work

The Wall Street Journal reports this week that requests to expunge criminal records are on the rise in this tough economy.

In Michigan, state police estimate they’ll set aside 46% more convictions this year than last. Oregon is on track to set aside 33% more. Florida sealed and expunged nearly 15,000 criminal records in the fiscal year ended June 30, up 43% from the previous year. The courts of Cook County, which includes Chicago and nearby suburbs, received about 7,600 expungement requests in the year’s first three quarters, nearly double the pace from the year before.

The criminological commentary…

The increase comes as unemployment has risen above 10%, allowing potential employers to be choosier than they have been in decades. More Americans have criminal records now, criminologists say, in part because a generation has come of age since the start of the war on drugs.

And…

In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

But is expungement a cure-all for those with a record? Maybe not, given ease of access to such information via the Internet for would-be employers:

Expungement doesn’t wipe away all traces. Local news Web sites routinely post arrest mug shots, which are nearly impossible to eradicate from the Internet. Search engines can turn up a smattering of decades-old news and police reports, plus caches of newer ones. Arrests that have been legally expunged may remain on databases that data-harvesting companies offer to prospective employers; such background companies are under no legal obligation to erase them.

Examiner.com recently reported on research into the connection between workplace gossip and office politics. Who gossips at work, and whom they gossip about, may reveal who has real power in the workplace.

Said Indiana University sociologist Tim Hallet, one of the authors of the study:

“If you’re interested in learning how an organization works, you can look at the organizational chart, which can be useful. But often people say, ‘I still can’t tell how things get done, who the prime movers are.’ If you’re attentive, you can see who has the informal status, which isn’t on the formal charts. It can help you understand how work actually gets done.”

More about the research:

In order to determine what political work was getting done through gossip, Hallett and his colleagues—sociologists Donna Eder and Brent Harger—observed the employees at an elementary school. At the time, teachers at the institution were adjusting to a new school principal and often felt like their concerns were not being adequately addressed. In order to cope with this sense of powerlessness, the teachers often used gossip to vent their concerns, as they believed the official channels were not open to them to lodge formal complaints.

According to Hallett, gossip not only happens during employee downtime, but often in more formal settings like business meetings:

“When you’re sitting in that business meeting, be attentive to when the talk drifts away from the official task at hand to people who aren’t present,” he said. “Be aware that what is going on is a form of politics and it’s a form of politics that can be a weapon to undermine people who aren’t present. But it also can be a gift. If people are talking positively it can be a way to enhance someone’s reputation.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that sociological research has motivated Los Angeles city Councilman  Richard Alarcón to take action to make nonpayment of wages illegal.

The issue:

“People think that just because they pick up somebody on the street or at a day laborer center that they don’t have the responsibility to pay them if they don’t like the work,” Alarcón said. “This would make it illegal for somebody to do that.”

Los Angeles would join a handful of cities, including Denver and Austin, Texas, that hold employers criminally responsible for not paying their employees. State and federal laws govern overtime, minimum wage and other labor standards, but the penalties typically are civil. A local ordinance would enable city prosecutors to file misdemeanor charges against employers.

The research:

Alarcón said he was motivated by a recent study that showed many low-wage workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago often don’t receive minimum wage or overtime pay. The study, based on interviews with more than 4,300 workers, found that 26 percent of workers weren’t paid minimum wage the week before and that 76 percent of those who worked overtime the previous week weren’t paid the proper overtime rate. According to the report, the violations were widespread and occurred in various industries, including construction, child care and apparel.

“We were shocked ourselves,” said Ruth Milkman, a University of California, Los Angeles sociology professor and one of the authors of the study.

Milkman said employers need to know the laws – and that there are consequences for not following them. “If criminal penalties are what is needed, there is no reason not to try that.”

The Crawler couldn’t resist the Wall Street Journal headline from yesterday’s paper: “The Sex-Housework Link: Housework Pays Off Between the Sheets.” The WSJ article begins…

Housework may seem like the ultimate romance-killer. But guess what?

A new study shows that for husbands and wives alike, the more housework you do, the more often you are likely to have sex with your spouse.

Earlier studies have hinted at this connection for men; the sight of a husband mopping the floor or doing dishes sparks affection in the hearts of many wives. But the more-housework-equals-more-sex link for wives, documented in a study of 6,877 married couples published online recently in the Journal of Family Issues, is a surprise.

But whoever thought vacuuming was sexy?

But for some high achievers who take a “work hard, play hard” approach to life, researchers say, working hard in one domain produces more energy for others. The study also found a correlation between hours spent on paid work and the frequency of sex in marriage.

“Rather than compromise their sex life” because of time demands at work or at home, “this group of go-getters seems to make sex a priority,” says Constance Gager, lead researcher and an assistant professor of family and child studies at Montclair State University, Montclair, N.J. The study doesn’t measure what proportion of spouses fall into this group, but she believes “they are on the leading edge of couples we expect to see more of in the future.”

More from the authors, one of whom is a sociologist…

Dr. Gager and her co-author, Scott Yabiku, associate professor of sociology at Arizona State University, Tempe, controlled the results for “gender ideology” and found the housework-sex link remained true, regardless of people’s views on roles. Results from the data, taken from the National Survey of Families and Households, were controlled for age, health, duration of couple’s relationship, religion, income, education and marital satisfaction.

The study defined housework as nine chores: cleaning, preparing meals, washing dishes, washing and ironing clothes, driving family members around, shopping, yard work, maintaining cars and paying bills. Wives in the study spent an average 41.8 hours a week on these tasks, compared with 23.4 hours for husbands—a split that is fairly typical, and often regarded by wives as unfair. However, the effects of any fairness concerns among wives weren’t measured in this study.

Outside the home, husbands spent an average 33.8 hours a week on paid work, compared with 19.7 hours for wives. Couples reported having sex 82.7 times a year on average, or 1.6 times a week, about the same as in other studies.

After a long national decline in time spent on housework, the study joins a growing body of research on how chores shape the dynamics of marriage. A survey of 2,020 U.S. adults placed “sharing household chores” as the third most important factor in a successful marriage, behind faithfulness and a happy sexual relationship, says the nonprofit Pew Research Center. That’s a sharp increase; 72% of respondents gave high importance to housework, up from 47% in a comparable study in 1990. In respondents’ minds, housework outranked even such necessities as adequate income and good housing, Pew says.

The article also links to another sociological study:

A 2003 study by Scott Coltrane, a sociology professor at the University of California, Riverside, linked fathers’ housework to more feelings of warmth and affection in their wives. And a survey of 288 husbands, reported in Neil Chethik’s 2006 book “VoiceMale,” linked a wife’s satisfaction with the division of household duties with her husband’s satisfaction with their sex life.

One husband, Mr. Chethik says in an interview, reported that his wife enjoyed flowers or a candlelit dinner out; but “if he wants to be sure of a romantic evening, he goes for the vacuum cleaner.”

Read more.

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a story on the newly released census data comparing at-home mothers with those who work full time.

The Post reports:

In her article today, Washington Post staff writer Donna St. George reports that a recent census survey shows stay-at-home moms tend to be younger and less educated, with lower family incomes. So why does popular perception hold that a rising number of highly educated women are leaving high-powered jobs to raise their kids?

St. George and Hunter College sociologist Pamela Stone were online Thursday, Oct. 1 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss the new report and what it says about mothering.

An excerpt from the interview:

Arlington, Va.: If it’s not true that women are leaving the workforce to raise their kids, why do you think it’s such a persistent myth? Where do you think it comes from?

Pamela Stone: Why the media fascination? Women who leave successful careers, typically in fields where they’re still minorities, are highly visible no matter what they do, and we tend to focus on exceptions, which these women are. Moreover, their actions seem to conform to traditional gender roles, hence reinforcing what we think we know. Finally, we expect women with solid educational credentials and successful careers to persist in them, so they’re not doing so is counterintuitive. All these things make for an element of surprise and newsworthiness. But I should note that these stories–women turning their backs on achievement to head home–have been around for a long time now, since the 1980s at least, and they all say the same thing. Some have called this evidence of media backlash. What I found in my research, by the way, was that the women I studied were NOT returning home primarily for family reasons, but were effectively being shut out of their jobs once they became moms.

—

San Francisco: To what degree has the myth that educated Moms are “opting out” of the workforce hurt women?

Pamela Stone: Good question. I think it hurts them and all women, by reinforcing the (erroneous) idea that they’re not committed to their work, that work is secondary, and that work and family are “separate spheres,” mutually exclusive. All the data show that women want both, that the vast majority of moms work, and that they need to work, contributing a good portion of household income and sometimes all of it. The opt-out myth, as I often say in my talks, lets employers “opt out” of doing something to really support working moms, making it possible to continue with their careers or easing the burden of work and family.

Read more.

Yesterday the New York Times reported on a new study indicating that at-home mothers rate themselves higher than working moms.

About the study:

The analysis, by the Pew Research Center, is based on several of their telephone polls, the most recent of which was conducted this summer and included 1,815 people 16 and older. It found that among the at-home mothers, 43 percent rated themselves 9 or 10, at the top of the scale, while 33 percent of working mothers did so.

“In perhaps the most powerful evidence of the cross-pressures that many working mothers feel every day,” the study said, “only 13 percent of moms who work full time say having a mother who works full time is the ideal situation for a young child.”

Conclusions with sociological commentary…

Women without a job outside the home are more likely to have an infant in the household and have less than a high school degree, the bureau found.

“It makes sense that the stay-at-homes are younger, as young people are more likely to be in school,” said Guillermina Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University.

Additional findings:

The Pew study found that 3 out of 10 stay-at-home mothers say family responsibilities keep them out of the labor force. While two-thirds of women with children 16 or younger work full time outside the home, most say they would prefer to work part time, the Pew study said.

The Pew study also found that in 66 percent of married couples with children under 18, both spouses were in the labor force.

The census data also revealed that the nation’s 5.6 million stay-at-home moms represent 24 percent of all married couples with children under 15.

Read more.

Earlier this week United Press International (UPI) ran a story about research by sociologists Sarah Burgard and James House of the University of Michigan and Jennie Brand at the University of California, Los Angeles, which revealed that “persistent job insecurity — not necessarily job loss — poses a major threat” to workers in the United States.

About the study…

[The authors] analyzed data on more than 1,700 adults collected over periods from 3-10 years. By interviewing the same people at different points in time, the researchers were able to disentangle the connection between poor health and job insecurity, and to control for the impact of actual job loss and other factors.

The first wave of the study was completed between 1986 and 1989 and the second between 1995 and 2005.

The authors note:

“It may seem surprising that chronically high job-insecurity is more strongly linked with health declines than actual job loss or unemployment,” Burgard said in a statement. “Ongoing ambiguity about the future, inability to take action unless the feared event actually happens, and the lack of institutionalized supports associated with perceived insecurity are among them.”

To measure feelings of job insecurity, study participants were asked, “How likely is that during the next couple of years you will involuntarily lose your main job?” At any given time, as many as 18 percent of those surveyed felt insecure about their jobs, the study said.

Read more.

A new study funded by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations and publicized by the New York Times this week revealed that low-wage workers in the U.S. are often cheated out of their pay. The survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago found that low-wage workers are “routineley denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage.”

The Times reports:

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.

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.”

More of their findings…

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.

And…

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,” saidAnnette 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.”

Read more.

U.S. News and World Report also picked up the story.

Earlier this week National Public Radio News ran a story about the emerging trend of women becoming the family breadwinners. NPR host Jennifer Ludden talked with Heather Boushey from the Center for American Progress and sociologist Michael Kimmel of SUNY-Stonybrook about new findings published by the Center for American Progress documenting how women are rapidly becoming the sole breadwinners of the household because men  account for three out of every four jobs lost in this recession. The new study also “looks at how families struggle to afford health care, housing and living expenses on a woman’s salary and how men cope with their changing role.”

Read the transcript.

Listen to the story.

Several media outlets including The Economic Times and the Globe & Mail have picked up on new sociological research indicating that “women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.”

The original press release notes…

The study, [presented] at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.

“This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,” said Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study’s primary investigator. “Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power.”

The Economic Times and the Globe & Mail ran the release throughout the week. The Globe & Mail conducted a more detailed interview with McLaughlin…

The harassers “aren’t trying to get into relationships [with their bosses], but they’re just trying to exert control over other employees,” said Heather McLaughlin, a University of Minnesota sociologist and the study’s lead author.

The study involved data from the Youth Development Study, which began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minn., public school district and has continued ever since. More than 500 women responded to the sexual harassment surveys, which were conducted in 2003 and 2004, when the respondents were about 30 years old.

One woman, named Holly, who was the first woman manager at her company, recalled her subordinates joking, “If we had somebody with balls in this position we’d be getting things done.”

Another woman, Marie, who worked as the only female project manager for a contracting company in construction, noted the day an older male subcontractor said to her, “This isn’t the job for a woman.”

After she helped him with some paperwork, Marie said, “I think he just thought I was being a nag and that I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“By objectifying women, it strips them of any power or prestige that they hold in the workplace,” Ms. McLaughlin said.

The article continues…

“It’s the notion that women aren’t welcome, women are less competent, women are not to be trusted with authority, and so on.”

Given that some of the study respondents were responsible for pay raises and advancement opportunities, the findings are somewhat surprising, Ms. McLaughlin said. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive,” she said of the harassment.

So what did guys get out of it?

Ms. McLaughlin said that mostly, men harassed their bosses in order to impress other men at work. She cited a 2002 analysis of “girl watching” by Montana State University professor Beth Quinn.

“She argued that it wasn’t really the women that were the intended audience, but rather other men.”

Ms. McLaughlin said that in the workplace cases, “it’s not that they’re trying to get the women fired or get her to quit her job; it’s about proving your manhood and masculinity to other men.”

Read more.

[Read coverage of the study in the Atlanta Journal Constitution]

[Read additional coverage from UMN News]