super conscious of it and I slip up All The Time. Thanks for changing it!

  26. Chaldanya, your link gives me an error page.

    Yeah, I’m doubtful about these stats. It says only four countries don’t provide paid maternity leave and then says 13 of 15 most competitive countries provide paid leave for new mothers. I’m guessing Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland aren’t in the 15 most competitive so what are the two of 15 that don’t provide paid leave?

    For any curious Canadians I tried to google paid leave. It’s different in every province. I found we get 0-10 emergency leave days. In Ontario it’s ten only if a business has 50 or more employees which leaves out so many people. I couldn’t find any province where everyone gets PAID leave unless I’m missing something. So I think the standards are definitely lacking here too.

  28. “I’d also like to add a bitter word or two on behalf of workers who technically have scheduled sick time and vacation days and even weekends, but who are expected to ALWAYS BE AVAILABLE in the event of crisis.”

    Yea, where I live (Germany) that is much more of the problem. Our laws, even though a lot of them have been dismantled over the past few years, are still amazingly employee-friendly. Reality, not so much.
    Like in the UK, you’re entitled to paid sick leave, vacation time and parenting time (still overwhelmingly taken by the mothers) in *any* job, no matter how temporary or how few hours etc.
    In practice, employers ignore those laws, they’ll lie to you or even be unaware themself because it’s such common practice not to have those arrangements in certain jobs. And there’s a lot of informal pressure, on many levels. A temp agency will tell you you’d better suck it up if you want a job at all, an employer may remark on how you’ve really been sick a lot lately, and we now have a whole subsector, especially in coveted creative jobs (design, media, architecture and the like) which runs on unpaid internships, indefinitely.
    I’m a fashion design major – I now do something entirely different, and some of the people I graduated with five years ago have essentially been working full time since, without ever seeing a dime.

  29. blue milk: further to Chaldanya’s comment, I don’t expect that contractors do get sick pay. However, redefining regular employees as contractors is thoroughly illegal and regularly clamped down on (partly because the government doesn’t get all the tax it should).

  30. I’m from New Zealand bluemilk – I think you have an official status called ‘casual’ in Australia (at least in some industries/states) where there’s casual loading on top and you don’t get sick leave. It doesn’t quite work like that here. There’s no legal status called ‘casual’ so employers can write whatever they like on their paperwork and you’re still entitled to sick leave. The requirement is six months continuous service, but there are provisions for people with regular, but not quite continuous hours (also it’s with the same employer, so if you’ve got a series of fixed term agreements you still get sick leave). So there are obviously some people who are left right out of that – most notably un-unionised seasonal workers (unionised seasonal workers will usually sort out a provision in their agreement). And then, of course, as with all labour laws there’s the enforcement problem. Because it’s all very well to have the right, but heaps of small businesses will just ignore it, and cut the hours of people who ask, and large businesses with workers who are new to the workforce will obfuscate as best as they can.

  31. Oh and just specifically on agency and temp workers – yes they get sick-leave, but that’s provided by the agency/temping company. There are pretty strict provisions on legitimate fixed term agreements here (again they get ignored), and I don’t think zero hour contracts is a term that gets used. But people on agreements with no fixed hours of work – which aren’t unusual, are entitled to sick leave after six months continuous employment – or after they’ve worked six months and averaged ten hours a week and at least one hour each week, or forty hours each month. Obviously those are minimum provisions – and particularly unionised workplaces will have more.

  33. wtf is #2 doing on this list and why is that fact supposed to piss off readers of a feminist blog? Why is it supposed to piss off anybody?

  34. How did the number of mothers working and the number of kids with two working parents come out to be exactly the same? I know there’s not a lot of stay at home dads, but not even 1% of children have stay at home dads? What about gay and lesbian parents?

    Considering the lack of sources, it looks like someone made up some things that sounded right.

  35. Oh yeah, and I have to comment on #7 – So Sudan has paid maternity leave? Iraq? Come on – at least say “developed countries” or “democratic countries” to limit your field, and then get it right from there.

  36. While it’s of course not perfect as a source, Wikipedia says that Iraq does offer paid maternity leave, as do Sudan and Saudi Arabia. A number of other sources that I googled in the last five minutes said the same thing.

  37. #2 is agreed – what’s that supposed to say?!

    However, didn’t we just witness a pretty horrible “discussion” about nationalism, US-centrism and the “western world” to not throw around phrases like “developed countries”…?

    Furthermore, some quick research (thanks, butch fatale for saying that), even by google, shows that countries like afghanisten and iraq indeed have maternity (rather: parental) leave. so, maybe we should watch out for prejudices and presumptions here.

    a different question that arises, of course, is the general situation (especially for women) such war-plagued countries… however, isn’t it significant that, from a stereotypical “western” point of view, allegedly “undeveloped” (ugh) countries like those acknowledge such basic human rights and the US does not?

  38. and, to clarify (i am sorry i forgot to include that): by “horrible discussion” i mean some of the reactions to chally’s “open letter” to USians a couple of days ago.

  39. Yea, you’d be amazed. The US have an appalling track record of human rights and social security (and no, I’m not saying all European governments are run by saints. In fact, give me a few drinks and I’ll start defending the Morgentau Plan. But we do get a few things right, and so do many other countries).
    I know a lot of Americans who are totally baffled when they hear they’re working more than any European counterparts.
    Hell, a few years ago I read stats that put the US closest to Japan (in work load and downtime), where they have a special word for death by overwork.

    So yea. You probably can’t uy as many brands of fabric softener in Saudi Arabia, but I’m pretty sure people also work less, in total.

    Another thing that shouldn’t be forgotten in the maternity leave debate: Some governments consider it in their own interest to incentivize procreation. Some of the German campaigns I actually find quite offensive. Over here, it’s the *conservative* parties constantly pushing for more maternity leave and more government child support and whatnot. And even in the liberal parties get on the same train, its always with the same line of reasoning: Germans are becoming extinct (and that would be oh so horrible… And all those Turkish immigrants would outbreedus, onoes!), so we have to get more women to breed for the fatherland! Throw them some money, throw them some extra downtime, maybe we can just peacefully *lure* them back to the kitchen.

    I can easily imagine Iraq or Saudi Arabia having similar motivatons.

  40. For those upset that the stat about how many working mothers are in the workforce, think just a moment about it. The point is that there are now so many working mothers in the workforce that they shouldn’t be ignored. It no longer flies to suggest we don’t need family friendly workplaces because there is assumed to be a parent at home. Employers can’t assume that anymore.

  41. Mama Mia: it’s not about how many mothers work; it’s the stat about how many are married. Who cares how many mothers have a piece of paper showing that they’re legally bonded to a man? What is the relevance in this context?

    The list seems a rather bizarre mishmash of unformed, uncited ideas. I can’t even tell whether they’re supposed to be global figures, USan figures, or something else. (fem 2.0 has a history of being relentlessly US-centric). And at least one stat is also just plain wrong: Australia has no mandatory paid maternity leave.

  42. @Lyndsay/lauredhel: Australia doesn’t provide paid maternity leave – yet.

    @blue milk: Here in Germany every worker is entitled to paid sick leave. Temp, permanent or whatever (what are “zero-hours” workers?), the employer has to pay for up to 6 weeks and then your health insurance takes over.

  43. I spent last semester doing an independent study under my women’s studies professor who has a background in economics. (My major is econ, minor is wmst)

    The workplace in America is not family friendly, especially compared to that of other industrialized/developed nations. Our federal government offers the FMLA act, which allows workers 6 week of unpaid leave IF you work for a company that has 50 or more employees. Our government does not offer maternity leave.

    Also, it’s extremely difficult to balance work and family in our corporate structure that demands 40 + hours a week. There is also a lack of professional part time options, such as part time tenure professor, or part time partner at a law firm.

  44. Lauredhel,
    I see what you are saying, but I think the point is still the same- there used to be a general assumption that women’s issues at work didn’t matter because there was a man bringing home the “real” money for the family. Women were always working for “pin money”, not for true famiy support. The number of non-married mothers working is significant not because of any moral reason, but because they are not working for “fun,” they are working to support their families, too, and employers can’t choose to fire the woman first simply because the man “has a family at home.”

    I think we can all agree, though, that the list diminished it’s effectiveness by not making this stuff more obvious. Also, the lack of citations is really frustrating to me, and it is a bit of a mish mash.

  45. Mama Mia: Oh, I think I understand – are you (and are the list writers?) assuming that “not married” means “single-income female-headed sole-parent family”? This is (very obviously, IMO) untrue.

  46. lauredhel,
    This is where statistics get problematic, isn’t it? So many people get hidden. It is hard to find clean statistics that reveal what we might be looking for. Hidden within the “non-married working mother” stat would be the single-income female headed sole-parent families, but also unmarried parents living together, and unmarried parent and non-parent living together. I can’t find very good stats, but here is what I do find for the US, which appears to have higher rates of unmarried mothers than the rest of the world. It looks like about 1.3 million people report being unmarried parents living together with their children. Even if you don’t divide that in half to account for families, that represents less than half a percent of the US population. Another half a percent are made up of one parent and one non-parent taking care of kids. But families headed up by a single-mother alone are about 35% or more (again, higher in the US than elsewhere). I would argue that non-married two parent homes have the same situation as married parents in terms of financial security. In the unmarried couples with one parent and one non-parent, there is increased risk for the child if mother loses her job, since that is the most likely place for health insurance to come from (in the US), while the non-parent would not be allowed to cover the child with workplace insurance.

    So, while there are unmarried parents, the vast majority of non-married working mothers probably don’t have the increased financial security of having another parent present in the home.

    But I think the real moral of this story is that using statistics without carefully explaining your point means your point will be completely lost. (Source of stats: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2008-07-28-cohabitation-census_N.htm) Sorry if this got too wonky. I most certainly recognize your points.

  47. I agree with the criticisms I’ve seen of #2 and I hate the way stats like this flatten out differences in, for example: race. Because I guarantee you in 1960 more than 10% of women of color who were mothers were working, and that percentage varied AMONGST women of color too.

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