What Will Work-Life Balance Look Like After the Pandemic?
Brother 2 sent me this article and noted: "The following article supports your theory that our economy will transition in the future to a "contractor" based model. I think the effects of how our country is dealing with this pandemic will only exacerbate this happening." From the article "As if being a working parent didn’t already include enough moving pieces to manage, even toddlers are now having standing teleconferences. For the two of us, our daughters’ virtual morning preschool meeting is one more item to be juggled as we attempt to work full-time from home without childcare. Our own conference calls are scheduled for naptime and occasionally interrupted by a request for potty. We attempt to wedge the rest of the workday into the early mornings and post-bedtime. The Covid-19 crisis has shoved work and home lives under the same roof for many families like ours, and the struggle to manage it all is now visible to peers and bosses. As people postulate how the country may be forever changed by the pandemic, we can hope that one major shift will be a move away from the harmful assumption that a 24/7 work culture is working well for anyone. For decades, scholars have described how organizations were built upon the implicit model of an “ideal worker”: one who is wholly devoted to their job and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year of their career. This was always an unrealistic archetype, one that presumed a full-time caretaker in the background. Yet today, over two-thirds of American families are headed by single parents or two working parents. With schools and daycares closed, work cannot continue as normal simply because working remotely is technologically possible. Employees are disproportionally well-compensated for being ideal workers. “Time greedy” professions like finance, consulting, and law — where 80- or 100-hour weeks may be typical — compensate their workers per hour more than professions with a regular 40-hour week. Flexible-work arrangements come with severe penalties; many who leave the workforce for a period or shift to part-time never recover their professional standing or compensation. When individuals push back — asking for less travel or requesting part-time or flexible hours — their performance reviews suffer, and they are less likely to be promoted, studies find. Simply asking for workplace flexibility engenders professional stigma. The “ideal worker” expectation is particularly punitive for working mothers, who also typically put in more hours of caregiving work at home than their spouses. Furthermore, men are more likely to “fake it” and pass as ideal workers, while women make clear that they cannot meet these expectations, including by negotiating flexible-work arrangements. Many organizations are not amenable to adjustments, leading to the perception that women are opting out of the workforce — although research suggests women are actually “pushed out.” In our world of laptops, cellphones, and teleconferences, the intellectual and analytical tasks of “knowledge workers” can continue at home. But low-wage workers increasingly are subject to similar expectations of responsiveness, even as they have less job security and even less flexibility than higher paid workers. In the midst of this pandemic, store clerks, delivery drivers, and warehouse workers are now forced to be “ideal workers” too, risking exposure to the virus in public with little support for the families they leave to go to work. There have been many calls for restructuring how work is done, including making more room for our families and questioning the real value of the eight-hour (or more) workday. Now is a time for companies to step back and reexamine which traditional ways of working exist because of convention, not necessity. Executives and managers have the opportunity to choose quality work over quantity of work. They can value the creative ideas that emerge after a midday hike or meditation session, rather than putting in face time at the office. They can stop rewarding the faster response over the better response, or the longer workday over a more productive workday. They can rethink highly competitive career tracks where you make it or wash out — such as giving tenure-track scholars and partner-track lawyers the choice of a longer clock before their evaluation. During this pandemic, employers are seeing that workers can’t function well without accommodation for their family responsibilities. Will that lesson last after the crisis is over? American families want greater choices in determining how their work and their families fit together. Post-pandemic, can we create a system that fits real workers, not just idealized ones? If so, we have the opportunity to emerge from this crisis with both healthier employees and better performing organizations." My response This has been coming for decades. The Boomers were the last generation to want the old model; the GenXers accepted it be never really wanted it. The Millennials hate it. Plus, the young know that there is no reason for the workplace. They know computers can function to assess work quality, and value and negotiate with the worker for appropriate pay for an amount of work. The problem is the Boomers are in a box. They cannot understand that the work arrangement which worked for them does not work for others, and they cannot understand how the new model will work without layers of bureaucracy and managers. Like most change, this will be glacial with loads of complaints right up until the moment the change strikes a chord in the majority of people; then it will shift rapidly to a new model. The "pre-change" takes decades, but the actual change will only take a few years or perhaps a decade. Some jobs might remain in the old model, just like buggy whip braiders last even today, but those jobs will be vanishingly few. We stand a the edge of a sea change, which will change the economic model, the work model, the wage model, the political model, our social model, and pretty much everything else. This change is more complicated than those in the past because it is so all-encompassing. My current concern is that the change will not be triggered by the virus but will take an additional trigger like a war. I don't think a war would need to be kinetic, but I wouldn't rule one out. More likely, the war would be cyber, or a geopolitical cold war, or perhaps something else entirely. I don't see the virus pulling us together, and I suspect that will have to happen before we can functionally work through this issue and execute the change. Perhaps it will be a civil war. Trump hatred seems to be sufficient to carry sufficient vitriol. I speak to progressives routinely, but I have never been able to get a serious answer on what is the base motivation for the Trump hatred. I have come to accept that it is baseless, probably tribal hatred driven by the tribes's loss in 2016 and the inability to accept that loss. Inchoate hatred of the tribes Emmanuel Goldstein is a sufficient trigger for civil war
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