Coronavirus Could Upend Traditional Workweeks (axios.com) 115
One of the pandemic's longer-term impacts on how we work could be the end of the five-day, 9-to-5 workweek. From a report: For many companies, these past few months have been a period of rapid experimentation -- and some are finding that shorter workdays and four-day weeks can work quite well. The gap between when the school day typically ends -- 3pm -- and when the workday ends -- 5 pm -- "is grossly unfair to working parents," Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at UPenn's Wharton School, writes in the Economist.
"If more of us end up working remotely after the pandemic, there is one change that could make work better: ending the misalignment between the school day and the work day," he writes. Parents juggling work and child care while telecommuting are already bearing burdens their colleagues are not, and shortening the workday to 3pm would take away a great deal of stress. Grant notes: "Take it from someone who studies work for a living: we can be every bit as creative and productive in six focused hours a day as in twice as many distracted hours."
"If more of us end up working remotely after the pandemic, there is one change that could make work better: ending the misalignment between the school day and the work day," he writes. Parents juggling work and child care while telecommuting are already bearing burdens their colleagues are not, and shortening the workday to 3pm would take away a great deal of stress. Grant notes: "Take it from someone who studies work for a living: we can be every bit as creative and productive in six focused hours a day as in twice as many distracted hours."
what the.. ? (Score:2)
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To reach middle class you need two incomes. This means children have to be taken care of by outside providers during working hours. This means that they need to work around business hours schedule, which is not the case.
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The change to below replacement levels happened approximately at the Civil War. This is also about the time the US got industrialized. Countries that get industrialized also have their birth rates drop significantly. I've tended to think the birth rate drops because children cost parents money in an industrialized economy(education, food, clothes, etc), while in an agricultural economy children make parents money(working the fields, milking the cows, etc). There are outliers with this trend, and my grandmot
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It's also the case that in more impoverished populations, infant and child mortality rates are fairly high. Wealthier societies can afford better prenatal and early childhood healthcare. Five hundred years ago, the average family often had well above five or six children, simply because the odds were that a significant portion of those children would not survive to adulthood. Since, in agrarian societies, you need healthy children to do a fair portion of the work, the only way to stabilize such an economy i
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The US population is about ten times what it was in 1865. Are you really asserting that 90%+ of the current population is immigrants?
A quick Google suggests that the US population growth went below replacement rate in my lifetime....
Re:what the.. ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Err...ok, while I can understand this is a concern when you have very young children...10 and younger maybe....
Why is this a problem for kids 11yrs and older?
I mean, when I was a kid, my parents worked...and I'd come home alone just fine.
Quite often as I got older, Mom would have some instructions for me to start the family evening meal...some times as simple and putting a bag of frozen veggies into the crockpot she's left cooking meat for stew, etc.
I mean, hell....most every kid in my neighborhood was what we called I think "latch key" kids.
We'd all get home form school and do whatever, play with each other till Moms and Dads starting coming home and we'd have dinner.
Do paterents today not teach their kids to start being automous at these ages any more?
I mean, once you're an upper pre-teen...you should be able to stay at home for a few hours alone and manage yourself.
Hell, what do these parents do in the summer when kids are out of school?
All of us that age had free roam of our neighborhoods at that age, and were out biking, skateboarding and in one neighborhood, we have a neighborhood pool....
Is everyone so paranoid today little Sally/Timmy will be kidnapped by the boogie man that they don't let kids grow up and learn how to be alone and start assuming some responsibility?
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Err...ok, while I can understand this is a concern when you have very young children...10 and younger maybe.... Why is this a problem for kids 11yrs and older?
From my experience you are correct. Employees at my company with kids over 10 years old are not significantly struggling right now, even if both of them work. My assumption is most of these stories aren't being very specific, and most of the problems they discuss are primarily for parents of young children.
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>Why is this a problem for kids 11yrs and older?
Last time I checked, having kids 11yrs and older generally requires that you go though at least 10 years of having kids 11yrs old...
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Even for older kids, you now have busy-body child protective services. Your children are taken away and you charged with neglect if you are not constantly seen supervising them until, I think, 16.
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Wow...seriously? Everywhere in the US?
I mean, it sounds like if I were raised today...I would have been taken from my parents and they would have been charged with a crime?
When did all this nonsense happen?
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That's part of it, but there is a phenomenon that has been noted for a very long time; that the wealthier as a mean that populations are, the less children they have. This is noted in the Early Modern Period in England, as the Middle Classes first started to arise, that members of the middle class tended to have fewer children. Fewer children means fewer mouths to feed, meaning a family can retain more of their wealth. My hunch is that even if you incentivized families being able to have one parent at home
Re: what the.. ? (Score:2)
I think the science says the real reason is educated women. There tend to be more educated women in wealthy societies. Women prefer a job to lifetime motherhood duties, it seems.
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We're going to see this in China soon - the 1 child policy meant that the female children were treated much better than their past generations that lavished attention on male children.
So now, young Chinese girls are "little princesses" who demand education, careers and independance. The last thing they will do is become baby-making machines like many of their parents generation.
The birth rate in China will fall further, possibly to the point where they start to complain about not having enough kids.
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My hunch is that even if you incentivized families being able to have one parent at home during the childbearing years, you would not, in fact, see that great an increase in fertility rates.
I don't see too many proposals of incentives to have one parent at home during childbearing years. Most of them, this story included, suggest ways to help both parents work. Incentives to hire parents with gaps in their working history is one example I can think of, and perhaps you could include any suggestion to increase median wages as an incentive for one parent to stay home. But by and large the incentives discussed proposals like making child care less expensive, work hour and location flexibility, bet
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Let's keep in mind that pregnancy and childbirth are not a lot of fun, and while most women I know are or want to be mothers, but are the first one or two, the desire for more definitely recedes. In more impoverished societies, where education and quality health care are harder to find, you still see populations growing above replacement rate, but once women have some choice, I don't think incentives really are going to be a big factor.
In the long run, raising the living standards in developing economies sh
Re:what the.. ? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Parents juggling work and child care while telecommuting are already bearing burdens their colleagues are not," So does this mean the collegues of the parents referenced in this article don't find their children to be burdens? Sounds like these are just bad oarents then. :)
With a sample size of about 50 employees (reporting to me or a close colleague), I have found the primary cause of family stress during this crisis are families with young children and two working spouses (that have both kept their jobs without reduced hours). This is common among my team as most are in their late 20's and 30's. Employees with kids who are around 8+ didn't have much struggle, with the exception of those with kids with extra challenges such as anxiety, ADHD or autism (the three issues I know I have colleagues dealing with now). Employees with one parent not working during the crisis or who were teachers also didn't have much trouble (teachers mostly had reduced hours in my area).
Employees with two working parents and one or more kids in K-2 were the hardest hit since they had remote learning to deal with and kids not old enough to self-manage that work at any level. Parents with kids under pre-K also had a hard time, but not quite as bad without the school responsibility.
I saw no examples of two employees in the same situation where one was handling it much better than the other. There was always a good reason for the difference, and in no case would "bad parenting" come to mind for any reasonable person listening to the specific situation.
My employees without kids, with older kids, or only one working spouse are simply getting more work done and in many cases are covering for other coworkers. I have noticed no resentment (so far anyway) as everyone understands they are simply lucky that coronavirus hit at a more convenient point in their life than their less fortunate coworkers.
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This is common among my team as most are in their late 20's and 30's.
I do not have that problem. I am in my 50s and struggling to find a white collar job again. I have the skills - but I am told that if I have the skills, I can get a job. But yet, no interviews. Now with Big Data, it is real easy to find out the demographic that an applicant fits into. So, age discrimination is illegal and I have no way to prove it, what is the point?
I cannot even get an interview. I have had several people give me resume advice, but yet, no interviews - nothing.
I have no kids to distract m
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This is common among my team as most are in their late 20's and 30's.
I do not have that problem. I am in my 50s and struggling to find a white collar job again. I have the skills - but I am told that if I have the skills, I can get a job. But yet, no interviews. Now with Big Data, it is real easy to find out the demographic that an applicant fits into. So, age discrimination is illegal and I have no way to prove it, what is the point?
I cannot even get an interview. I have had several people give me resume advice, but yet, no interviews - nothing.
I have no kids to distract me, but yet nothing.
I wish Baby Boomers would shut the fuck up; age is NOT just a number.
Switch from tech to finance. They hire old folks like us. And I'm paid 2x what I was in tech.
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We've had to make a lot of accommodations. It's particular tough on single parents, who used their parents and other families as daycare providers, and physical distancing meant that evaporated. And yes, productivity has dropped.
One thing I have noticed is that some of our staff who are parents are actually effectively working more hours; putting in the 8 hours a day but spread over 10-12 hours. I can see them logging on to remote services sometimes as 7am, probably before the kids wake up, and often times
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No. It may mean that the colleagues do not have children, or do not have to commute, or have someone who who can help with child care, ...
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In the quoted sentence the term "colleagues" is referring to people who are not "Parents" .
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Or the colleagues in question just don't have children. Fewer extra-employment issues, fewer costs, it's the obvious 20% of the population to selectively employ.
traffic would be insane (Score:2)
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heh, but the idea is those 30-40% that can work remotely do, and so cut down traffic
Educate not Babysit (Score:2)
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You appear to be relying on anecdotal evidence, third hand at best.
Re: Educate not Babysit (Score:1)
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My first grader has more homework than I had throughout middle school.
Truth. When my 9yo was in kindergarten, she had to do a research project. First and Second grade averaged out to be 45 minutes of homework a day. I came to the conclusion it was to drive parental involvement, since there was no way they could do the work unassisted.
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When my 9yo was in kindergarten
Wow, she got held back quite a few times!
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I've worked in a couple of high schools recently. The only daycare I've seen was for teaching the kids how to take care of kids(whatever they currently call Home Economics).
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I've worked in a couple of high schools recently. The only daycare I've seen was for teaching the kids how to take care of kids(whatever they currently call Home Economics).
In our high school that is one use of the day care, although the services are first offered to children of teachers before opening up to the community at large. I guess you both can be correct.
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Kids may leave school earlier than the office but that is to give them time to do homework and for teachers to grade homework and do the final prep for the next day's lessons. If we are going to have shorter workdays then school will need to end even earlier to allow teachers to have the same workday as everyone else.
Or just have more free study periods at school where the students are studying and the teachers prepping for their next day, grading papers, etc. Teachers only do those things after hours because of school days being so short. Add another hour to the school day and both kids and teachers can be freed from most of their after hours assignments. Then we should get rid of summer vacation too because we don't live in an agrarian society any more.
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So... (Score:4, Insightful)
2 options.
1) lengthen to school day to provide day care for all those parents and give the government more control over how our kids are raised.
2) Stop insisting that the aaverge family should have 2 incomes and have 1 spouse primarily take care of the kids, better yet homeschool them, better education and less taxpayer money.
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But 2) would cut the number of wage slaves by 2!!! Are you really suggesting that top 1% not buy that yacht every year, because of some kids and slaves having quality of life?
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
To get into the top 1% in America, you have to have a pre-tax income of about $420k/yr. Despite popular beliefs, the top 1% pays an average of 27% federal income tax (not counting Social Security, Medicare, State & Local taxes, etc). So I think it is safe to say that somebody in the top 1% of income earners could have as "little" as $250k of money to spend each year, before housing, food, and other living expenses. To be conservative I'm going to go with at most $200k of "extra" spending money, although to be fair most people in the 1% would have much less left over after housing and other expenses, especially if they live in NYC or the Bay Area.
I bring this up because I know something about yachts. There is no official definition of a "yacht" but typically it means a large boat that you can actually live on in some amount of comfort. If so, a new yacht would cost between about $500k and $500 million. When people think of rich people on yachts I don't think they are thinking about a small sailboat in the $500k range, rather a larger motorboat in the $2+ million range.
There are broker fees, delivery fees, startup costs, and in most cases sales tax on yachts. Yachts also cost an average of 20% of their purchase price each year for maintenance, insurance, and storage fees. That's excluding a crew, which is not strictly necessary, although again most people who picture a rich person on a yacht expect there to be at least one crew member, if not a few.
So to own a $500k "yacht" with no crew, you'll spend about $100k/yr in expenses. That leaves $100k/yr left over, at absolutely best case. That means somebody in the 1% might only be able to buy a new one every 5-10 years depending on residual value and housing costs. And that's a small sailboat.
If you go to a real yacht, let's look at a starting point of $2 million to buy, and $400k annual expenses, and say $200k/yr for crew. These will lose a lot of value when you "drive them off the lot" so let's assume 60% residual value and 10% in taxes/purchase costs. So your annual cost to switch to a new $2m yacht each year and maintain those yachts would cost about $1.6 million per year. To account for taxes and other living expenses you'd need to be earning about $3 million per year to be able to comfortably switch to a new yacht annually.
It looks like the top 0.1% of US income earners starts at $1.5 million per year, so that's not really enough for a "real" yacht as opposed to a small- or medium-sized sailboat. The top 0.01% of US income earners starts at $7 million per year. I think that's where your statement becomes a reality.
Now, this is hard to get solid numbers on, but it looks like the top 0.01% earns 5% of all income in the US. It looks like total income in the US is about $20 trillion per year. So that would be about $1 trillion per year. The top 0.01% pays an average of 25% in federal income tax based on what I can find, plus FICA, state, and local taxes. So at best, taking all of the rest of the money that the top 0.01% earn each year, and assuming they keep earning the same amount (versus leaving the country, hiding income, etc), it would earn us an extra $600 billion in additional annual tax revenue.
An extra $600 billion in revenue, for as long as it lasts, wouldn't even balance out the budget deficit before Covid-19.
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
As a member of the top 1% (on the low end), the idea of spending $100k a year on a boat is pretty laughable. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining in the slightest (I consider myself extremely fortunate), but the top 1% lifestyle is very different from the popular imagination. When people say "top 1%" they tend to imagine jobs and lifestyles that are more associated with the .1% or .01%. Most 1%ers are doctors, lawyers, middle managers, small business owners- not celebrities, F500 CEOs, fund managers, or other assorted masters of the universe.
The main difference between $100k a year and $500k a year is that you can actually afford the upper middle class lifestyle people aspire to. You can afford to save for retirement, pay for college/daycare, own a 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood, 2 late model cars, pay for weddings/funerals, etc., and still have a bit leftover at the end of the day. People making more like $100k often do some or all those things, but are in debt up to their eyeballs in the attempt. People making less than that have to give up some or all and can't plug the hole with debt. Of course, things vary based on local cost of living, but most people with top 1% incomes also live in places where cost of living is high.
If you actually attempted to live the "lifestyles of the rich and famous" on $500k by buying things like yachts, you'd be in an even worse debt situation than the folks trying to pay for an upper middle class lifestyle on $100k/yr.
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I'm not sure what you know about yachts, but most of that is made up. You can get an awesome 40-50' bluewater French sailing yacht for ~$300k at the top end, nicer than most people's apartments. Buy one that's five years old and that price drops to $100k. You wouldn't just walk up with a briefcase full of cash of course, you'd get a mortgage and put maybe $20k a year into it.
Apparently if you want one without sails, those are expensive. Not sure why anyone would though.
Re: So... (Score:2)
I just checked for new boats in that range in Yachworld and I'm generally seeing prices around $600k.
And financing it doesn't help if you are buying a new one every year. My calculations are the same, it's just a bit more expensive if you finance.
But a 40' or 50' monohaul isn't what people picture when they talk about rich people on yachts. I think they picture hot tubs, beach clubs, waverunners, and definitely not sails.
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2) Stop insisting that the aaverge family should have 2 incomes and have 1 spouse primarily take care of the kids
It typically takes two incomes in order to sustain the "average" lifestyle. Yes, there's variance from that of course. But the typical bar is 200% poverty wage and for many States within the US, the vast majority of jobs provide less than that level of income. Again, there's jobs that do provide that level and there's families that can sustain 150% poverty wage, there's a lot of in-between here. But the vast majority are in lifestyles that are in the 200% poverty domain and have jobs that earn less than
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Except the costs of having two jobs, which includes daycare, transportation, eating out more, and more expensive clothing costs, wipe out most of the benefit of the second job.
The average family makes a little less than $60,000 a year. If we take the cited statistics about the male-female pay gap, that means the man earns about $33,000 and the woman makes about $26,500.
Taxes on that would be about $3180. Other federal taxes would be about $1,600.
Daycare averages $1,000 a month per child, but will will be
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Of course you're also completely overlooking the fact that the house-parent pays a much higher cost in the form of their career pretty much dead-ending.
Considering that roughly half of all marriages end in divorce, that's a major consideration that every house-parent should consider. Especially since even generous alimony payments rarely come anywhere close to compensating for the lost earning potential, and very often disappear entirely after children come of age.
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No, you failed. Badly.
Even if the second parent comes out even by working, they still are paying social security, and quite possibly are paying into an IRA or 401k.
If you don't ever work, your retirement is shit. You will get a ton more money for retirement by paying into social security with a good paying job, and even if your 401k or IRA contributions are pretty low, they do grow over a 40+ year career. Although if married and filing jointly one spouse can pay into some retirement for the other, it's very
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Wasn't trying to move the goal posts at all - just pointing out that your rationale for why there should be a stay-at-home parent is fundamentally flawed in a society where they get no long-term security for that economic sacrifice.
You also made plenty of other extremely questionable assumptions, the two biggest being
- that there would be no second car payment with a stay-at-home parent. That essentially eliminates any freedom of motion for them, making them wholly dependent on their spouse, and eliminatin
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Or just maybe divorce increased dramatically because
- women are now able to get decent jobs so that they can leave abusive or unsatisfying relationships without consigning themselves to poverty or prostitution
- we started believing that love, romance, and personal fulfillment were essential parts of marriage, which is traditionally a business arrangement. Granted that started during the Romance Era, but Women's Lib advanced that belief dramatically, for both genders (but probably more for women)
- the inf
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Daycare averages $1,000 a month per child, but will will be generous and say it is that for all children($12,000).
Yes, but some of that is refundable in taxes and some can be paid in pretax wages.
Second car payment is $300 ($3,600), insurance $100 ($1,200), gas, etc. $40 ($480)
Now I can't speak for every region. But there aren't many people in my area of Tennessee nor in Nashville proper that are okay with just a single car. Outside of buses, it's car or hoof it here. And from a lot of the public that I get to see everyday, not a lot are hoofing it. So I don't think you can just assume that a single wage earner equals a single car payment. I think that's a pretty bad assumption in your equation
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Or just offer afterschool programs for the gap (Score:2)
2 options. 1) lengthen to school day to provide day care for all those parents and give the government more control over how our kids are raised. 2) Stop insisting that the aaverge family should have 2 incomes and have 1 spouse primarily take care of the kids, better yet homeschool them, better education and less taxpayer money.
Homeschooling is not a smart suggestion. Most adults cannot properly educate a child. I consider myself an accomplished individual on many fronts, but cannot teach nearly as well as a professional teacher. No homeschooling environment can match what a professional education system can do. Home tutoring can add a lot of value, but not replace it. That's like saying you never need to leave the house. All you need is a treadmill. It's technically true...you can get all the exercise you need from a tread
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Additionally, being around peers of your age is fairly important in becoming a functional member of society.
One of our friends decided to home school their kids and compared to other kids the same age, those kids are insufferable.
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Homeschooling is not a smart suggestion. Most adults cannot properly educate a child.
This is true of well-educated parents, with time and money to invest in their child's education. When it comes to parents without a good education, and/or without the time and money to invest, they are pretty much SOL unless they lucked out and have some top 5% exceptional child with a real aptitude for learning.
I work with an awesome woman who has a masters degree and who is by and large a motivated, competent individual. She can definitely teach her kids a whole lot, but she's got the stereotypical, "I su
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In Asia, students spend time after school cleaning the classroom, and participating in club activities. Characterizing lengthening the school day as "day care" creates a false adversarial relationship between the interest of students/schools and parents.
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better education and less taxpayer money
[Citation required] And while you're digging out in vain evidence that in a general case home schooling provides better education that the education systems around the world, also consider that you gave up a whole source of income for your scheme before you even considered how much money you spend on materials.
Not sure about you but I don't pay $90k / year in taxes just to send my kid to school. Hell we combined don't spend that much in taxes full stop for everything our government does, let alone schooling
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It looks like there is a lot of misconception about homeschooling. I have read thru the comments, and people have opinions, but I failed to see parents who actually tried that.
We really considered homeschooling this year, but eventually decided otherwise. (Thanks to COVID, we are now forced to do it, but that is coincidental). What I learned is that, you are not actually "the teacher", but "the administrator" in your homeschool. A parent (or two) cannot possibly know about all the relevant subjects, nor the
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Source? Tim McVeigh went to public school.
If you want socialism... (Score:2, Insightful)
Different lives, different considerations. If you want socialism, just come out and say it -- stop trying to pretend that every individual "unfairness" needs a solution while trying to push for exactly that.
Further, you chose to have kids, you accepted that they are an additional burden. Stop acting as though everyone else should provide for your choice.
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Further, you chose to have kids, you accepted that they are an additional burden. Stop acting as though everyone else should provide for your choice.
That is an argument. Its also an argument to say that if you don't choose to have kids you are effectively sponging off everyone who does. That house/land you own what do you imagine happens to the value of it if the next generation is much smaller? What will the cost of the bugger you got at the drive thru yesterday be if the pool of cheap teenage labor evaporates?
Oh you want to just replace the population with immigration - ok but than don't complain in your old age, about what happened to the culture et
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I'm surprised OP didn't mention how insufferable it is that parents need bigger houses than people with no kids. And bigger cars. And more expensive travel/vacations. And food and clothing. And let's not even talk about post-secondary education. I mean, think of the opportunities here for more taxes and social programs to make everything "fair".
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Was. Is not anymore. Now that 25% of the population lives on welfare and/or "disability" and will always vote for more, it's not about workers rights.
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True. And whereas once socialism was all abut exploiting workers and bosses economic disparity, once workers got rich (even though the bosses got richer still, it no longer mattered) socialism turned to alternative forms of division - today its Islam, transgenderism, or black lives mattering that form the basis of socialism.
rather have the 4 day workweek (Score:3)
I'd rather have the 4 day workweek as standard, government can lead with it and offices be right behind.
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Companies should just be flexible with their schedules.
Middle Managers are not convinced (Score:1)
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The people that write articles like these are dreamers and are out of touch with the reality of working in the corporate world. Heck, they even reference "9-5" as if those are hours that people actually work.
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At least you got a 4-day work week out of it. They cut our hours, and the first question that everyone had was "Can we take Fridays off?". The answer was "nope". We have to work all five days, just 1-2 hours less each day.
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I work for a consulting company and I mentioned this idea to my middle management and the eye-rolling was universal.
I've dealt with a lot of middle managers during my life, and there has been a pretty strong correlation between the ones who were open to trying different things and the ones who seemed to be actually effective at their job. But those people were a distinct minority of the entire group.
Unfortunately, most middle managers get in the way of work rather than helping work get accomplished. The best thing that could happen to increase productivity at most organizations would be for them to lose the majority of t
Be at work - same place, same time (Score:3)
We had "Elastitime" at my last job and that got rather stupid at times. I'd start work at around 06:30 to 07:00 and would be looking to head home at some time after 15:00 (3 pm for the uninitiated) depending on what was left to do. Someone I needed to coordinate with would come in at 12:00 - or later - and have his midday meal immediately. We had around two hours where we were both present, our coordination was anything but.
If we had had 6 hour days then he would have graced us with his presence around two hours after my departure, maybe less because the works "restaurant" stopped serving at 13:30.
Honestly, we had people whose timezone was 6 hours later than ours who were easier to reach than him, he lived 10 mins walking distance from the office. Having an eight+ hour working day helps ensure team members can actually work with each other.
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That's why 'core hours' were introduced for flexible hour jobs, to stop people taking it to extremes. Flexible start - 7-10, core hours 10-4, flexible end 4-7, ability to move hours between days to a reasonable extent.
And what you describe is little different for multi-national teams, e.g., bangalore and london, you schedule the meeting when you are both available.
If he was refusing arranged meetings, there was an issue with his teamwork and it should have been raised higher up.
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But the entire issue revolves around using meetings as a mechanism for getting work done.
Meetings are the opposite of that, most of the time.
I've been getting a ton of work done asynchronously with my coworkers because we are competent adults who can use the basic features of Google Docs. We suggest changes, add comments, assign each other tasks, etc. It tracks the changes, so we can go in and see who changed what when. One of my coworkers likes to get an early start, and is often working a couple of hours
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I worked at a place with flexible hours once. You were expected to work 8 hours a day, and there were "core hours" you had to work .Something like 11-3 or 12-4, I forget exactly. You had some people that got in as early as they could, and some people that got in shortly before core hours started. It worked pretty well. You had a good chunk of time when you knew your coworkers would definitely be in. People usually kept pretty consistent schedules, so you knew when you could expect people to be there. For th
OK, but how to do it? (Score:2)
"Parents juggling work and child care while telecommuting are already bearing burdens their colleagues are not"
Yeah, that's us. We could be in much worse shape , but both of us are working at jobs that expect the same core hours, and we have 2 kids at home. Even wish shifting some of the work around to the evening or after the kids go to bed, the extra cognitive load is not good for me. I end up feeling like I'm working all the time if I just move stuff around. I'd be all for shifting to an aligned work sch
Change is Possible, but Anything Major is Unlikely (Score:2)
Re: Change is Possible, but Anything Major is Unli (Score:2)
It's legislated through overtime rules. Change the law and business will quickly follow.
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If I could do 4x10 WFH, I'd do it in a heartbeat. It would be the length of my normal work day plus commute, except I'd get 3-day weekends all year round. 4x10 going into the office? I think I'd do that a few weeks a year, but not every week. That's just some long days when you slap a commute on each end of those 10 hrs.
More ridiculous predictions (Score:2)
3-5 years (Score:2)
There's only like a 3-5 year zone where your kid is going to school, but needs someone at home when they get home.
Not to say it's not an issue, but the much larger issue is child care before school starts.
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What are "home alone" laws? What country?
Re: 3-5 years (Score:2)
It's not super common, but apparently there are some U.S. states with these laws designed to keep women in the kitchen where they belong. The big three (CA, TX, NY, collectively a third of the nation) don't have any laws about this, and neither do most other states.
http://www.latchkey-kids.com/l... [latchkey-kids.com].
9-5? (Score:3)
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Ya, I don't know how the 9-5 phrase continues to be used. I've literally only ever worked 8-5 positions. 8 hours of work and 1 hour of lunch. I've seen people choose 8-4:30 because (in California) you're only legally required to take a 30-minute lunch break for 6 hours of work, so instead of taking a full hour lunch, they leave 30 minutes early.
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I haven't worked that in years. My last 4 positions required 8-5, "because 1 hour lunch", and had on-call and weekends and/or nights as needed.
As someone who brings his lunch to the office most days, I really don't need a 1 hour lunch break. Fortunately my workplace is flexible, so I just take 30 minutes for lunch unless our group goes out together somewhere.
Of course right now I'm working from home 100% of the time, so group lunches aren't happening.
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>"I haven't worked that in years. My last 4 positions required 8-5, "because 1 hour lunch", and had on-call and weekends and/or nights as needed."
Yeah, I have never heard of working "9 to 5." All my jobs have been 8.5 hours a day, 8 hours of work and 0.5 hours of unpaid lunch (and two paid 15 minute breaks). Which is 8:30 - 5 or 8- 4:30.
I love this part of the article:
"is grossly unfair to working parents"
Unfair? Waaaaah, waaaaaah!!!! Oh grow up. Yeesh. How about it is "unfair" to people without ch
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Normally there is after-school childcare available (Score:2)
Parents with children put them in nursery/childcare/after-school-club in normal times if they go to work.
In pandemic times where those facilities are closed, then the employer has to suck up the reduced performance for people working from home who find themselves managing increasingly feral children, their 2-4 hour schoolday, seventeen meals a day, and constant interruptions.
There is a huge difference between having children at school and not at school when it comes to employee performance, assuming there's
Well... (Score:2)
the corona virus is exposing a lot of things. For example, our reliance on schools to not only educate children but to feed them and babysit them as well. Two income households only exacerbate this even further. Neither parent has the time, nor seemingly the desire, to perform these historically necessary tasks. Cooking, cleaning, taking your kids to school....have all been deemed to be beneath the modern successful career woman.
Feminists have been telling us for years that you don't need men - as husbands
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"our reliance on schools to not only educate children but to feed them and babysit them as well."
We who grew up poor have never questioned this. In the early '90s, public schools in California began offering breakfast and snack breaks to low-income students. We LOVED it. Some districts even offered lunches during the summer if you could make it to the K-8 schools. I question whether I would have been able to make it to college without the numerous forms of public assistance and being fed by my schools never
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"We who grew up poor have never questioned this. In the early '90s, public schools in California began offering breakfast and snack breaks to low-income students. We LOVED it. Some districts even offered lunches during the summer if you could make it to the K-8 schools. I question whether I would have been able to make it to college without the numerous forms of public assistance and being fed by my schools never goes unmentioned." - Yes point taken. I'm not suggesting it is a bad thing to feed kids at scho
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"African Americans weren't doing well before the New Deal, and other countries have not had the same problems with welfare policies." And they are not doing well after the New Deal. I think we can agree on that. Again, the stated goal of the New Deal was to eradicate poverty. On a percentage basis, we are at roughly the same rate of poverty now as we were before the New Deal. I would call that a failure.
"The reality is that the situation AAs are in is mostly about racism. They're suffering for the exact sam
I Chose to Have Kids! Adjust to Me! (Score:3)
"...the gap between when the school day typically ends -- 3pm -- and when the workday ends -- 5 pm -- "is grossly unfair to working parents,""
No, it's not. It's highly predictable and has been so for nearly 100 years in western nations. You choose where you live. That location has certain job prospects and costs of living. You choose to have kids. Those kids must attend school between certain ages. This isn't a sudden constriction in time. The variables existed before you made your decisions.
And you're not the first people to ever have to sort out what the kids are going to do between school and when you get home.
Here's an idea: teach your kid to get home from school (bus, carpool, walk, bike), unlock the door, enter the home, close the door, and lock the door.
"But it's so dangerous to get home!!"
No, it's not. It's safer than it has ever been. I grew up in California's Inland Empire in the '90s at the height of gang violence. I walked or biked to/from school 1-3 miles for most of K-12. I knew what streets to go down and not go down because even MY drug-addled parents cared enough to tell me honestly where to go and not to go.
"But it's so dangerous to be home alone!!"
No, it's not. Unless you're a really shitty parent, by the time your kid is in kindergrarten, your kid should know (without question):
1. Don't stick anything in an electrical socket
2. Don't play with knives
3. Don't play with fire
4. Don't open the door for anyone except a specific list of people.
5. (Today) Call/Text when you leave school and when you get home. (Thought this wasn't even an option in the 90s, so it's not really necessary today.)
Modern parents are just scared and parental fear is insufficient justification for changing a work structure. There are plenty of OTHER GOOD REASONS that won't be so easily shot down. So drop this one.
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School is 10 miles away as the crow flies and there's no busing from our neighborhood. They're 8 and 10. How do you suppose I teach them to get home?
I'm not scared but what you said just isn't always practical.
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School is 10 miles away as the crow flies and there's no busing from our neighborhood. They're 8 and 10. How do you suppose I teach them to get home?
I'm not scared but what you said just isn't always practical.
If your home is so inconvenient to outside services, you could always move. Every school district I've ever lived in offered bussing. The timing of things is certainly up for debate, but I'm guessing the local authorities didn't just stop transporting your kids to and from your remote location yesterday.
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we will just workers down to 29 hours a week max (Score:2)
we will just workers down to 29 hours a week max
missing the point (Score:2)
A shorter work week translates into less pay. Business are not going to pay you the same salary to work less hours. Heck you're under paid as it is - salaries are based on a 40hr work week but people tend to work more than 40hrs, thus you are getting paid less.
Bottom line this is not positive thing for the employee. So stop spinning it like it is.
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Depends on the type of work really, your performance and thus pay should be based on the amount and quality of work achieved, not the number of hours spent sitting at a desk.
For a lot of tasks, you can only concentrate properly for a limited period of time, after which you become a lot less productive. You might be sitting at a desk for 8 hours, but you might only be achieving anything useful for 4 of them.