The Importance of the Humane Workweek
What emerged from the comments section of Judith Warner’s article is a conclusion I often think about: “What we really need to fight for, for everyone, is a humane work week.”
As it stands, an inflexible 50-80 (100?) hour workweek makes it impossible for those working to care for their children, so each working person has to team up with a non-working person in order to have a family. Since men get paid more than women, the non-working person usually becomes the woman.
Not only does this deny women career opportunities and men family time, but it also punishes women whose breadwinner spouses ever leave them (which, as we all know, happens). The woman will have to find a way to support herself and her family even though she has been out of the workforce her whole life. She remains the sole caretaker but now must also become the financial provider.
Even in cases where the woman is the sole provider, she cannot compete with men who don’t get pregnant and thus don’t take any time off. The money and status she loses by being absent from work is their gain. And she can’t even entertain the idea of leaving the workforce for a few years to spend time with her child rather than spending her entire salary on childcare, because once she leaves the workforce she may never get back in.
A man that wants to both work and care for his children, arguably, has it even worse. However little sympathy there is for women’s caretaking needs, there is no sensitivity to men’s caretaking needs at all. Imagine a father in a male-dominated field like banking pushing for maternity leave or more flexible working hours so he can take care of his children.
And yet, that’s what has to happen. As a society, we need to push for flexibility in work schedules and reasonable limits on work hours for women and men. We need to value children enough to value their care.
One commenter wrote:
I would say that, in many American corporations today, the *real* reason for the ‘long hours/extensive travel’ thing is to find a rationale — in a supposedly non-discriminatory workplace — to continue promoting straight white men into positions of power; to perpetuate the old power structure for at least one more generation. It’s the new shibboleth for the ruling class.
Too bad nobody in this power structure wins.
