Grayson Schoenfeld 4/15/2018

Work and Family Writing Assignment

The new workplace and its accompanying trends have had an enormous impact on the

balance between work and family life. As evidenced by the numerous figures presented in the

course material, the trend overall has been towards increased struggles for the majority of

American families. A significantly higher proportion of children in the U.S. today grow up with

both parents working than in the past (a solid majority of 70% today versus a solid minority of

20% in 1960). Most every quantitative measure of work performed has increased (e.g. a 400%

increase in worker productivity since 1950 and a majority of American workers—86% of males

and 67% of females—working in excess of 40 hours a week). Meanwhile, wages have stagnated

or fallen and state-sponsored mitigating factors that have been in place among nearly all the

rest of the world’s industrialized nations, including guaranteed paid vacation/parental leave

and a codified maximum work-week length, have yet to be enacted in the U.S. As a result,

maintaining a balance between work and family life, with regards to both spousal and parental

relationships, has become even more difficult and stressful in the new workplace.

Technology affords just a small minority of today’s workers with enough flexibility and

autonomy to facilitate an enhanced balance between work and family roles. By and large

however, the entirety of America’s workforce from low-income to high-income families has

experienced increased stress and conflict involving this balance, albeit in different ways.

According to Time Work by Overworked Professionals: Strategies in Response to Stress of Higher

Status, Americans occupying high-status jobs in the new workplace have been subjected to “the

largest increase in working time, the greatest gaps between their perceived ideal and actual

work hours, and higher levels of stress, despite the higher autonomy and schedule control.”
Grayson Schoenfeld 4/15/2018

The internet has led to boundary-less work, wherein work duties and considerations spill over

into family and home life to the point that the boundaries that may have once existed between

work and family have all but eroded away, leading to “time strain”—the strain experienced

when dealing with the difficulty of fulfilling competing time obligations—that must be dealt

with by doing “time work”, or whatever efforts are undertaken to mitigate the negatives of this

stress. One avenue of time work that many professionals try to take is time prioritization.

According to the findings in Time Work by Overworked Professionals, the entire notion of

prioritizing family time, despite a strong desire to do so, turns out to be little more than wishful

thinking. The new workplace culture provides little-to-no negotiation on the point that those

who put their career above family (and even health) stay employed. Those who truly do

prioritize family time are the exception, and for the majority of workers, the result is guilt.

In lieu of successful prioritization, many try to “scale back” on responsibilities, another

strategy that Time Work found to be a non-option in practice. Scaling back on home/family

responsibilities leads again to guilt, and attempts to scale back on work responsibilities are

essentially non-starters that end up taking an unsuccessful shape indistinguishable from

attempts to prioritize family time. Other common strategies such as time-blocking (setting

boundaries and dedicating specific times to specific responsibilities) and time-shifting (shifting

paid work hours to preferable times and/or integrating them with preferable activities), mostly

just give the illusion of improving work-family balance while in actuality conceding to

dysfunctional work-family conflicts in a more systematic manner. “Time strain” that manifests

in the form of work-family unbalance is essentially a fact of the new workplace.

Grayson Schoenfeld 4/15/2018

America’s low-wage workforce has it even worse. The jobs that such Americans occupy are

accompanied by the burdens of irregular work hours and a lack of autonomy/flexibility on top

of low wages and the resulting lack of mitigating resources that higher-income earners can

access. Working mothers, and especially single mothers, have an especially brutal time

managing to fulfill both family and work obligations. A working single mother in America today

will be forced to make painful sacrifices on some and often on all fronts, including the quality of

their child’s development and their own career advancement prospects to say nothing of their

personal satisfaction. Such mothers face the same burdens of low-wage workers—notably the

inflexibility and irregularity of low-wage jobs—with the added obstacle of unfair, harsh

judgments and preconceived notions about the nature of their character and life choices.

Working mothers in general assume a great deal of blame for supposedly neglecting

their children, even when the mother in question is an upper-middle to high-income earner and

can, to a greater but notably insufficient extent, afford resources such as childcare and a less

demanding work schedule. Single working mothers in particular experience a large degree of

judgment about their choices and character, receiving charges of personal irresponsibility and

poor devotion to either work or their children. This in turn affects their future prospects for

opportunities to improve their economic and familial situations, as they are seen as having a

character fault that makes them undesirable for such opportunities. As concluded in the

lecture, work hours and the workplace in general are ruthlessly unforgiving to working single

mothers.

Work and family in the United States’ new workplace can be summarized as inadequate

and in perpetual conflict. All but the wealthiest of Americans can be reliably expected to
Grayson Schoenfeld 4/15/2018

experience and suffer from considerable stress and strain when it comes to attempting to fulfill

both work and family obligations. It would seem that in order to avoid these difficulties, one

needs to have enough money to comfortably abstain from full-time work at all. Unless public

policy is enacted to combat these issues (paid vacation, parental leave and a maximum work

week come to mind), or until society reaches the point of “robo-communism by automation”

(which would still then require a public policy solution), this is quite unlikely to change.