Apt. 11D

Union Wages, Union Pensions

Last week, we had a splendid discussion in a comment section about teacher salaries. For those who don't have time to wade through the comments, here are the highlights. Someone talked about poverty level wages of teachers. I looked up the salaries of teachers in my town and I found that the average salary was $90,000. The majority of high school teachers made over six figures. The superintendents in this area pull in over $200 grand and most are in charge of two or three little schools.

I was shocked by these numbers, but I admitted that my perspective was skewed by years of low pay. We briefly talked about whether or not these salaries were fair, but everyone has their own yardstick for determining fair pay. Some thought that instead of questioning union pay that everyone should demand the same benefits that union employees receive. I said that matters should at least be discussed and debated, and the failure to do so has resulted in the election of Christie-types.

David Brooks brings together this discussion with the failed tunnel project. Gov. Christie claims that New Jersey can't afford this investment in infrastructure, because so much of the budget goes towards the public sector and pension programs.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

Instead of responding to Brooks, I thought I would let you all take another shot at this.

Girly Jobs and Low Pay

My social security statements are an embarrassment. I've worked since I was 18, but my yearly income is poverty level. In college, I worked in the dishroom at the dining room and as a secretary in a valve company. I've had jobs in publishing, special education, academia, and journalism. I've also been an at-home mom, which is a job, FYI. 

Like many women, I was attracted to creative and caretaking jobs. I could have gone into finance (720 on the Math GREs and 750 on the analytic, baby), but I didn't. I wasn't interested. A great post by Nancy Folbre in the New York Times's Economix tells me that I'm not alone.

... Nicole Fortin, at economist at the University of British Columbia, finds that women tend to place less importance on money and more importance on people and family than men do...

Both biological and cultural factors can explain attitudinal differences between women and men. In our society, caring for others has long been considered an essential aspect of femininity (social psychologists devote considerable effort to measuring such things). And sometimes women don’t choose girly jobs, but end up in them because they face discrimination or harassment in other jobs.

Caring often entails commitments to dependents such as young children, adults with disabilities or the frail elderly who can’t afford to pay directly for the services provided. It doesn’t fit easily into the impersonal logic of fee for service or supply and demand.

We need caretakers in our society. Not everybody can be employed by the Bank of Evil. We really do need people who care for toddlers and old people. Educating children well has long term benefits for all of society. As Folbre says, "Good care helps create – and maintain – good people."

Instead of pushing women into lucrative jobs, caretaking work needs more respect and a bigger paycheck.

Office Space

I have a weakness for hipster office space. Check out these pictures of Gawker and Tumblr at TimeOut New York.

How Much Vacation Time?

The New York Times has an interesting "Room for Debate" series about vacation time in the United States v. Europe. Clearly, they get a lot more and at issue is whether or not this is a good thing.

(Chart and more information at EPI.)

Steve gets four weeks off a year, which is pretty good. His firm has to compete with European banks, so they have to offer their workers generous vacation time. Still, four weeks doesn't seem to be enough, because we only use a small portion of that time for actual vacation. When I was working full time, he had to use nearly all of that time to cover the kids during school breaks. There's all the hoopla at Christmas, which means he has to take off more time. With all the extended family and cooking and arranging, staying home during the holidays is actually more work than going into the office.

Still, it would be bitchy to complain. We actually have the money to go away this year, and four weeks is pretty good by American standards.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure I get any vacation time at all. If my full time job is parenting combined with putting together a new career, I never take a day off. Even when we're traveling next week, I'm going to be watching kids and composing blog posts. When does school start again?

<tangent> On Monday, I woke up with a terrible stomach virus. Blew chunks in the bathroom and then cleaned myself up, because Ian had an audiology test at a pediatric hospital. There was no way I was going to cancel that test. It takes months to get an appointment. So, I sat in a padded closet with him for TWO HOURS without moving. He had to listen to words and sounds with headphones that kept slipped to one side. Green faced and repressing the urge to heave, I kept sliding down in my chair. He did fine. He just can't hear anything with background sounds. </tangent>

That's why I need a vacation, too.

Do we need more vacation time in America? How much vacation time do you get per year?

Barriers for Moms

David Leonhardt in the New York Times today writes about how well women (without children) are doing in the workforce. We have had three women (without children) nominated to the Supreme Court in recent years. The feminist movement was very successful in getting women (without children) to achieve equal pay as men (until they have children) and in breaking barriers to have them reach top positions in business and politics (until they have children).

The problem is in the parenthesis, of course. Women find it hard to work full time and balance a family life. If they take time off, they never catch up to the men. There are few opportunities to work part time or flexibility, so women are increasingly dropping out of the workforce entirely after they have children.

Leonhardt discusses a recent study of business school graduates from the University of Chicago.

A recent study of business school graduates from the University of Chicago found that in the early years after graduating, men and women had “nearly identical labor incomes and weekly hours worked.” Men and women also paid a similar career price for taking off or working part time. Women, however, were vastly more likely to do so.

As a result, 15 years after graduation, the men were making about 75 percent more than the women. The study — done by Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz — did find one subgroup of women whose careers resembled those of men: women who had no children and never took time off.

This is hardly an original column. We've been talking about this problem for ages on this blog. Leonhardt should have interviewed other experts and referred to some key books. Whatever. Just glad it's being discussed.

Unemployment Numbers

I've finally eaten my way through a long list of chores, and I can finally catch up on the world. One of my chores this morning was to call the unemployment center to get my $400 weekly check. Everything helps.

Lots of people are buzzing about this chart from the Wall Street Journal, which looks at the historical percentage of the unemployed who've been without a job for 27 weeks or more. Hey, I'm one of those blips. 

Long term unemployment is bad news for a lot of reasons. Ezra Klein explains,

Unemployment isn't just a problem because it means someone loses his job. It's a problem because it means that person's next job is likely to be worse than his last one. People lose their skills, their contacts, their self-confidence. Their résumé begins to look worse and, if they're older, age discrimination kicks in.

The actual numbers of people who are unemployed or are marginally employed have to be even worse. Those numbers don't include my buddy who is trying to find a job after taking off years to raise her kids or the buddy who is piecing together freelance jobs, because she can't find a teaching job after getting a Masters in Education or all those people who have been unemployed for so long that the system isn't keeping track of them anymore. They also don't include all the kids who graduated last year (or the up-coming graduates) who never found jobs.

If you really want to get depressed, talk to a college student about trying to find a summer job. I hear that some stores are actually paying less than the minimum wage right now. Check out Jobvent.

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home & Home Becomes Work

A month ago, I picked up The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work from the town library. I read a few chapters, but it threw me into a tailspin of despair and I had to skip to the last chapter.

Hochschild interviewed all levels of employees at unnamed corporation on one of those meticulously landscaped office parks that are nestled into suburban communities. She wanted to find out how the workers juggled their lives at work and at home and whether they took advantage of the company's work-life programs. In addition to in-depth interviews, she followed them around the office and observed them at home. It was certainly thorough research.

She found that few employees were taking advantage of the company's work flexibility packages. Some really needed that flexibility, but couldn't leave work because of old stodgy bosses. Others didn't leave work early, because they didn't want to. They liked their neat and tidy lives in the office. Their officemates had become their family. Their real family was needy and demanding and complicated. It was much nicer to come into the office with tidy clothes and leave the kids and their spouse behind. 

Hochschild is very pessimistic about these developments. You feel her sympathy for the abandoned families and her disgust at people who have sold their souls to the company. There were too many forces working against change in the workplace. By the end of the book, a downturn in the economy meant that the flexibility program was entirely discarded.

She has wonderful little observations about corporate life. For example, she notes the differing ways that people display pictures in their office. The lower level workers, such as the secretaries, had informal pictures of their kids taped discretely to their computer screens, so they could look at their kids while they worked. Upper level management did things differently. The men had formal shots of their kids in expensive frames on credenzas behind them. The pictures were for other people to look at, like trophies. The female managers had no pictures of their children in the office at all.

While these sorts of case studies are wonderful for providing thick descriptions, I was left unsure of how typical this office was. What happens in other companies, in other industries, in other parts of the country? The book was published in 1997, which isn't that long ago, but I worried that the findings in the book were a little dated.

The Unpaid Internships Blues

A friend of mine has been looking for freelance writing jobs, but has been coming up empty. The only available positions involve hours of copyediting work and no salary. That's right. You work a lot of hours and don't get paid for it. People sign up for these jobs, because they can put the job on their resume and perhaps get a reference when a real job opens up.

The equivalent in academia is adjunct teaching. Excuse me, while I hack up a goober of bile.

Apparently, these unpaid jobs are increasing and may even be illegal. 

Rob Farley writes that these unpaid jobs benefit rich, trust fund kids.

Let’s be clear; the unpaid internship effectively excludes a wide socioeconomic swath from gaining useful experience and making effective connections in business, government, and NGOs. For example, it was utterly impossible for me to even consider an unpaid internship as an undergraduate; paying the bills was difficult even with loans and full time work. Lots of young people lack significant parental support, and require minimum payment to have any hope of making ends meet. Moreover, even for those with support the “payment” for unpaid internships (connections, experience, and recommendations) often has no lasting effect on the intern’s job prospects. If you’ve ever wondered why DC NGOs and journalistic organizations are dominated by Ivy Leaguers, it ain’t just because they’re smart.

Come a Long Way, Baby?

Newsweek has a much discussed article about the barriers that women still face in the workplace. (Thanks, Macaroni!)

The author writes that despite some obvious changes in the workplace, women are disillusioned. American women still lag behind other countries, including Cuba and Namibia, on rankings of financial and political success. Women (particularly women with children though the article didn't say that) lag behind men in terms of pay. "Female bylines at major magazines are still outnumbered by seven to one; women are just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and less than a quarter of law partners and politicians."  Susan Douglas is quoted in the article and concurs that much work is to be done. (And much work has to be done by me. I have to do a review of her new book, Enlightened Sexism.)

Does sexism still exist in your workplace?

Jobs and Jobless

It's 6 am, but we've all been up for hours around here. Steve woke up at 2 stressing out about a crisis at work. At 5, he gave up trying to sleep and just took the bus into work. I got up with him partly out of sympathy and partly out of perverse perkiness. I've got an extra hour to plan out the day.

Now that I'm home, I have to be super disciplined or the day degenerates into mindless Internet surfing. I've finally got my writing project for the year in focus. I even made a chart with goals and a status column and everything. Getting published is a huge, long shot, but I really have no alternative. So, I'm keeping at it, even as the inner demons laugh.

A few days ago, I heard about another friend who was dropping out of academia. His seven hour commute was killing him. So, he was looking into teaching at private schools in Manhattan. After a tough morning of self-doubt, I googled "private schools Manhattan teaching." After a few errant clicks, I somehow ended up at the jobs section on Craig's List.

Craig's List didn't have any jobs that I was interested in, but that didn't stop me from blowing an hour skimming ads. One woman is looking for a "humble nanny" to watch her five kids, clean, and make dinner every day between 3 and 8. Any "humble nannies" out there? The woman made sure to describe herself as a "professional mother." I bet she would be a joy to work with.

There has been a lot written about how this is a jobless recovery, ex. the Atlantic Monthly article. My friends, impractical types who majored in the liberal arts in college, have been hit especially hard. There are no editing jobs, no writing jobs, no public school jobs, no part-time jobs, no jobs for musicians, no academic jobs. Even lawyers can't find work. While Wall Street was able to pay back their TARP money last year, the mood there is still pretty grim. Nobody is hiring, and stress levels are high.

Joblessness is slowly grinding away on society, as people work through their savings or go on food stamps Those with jobs wake up at 2 in the morning with stress -- this is not a good time to be on the job market.

Are things going to get better soon? Phone calls from friends are full of doom and gloom. Maybe things will get better when the crystallized dirt on my front lawn finally melts away and it's time to plant my tomatoes. Maybe we'll have to wait until next year.