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How does the United States compare to other countries in terms of providing state-supported family and medical leave? (Must be supported by scholarly sources)

11 Work and Families

In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s literary classic Little House on the Prairie, a family of nineteenth-century American settlers lives a self-sufficient lifestyle on the Kansas plains (Wilder 1935). For breakfast, the children drink milk from the family cow and eat stew made with rabbits they hunt, accompanied by corn hauled on the family’s wagon. Their food is produced and prepared within the family, by the parents and children. In that setting, the relationships between people, and between people and their work, seemed relatively straightforward. Everyone could see whom they were feeding and where the food came from.

As the process of feeding children has grown more complicated in modern society, so has the relationship between work and families (DeVault 1991). Today, the work done within families and the work that people do outside their family home occur in very different social settings. Sorting out these complications will help us understand work and family today. Consider the breakfast experiences of some contemporary children:

• Walker Harrison, a teenager who lives with his upper-middle-class parents in Brooklyn, New York, has a baseball game on Sunday. He starts the morning with breakfast cooked by his father, who is a writer and editor: four eggs, three pieces of bacon, and honey toast (Wilson 2009).

• Gloria Castillo’s boys, ages 7 and 8, eat breakfast from a McDonald’s drive-through in Dallas, Texas. Their mother takes them there on the way to school—after her night shift at work ends and her husband leaves for his day shift. They split sausage, eggs, bacon, biscuits, hash browns, and orange juice and get to school by 7:45 a.m. (LeDuff 2006). 400 Chapter 11: Work and Families

• Christopher, a 14-year-old boy from Manassas, Virginia, eats a free breakfast in the school cafeteria, along with 460 other children (paid for by a combination of government programs). “I eat it every day. I love the pancakes,” he said (Robotham 2017).

These scenarios illustrate three institutional arenas in which we feed and care for children: the family, the market, and the state. As we saw in Chapter 2, the transformation of the American family over the last century and a half has been closely related to the growing influence of the market and the state. In recent decades, the most important change has been the movement of women’s work from their families to the paid labor market (Thistle 2006). Day care centers, nursing homes, restaurants, cleaning services—all these are market locations for work that was once primarily done within families.

Today, the 24-hour service economy both serves the demand for prepared meals and provides many people with the jobs that help pay their bills (Presser 2003). In fact, Gloria Castillo bought her children breakfast at McDonald’s because she was rushing to get them to school after her night shift at Burger King. Most women and men—even those with young children—have paid jobs. For all the benefits that people get from their jobs—including not just money but also a chance at personal independence and a sense of identity in the world—the tensions between paid work and family obligations have only grown more severe. That means that the work-related decisions that people face as individuals and as families have grown more important.

The sociological perspective on work, as with families, is somewhat different from common notions. As you can tell from the earlier examples, we pay careful attention not only to what kind of work people do—the content of the work—but also to the relations between people involved—the social context of the work. Combining content and context provides us with the perspective on work that we need for this chapter.

Work in Institutional Arenas In its simplest definition, work is the exertion of effort to produce or accomplish something. However, I will use three terms to identify different kinds of work. The first is the most directly relevant for this chapter because it is the most clearly identified with families. Care work is work performed face-to-face for the purpose of enhancing the capabilities of another person (England, Budig, and Folbre 2002). The quintessential care work is child care, which is usually hands-on, intimate work to provide children with the material, intellectual, and emotional support they need. On the other hand, housework is work to maintain a household’s functions. Most housework is devoted to cleaning and cooking, but maintenance, working in the yard, shopping, and paying bills are housework as well. Compared with the direct, interpersonal qualities of care work, housework is often seen as solitary drudgery. Sometimes care work and housework overlap or are done together, such as when a parent both cooks a meal and feeds it to the children at home, something many parents find especially stressful (Offer and Schneider 2011). In modern society, these tasks increasingly are performed by people outside of the family. Some work is done for pay, in the service sector of the market economy. And some work is done by (or with the help of) machines, from refrigerators to vacuum cleaners and washing machines (see Changing Technology, “Laborsaving Devices,” in Chapter 2). Thus, more and more of the care work and housework in society is performed as market work—that is, work done by employees for pay. To organize our thinking about how these different kinds of work are related, we can use the term system of care to describe how a society accomplishes the necessary care work and housework (Ferree 2010). Although the system doesn’t have a central coordinator or a master plan, we can see it as a system when we step back and look at the patterns of decisions and interactions it entails. In the framework of this book, we want to understand where such work takes place in terms of institutional arenas. Figure 11.1 shows how housework and care work partly overlap within families and how either kind of work can be done in the market for pay or at home without pay. The overlapped areas in Figure 11.1 represent some of the interesting challenges for the study of work and family. Here are some of the decisions modern families must face (Hartmann 1981):

• How to divide the housework and care work within the family. For couples, this is often a contentious issue, which shows us that it is not really “families” that make decisions, but the individuals within them. That decision making may be cooperative, but it isn’t always, especially when economic pressures make the choices increasingly difficult (Legerski and Cornwall 2010).

• When to pay for household services instead of doing the housework themselves. Based on their budgets and their personal preferences, people have to decide which housework to “outsource” to the market—for example, whether to hire a lawn-mowing service or eat their meals at restaurants (Craig and Baxter 2016).

• When to take care of children at home versus using child-care services. Parents must compare the costs of high-quality child care with the benefits of parents’ employment. Government policy affects these decisions—for example, by subsidizing (or not) child-care costs (Ha and Miller 2015).

Each of these modern dilemmas involves the overlap among the institutional arenas we discussed in Chapter 1. The prospects people face in one arena (such as their potential earnings from market work) need to be weighed against their relationships and expectations in another (such as the feelings of love and obligation within the family). When something changes in one area—for example, a new job opportunity—people may have to reevaluate their decisions. In addition to the relocation of work from within the family household to paid workplaces, another, less visible change has taken place. The state redistributes much of the product of our labor. That is, the government takes taxes to pay benefits and provide services for people in certain categories, such as old people, children, the sick, and the poor. That redistribution has taken the place of direct support for many people, which means that when we work, the beneficiaries of our labor often are not personally known to us. For example, you could say that a young worker in a coffee shop in Florida is paying for the health care of a low-income retiree in California, although the two will never meet. As a result, our personal contribution to caring for others has become more abstract and hard to observe. This transition—from the face-to-face nature of family-centered care work to the more impersonal system of care associated with the market and the welfare state—has had a far-reaching impact on both families and society.

In the last half century or so, the main story in the realm of work and family has been the growth of market work in the system of care. That involved the majority of women taking paid jobs outside their homes for the first time in history. And it transformed both paid work and family life.

Paid Work

In Chapter 2, we saw the transformation of work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with men increasingly working away from home, in urban factories and offices, while women worked in increasing isolation at home without pay. But women’s movement into the paid workforce grew as well—it just started later (Goldin 1990). First single women, then married women without children, and eventually even most married women with young children took paid jobs outside the home. The most rapid period of change occurred in the three decades after 1960 as the proportion of women in the labor force increased from about one-third to three-quarters (Cohen and Bianchi 1999). Figures 11.2 and 11.3 show how widespread and dramatic this change was. At all levels of education, with children or without, and even with young children, women’s labor force participation rocketed upward. The increase was greatest for college-educated women—and there are more of them than ever—whose participation rates have reached 85 percent. By looking closely at the time around the birth of a first child, we can see how the intensive child-care period has narrowed for most mothers. The proportion of women employed while they have a child under age 1 increased from less than 20 percent in the 1960s to more than 50 percent by the 1990s, where it remains today. (About 10 percent of these mothers have a job but weren’t working the week they were interviewed; they were on leave.)

In historical terms, women’s employment patterns have evolved extremely quickly—so quickly that the expectations people have for work and family are unclear. On the one hand, some women feel pressured to take more time off from work for the sake of their children. As one schoolteacher recalled,

“I remember having a conversation with [my husband’s] sister. She said, ‘What! Oh! Only taking six weeks? Blah, blah, blah.’ And I was thinking, ‘I am not going to put us in debt so that I can stay home for six more weeks!’ I’m just not going to do it. It’s ridiculous. The baby’s not going to remember if I was there or not. You know? She’ll be fine!” (Barnes 2013:13)

On the other hand, some women feel guilty when they do take time off from their jobs for maternity leave: “I thought I was sort of a bad person because I had got pregnant at this juncture,” said one woman. “And now I was already on maternity leave.” (Sevón 2005:472) Even though the growth has stalled since the 1990s, the movement of women into paid work left a profound mark on today’s families. The baby boom children—those born between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s—are most of today’s grandparents. It was their lives that changed so suddenly during that postwar period. For them, the whole sweep of changes described in this book—including not just women’s education and employment but also delayed marriage, falling birth rates, and rising single parenthood and divorce—were felt as a great wave of social transformation. But the movement of women’s work out of the home was perhaps the most profound, and many people see it as the precursor of—or the driving force behind—the other changes of the era (Bianchi 1995). While women’s behavior was changing so dramatically, with paid employment becoming a permanent, lifelong aspect of most American women’s lives, what happened with men? I did not include men in the various graphs because the lines would be boring. Men’s employment rates have declined a small amount, as some retire earlier and some have been squeezed out by economic changes that left them jobless. But in the 25- to 54-year-old age range covered in the women’s graphs, employment for men remains above 80 percent. In that sense, what some people call a “revolution” in work behavior has in fact been quite lopsided (England 2010).

Occupational Segregation

Women’s employment became acceptable within the cultural mainstream so rapidly in part because of the kinds of paid work women did. The U.S. labor force was (and remains) marked by occupational gender segregation, with men and women having jobs in separate occupations. The kind of paid work most women do is closely related to their work within the family. Occupational segregation, together with the way men and women divide unpaid care work and housework, make up the gender division of labor—the allocation of work between men and women in society. Women at home do the lion’s share of housework and care work (discussed shortly), and as we saw in Chapter 5, their paid work is also concentrated in these areas—for example, nursing, child care and teaching, food service, and cleaning. Figure 11.4 provides a closer look at some jobs that involve tasks similar to those mothers are most likely to perform at home. In the paid market, naturally, jobs are very different. Some of women’s traditional work is now done in nursing, for example, which is a professional occupation with tasks much different from the care women historically provided to sick family members at home. But among professionals, the tendency of women and men to specialize in different educational fields—for women to train in psychology, for example, while men become engineers—maintains the traditional divisions. This segregation meant that as women entered the workforce, even if some men were uncomfortable with their own wives leaving home every morning, most did not feel that their jobs were threatened by women’s presence in the workforce. Popular attitudes toward the appropriate divisions between men and women have gradually shifted. Both men and women express support for gender equality, especially regarding work, much more than in the past. For example, in the late 1970s, only one-third of Americans told the General Social Survey that mothers’ employment was not harmful for their preschool-aged children; 40 years later, that has risen to three-quarters. As attitudes shifted, occupational segregation declined, and women came to occupy positions in formerly male-dominated occupations, especially in white-collar jobs such as school and health care administration, real estate, and human resources (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2004). However, it remains the case that most Americans labor alongside coworkers of the same gender—and most women work in the female-dominated occupations that have grown as the service sector has become more prominent in the economy (Cohen 2013c).

Housework and Child Care

Women’s movement into the workforce has increased their independence and their own incomes. But does it also represent more work for them, as they are still stuck with a “second shift” (Hochschild and Machung 1989) of seemingly endless housework and child care on top of their hours working for pay? Men’s employment patterns haven’t changed very much, but have they changed their role at home—or do men still leave the great majority of housework and child care to their wives, girlfriends, and mothers? Beneath these questions lies a larger issue: Who decides? Are families making decisions cooperatively, dividing work and rewards according to a common purpose, as the consensus perspective suggests (see Chapter 1)? Or are household members acting as individuals, making decisions in their own economic and emotional interest, according to the expectations of conflict theory? Before addressing these issues directly, I will describe a method for studying unpaid work and other informal activities that has greatly enhanced the ability of sociologists and other social scientists to understand how families work: time use studies.

Time Use Studies

In the market arena, most relationships are formal, and payments are handled with currency (dollars), which is easily measured. That makes paid work relatively straightforward to study, with consistent national statistics. In the family arena, on the other hand, where most work is not paid, there is no formal accounting of who does what for whom and how they are compensated (see Changing Culture, “

Valuing Unpaid Work

”). Moreover, the benefits of this unpaid work sometimes take years to appear (for example, when children grow up). As a result, family-based housework and care work often seem invisible, especially to people outside the family (Folbre 2001). Because of this difficulty, time use studies are a way for researchers to investigate how people fill their days with activities (see Chapter 1). The most prominent of these is the American Time Use Survey, conducted each year by the federal government. Using data collected in 2015, Figure 11.6 shows the breakdown of activities for American men and women in a typical day. I have organized the activities so that the work tasks are all grouped together at the bottom. Adding up the paid work, housework and cooking, shopping, lawn and garden care, and care work, you can see that men spend an average of 8 hours and 04 minutes per day working, almost the same as the 8 hours and 22 minutes women work. (Note that this “typical day” includes weekends as well as weekdays, and it includes people who are employed as well as those who aren’t, so these are very general averages.) Thus, the greater hours of paid work for men are, on average, balanced out by the greater hours of unpaid work for women (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006).

Valuing Unpaid Work

Consider two hypothetical families, the Smiths and the Johnsons (see Figure 11.5). In the Smith family, the husband and wife divide work pretty equally. They both work full-time jobs at $15 per hour. In addition, they each do some unpaid work—housework and child care. Let us say that Mr. Smith does about 1 hour of unpaid work each day, and Mrs. Smith does 2 hours—not too unusual. In the Johnson family, on the other hand, the division of labor is more traditional, and Mr. Johnson has a higher-paying job. At his full-time job he earns $30 per hour, but he does no unpaid work around the house. Mrs. Johnson works the same number of total hours as Mrs. Smith, 10 hours, but all of it is unpaid work. Which family is better off? In terms of income, the two families are equal. Each earns $240 per day. But in terms of total economic gain, the Johnson family has a clear advantage. In addition to the same amount of money, the Johnsons have the benefit of 7 additional hours of unpaid work. Maybe their house is cleaner, their children are better cared for, or their meals are more delicious. On the other hand, maybe the Smiths have to spend some of their $240 per day for frozen dinners, takeout meals, child care, and a housecleaner. At a glance, then, in the short run at least, it appears that the Johnson family comes out ahead—but what they gain doesn’t show up directly in their bank balance. (This example is modified from one offered by Nancy Folbre [2009].) But what about the spouses considered separately? Mr. and Mrs. Smith share the benefits of their relationship pretty equally. Mrs. Smith does more unpaid work, but that is not uncommon, and the couple can probably rationalize it without too much conflict. On the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson depend on each other more directly. If they were to split up, each would have to face the problem of replacing what the other had provided. Mr. Johnson either would need a new partner or would have to spend some of his money replacing Mrs. Johnson’s labor. Mrs. Johnson would need a new source of income, either by getting a job or finding a new breadwinning partner. But the Johnson situation is not really equal, because Mr. Johnson is gaining work experience and seniority, so if he ends up on his own, he will be in a position to earn more money. Mrs. Johnson is not gaining new job skills and experience, and her abilities as a homemaker are not likely to be highly rewarded in the labor market if she ends up needing a job. In short, she is taking a greater economic risk in their marriage. The extra unpaid work and the imbalance in the marriage create two problems. The first is that unpaid work is not recognized because it has no direct dollar value—and dollars is how we usually measure value in a market economy. And the second is the unequal implications for Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Wages for Housework? There are a lot of other differences between families like this, with many pros and cons to each arrangement. The spouses may be happy, or not, for a variety of other reasons beyond the simple economics. But this comparison raises a challenge. Some economists believe that the gross domestic product (GDP) and other common measures of economic activity are seriously flawed because they do not take into account the value of work done without pay (Folbre 2001). And politically, some feminists believe that the lack of compensation for unpaid work is a systematic means by which male domination is perpetuated. In the 1970s, in an effort to empower women, a group of feminists organized to demand that housewives be paid wages for their labor (MacKinnon 1991). If housewives’ labor was paid, they could freely choose between a job outside the home and working at home for pay, without sacrificing income or independence. They would also have public recognition for the value of their work because it would become part of the formal economy. It could be taxed, they could receive pensions based on their pay when they retire, and they could organize labor unions with the option of going on strike to demand better pay or working conditions. “If women were paid for all they do,” went one slogan, “there’d be a lot of wages due” (Edmond and Fleming 1975:5). How much would really be due for all that unpaid work? We don’t know for sure. But we can make some guesses. At the time of the “wages for housework” campaign, wives did about seven times more housework than their husbands, so it made sense for feminists to treat it as a women’s issue. Now the balance is much more equal, so husbands would have about 40 percent of this money coming to them as well. By my calculations, using the unpaid work time shown in Figure 11.6, it would cost $10,643 at $12 per hour to hire someone to do the typical man’s unpaid work for a year (2 hours, 26 minutes per day) and $22,207 to hire someone for the typical woman’s workload (5 hours, 4 minutes per day). Of course, $12 per hour might not be high enough to hire qualified people to do all the unpaid tasks we do, so that might be a low estimate. In any event, we are talking about a lot of money. In the big picture, by one government economic estimate, the total value of all unpaid household work is equal to 26 percent of the country’s GDP, which is the total value of all the goods and services the economy produces in a given year (Bridgman et al. 2012). The campaign to gain wages for housework ultimately was not successful. Instead, the great majority of women entered the paid labor force, and the struggle to achieve equality in unpaid work mostly remained within the private sphere of the family home. However, as women’s work contributions outside the home increased, the unfairness of the division of labor at home became more apparent for all to see. As a result, more couples have wrestled with the balance in their relationships, and the gender gap has narrowed.

Toward Gender

Balance

Time use studies have also made it possible for us to track the other side of the rapid change in employment patterns—unpaid work at home. For decades, feminist social scientists have argued that the division of unpaid work within families is a fundamental source of gender inequality (Hartmann 1981). On the other hand, some analysts counter that the division of labor represents a rational, cooperative response of families to the demands on their time and money (Becker 1981). There are elements of truth in both perspectives, as we will see.

Time use data show that married women have cut their housework time roughly in half over the last half-century, while married men have doubled theirs (see the Story Behind the Numbers). As a result, where married women once spent seven times as many hours on housework as their husbands, the difference is now less than 2 to 1. The figure also shows how the gender difference eroded not just because the balance between men and women shifted, but because the total amount of time spent on housework by married couples declined. Married couples do less housework, and husbands do a greater share of it. When we focus on child care, we see a similar narrowing of the gender gap among married couples with children: Mothers did about four times as much child care in 1965, but only twice as much in 2015. But the child-care change since the 1970s did not result from a decline in total child care. Instead, both men and women increased their time with children (Bianchi 2000). With those basic trends in mind, we can discuss the reasons couples divide their labors the way they do. Examining these patterns will help us understand the nature of the social change that has occurred, as well as the dynamics of families today in our system of care. The division of unpaid labor within families follows certain common patterns that have been identified by those researchers trying to understand why there is such a persistent gender gap. (Note that this section mostly concerns families that are living together, partly because that is what our data reflect and partly because it simplifies the issues for purposes of discussion.) There are three main factors within couples that seem to account for the fact that women perform so much more of this work than men: time, resources, and gender (Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard 2010). First, the partner with greater obligations away from home tends to do less housework and child care because that person has less time available. Since men’s employment rates are higher than women’s, they are more likely to be away from home and not available to do unpaid work (Sayer 2005). This reasoning is somewhat circular, however. The decisions about which partner will work for pay and which will concentrate on unpaid work may be made at the same time: Maybe the husband does not do housework because he is busy working for pay, and maybe the woman does not have a job because she is busy doing housework. In fact, research shows that women whose husbands work especially long hours are more likely to quit their jobs altogether than are those whose husbands work regular full-time hours (Shafer 2011). Second, although some people enjoy housework and child care, most prefer to avoid at least the more onerous aspects of these responsibilities (and it’s hard to separate the fun parts, such as playing peekaboo or reading together, from the less pleasant tasks). Therefore, as couples negotiate over who does what work, partners with greater personal resources are more likely to take the upper hand in the negotiation and do less unpaid labor. This is where the apparent equality between the total work time of husbands and wives becomes problematic. If one partner’s work is paid and the other’s is unpaid, the partner who has the earnings controls more resources and usually has more decision-making power in the relationship (Sayer, Bianchi, and Robinson 2004).

With the increase in women’s employment, it is more common than it once was for a woman to earn more than her husband. However, because men are still more likely to work, and work full-time, and men are likely to earn more than women, husbands remain much more likely to be the higher earner in the family. As you can see in Figure 11.7, husbands earn significantly more than their wives in more than half of all couples, while the wife significantly outearns the husband in only 1 in 5 marriages. In one-quarter of families, the husband and wife have earnings that are close (within $5,000). This disparity affects decision making with regard to housework and child care and again creates a cycle in which the spouse with higher earnings is more likely to stay on the job and the one with lower earnings is more likely to specialize in unpaid work (Schneider 2011). Finally, notice that the previous patterns regarding time and resources are gender neutral in principle. That is, whichever partner has more time available or less resources with which to bargain will end up doing more unpaid work.

However, gender dynamics also affect couples’ internal interactions directly. For example, men and women in couples often act out the socialization they experienced growing up, which tends to pass the division of unpaid labor from one generation to the next. And people who express adherence to traditional gender expectations and attitudes are more likely to arrange their household labor in the traditional way. (I use traditional in this section as shorthand for the separate spheres ideal, as described in Chapter 2.) Thus, much of the pattern we see is the result of cultural attitudes—or gender ideology—lived out in daily life (Greenstein 2000). Socialization is not a simple blueprint of adult behavior, however. The lessons learned in childhood are applied in relation to the situations in which people find themselves as adults. Thus, men who grew up with an employed mother do more housework when they grow up themselves. But they still also negotiate and bargain along the lines of the time and resource principles (Gupta 2006). In addition to the factors described here, research has identified some groups as having either more traditional divisions of household labor or less traditional divisions. For example, Christians with a conservative interpretation of the Bible follow a more traditional gender division of labor than average (Ellison and Bartkowski 2002), especially for the less pleasant tasks of infant care (DeMaris, Mahoney, and Pargament 2011). On the other hand, there is evidence that lesbian and gay male couples share housework and child care somewhat more equally than male-female couples, although the research in this area remains quite limited (Civettini 2016). And with regard to race/ethnicity, White and Black couples share housework more equally than Latino and Asian couples. That is partly because Hispanic and Asian women are in general less likely to be in the workforce, but also because of other factors, such as attitudes toward gender (Wright, Bianchi, and Hunt 2013). Putting these factors together, we can create profiles of couples and how they divide their unpaid labor. Equal divisions are more likely (though still rare) where both partners are employed, where the demands on their time are lower (such as those who have no children), where their earning potential is equal, and where they share a set of beliefs that encourages equality between men and women (Deutsch 1999). On the other hand, couples in which the husband works more outside the home and earns more, where there are heavy care work demands, and where the partners do not share a commitment to equality are likely to assign a much greater share of the unpaid labor to the female partner (Milkie, Raley, and Bianchi 2009). Social Change Even among the more traditional families, a sense of generational change pervades U.S. society in the area of housework. One baby boomer—a 50-year-old, working-class, conservative Christian woman whose husband had recently lost his factory job—described the changes she saw: I’m from a different generation than the young girls, and I still feel that my job is in the home and the meals. I think that the new generation is more like, “I work, you work.” I know that my girls do that. They’ll come home and my son-in-law will come home and she hasn’t fixed supper and she goes, “If you want something, fix it.” My generation just didn’t do that. (Legerski and Cornwall 2010:461)

Interestingly, this woman expressed such a traditional perspective even though at the time of the interview she was employed full-time herself. In fact, it is common for spouses to rationalize unequal divisions of labor. For example, they might attribute women’s housecleaning to men’s longer work hours, even when the housework inequality is larger than the paid work difference. Thus, although inequality is a source of serious conflict in many families, many spouses also justify the division of labor in order to avoid conflict. That is probably because expressing a commitment to equality in relationships has become culturally expected (van Hooff 2011). Although these patterns concern housework and care work performed within families, the institutional setting surrounding families is crucial as well (Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). That setting includes a number of social factors:

• A labor market where men usually earn more than women, which encourages couples to decide that wives should stay home with the children (Lincoln 2008)

• A relatively low-wage (and therefore low-cost) service economy that permits those women who have their own earnings to avoid housework that their husbands are unwilling to do (Craig et al. 2016)

• A variety of government policies that affect work-family balance, such as offering paid leave or public child care, which can also affect how couples divide their labor (Altintas and Sullivan 2017)

• A pattern of gender socialization—primarily through families, schools, and the media (see Chapter 5)—that affects how men and women feel about the division of labor within their families, their ambitions, and their ideals for family life Once again, we see that although family decisions often seem highly individual and feel intimate, they are influenced in many ways, large and small, by the broader social situation.

Conflicts and Solutions

In preindustrial America, work and family were not separate realms with competing time demands. In the Little House on the Prairie scenario that opened this chapter, care work, housework, and market work were interwoven throughout the activities of fathers, mothers, and children. However, in the system of care established with industrialization—and under the separate spheres ideal—women’s and men’s work were divided, hers mostly at home and his mostly in the labor market (Thistle 2006). In the last half-century, however, the growth of women’s employment contributed to conflicts between family and paid work obligations. The system in which women’s unpaid work combined with men’s income to provide essential goods and services for families was disrupted. The system did not work for single parents, who could not combine the paid and unpaid work of two spouses. And among married couples, who spent more time and energy away from home, getting housework and child care done was increasingly difficult. At the same time, employers found themselves attempting to manage employees with more demanding obligations outside the workplace. In fact, more than 80 percent of American parents report that they would like to have more time with their families, according to the General Social Survey. As researchers came to examine this tension systematically, they identified the problem of work-family conflict, which occurs when the time demands, strains, or obligations of work or family roles make it difficult for people to fulfill their obligations in either role (Greenhaus and Beutell 1985). Work-family conflict has become a pervasive and costly experience (Kelly, Moen, and Tranby 2011). It harms workplaces when employees can’t be productive, and it harms families by increasing their stress and hardship (Offer and Schneider 2011). Many of the work-related problems that families experience today arise from work-family conflict.

Single Parents

Although married couples seem to get most of the attention, the growing number of single mothers experience the most severe work-family crunch (Nomaguchi 2012). Not surprisingly, research now finds that single mothers are more likely to feel stressed and fatigued while spending time with their children (Meier et al. 2016). For those without the ability to earn higher incomes, there simply are not enough hours in the day to earn money, do housework, and take care of children without a time conflict erupting between those obligations. Most, but not all, of these single parents are women, who lead 82 percent of poor single-parent households (Proctor, Semega, and Kollar 2016). Besides being fewer in number, single fathers are better off for a number of reasons. They are more likely to have high-paying jobs, more likely to live with a partner who can help care for the children, and less likely to have very young children, for whom care work is most demanding (Coles 2015). From the 1930s to the 1990s, federal welfare policy was designed to supplement the incomes of single mothers who were poor so that they would not need to have jobs—or at least not full-time jobs—while caring for their children alone. This policy recognized that most married mothers were supported by employed husbands. By the same token, its supporters argued, single mothers and their children should be supported by the state—that is, welfare should supplement the system of care to plug the hole left by absent fathers (Mink 1998). That system was far from perfect, and many single mothers experienced poverty and hardship anyway. But when the welfare system was reformed in 1996, policymakers abandoned the assumption that the government would provide income support instead of full-time work. Instead, single parents were expected to maintain a job while receiving temporary support and then transition to full-time work with no cash welfare benefit as soon as possible (Greenberg et al. 2002). That new policy approach has not worked well, however. As we saw in Chapter 4, the number of single mothers living in poverty increased over the decade of the 2000s. Under the new welfare rules, the federal government’s cash assistance program did not keep up with that increase. At the same time, employment problems for single mothers also mounted, both because of the 2000s economic recession and because of work-family conflicts that made it difficult for them to get and hold jobs. In 2016, only 70 percent of single mothers were employed— no more than had jobs when welfare reform was implemented in the late 1990s. Declining welfare support, and stagnant employment prospects, together add up to intensified hardship for single mothers and their families over the last two decades (Eamon and Wu 2011).

The “Motherhood Penalty”

Another cost of work-family conflict is the “motherhood penalty,” the loss of earnings women experience after they have children. At first glance, this may appear to be the simple result of the choices mothers make: They take time out of the labor force for childbirth, child care, and housework, and they select jobs with flexible or part-time hours or jobs that are closer to home so they have time for child care and housework. And that is all true to some extent. However, even after taking work experience into account, women earn less if they have children (Budig and England 2001). And research shows that their occupational choices aren’t the explanation for their lower earnings either (Glauber 2012). In fact, many mothers lose earnings because of employer discrimination, as employers believe that mothers will be less devoted to their jobs, so they should be paid less or passed over for jobs altogether (Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007). Further, the time and energy that women expend on their family obligations end up hurting their careers. Ironically, it is women with the highest earnings potential who lose the most in terms of future wages when they take time out of the labor force to have children (England et al. 2016). Despite their best efforts, then, modern mothers pay a price at work for their children, while fathers generally do not. In fact, fathers seem to earn a “fatherhood premium” against the motherhood penalty—that is, they earn more than men who aren’t fathers—partly because (when they are married) the labor and support of their wives helps them get ahead at work (Killewald 2013).

What Gives?

Given the prevalence of work-family conflict, the time and money demands of intensive parenting, and the tensions over the gender division of unpaid labor at home, what choices do people have? To alleviate these problems, something has to change: work has to change, families have to change, or people have to alter the balance between work and family in their lives (Damaske 2011). Each possibility has shown some promise, and each raises its own obstacles.

Work One of the major goals of the U.S. labor movement of the late nineteenth century was a limit to the length of the working day. Through a series of hard-fought legal reforms over several decades, the federal government eventually established a standard 40-hour workweek for most workers (Whaples 1990). One of the movement’s early slogans was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” (Rosenzweig 1983). Thus, balancing work, rest, and leisure has long been an aspiration for American workers.

In recent years, some employers have adapted to the work-family conflicts of their workers. They may offer flexible or part-time schedules, for example. But the progress has been slow, and even though some businesses are able to recruit and retain good workers with such policies, other employers view them as costly sacrifices that put their companies at a disadvantage in the competitive marketplace (Glass and Estes 1997). In fact, there is an ongoing debate over who is responsible for creating policies to ease the relationship between work and family demands: employers or the government (Esping-Andersen 2009). To reduce work-family conflict, a number of work-based reforms would help:

• Work hours could simply be reduced, permitting workers greater equality in the work-family balance. In the United States, the standard full-time workweek is 40 hours, but the typical employed person works 34 hours per week including breaks and leave, which is still substantially more than in most wealthy countries. For example, Germans and Norwegians work an average of 27 hours per week (see Figure 11.8 below).

• Work hours could be more flexible across the day or the week, allowing workers to arrange schedules to meet the competing demands on their time (Kelly, Moen, and Tranby 2011). Ironically, although flexible scheduling—or “flextime”—has become more common, it is workers in the highest-paid jobs who have so far benefited most from this trend (Glauber 2011). On the other hand, it seems that flexibility in work time often benefits employers more than workers, as American workers are much more likely than those in Europe to work on nights and weekends (Hamermesh and Stancanelli 2014).

• Finally, family supports by employers—such as child-care benefits or time off for family care—would reduce the strains associated with work-family conflict (Boushey 2016). Unfortunately, many of the workers who take advantage of these benefits, mostly women, find that their careers suffer as a result (Glass 2004). The federal government does require some unpaid time off for family care obligations, but it is often not adequate to the needs of modern families (see Changing Law, “

Family

Leave”).

Naturally, reform in any of these areas would entail costs as well as benefits. For example, allowing reduced hours or scheduling flexibility might reduce employee turnover, which saves employers money in the hiring and training process. But if employers are responsible for paying health insurance and other benefits for each worker, it may be more cost-effective for them to have fewer employees working longer hours each. Because of the difficulty in implementing such reforms—and the powerful interests of business leaders who oppose reforms that might reduce profits—workplace change is not a simple prospect.

Family

If U.S. workplaces are inflexible, is it up to families to respond? As sociologist Judith Lorber puts it, “Workplace pressures are thought to be unchangeable, so the burden of innovation falls on the family” (2005:40). We have seen that housework and care work patterns have changed, with men doing more and women doing less. But the gender balance that remains is still quite unequal. And the cost of replacing unpaid work with paid services is too high for most families (Craig and Baxter 2016). Ironically, as some wealthier families have reduced their work-family conflicts by employing service workers—either directly as nannies and housecleaners or indirectly by relying more on restaurants or dry cleaners—this has increased the number of low-wage workers who work long hours or odd hours, exacerbating their own work-family conflicts (Presser 2003). Many families strive to reduce work-family conflict by changing the dynamics or arrangements within the family (Hansen 2005). For example, they may arrange for extended family members to move in with them, contributing rent, child care, or housework support (Cohen 2002). Or they may take alternate shifts, like the woman who told researcher Sarah Damaske how she and her husband split their time: “He worked nights and I worked days. He had a shift where he would work sometimes from eleven o’clock at night to seven o’clock in the morning. So, I slept along with the kids. And that’s the way we had to do it in order to balance out the babysitting” (Damaske 2011:84). Arrangements like this are not available to or practical for all families. And some people—such as single parents or those without extended kin—don’t have this option. To achieve a more complete solution to the imbalances and inequalities within families, Lorber proposes “degendering” families, so that gender differences in the responsibilities of men and women are gradually erased. In the process, she believes, parents will gain more high-quality time to care for their children, and the conflicts between paid and unpaid work will be reduced. Although hardly anyone has removed gender from the division of labor entirely, some families have successfully divided their parenting work evenly by making deliberate efforts to ensure balance through ongoing negotiation— and through a shared commitment to equality. The families that practice what Francine Deutsch (1999) calls “equally shared parenting” have succeeded best by focusing on the early childbearing years, when the division of labor tends to be the most strongly marked by gender (Glauber and Gozjolko 2011). Figure 11.10 shows the division of time use between men and women, using the same time use data I showed in Figure 11.6 but now focusing on those who have children under age 6. You will notice that both men and women average about 8.5 hours per day of work. But the gender division is such that women do much more unpaid work, while men do much more paid work. Although this may seem equal in terms of total hours, it leaves women disadvantaged in several ways: because they earn less money, they are less likely to control the family finances; because they get out of the house less, they are less likely to have a fulfilling social life; because their own careers stagnate, they are more at risk in the case of a divorce. To find couples who truly share housework and child care equally often requires identifying people in unusual circumstances. For example, researcher Bonnie Fox (2009) identifies a couple—Ross and Rosa—in which the wife was the primary earner before their baby was born, the husband believed strongly in sharing work equally, and they were financially secure enough that they could both take six months off after the baby arrived. Under those rather unique circumstances, and with a commitment from both partners, they were able to share child rearing and housework responsibilities evenly. Instead of the birth of their child exacerbating gender inequality, then, it became an opportunity to rebalance. For example, when Rosa was breastfeeding, Ross found himself spending more time doing housework. In contrast to a deliberate decision to divide care work evenly, some couples find their roles suddenly reversed—or at least upended—by economic crises. In fact, the most common reason for families to adopt an at-home father arrangement is because the father has lost his job or is unable to work (Kramer, Kelly, and McCulloch 2013). In such cases, it is common for the father’s unemployment to cause resentment and unhappiness or even a stronger commitment to traditional gender roles (Legerski and Cornwall 2010). That resistance partly results from the discomfort people feel in a role that may not be socially recognized. As one stay-at-home dad told researcher Beth Latshaw, “On some level, I see a stay-at-home dad and think, what’s wrong with you? I know what’s wrong with me, but what’s wrong with you? I joke about it, but honestly, I have that reaction, so if I’m having that reaction, everyone’s having that reaction” (Latshaw 2011:138). Sometimes, however, we find that stay-at-home fathers do embrace their new role as primary caretaker of the children (Chesley 2011). But this is quite uncommon and has not caught on as a social trend. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau asks families in which the wife was employed who has primary responsibility for taking care of the children. In 2011, only 10 percent of fathers in working-mother families were the primary caretakers for their children (Laughlin 2013:20).

Family Leave

When Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in 1993, then vice president Al Gore declared, “American families will no longer have to choose between their families and their jobs” (Clymer 1993). That was a goal that many people sought, but achieving it was not as simple as it was for Democratic president Bill Clinton to put his signature on the bill the next day. Under the law, American workers now are entitled to unpaid leave if they become too sick to perform on the job or if they need to care for family members in the event of a birth, adoption, or illness. This leave can extend up to 12 weeks per year. The guarantee means, in effect, that the employer must hold workers’ jobs for them while they are away (and continue their health insurance, if they have it). However, not everyone is covered by this guarantee. It generally applies to all government workers and to those in the private sector who have worked for at least a year at a workplace with at least 50 employees (U.S. Department of Labor description: http://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/). Those restrictions translate into about half of all workers. Business leaders were afraid that FMLA would drive up employment costs and reduce profits—which is why Republican president George H. W. Bush had vetoed the law two times before 1993. Many family and women’s advocates, on the other hand, feared that the law did not go far enough and provided too many exemptions and exceptions. Whether it has been effective or not, however, FMLA represented an increased level of regulation of the American economy, an intervention by the state into the delicate balance of work and family life. How U.S. Law Compares with Other Countries In the United States, care work is much more market based than it is in many other countries, which tend to have more state-based solutions. For example, children here spend more time in the care of their parents or informal caregivers, paid for by their own families. In Europe, children spend more time in professional day care centers, and the expense is much more often borne by the government (Esping-Andersen 2009). Even though it was a government act, however, FMLA did not really change all that. Rather, the law attempted to protect the family’s role in the system of care by protecting workers’ ability to spend time caring for their family members. A quarter of a century later, the United States is the only wealthy country that still does not guarantee any paid leave to parents to care for their children—and most countries provide more unpaid leave as well. Figure 11.8 shows a comparison of 20 wealthy industrialized countries, in which the United States ranked at the bottom in terms of paid parental leave guarantees. (Most of these countries don’t guarantee full pay during the leave time, but all include a substantial portion.) At the other extreme, Finland guarantees more than three years of paid leave. But in many countries it is common for parents to be provided with a year or more of paid leave to care for their children. In some countries, the policy is motivated in large part by the desire to promote childbearing. The governments hope that by making child rearing more compatible with pursuing a career, they will encourage young couples to have more children. In addition to the shorter leave provided in the United States, researchers have identified three major limitations to the protections offered by the Family and Medical Leave Act (Gerstel and McGonagle 1999): • Leave is unpaid. That makes leave hard, or even impossible, for many people to afford, even if they are covered by the law. And many families are in a bind because they have to choose between giving up their salary to take care of their children and remaining at work and attempting to arrange high-quality child care. • Many people aren’t covered. With only about half of the workforce covered, FMLA is not really a national policy. Further, those who are covered tend to be people who have better jobs already, such as those who have worked for their employers longer and those who work for larger companies. • Many employers offer leave only grudgingly. Although it may be required by law, many workers feel pressured not to take leave when they have children, for fear that they will anger or disappoint their employers. Those who do take leave may find themselves punished informally in the future when it comes to wage increases or promotions. The extent of inequality in the availability of parental leave is starkly illustrated in Figure 11.9. It shows, for example, that half of all women with less than a high school education quit their jobs when they have their first child, compared with about 1 in 8 of those with a college degree or higher. On the other hand, about two-thirds of college graduates take some paid leave when they have their first child, which may include formal maternity leave, vacation leave, or paid sick leave. Compare that with less than 20 percent of women who have not graduated from high school who take paid leave. Some workers also use disability leave for childbirth, and the figure shows that this option is more available to those with higher education as well. Thus, the quality of one’s job appears to play a large role in the options available for balancing work and family, at least around the issue of time off for having children. FMLA may help provide a basic level of leave to many workers, but clearly it does not resolve work-family conflicts for most workers or alleviate the inequality between workers with better or worse job opportunities.

Balance
Balance

From what we have seen, families may be as difficult to change as workplaces. One unintended consequence of this logjam may be a solution that people choose reluctantly: reducing the role of family in their lives. As we saw in Chapter 9, women are having fewer children—and having them later in life—than they did in the 1960s. Delaying marriage also reduces housework burdens, at least for women. That is because, deliberately or not, over time marriage increases the tendency of couples to fall into a traditional division of labor (Baxter, Hewitt, and Haynes 2008). However, it is hard to tell how much people are delaying their marriage and childbearing as a strategy to manage work-family conflict or for other reasons, because people often can’t explain their own motivations objectively to researchers (Damaske 2011). The barriers to rebalancing work and family are substantial (Damaske and Frech 2016). Most people need their jobs to pay their bills, and they need their own labor at home to stretch their paychecks enough to make ends meet. But we can still learn something about what people say they would like to do. Research shows that many people who experience work-family conflicts would like to reduce their work hours, and this is especially the case when people have children (Reynold and Johnson 2012). When the Pew Research Center asked women what their ideal work situation would be, they found that a majority of American mothers would prefer not to work a full-time job (see Figure 11.11). Half of those with jobs would prefer a part-time job, and another 11 percent would rather have no job at all. Among mothers without jobs, however, a majority would like to have either a part-time or full-time job. Clearly, ideals are not matching reality in many families. (Interestingly, three-quarters of fathers think a full-time job is ideal for them, and this figure has remained stable for many years.) Working part-time is a popular preference among employed mothers who feel the pull of parenting and the demands of unpaid work, whether because they are single or because their partners won’t—or can’t—do more at home. But part-time work is not an easy choice. Those who are employed full-time and want to drop down to part-time hours often face uncooperative employers. For example, some of the successful businesswomen that sociologist Pamela Stone (2007) interviewed looked into working part-time rather than dropping out of their jobs to take care of their children. But they found that it was simply not an option in their fast-track careers. And many of those who manage to arrange part-time schedules find that their career progress stalls as a result (Bertrand, Goldin, and Katz 2010). People who are not employed and seek to enter the workforce (or reenter it after taking time off) find that part-time jobs don’t offer the same career potential and opportunities. Still, even a part-time job with limited career potential can provide an important sense of independence and personal value.

“I can’t wait to get out of this house,” said one woman, who worked part-time as a pharmacist. “Just to have some time to myself. You know, just dress up and get out [chuckling]. . . .I think working gives you a higher self-esteem, like you’re qualified to do something that you’re good at. When you know you’re good at it, it’s rewarding.” (Damaske 2011:110).

The problems of work-family conflict are certainly complex, as are the potential solutions we might consider. On the one extreme, some people have too much work. Professional careers are increasingly demanding extra-long workweeks, creating harried parents who, when they finally make it home, are frequently interrupted by their ever-present mobile communication devices (Conley 2009). On the other extreme, some people have too little work. Working-class parents often string together a series of overlapping part-time or temporary jobs—interrupted by periods of no job at all—trying to bring in enough earnings and benefits to keep their households afloat (Kalleberg 2011). Many such parents report that they would like to have more time to do housework (Stanczyk, Henly, and Lambert 2017). In between these extremes are millions of American families and individuals with one or the other of these problems—or both—to varying degrees. As a result, time itself has become an increasingly central piece of America’s inequality puzzle (Jacobs and Gerson 2004).

Government Action

Despite the tenor of the previous section, there is a lot of good news in the story of work and family in the United States. Increased women’s employment has brought new levels of independence and individual self-fulfillment to several generations of women. Workplaces, colleges and universities, and families themselves have seen many benefits from tapping into the much larger pool of potential that resulted from women gaining more education and joining the workforce in such great numbers. Children have grown up with wider horizons and more potential opportunities. Nevertheless, the underlying issues discussed in this chapter often lead to seeing work and family as a series of problems that remain to be solved. To summarize, these problems may be put into three categories:

• The inequality between men and women that persists in the workplace is mirrored in most families as well. The gender division of labor is associated with a gender hierarchy in which men have more power and more options than do women.

• The balance between work and family—or rather the imbalance—creates stress for men, women, families, and workplaces that undermines the potential benefits of the social changes we have seen in the last half-century.

• Raising children to be happy and successful, and raising them in a way that offers equal opportunity to all regardless of the status of their parents, seems impossible to many people under the current arrangements that dominate the U.S. scene. Most parents are under too much stress, are too busy, and face too many irreconcilable choices to achieve the parenting they want for their children.

We have seen that people have tried—in workplaces and in families—to find new sources of balance in the work-family relationship. But in each arena, the challenges remain formidable. Given the apparent state of impasse, some analysts believe that strong government action is needed. The theory that the state can jumpstart change in both the workplace and the family arises from the belief that government can create incentives for reform that are more universal, and more equalizing, than either families or the market can achieve on their own. This is especially the case with regard to workplaces, because many employers believe that they would be at a competitive disadvantage if they took steps on their own to improve their employees’ work-family balance (Baum 2003). Companies are especially concerned about losing their investments in hiring and training when workers leave the job. However, if the government requires certain practices by all companies, and if everyone has to comply with them, then companies are not going out on a limb alone by implementing a new, family-friendly policy. What are the most important policies? The economist Heather Boushey, in her book Finding Time (2016), suggests four areas in which relatively small policy changes could make a big difference for work-family balance (although she prefers the term work-life balance). By implementing changes in the areas she calls Here, There, and Care, Boushey argues we can help people to earn a living, care for their families, and reduce inequality between men and women, all while fostering the healthy development of children—and boosting the economy as well. Here Workers need time to be “here,” at home, without jeopardizing their jobs, which means guaranteed paid family and sick leave. One of the biggest problems that parents face is the disruption in their careers caused by the demands of caring for children or other family members. Many parents cannot afford to take unpaid leave, especially if there is no guarantee that their job will be waiting for them when they come back—and many American workers can’t even call in sick from their jobs without losing pay, or worse. This prevents people from making the contributions they could at home and at work. If the government required this from all employers, no one would be at a disadvantage for offering such benefits. To help reduce costs for employers, the government can provide some of the compensation to workers from payroll taxes, as it does for unemployment insurance. There When to be “there,” at work, is a major challenge as well. Some people have hours that are too short, others have jobs that demand too much—and hours on the job are increasing overall (Miller 2015). Boushey calls for regulations that would permit worker flexibility to arrange their schedules, while providing an assurance of predictability so they can plan their schedules in advance instead of being forced to respond to employer demands on short notice. We have as examples a number of countries that have reduced their working hours through shortening the workweek altogether, increasing the number of part-time workers, or offering more time off from work (see Figure 11.12). Employers are reluctant to embrace such changes alone if it means they must train and provide benefits to more workers. But if all companies are required to implement these changes, it is not as costly for them. Care Securing high-quality, affordable care for both young children and adults who can’t live on their own is a problem for almost all families at one time or another. Addressing that squeeze will be expensive at first, but experts insist the long-run payoff will be worth it both socially and economically. In the United States, it is common for children to have only informal child care or family-based child care until age 4 or even 5; only 29 percent of U.S. four-year-olds attend public preschools (National Institute for Early Education Research 2016). Those who support expanding education to children at earlier ages argue that the cost of child care and the time required to manage it are a major impediment to parents’ careers in the early years of parenthood. And many American parents find it impossible to afford higher-quality child care at all. In response, several states and cities have moved to expand pre-kindergarten education in recent years, most notably New York City (see Trend to Watch). In contrast with the United States, most European countries start education at a younger age, with children expected to attend a public school by age 3. Many economists believe that providing more universal high-quality early childhood education will go far toward equalizing opportunities for children as they grow up (Heckman 2006). At the other end of the age spectrum, the problem of providing care to old people who need it causes emotional and economic problems for a growing share of families. As the population ages (see Chapter 13), this challenge will only grow more acute. How people and their families decide who will do which work, and for what rewards, remains a dilemma not only for individuals but also for families, workplaces, and the government (Jacobs and Gerson 2016). The stakes are high, as the outcome of these decisions will affect everything from the stability of marriage to the equality between men and women, from the productivity of our workplaces to the potential of our children. For sociologists, this subject tests our understanding of how major institutional arenas interact in everyday life. As busy as we are researching these issues—and there are dozens of new sociology articles published every year with the words work and family in the title—there is little chance that we researchers will put ourselves out of work anytime soon.

Work for What, Whom

Where At the start of the chapter, I described the work of feeding children in three different institutional arenas: home (family), school (state), and fast-food restaurant (market). In this workshop, we dig deeper into the principle that the social setting or context of work often is as important as its content. To help understand the importance of this point, let’s consider specifically the rewards, rules, and relationships of work in different situations. Consider growing tomatoes in three settings:

• Urban balcony garden. A couple named Kyla and Peter started a blog called “Adventures in Clueless Urban Balcony Gardening.” They described it as “a little diary by two younguns who like the idea of growing at least some of their own food.” For them, the rewards are mostly aesthetic—they enjoy the work and the feeling of satisfaction it provides, and they like the tomatoes. They might save a little money by growing their own tomatoes, but that’s not the point.

• Family farm. The Pritt family farm in northern Ohio grows tomatoes as well (Podolak 2012). Owner Artie Pritt and the family support themselves by selling the produce grown on 70 acres, with the help of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. “It’s wonderful to have our four generations working together,” said his daughter Rhonda. “The kids learn about a work ethic, customer service, and having pride in something they’ve helped to grow.” For the children, those life lessons may be all they earn for a day’s work: According to U.S. labor law, children can work on their family’s farm without pay, as long as it is outside of school hours and the work is not hazardous.

• Commercial farms. In Florida, there are more than 30,000 tomato-farm workers, who earn about $17,000 per year—paid by the pound as they hand-carry some two tons of tomatoes per day. As farmworkers, they have less legal protection under labor laws than the rest of the labor force. Most are immigrants or migrant workers from Central or South America, earning a wage to feed their families (who are either in Florida or back in their home countries). In recent years, they have organized a series of successful protests and boycotts to increase their wages and improve working conditions, but they remain among the lowest-paid workers in the country (Ríos 2011).

Trend to Watch: Local Policy Innovation

From marijuana to the minimum wage, and many other issues, state and local law is often where important policy innovations emerge. And work-family policy is no exception. Consider early childhood education, a key part of extending state support to reduce family work burdens. In 2013, then president Obama called for the government to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America” (Rich 2013). But with Republicans controlling Congress, Obama had little chance to create a big federal program during the remainder of his presidency. It was different in New York City, however, where Bill de Blasio, then running for mayor, took up Obama’s call and made it part of his winning campaign (Kirp 2016). Now the city has a successful program that enrolls tens of thousands of children every year, and the mayor wants to expand it to include three-year-olds as well (Taylor 2017). New York’s popular effort may become a model for other local governments, or someday inspire a federal policy. There is a similar story with paid family leave. After the federal Family and Medical Leave Act failed to provide paid leave, the California state government took up the challenge and implemented a paid leave program in 2004. Now a number of states and cities have moved to develop their own family leave laws, and a handful of states have implemented paid policies as well (National Conference of State Legislatures 2016). California, still the biggest, offers six weeks of paid leave to all workers who have spent at least one year working more than half time at their current employer (Milkman and Appelbaum 2013). The program is funded by a payroll tax on all workers, and it provides about half pay for workers with a new child or ill family member. The result in California has been more mothers taking leave from their jobs around the time of childbirth, and returning to the same job later in the year. (Fathers have used the program much less, however [Baum and Ruhm 2016].) With California’s success, other states are following (including New York and New Jersey), and some cities are trying as well (such as Washington, D.C.). Progressive work-family policies seem to be getting little attention at the federal level, so these state and local initiatives may represent a way forward for advocates of work-family balance and policies that support care work. A patchwork of policies across the country might be confusing and inefficient. And maybe people will start thinking more about such policies when they decide where to move for work or family reasons, which could further polarize the country between places that embrace such programs and those that don’t. On the other hand, local successes might lead to national gains by creating successful policy examples, eventually shaping federal policy. That question is one of many uncertainties on today’s political horizons.