Does 5 to 9 solve 9 to 5?

In the title song for the 1980 movie "9 to 5", Dolly Parton captured the inhumanity of underpaid and over-harassed working women, which includes the well-known chorus:

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely gettin' by, it's all taking and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.

From this chorus you can get a pretty good idea that work isn't portrayed all that positively in the song and accompanying movie. Work here is unfair, unequal, and sexist. Fast forward 40 years and Dolly Parton's song has been rewritten — or perhaps we should say "has pivoted"? — to "5 to 9" for a Super Bowl commercial:

 Replacing the original chorus, but with essentially the same tune, 9 to 5 becomes:

Working 5 to 9, making something of your own now
And it feels so fine to build a business from your know-how
Gonna move ahead, and there's nothing that you can't do
When you listen to that little voice inside you
Well you got dreams and you know they matter
Be your own boss, climb your own ladder
That moment's getting closer by the day
And you're in the same boat with a lotta your friends
Launching ideas you all believe in
The tide's gonna turn and it's all gonna roll your way.

In many respects, nothing has improved — in real life, and in the song's portrayal of work. The Super Bowl commercial starts out with repetitious images of the drudgery of office work and bored office workers — again, not a rewarding way to make a living. And the new chorus above has you dreaming of something better and being your own boss because the daily grind is just that.

But as I've explored in my book The Thought of Work, work is complicated and can have multiple meanings. In addition to being a curse, drudgery that people tolerate to earn money, or something endured to confirm your social status as someone who works rather than loafs, work can also be a source of freedom and fulfillment — be your own boss, climb your own ladder, launch your own creative ideas.

Work as freedom and fulfillment are a reality for some (at least partly); a dream for others. And yet, 5 to 9 has created a backlash, including in provocative opinion pieces in the New York Times and NBC News. To see why, we need the remainder of the new 5 to 9 lyrics:

Working 5 to 9 you've got passion and a vision
'Cause it's hustlin' time, a whole new way to make a livin'
Gonna change your life, do somethin' that gives it meanin'
With a website that is worthy of your dreaming
5 to 9, you keep working, working, working
Working 5 to 9, 'til your dreams, come true
Working 5 to 9, you keep dreaming, dreaming, dreaming
5 to 9, 5 to 9, you can do it

One controversy stems from the apparent celebration of "working, working, working" at a time when many feel overworked during the pandemic. Particularly ironic or galling is that the original 9 to 5 was somewhat of a feminist anthem, but 5 to 9 becomes extra humiliation as women are bearing much of the extra caring burdens with children home from school and elderly relatives unable to access support services. Indeed, 5 to 9 could mean 5pm to 9am (the famous "second shift") so that women are expected to work, work, work around the clock.

Another controversy is that, whether intentional or not, the "hustling time" reference in the new lyrics taps into slang around the gig economy in which workers are continually forced to work side hustles or numerous jobs just to make ends meet. This is particularly true during the pandemic with record rates of job loss and unemployment. We shouldn't be celebrating how hard it is to make a living. 

So how should we interpret 5 to 9? Is it really a way to really break from jobs that are "all taking and no giving" such that people can earn a decent living doing "something that gives [life] meaning" without needing to work side hustles and multiple jobs, or becoming overworked through working, working, working. That is, does it allow you to take your day job and shove it, to paraphrase another well-known work song? If so, then this would be a good thing.

But the harsh reality is that for many, this takes more than a website worthy of their dreaming (yes, 5 to 9 is an ad for a web hosting and design company, Squarespace). So 5 to 9 really is 5pm to 9am, and it's added on top of other jobs. If this is the case, then we shouldn't be celebrating overwork. We should be trying to improve work so that people have can high-quality jobs that allow them to support a family without being overworked. And we should be doing so in ways that recognize rather than deny the deep inequalities rooted in race, gender, class, and other identities that shape work. But in the meantime...

9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There's a better life and you think about it don't you
It's a rich man's game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life putting money in his wallet

Paid Family Leave: The Lack of a National Policy Isn’t the Only Barrier

Paid family leave is back in the U.S. news again, this time with a proposal by Senator Mario Rubio called the Economic Security for New Parents Act, which would provide paid leave to parents who agree to delay taking social security benefits by an amount to offset the paid leave. I’m not going to get into the merits and controversies of this approach (for that, see this by the proposal’s originator, Kristin Shapiro, and this piece).

Rather, my key point is that simply offering a family leave policy does not automatically alleviate workers’ concerns about income loss or other potential negative consequences of taking a leave. So while new ideas about universal policies are important—and actually enacting policies would be even better!—we also need to better understand the factors that prevent workers from taking a leave, and ways to reduce these barriers.

So to think about the barriers to a leave, Tae-Youn Park (Vanderbilt), Eun-Suk Lee (KAIST), and I develop a four-part framework consisting of all A’s: availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance. These four elements reflect the key considerations for whether any worker takes many kinds of leave from work: 1) the policy needs to be available, 2) if available, the worker needs to be aware of it, 3) even if aware of an existing policy, the worker needs to believe he or she can afford a leave, and 4) even if affordable, the worker needs to have assurances against negative consequences that might result from taking a leave (e.g., a promotion going to someone else). We think this framework can help guide research into leave-taking barriers.

In a paper titled “What Do Unions Do for Mothers? Paid Maternity Leave Use and the Multifaceted Roles of Labor Unions,” the three of us focus specifically on the potential impact of labor unions. For starters, based on existing research on what unions do, it’s clear that unions have the potential to positively affect all four of these key steps (and not only in the United States). They can bargain for (better) leave policies; help spread awareness through newsletters, one-to-one interactions, and the like; make leaves more affordable through higher wages and better insurance coverage; and combat reprisals through bargaining, grievance procedures, and other means. But what happens in practice?

To find out, we turned to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) which, importantly, is a nationally-representative sample. Due to some data peculiarities, we are only able to analyze women taking paid maternity leave, but future analyses of paternity leave taking would also be valuable. Our final data set has 27,472 observations from 4,108 female workers across a 15-year period. Ultimately we find that union-represented workers are at least 17 percent more likely to use paid maternity leave than comparable nonunion workers, and that unions facilitate this leave-taking through the availability, awareness, and affordability channels. We also find that mothers who take a paid maternity leave experience a post-leave penalty—specifically, their wage growth is slower when compared to those who did not take a leave. Surprisingly, we did not find that labor unions lessen this penalty, which would be one aspect of the assurance dimension.

At one level, this research is about what unions do with respect to the important issue of helping new parents take the amount of leave they deserve after a birth or adoption. In looking at the aggregate picture, they appear to be helping in some ways, with perhaps room for expanding their activities. What happens on a case-by-case basis, we cannot observe. But at a higher level, this research is about continuing to deepen our understanding of the barriers to parental leave taking, which can help with policy design when (hopefully!) a policy is (finally!) enacted in the United States.

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Source: Tae-Youn Park, Eun-Suk Lee, and John W. Budd (forthcoming) "What Do Unions Do for Mothers? Paid Maternity Leave Use and the Multifaceted Roles of Labor Unions," ILR Review (https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793918820032).
Click here to read the full paper.

The Perniciously Simultaneous Erosion of Work and Family Stability

Last month I had the pleasure of attending and presenting my work at two stimulating conferences. Interestingly, a prominent speaker at each conference echoed a similar theme--that is, scholars of work and those interested in the well-being of workers and their families need to pay attention not only to rise of job insecurity, but also to the interplay with the rise of family insecurity.

At the American Sociological Association meetings, Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University, emphasized that increasing economic insecurity has been accompanied by a decline in personal relationship stability. Importantly, these are not independent. At the same time that parenting intensification is needed to combat the economic insecurity of the next generation, relationship instability makes this parenting intensification harder to achieve (as presumably does the increase in the parents' economic insecurity). So, as Professor Gerson notes, the worlds of work and care are colliding.

Later in month at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Research on Work hosted by the Turku University, I was then struck when Jill Rubery, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Manchester, again raised this issue. Professor Rubery's keyword was "fragmented." She discussed the well-known ways in which work and employment relationships have become increasingly fragmented, with negative consequences for job security and job quality. Like Professor Gerson, Professor Rubery insightfully demonstrated that these changes are placing greater strains on families at the same time as family structure is also becoming more fragmented. A striking number of OECD countries, for example, have experienced double-digit increases in the proportion of births that take place out of wedlock.

Granted, these are complex dynamics. Does an increase in job insecurity cause greater family fragmentation--for example, due to the increased stress of uncertain finances? Does greater family fragmentation contribute to employment relationship fragmentation--for example, by reducing human capital accumulation? Are fragmented families with stable jobs better or worse off than stable families with fragmented jobs? It will take a lot of careful work to rigorously understand issues as complex as these.

In the meantime, even if not fully understood, the likely interrelationship between work fragmentation and family fragmentation should be another strike against the myth that sees work and family as two separate spheres. What happens in the workplace, affects the family. What happens in the family, affects work. Ideally, stability in one domain should be able to help cushion the blow of instability in the other. But many workers and their families are not so lucky. As work and families are both increasingly more fragmented, it is critical that we pay closer attention to these linkages. From this can come better strategies to address the host of negative effects for workers, their families, and their communities.

The Power of Work's Connections in Billy Elliot

While in London for the Voice and Value conference (see The Value of Voice entry), we saw the musical Billy Elliot. I might be biased because my family tree includes miners from County Durham, and because of my interest in labor unions, but anyone who does not believe that work has deep connections with family and community should see this musical. I defy them to not be moved by the raw power with which Billy Elliot exposes the impact of the 1984-85 miners' strike on the home life of Billy, his Dad, and his brother, and illustrates the interconnectedness of each family with the entire community. Sometimes this involves solidarity, other times sharp conflict. But in all cases, the relationships are very powerful, and are rooted in class and the nature of work.

Oh once I was a young man
Looked over vales and hills
Saw myself a future
of riches and of thrills
But on me fifteenth birthday
I paid my union dues
And they sent me deep into the ground
Oh the winter wind can blow me colder
Oh the summer's heat can parch me dry
But I'll not leave here for a fortune
I shall never leave here till I die
from: Deep Into the Ground

My wife observed how much rage there is in the musical. This is not an emotion that we commonly associate with work, except in particularly deviant cases of workplace violence. But I think this reinforces how important work is for the families and community in Billy Elliot. The strike does not simply pose a threat to their immediate economic welfare. Rather, it represents a fundamental threat to the community's entire way of life. So the ramifications are deep, and the resulting emotions are quite intense.

And though our hands are bruised and bleeding
And our lungs are full with dust
And our hearts are near to breaking
We will never forgo the trust
We will fight through pain and hunger
Every arrow, every knife.
And we will never give the hope up
Of a proud and honest life
from: The Stars Look Down

In this way, the rage of Billy Elliot is a very vivid reminder of the tremendous importance of work not just for individuals workers, but for their families and communities.