New York Times article

Recession Drives Women Back to the Work Force
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The Great Recession is pushing many highly educated women who had left work to stay at home with their children to dive back into the labor pool, according to several nationally recognized experts on women in the workplace.

Many of these women are sending out job applications for the first time in years because their husbands were laid off, fear being laid off or had their salaries cut or because their family’s investments plunged in value.

Last February Trudi Foutts Loh felt compelled to find full-time work, some 20 years after she quit her job to care for her two children. Her job back then as a lawyer and three hours of daily commuting made balancing everything impossible.

She occasionally worked as a political consultant and writer, but numerous economic worries made her conclude that that was not enough.

She pointed to investment losses “in the healthy six figures,” along with “some very high medical expenses for a family member and having two daughters in college. And then the value of our home and pension plan has taken a tumble.”

She feels lucky because a law school friend hired her at a prestigious firm in Pasadena, Calif.

For Lisa Hughes, a mother of two, it was an unexpected layoff that shoved her back into the labor pool.

A former corporate lawyer, she moved from Montclair, N.J., to California last year, after the World Poker Tour recruited her husband to be its chief operating officer. Then, squeezed by the recession, the tour laid him off, pushing Ms. Hughes to pursue full-time work for the first time in 16 years.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine he would be unemployed a year later,” she said. She plans to start a solo practice because “it’s hard to find jobs after 16 years.”

According to some economists, these women, once part of a privileged minority that could afford not to work, are now collateral damage of the recession — not forced out of work, but back into it.

“What’s happened is 78 percent of the people who lost their jobs in the recession are men,” said Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. “That has brought home to many families that having one income places you in a very vulnerable position. Some women who expected to take a long time out of the work force suddenly felt they needed to re-enter, in some cases much more quickly than they expected.”

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found preliminary evidence of affluent women returning to the labor force. When it comes to women with a college education who are 25 to 44 years old and living with a spouse, the proportion of those working or looking for work increased to 78.4 percent in the first half of 2009, from 76 percent in the first half of 2007. Economists say this is surprising because the percentage of people in the work force usually drops as unemployed workers grow discouraged and stop looking for work in a recession.

Over the same period, the proportion of men of the same age and circumstance inched down, falling from 97.4 percent to 97.1 percent.

It is too early to tell whether those numbers reflect an increase above and beyond the long-term growth of women’s participation in the work force.

Examining women’s work force participation — and especially women with children — has been one of the battlefields of economics.

In the last several years, some researchers have suggested that many affluent working mothers chose to leave the work force during the boom times of the 90’s and early this decade, saying there was a trend of women opting out of careers once they had children. The suggestion — highlighted in an Oct. 26, 2003 New York Times Magazine cover article — prompted a huge controversy.

Critics responded that most women had no choice but to work and that only a small affluent minority could chose not to. They said many working mothers left the labor force not because they were opting to, but because they were forced to by workplaces that made it too difficult to balance family and work. Separately, some economists argued that the decrease in women working was not caused by opting out, but by the 2001 recession that was followed by years of weak job growth.

Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the liberal Center for American Progress and a fierce critic of the notion of opting out, said her studies showed little difference in how often mothers and women without children left the labor force.

Ms. Boushey nonetheless agreed that the current recession was pushing women who had stopped working for whatever reason to re-enter the labor force.

She said this helped explain why the percentage of women aged 20 and above in the work force has remained relatively flat during the recession, while the percentage of men has fallen slightly. “This does indicate that some women are opting back in,” she said.

One of them is Patricia Smart. She quit her banking job 14 years ago when her son was born. But last April, her husband received a layoff notice. “It was a cosmic kick in the butt,” said Ms. Smart, who had toyed with returning to work for years. “It forced me to do something.”

After a quick job search, she landed a job in July as a full-time manager at Wachovia Bank in Charlotte, N.C.

Carolyn Bednarz was not as fortunate. The former lawyer at Milbank & Tweed spent nine years at home raising three children, but she became frightened for her family’s future after her banker-husband endured four rounds of layoffs and reduced bonuses.

Ms. Bednarz started looking for work. After a 10-month search she couldn’t find a paying job.

“I probably applied for 30 jobs on Craigslist, and hardly anyone writes back,” she said, complaining that many employers aren’t interested in hiring someone who has not worked in years. “This is just the most humbling experience.”

In the end, she took a position as an unpaid intern at a law firm in Marin County, Calif., north of San Francisco.

Several studies have found that two different groups of women are likely not to return to work after giving birth: affluent ones and poor ones unable to afford child care.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, an independent research group, and several other economists and experts argue that there is an unmistakable trend toward women returning to the labor force — and not just professional women.

“Women are at a watershed moment,” Ms. Hewlett said, pointing to the recession’s squeeze on incomes.

Anna Bresnahan of Spokane, Wash., says she would not have returned to work if she and her husband had not started worrying that the bank where he worked might fail. “I decided I could start looking. He said, ‘That would be nice.’ ”

Ms. Bresnahan, who quit a marketing job in 2001 after her first child was born, found a position with an accounting firm in December, although at a lower salary. (Studies have found that for every two years a woman is out of the labor force, her earnings fall by 10 percent, a penalty that lasts throughout her career.)

Karen Boon felt pressured to return to working full time after staying home for five years to raise her two children. Her husband’s job for Boston Scientific, a manufacturer of medical devices, was shaky and the family’s investments had plunged.

Ms. Boon regularly visits the Opting Back In chat room, sponsored by the Hastings College of Law, where lawyers with new jobs trade stories, tips, hopes and complaints.

“If my husband had been laid off, it would have been a world of hurt,” she said.

In April, she found a temporary job as counsel for a Bay Area company that oversees surgery centers, replacing someone on maternity leave.

She said it was a pleasure to be working with adults again.

Still, she added, “It is really hard to do two jobs at once — the kids still need to be fed and the laundry still needs to get done.”

Ms. Bednarz, the former Milbank lawyer turned intern, also participates in the chat room. “The women who lead the chat room say, ‘Don’t jump into something until you find something that’s just right,’ ” she said. “That’s all well and fine, but some of us have to find something right now. It’s not like we have that luxury in today’s job market.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Assignment Reminder

Happy Labor Day, Everyone!

I encourage you read Robert Reich’s Blog entry for Friday, September 4th, on The Real News About Jobs and Wages -- An Ode to Labor Day
You can find it at: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

I want to remind you that the first interview assignment (Employment, Care, Work & Justice Interview & Gender & Class Analysis Paper) has two due dates. You need to send me information about the women you selected for the first interview. The woman must have had a child during her working life. This woman does not necessary need to have children currently at home but must have worked at sometime while she had children. Your interview subject may be single, married or divorced. A one page description is due on September 13th at midnight. Please e-mail me the one page as an attachment.

Professor Romero

Are You Being Too Efficient?

Here is an essay questioning some of the unintended consequences of being too efficient. By trying to be a “supermom”, the author questions her quality of life and her ability to be her best. She offers interesting points to ponder in our writings on balance work and family.

Motherlode - Adventures in Parenting

Are You Being Too Efficient?

By Laura Vanderkam

Even in a slack labor market, Americans waste a lot of time. Case in point: are you reading this at work? If so, don’t sweat it. Reading a blog post only takes a few minutes. The real vampires — meetings and phone calls that didn’t need to happen, trips that didn’t need to be taken, excess layers of supervision — can steal whole days.

As the Johnson & Johnson commercial says, though, having a baby changes everything. When full-time working women become full-time working moms, our tolerance for anything that wastes our time plummets. Over the past six months I’ve interviewed hundreds of people about their time management techniques. Moms in particular have told me about how they squeeze minutes out of the day. One professor, a mother of two small kids, explained that she takes the stairs because she hates waiting for the elevator. Another sets a kitchen timer for 30 minutes and challenges herself to race — undistracted — through her assignments.

We change the way we work. We change the way people work with us. Parents boast of getting more done in less time than they ever thought possible.

In general, that’s a good thing — for the economy and our jobs. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering: In our quest for efficiency, do some of us take things too far? In our efforts not to shortchange our children, are some of us unnecessarily shortchanging our careers?

Since I work for myself, I’ve never had to deal with the office woes many other women have, but still, after my son Jasper was born in May 2007, I found my work habits changing. In order to spend time with him, I — like many moms — crunched my schedule to quit by 5pm. I dropped projects that I didn’t think were advancing my career. I planned out my weeks and days based on my top priorities. I spent a lot less time in political chat rooms. I let unimportant emails pile up during the day, then I’d take a few minutes to mass-delete ones I didn’t intend to deal with.

My day-to-day assignments got done. Once I started adding a two-hour shift some weeknights after Jasper went to bed, I even added a few new clients.

But in my zeal to be efficient, I noticed that I’d stopped doing things that maybe weren’t the wastes of time they appeared to be. I love to write fiction, but I wasn’t reading any fiction — and hence not picking up new ideas to improve my craft. I didn’t spend much time surfing the web, but that made it harder to come up with story ideas. I wasn’t promoting myself, because I felt busy enough. And I rarely left my home office to meet people in person or attend networking events. Traveling takes time — getting there and making myself look presentable — and anything that happened outside Jasper’s usual childcare hours required the kind of logistical feats that made it easier not to bother.

Periodically though, I’d be a little inefficient — and be amazed at the results. A quote from Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto turned out to be perfect for something I was writing. A casual mention of a project at a PR event led to just the source I needed. I’d give myself an hour to daydream and would come up with a column idea.

So how do you strike the right balance? How do you keep the upsides of working motherhood — like garnering the courage to extract yourself from a weekly meeting that doesn’t matter — without being so efficient that you cut yourself off from opportunities?

I’m still trying to figure this out as I prepare to welcome a new baby into my life this September. I now set “inefficient” goals for myself, like going to one professional meeting or event outside the office each week and reading one novel a month.

I’m also learning to relax about how many hours per week I work, total. Often, moms who work full-time think that our work is somehow taking time away from our children. We think that moms who work less are spending vastly more time with their kids. But as I’ve been studying the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily the case. There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 50 of those hours (as I do; I’ve kept logs) and sleep eight hours a night (56 hours a week), this leaves 62 hours for other things. The average mom who is not in the workforce and whose youngest kid is under age six, spends less than six hours per week playing or doing hobbies with her kids, and just over two hours reading or doing educational activities. Since I beat this hands down during my 62 waking, non-working hours, there’s no reason to hold myself to a 40-hour work week just so I can have 72 family and leisure hours. There’s definitely no reason to work part-time so I can have 92 hours. In the context of 168 hour weeks, working 40 or 50 hours a week is a lot closer to “balanced” than working 15-20.

Indeed, I am learning that just as putting some limits on your workweek forces you to make better choices, putting some limits on your waking, non-work hours forces better choices there, too. If I know I will see my son three evenings during the work week, I put more effort into those evenings than I would if I had five. We go play on the playground together — really together (yes, that would be me, the woman who’s seven months pregnant and trying to go down the slide). We hunt for street fruit vendors selling “nanas” and then camp outside the window of the nearby doggie day-care and watch the puppies. We read our new favorite book about Louis Blériot’s 1909 flight across the English Channel rather than watch the videos I’d be tempted to use if I had more time.

In other words, it is quite possible that my work hours, and my interactive time with my son, have been rising in tandem. This is not the usual narrative you hear in work-life balance literature, but it’s true for us. And I’ll bet that others have discovered this secret, too — that working a little longer, and maybe not so efficiently, can go a long way toward making life fit better.

* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Low wage workers are cheated

Here is a NYT article:

September 2, 2009
Low-Wage Workers Are Often Cheated, Study Says
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

“We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate,” said Ruth Milkman, one of the study’s authors and a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the City University of New York. The study, to be released on Wednesday, was financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations.

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

The researchers said one of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed for compensation to pay for medical care and missed days at work stemming from those injuries.

“The conventional wisdom has been that to the extent there were violations, it was confined to a few rogue employers or to especially disadvantaged workers, like undocumented immigrants,” said Nik Theodore, an author of the study and a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “What our study shows is that this is a widespread phenomenon across the low-wage labor market in the United States.”

According to the study, 39 percent of those surveyed were illegal immigrants, 31 percent legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans.

The study found that 26 percent of the workers had been paid less than the minimum wage the week before being surveyed and that one in seven had worked off the clock the previous week. In addition, 76 percent of those who had worked overtime the week before were not paid their proper overtime, the researchers found.

The new study, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” was conducted in the first half of 2008, before the brunt of the recession hit. The median wage of the workers surveyed was $8.02 an hour — supervisors were not surveyed — with more than three-quarters of those interviewed earning less than $10 an hour. When the survey was conducted, the minimum wage was $7.15 in New York State, $7.50 in Illinois and $8 in California.

Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis responded to the report with an e-mail statement, saying, “There is no excuse for the disregard of federal labor standards — especially those designed to protect the neediest among us.” Ms. Solis said she was in the process of hiring 250 more wage-and-hour investigators. “Today’s report clearly shows we still have a major task before us,” she said.

The study’s authors noted that many low-wage employers comply with wage and labor laws. The National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small-business owners, said it encouraged members “to stay in compliance with state and federal labor laws.”

But many small businesses say they are forced to violate wage laws to remain competitive.

The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

“These practices are not just morally reprehensible, but they’re bad for the economy,” said Annette Bernhardt, an author of the study and policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project. “When unscrupulous employers break the law, they’re robbing families of money to put food on the table, they’re robbing communities of spending power and they’re robbing governments of vital tax revenues.”

When the Russell Sage Foundation announced a grant to help finance the survey, it said that low-wage workers were “hard to find” for interviews and that “government compliance surveys shy away from the difficult task of measuring workplace practices beyond the standard wage, benefits and hours questions.”

The report found that 57 percent of workers sampled had not received mandatory pay documents the previous week, which are intended to help make sure pay is legal and accurate. Of workers who receive tips, 12 percent said their employer had stolen some of the tips.

One in five workers reported having lodged a complaint about wages to their employer or trying to form a union in the previous year, and 43 percent of them said they had experienced some form of illegal retaliation, like firing or suspension, the study said.

In instances when workers’ compensation should have been used, the study found, one third of workers injured on the job paid the bills for treatment out of their own pocket and 22 percent used their health insurance. Workers’ compensation insurance paid medical expenses for only 6 percent of the injured workers surveyed, the researchers found.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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