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thursday, MARCH 19, 2015
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guyanatimesgy.com
Foundation
― long hours put the squeeze on workers and their families (Continued from Wednesday) By Miriam Schulman
Problem spillover
Whatever the motivation for overwork, eventually, Shefrin cautions, “something does give. It’s not like people will get more efficient if we keep piling jobs on them. [The overextension] shows up in different places: It might show up in teaching or level of scholarship or the quality of the other service they do.” Alexander Trotman, Chair of Ford Motor Co, has the same worry. Though Ford workers do significant overtime, Trotman told Time magazine, “You don’t get real productivity by simply ramping up the line speed... In the beginning, everyone enjoys the extra pay; but we all get tired, pressures build up, people get edgy, and tensions break out.” These tensions affect more than the individual worker and the work environment. They also come home. A 1992 study by the Families and Work Institute found that job-to-home problem spillover was three times as troubling to respondents as home-to-job problem spillover. “It appears that family members and friends must endure the stresses and problems that arise from work as well as from personal/family life,”
the institute report concluded. Dennis Moberg, SCU Professor of management, relates the phenomenon to the Soccer Mom, made famous in the last election. “I see the Soccer Mom as someone who is totally harried, someone who is having a difficult time keeping all the balls in the air at the same time. She may be holding down a part-time job, volunteering at school, getting the children off to practice and day care. Then, on top of that, she is trying to compensate for an overworked spouse. She’s sort of the residual in the equation; she has to pick up the messes of others who are working too hard.” If the Soccer Moms are stressed, imagine the strain on mothers who work fulltime. For these women, the disappearance of free time can be especially acute because mothers usually are responsible for the lion’s share of the work at home. Schor calculates men are doing more domestic chores than they used to – up 68 hours a year since 1969 – but their total 689 hours still hardly compare to the average 1123 hours put in by women. The result is often a family gasping for breath. Manuel Velasquez, Dirksen Professor of Business Ethics
at SCU, puts it simply: “A major pressure is that now, in order to support a family, both parents have to work.”
Job stress equals family stress
Parents’ long hours at work have been blamed for family breakdown and its attendant ills. Gordon argues that, while America’s social problems have been laid at the feet of lazy workers, ungrateful immigrants, and welfare chiselers, falling wages and other employment issues such as overwork play a more important role. Though he is writing about the general nature of employment, Gordon’s comments may also apply to the more specific issue of overwork: “In seeking to understand the stresses and strains on Americans’ lives and communities, rather than spending so much time blaming deviants or moral pestilents, we should focus much more clearly on the character of employment in the United States.” Tibor Scitovsky, Professor Emeritus of economics at Stanford University, believes we can cure many social evils by addressing overwork. Besides solving the unemployment problem (people without jobs would be hired to work the extra hours), Scitovsky believes that shortening the
workweek would shore up the family. In an article for the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, he writes: “More time away from
would fall, thereby improving school performance and stemming the school dropout rate that makes so many of our youth today turn to drugs and crime because
work would help make family ties stronger, reduce divorce rates, and increase quality parenting. The number of latchkey children
they are unemployable. Even if Scitovsky is stretching a point, few people would argue that more leisure would be bad for
families.”
Reining in the excess
Velasquez thinks many companies are beginning to address overwork, not because they are public-spirited but because it makes sound business sense to do so. “A lot of forward-thinking companies recognise the problem,” he says. “In an effort to get the highest quality labour force, they make sure that company policies are designed to lay as little stress as possible on families. Such practices can be a recruiting tool.” Some companies, for example, rotate overtime so no worker gets stuck continually with extra hours. Others may try to integrate the family into the business, by providing services such as on-site child care. Susan Seaburg, Americas field development manager for Hewlett-Packard, says her company has made work-life balance a major priority, reviewed quarterly in the same manner as other business objectives. Organisations like HP have moved toward greater scheduling flexibility to relieve some of the pressures of long hours. “My own workday doesn’t look anything like it did three years ago,” Seaburg says. While she used to show up at the office at 08:00h or 08:30h. and stay at her desk eight to 10 hours, she now drops her daughter off at school and goes home, where she handles her voice mail – a task that can take as long as two hours. Seaburg acknowledges that being able to take her job home can be a double-edged sword: “The good news is that now you can work anywhere, and the bad news is that now you can work anywhere,” is the way she puts it. But she finds the greater flexibility has made her job less stressful. Another HP effort has been to reduce company encroachment on weekend time. For example, the company used to schedule regional meetings for 08:00h. Monday. “It virtually required you to travel on Sunday,” Seaburg remembers. And if an employee complained, he or she was “viewed as not being a team player.” Now, major regional meetings usually start at 16:00h. Monday, and those who still have to travel during the weekend are encouraged to take comp time for the hours they spend away from their families. (www.scu.edu)