work

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a story about joblessness in the current recession. The article, entitled “The Price of U.S. Recession is Paid in Jobs,” includes commentary from sociologist Thomas Cottle.

The Times reports:

The pain of joblessness extends well beyond the workers themselves, hitting their families and entire communities as home foreclosures mount, neighborhoods decay and crime rises.

“I see long-term unemployment as a real, treacherous disease. And it kills. It kills,” said Boston University sociologist Thomas Cottle, ticking off side effects from stress and hypertension to depression, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Even the rate of dental cavities goes up as the unemployed tend to put off routine medical care, said Cottle, author of “Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment.”

He worries that the recession is slowly eroding belief in the American ideal that if you work hard enough, you will get ahead. The longer unemployment endures, the more people will feel abandoned and betrayed, he said.

Read more.

Sparks FlyingAn interesting New York Times article published earlier this week highlighted a segment of the American workforce that is booming despite the persisting recession.

The Times reports:

The unemployment rate has risen precipitously to 9.4 percent, the highest level in nearly 30 years, and most of the jobs that do come open are quickly filled from the legions of seekers. But unnoticed in the government’s standard employment data, employers are begging for qualified applicants for certain occupations, even in hard times. Most of the jobs involve skills that take years to attain.

Welder is one, employers report. Critical care nurse is another. Electrical lineman is yet another, particularly those skilled in stringing high-voltage wires across the landscape. Special education teachers are in demand. So are geotechnical engineers, trained in geology as well as engineering, a combination sought for oil field work. Respiratory therapists, who help the ill breathe, are not easily found, at least not by the Permanente Medical Group, which employs more than 30,000 health professionals. And with infrastructure spending now on the rise, civil engineers are in demand to supervise the work.

The Times calls upon sociologist Richard Sennett to elaborate on this emerging trend…

For these hard-to-fill jobs, there seems to be a common denominator. Employers are looking for people who have acquired an exacting skill, first through education — often just high school vocational training — and then by honing it on the job. That trajectory, requiring years, is no longer so easy in America, said Richard Sennett, a New York University sociologist.

The pressure to earn a bachelor’s degree draws young people away from occupational training, particularly occupations that do not require college, Mr. Sennett said, and he cited two other factors. Outsourcing interrupts employment before a skill is fully developed, and layoffs undermine dedication to a single occupation. “People are told they can’t get back to work unless they retrain for a new skill,” he said.

Read more.

Feb 10, 2009 - Office CorridorWith a fascinating new article in Gender & Society, the Sociologists for Women in Society issued a press release through EurekAlert, making its way onto the Crawler radar today. The study suggests that pressure to work overtime in the workplace is adversely affecting families – dads are overworked and tired while moms may be more likely to be demoted or fired.

EurekAlert reports,

If dad looks exhausted this Father’s Day it could be due to his job, suggests new research that found many male employees are now pressured to work up to 40 hours of overtime—often unpaid— per week to stay competitive.

Women face the same pressures, but family obligations may force them to work fewer hours on the job, putting them at risk for demotions or even firings.

The new findings, published in the journal Gender & Society, add to the growing body of evidence that heightened competition in the workplace, combined with modern business practices, are resulting in near-unprecedented levels of overtime that may not even be productive in the long run.

“This clearly does not ease the situation for women and men who want to combine career and family-life,” concluded lead author Patricia van Echtelt and colleagues. “Moreover, a growing body of literature shows that working long hours does not automatically lead to greater productivity and effectiveness, and thus not necessarily contributes to employers’ needs but potentially harms the well-being of employees.”

Their conclusions…

Van Echtelt, a Netherlands Institute for Social Research scientist, and her team found that, among the survey respondents, 69 percent of all men worked overtime versus 42 percent of women. Women who work overtime do so at a rate that is about one-third lower than that of their male colleagues.

It’s “usually explained by the continuing trend for women to be more involved in unpaid family work,” the researchers noted. And even when partners share family chores, “men often characterize their contribution as ‘helping’ their wives, without feeling to have the main responsibility.”

The researchers therefore predict families with more kids and at-home responsibilities will become “more constrained in their opportunities to indulge the ‘choice’ to work overtime.”

Choice is turning into expectation at most companies built upon the “team work” model, with pressures coming from project teams, responsibility for meeting profit or production targets, imposed deadlines and employees left to manage their own careers. A separate study at a software engineering firm, for example, determined that interdependent work patterns, “a crisis mentality,” and a reward system based on individual heroics led to “inefficient work processes and long working hours.”

Read more.

I Told You To Never Call Me HereYesterday The Examiner ran a story on an article published in the  American Journal of Sociology – and winner of the 2008 Kanter Award Winner for Excellence in Work-Family Research – about the ‘motherhood penalty’:  the pattern demonstrating that working mothers make less than women without children. The study, authored by Shelley J. Correll of Stanford University, Stephen J. Benard, and In Paik also suggests that, “the mommy gap is actually bigger than the gender gap for women under 35.”

About the methods:

188 men and women participated in the study. Researchers used two types of experiments in the study; a laboratory experiment and audit study. The laboratory experiment was used to determine “how evaluators rate applicants in terms of competence, workplace commitment, hireability, promotability and recommended salary.” The audit portion of the experiment measured “positive responses to applicants based on the number of callbacks from actual employers.”

Researchers created fictitious resumes and cover letters and found that the starting salaries were quite different for the women with children versus their counterparts, even though the qualifications in the resumes were equal. The researchers also created fake resumes for both working dads and men without children and found no difference in starting salary for the male gender.

And the findings…

The study found that “Mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary.” On the other hand, men were not. In fact, according to the study, some working dads actually benefited from being a father.

On average, working mothers were offered $11,000 less pay per year than equally qualified women without children.

According to the report, women without children received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers who were equally qualified.

Women without children were recommended for hire 1.8 times more than equally qualified moms, while fathers were recommended for hire and called back at a higher rate.

Read more.

25/365What is ‘weisure,’ you ask? The term ‘weisure time,’ coined by sociologist Dalton Conley, is used to describe the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure time for Americans. In their article on this emerging phenomenon, CNN noted, “The increased mixing of work and play doesn’t mean bankers will be refinancing houses during their kids’ piñata parties. But what it does mean is more and more Americans are using smartphones and other technology to collaborate with business colleagues while hanging out with their families. It doesn’t mean tax attorneys will be getting makeovers during their tax-law seminars. But they may be chatting with Facebook friends while participating in a conference call.”

CNN reports:

Many who haven’t already abandoned the 9-to-5 workday for the 24-7 life of weisure probably will do so soon, according to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who coined the word. It’s the next step in the evolving work-life culture.

“Increasingly, it’s not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun,” be it “in an office or at home or out in the street,” Conley said. Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous, he says, as “all of these worlds that were once very distinct are now blurring together.”

Conley used the 1950s as a point of reference. “Back then, there were certain rules, such as ‘don’t do business with friends, and keep those spheres separate.’ It was just one of the hallmarks of capitalist social life. That has completely changed.”

But what is the problem?

Perhaps more disturbing is the idea that weisure is changing us. “We lose our so-called private sphere,” Conley said. “There’s less relaxing time to be our so-called backstage selves when we’re always mingling work and leisure.”

If you’re thinking that a backlash may be around the corner for the weisure concept, you’re right. In fact, Conley says, the backlash has begun.

“You can see that in the populist anger against the bankers” who’ve been blamed in part for the current economic downturn, Conley says. The backlash is evident in the rise of alternative social movements involving people “who live in a more frugal and environmentally conscious way,” he says.

But, short of a nuclear winter or some cataclysm sending us back to the stone age, there’s no turning back the clock on the spread of weisure, he says. The weisure lifestyle will engrain itself permanently in the American culture.

Read more…

Classic 50's SignMiller-McCune ran a story yesterday based on new research presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America this past weekend. Miller-McCune reports, “We’ve long known that high-pressure jobs can be hazardous to one’s health. New research suggests that, for working mothers [especially those who are less-educated], employment-related stress may also be detrimental to their children’s intellectual development.”

 

Sociologist Amy Hsin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and economist Christina Felfe at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, compared assessments of verbal skills of 5- to 12-year-olds with the jobs their mothers held. Those jobs were ranked in terms of stress, with both physical hazards and social pressures taken into account.

High-stress jobs for well-educated mothers included nursing and teaching. Those for less-well-educated mothers included factory work and housecleaning.

“For both less-educated and highly educated mothers, the degree of hazards or social stress experienced at work is negatively correlated with children’s language development,” Hsin reports. The researchers did not find that the stressed-out mothers spend fewer hours with their offspring.

“We find that total time (a mother spends with her child) and time spent on educational activities (i.e. playing, reading, arts and crafts, etc.) do not differ across work conditions,” Hsin said. “We speculate that the source of the problem is less about time per se than the type of interactions that are occurring during time spent together.

“When a woman comes home from a stressful day at work, she may be less patient, less responsive and talk less to her children. Or the type of conversation may be short or even dismissive rather than interactive and engaging.”

The researchers believe better access to intellectually enriching day care and preschool programs is a possible solution to this problem. “Providing affordable, high-quality day care is beneficial for mom, child and family,” Hsin said.

Read more.

Business Week ran a story over the weekend about how the economic meltdown is hitting male-dominated jobs, such as those in car manufacturing and finance, much harder than the service sector, where jobs are more often held by women. 

Good thing they call upon a sociologist to sort this out for their readers…

“In a society where services are becoming increasingly important, women quite simply have the better jobs,” says Hans Bertram, a sociologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Bertram is not at all surprised by the fact that it is men who are worst affected by the crisis. “That was historically always the case, for example when you look at the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the Ruhr industrial region,” he says. Unemployment has always been a part of life in an industrialized country, and belongs to the rhythm of industrial society. “As long as someone is young and strong, he can make good money as a construction worker. But once you are 35 and your body won’t cooperate any more, there are fewer prospects,” Bertram explains.

He thinks it unlikely that, for example, former Opel workers will simply retrain to work in the service sector. “You can’t turn a steel worker into a call center agent,” he says. The service industry usually requires higher qualifications and these are not easily acquired later on in life, he explains.

“The change will only come with the generations,” Bertram says. “Perhaps young men will now more often decide against becoming a mechanic or a construction worker and instead opt to train as a nurse.”

Read more. 

photo from the empire state building, 1The New York Times City Room ran a story about whether or not street vending could help alleviate New York City’s soaring unemployment rate. The article suggests that some members of the City Council as well as advocacy groups think that raising the cap on permits for street vendors might ease joblessness…

Michael Wells, co-director of the Street Vendor Project, said that the city needs to raise the number of permits to handle the surge of people who are looking to make a living. “People call because they have lost their jobs; people call because their husbands have lost their jobs; people call in anticipation of being laid off,” he said at a rally Tuesday morning on the steps of City Hall.

But he said he almost always told them that the chances of securing a legal vending permit was almost next to none. The number of New York street vending licenses for food and merchandise has been capped at fewer than 4,000 for decades — 853 general vending permits and 3,000 food permits citywide — though the Bloomberg administration introduced 1,000 new permits for fruit and vegetable vendors last year.

One sociologist weighs in…

The current set of caps was more or less put into place during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, as part of an effort to clean up the streets, according to Prof. John Garber, a sociologist who has studied New York City street vending.

“They cut the number of vendors permits in half,” said Professor Garber, a who will soon be teaching at the University of Arkansas. “The number of vendors never decreased. The number of illegal vendors increased. It just forced the business of street vending to be illegal.”

“There is an erroneous theory that if you increase the number of street vendors’ permits you increase the number of vendors on the street,” Professor Garber said. “Street vending is bare-bones economics, supply and demand.” He added, “If there is no profit incentive, it doesn’t matter if they have a license or not, they are not going into street peddling.”

His research also found that vendors are often looking for other jobs while they are doing their selling on the street.

Sociologist Mitch Dunier comments on the opposition to street vending…

Opposition to broadening street vending permits comes from a number of directions, said Prof. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist at Princeton who has also studied street vendors. Many people argue that street vending causes congestion on sidewalks and streets. In fact, the arrival of trucks as a means for delivery prompted a movement against street peddlers and their pushcarts because they “cluttered” the streets. “How much pedestrian congestion is a reasonable amount is frequently a cultural phenomenon of different neighborhoods,” he said. (Chinatown, for example, has a higher tolerance.)

Prof. Duneier added: “There has historically always been a give and take between the business community that is part of the formal economy and the informal economy. Businesspeople who pay rent and taxes are very, very skeptical.”

Garber suggests that this opposition is overstated…

Prof. Garber added that competition is overstated and that in fact, he saw many instances in which street vendor and store were more synergistic. Street vendors generally sell smaller-ticket items, while stores, because of their high-fixed costs for rent, generally try to sell higher-priced items.

“It’s fairly rare for street vendors to compete with store owners,” Professor Garber said. “The direct competition between the two is not really there realistically.” In fact, he noted that street vendors can be good for the city because they provide a sense of safety with vendors and create a urban feel and draw more foot traffic.

Read more.

88/365 - take two aspirin and call me when you can see againYesterday USA Today reported on how executives who carry out layoffs are suffering too. They now report numerous symptoms including stress, poor sleep, and other problems with their physical health. The paper reports, “About 3 million Americans have been laid off since the recession began 16 months ago, the government says. In every instance, someone decided the worker had to go, and someone delivered the bad news.”

Of course these people can’t expect much sympathy from the laid off employees, but at least we can call upon a sociologist to explain the trend…

Managers involved with layoffs at one large company were more prone than other executives to have sleep problems, ulcers, headaches and even heart trouble up to three years after the layoffs, says Leon Grunberg, a sociologist at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. They also had more job stress and depression. Grunberg led the only long-term study of how such bosses fare, following 410 managers over 10 years, until 2006.

In interviews, managers called the layoffs “gut-wrenching” and “devastating,” Grunberg says.

Something changes

In his study, the managers had mostly regained emotional health up to six years after the layoffs. But they still were more likely than other bosses to have stress-related health problems, such as ulcers and heart trouble, he says. “It seemed to change their image of the company dramatically. One said, ‘It’s almost a falling-out-of-love feeling.’ “

Read more.

Minnesota Public Radio ran a segment on ‘Midmorning’ yesterday about how men are increasingly feeling the conflicts that come out of trying to balance work and family. The segment was developed because of “a recent survey from the Families and Work Institute, which found that women in two-worker households are earning more money than their male partners, yet men are feeling more stress about the work-life balance.”

The show featured guests Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder of Families and Work Institute, and Scott Coltrane, Sociologist and Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.

Listen in…