(This post was inspired by a post by my friend Red over at her Poverty Blog at Change.org... and expands - widely - on a comment I put up over there.)
Every so often, the left side of the blogosphere gets caught up in discussing the plight of American workers - how bad we have it, how much disparity we have in income (which is what happens when CEOs make multimillion salaries while hourly workers can get less than minimum wage), how bad our benefits are (health reform!), and how, compared to many countries, we get very little time off for vacation or illness.
I always have mixed feelings about these things - and the way America differs from other countries when it comes to notions of vacation and sick time. I think a lot of this is tied to our work ethic, and it's worth noting that people who have time available, often, rarely take it. And that, for many, the problem isn't time, and for businesses the problem isn't money... it's the question of who can do the task of another when that person needs to take time off.
The reason for problems in retail and food service around sick time is about carrying extra bodies - especially now, in a recession, when most retail operations are running close to the bone on staff, the question of a person calling out sick can mean havoc for those who are left. I've worked in department and specialty stores for a long time, and currently for Starbucks. Losing a worker to an illness or a long term outage of another sort deeply affects our ability to be fully staffed, and puts enormous pressure on the rest of our team... and ultimately, what suffers is our ability to provide good service, which leads to a bad customer experience... which leads to loss of business ("I tried to buy a blouse at Macy*s... and there were no cashiers!"). And so, very often, conscientious workers, even with illness, tend to show up. Sick time, in these cases, isn't necessarily all of the issue.
I also spent time as a worker in corporate HR, at a company with generous vacation, sick and maternity benefits (which tried, especially, to be family friendly, with sensitive policies for moms and dads). And, as often as not, our problems were as much about workers refusing to take time as it was workers who took too much - and a lot of time spent coaching managers that they could not set unreasonable time expectations for their teams based on their own driven workstyles. Even so, for many workers, there was still a problem of coverage and replace-ability; losing an assistant for days or weeks was simply putting additional work on other assistants with full workloads. But the alternative - carrying extra staff - was not an option, either (and an unfamiliar, expensive temp also rarely afforded a good solution).
My point isn't to suggest that as a nation, we don't have a problem with sick time that deserves to be addressed; my point is that we have a complicated set of cultural norms and expectations around work in America that drive our policies and processes. Government mandates for sick time benefits (which will be hard to get past business lobbying anyway) do not guarantee that sick time will get taken, or that workers will feel less pressured to show up, even when ill. Changing that requires a longer, broader, cultural conversation around work, and our lives outside of work. We really don't have that conversation very much, I find. And we could certainly use it.
But I think to have that conversation, we also need to see a new paradigm develop, on the left, about how we talk about working, and workers. Since last year's election, with progressive ideas enjoying a fresh momentum, the discussion around labor issues has returned... well, to Big Labor. Despite the fact that the majority of Americans are no longer unionized - and many can't, or won't, wind up being unionized - the discussion of labor issues starts, on the left, often, from a place where unions are the first, best option. That protecting workers works best when the workers are united. It's lovely thinking... it's just not our reality.
After working on a Congressional campaign, my campaign manager boss wanted to run for City Council - which she did, ultimately, and won - and she started by sitting with her key staff and talking about what a run would take. One thing that came up, because she felt strongly about it, was that she wanted to be critical of the teacher's union, one of the most powerful in New York. And, ever the contrarian, I raised the traditional lefty point: how do you win by pissing off union workers? How can you say unions are bad?
As I said, she ran, and won... and she remained a vocal critic on education, and especially of the teacher's union... which, over time, managed to marginalize her and eventually get her off the Council. Which kind of proved my point. But over time... I've come to see hers.
I am not anti-union - no one, I think, can seriously claim true liberal or progressive thinking without supporting the notion of organized workers - but I think how we think about labor, labor organzing, and our working lives in America, has to change among liberals, and soon... or we can't make the kind of progress that needs, desperately, to be made. We need, as progressives, to understand and admit that the interests of all workers and the interests of organized labor are not always the same. And we need to face up to the business realities that sometimes union rules and requirments can work against good business practices. And that includes popular unions like the Teachers, auto workers, and healthcare workers. The tension between what's good for unions, and what's good for other workers needs to be brought out into the open and examined... or we can't make further progress. For anyone.
And no issue reflects those tensions - our old labor thinking not fitting our current problems - than on questions like vacation and sick leave and other worker benefits. Thinking, simply, in terms of a government mandate to require the availability of time off won't get it done. Business interests are arrayed against it; but just as importantly, as I mentioned, the work we do, and how we think about it, colors how we approach using the benefits we already have, and what benefits we expect. More vacation time... will not mean more vacations. More sick time will not reduce our public health problems. Not until we seriously talk, in the culture, about a different idea for our work ethics, and a different approach to our working lives.
Health reform is another key example - unions, for instance, are not necessarily thrilled about plans to tax so called "Cadillac plans" that offer better benefits at increased cost; often because unions have managed to negotiate such plans for their workers (ah, being united might pay off in benefits? Who knew?). But more centrally, the problems we have with healthcare stem from 60 plus years of tying our healthcare benefits to our working lives; and perhaps the most problematic element of "reform" under discussion - and the least thought through - is that many of the reforms under discussion would further solidify, rather than reduce, our links between healthcare and employment. And in part, it's seeing that we link healthcare and employment... because we think pretty much everyone can, and should, be employed.
It fascinates me - much as it has my mother, in all of her professional life - that so much of who we are as Americans (that is, our working lives and how much who we are is tied up in what we do) is often talked about so little, and rarely with a clear eye for the work we actually do. We continue to talk, often, about work as if we are a country dominated by manufacturing and farming... when we are in fact a country dominated by service work, retail jobs, and white collar professions. We are more specialized, more productive because of technological advancements... and less able to replace one another mindlessly as we were on assembly lines and in the harvest (we think, in fact, of retail service work as mindless... when it's not). Until we can refocus our discussion of work on the work we actually do... I don't think we can figure out how to reshape our working lives. And more to the point... I'm not sure, culturally, that we actually want that. Until we talk about it, though... we'll never know.
How.... get back to work!
Comments