Description of cartoon: The cartoon shows a woman holding a child’s hand, in a fairly dismal-looking city area, standing on a sidewalk at the entrance to a building. Above the entrance is a sign that says “Really Good Careers.” To the right of the entrance, a smaller sign says “An equal opportunity employer.” The entrance is shaped like a male silhouette; it seems apparent that the woman and her child could not fit through the entrance.
Not to nitpick but a man with a child wouldn’t fit through that door either, so the description at least seems a little strange – is this a comment on the effects of gender on careers or the effects of parenthood on careers?
Hmm.
I entirely agree with the various possible premises, but I don’t think you’ve managed–as well as you usually do–to put your point into cartoon form. It’s good but not great.
Take this for the little it’s worth:
If you’re trying to convey “women can’t get jobs” then I don’t think the shape of the cutout really works here. Perhaps it’d be better to use the legs (separated, so you can see there’s no skirt) which are fairly standard on stick people? I’m assuming you’re trying to convey that it’s her femininity (skirt!) and not her hidden-by-the-skirt legs which are the problem here.
If you’re trying to convey “equal opportunity employer ads are lies” then you probably need a different cartoon.
If you’re trying to convey that collateral issues are interfering with facially equal work opportunities–I note that she has a kid with her–then you also probably need a different cartoon. I’m not sure what the kid is doing in this one.
I like the art, and I like the point, but I think you need to clarify the message a bit.
The first thing I thought when I saw the image is “the child could fit in there quite easily”.
Which is probably not the message you’re going for.
Looking more closely it also looks like the child is trying to pull the woman away from the entrance which is either a very good commentary on the pressures people with children face or a somewhat ironic one that the thing stopping a person taking a career is their own children…
Can’t she just turn sideways and go in? Or is that too much work.
Whatever your point is – the cartoon is not getting it across.
But isn’t that the point? She can’t go in without turning sideways, letting go of her child, or walking on tiptoe. Or all three. So many employers are baffled by the idea that they should give women any “special allowances” (like parental leave or flexibility) in order for them to succeed. But it’s much different for a mother to work than it is for a father. Most highly-paid managers and CEOs have a stay-at-home spouse. That’s just not an option for most women. Most men who get ahead don’t have to deal with pregnancy complications or breastfeeding, either. If you really want to make things equal, you have to make the doorway wide enough to accommodate everyone.
I thought it worked just fine. She can get in, but only if she contorts herself and ditches the kid. But what do I know? I’m just a woman with a job and a couple kids.
I am getting curiouser and curiouser: what did Amp actually intend the cartoon to mean?
Doesn’t matter. Authorial intent is dead. Didn’t you hear?
—Myca
I’m with chingona, but then, I too am just a woman with (now grand-) kids.
Kaylie:
What baffles employers is the idea that their major concern should be helping women succeed. They’re worrying about their businesses succeeding. If that can be done without helping women succeed then that’s what they’re going to do. If they can’t succeed without women succeeding then they’ll help women succeed – but not until.
Kaylie (and others):
You realize that plenty of men would rather be at home than be doing work outside the home. A stay-at-home spouse is also an option for a woman. I think that women don’t want men who don’t work outside the home for the most part, but I guess that’s a discussion for somewhere else.
I also think the fact that CEOs have a stay-at-home spouse is an effect rather than a cause. You have to already be at a certain level of money-making before you can support someone to stay at home.
Kaylie, as a SAHD I take exception to the notion that mothers need special treatment.
Quite possibly PARENTS need special treatment, and quite possibly there is going to be a gender mismatch in the percentage of workers of each sex taking advantage of that treatment if it is offered.
But to argue that women are delicate flowers who must be coddled by employers, is to validate the old-school position that says discriminating against women in the workplace is just common sense.
Robert, I came up with what I thought was a quite amusing explanation of what SAHD means. But since the rest of your comment sounds serious I’ll spare everyone and just ask what it means.
Stay At Home Dad. Technically I am (was) a work-at-home dad but I did a lot of childrearing.
Why isn’t it an option? It’s not as if there aren’t loads of single long-term unemployed guys or home-working struggling writers or artists, I’m sure these guys would love to marry a woman with a highly-paid career. I really don’t think finding people willing to do nothing/very little in return for being kept is that difficult a challenge – as you say most male managers/ceos don’t find it that difficult.
It’s “not an option” because cultural prejudices say that if a woman marries a man who isn’t more “successful” than her in every measure, she’s failed.
This is a shitty cultural prejudice, has been personally harmful to me, and needs to change.
ROTFLMMFAOIBHAAAYI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*
Whew. that felt good.
Man. You must not do much childcare.
(*Rolling on the floor laughing my mother fucking ass off in both horror and amusement at your idiocy)
In more seriousness:
It’s a question of what “equal opportunity” means. And a question of who is supposed to provide for it.
Imagine I am interviewing some folks fairly soon. Imagine that I’ve got applicants who want to leave early at various times during the week, for various reasons:
-watch their favorite TV show
-Keep the same appointment time with their Little Brother/Little Sister that they’ve been keeping for years
-Volunteer for distribution at the local food bank
-go to their usual chiropractor appointment
-take care of their kids
-help a disabled friend prepare dinner
-get some sleep before their night job, that they have to work to pay the rent.
We probably all agree that every one of those (with the exception of “watch their TV show”) are socially beneficial, admirable, and/or generally good. But should I–or any other individual employer–agree to take on the costs of allowing them to do those things? Would it make sense to prioritize “childcare” over all the others? How do I consider those things in the context of all of life’s other inequalities?
I can’t easily answer those questions, so I basically avoid them by ignoring the issues equally: it’s all about what happens while they work for me.
A good cartoon.
Grace
gin-and-whiskey:
I didn’t write what you attributed to me. Please correct it.
Further: The statement in your misattribution isn’t even necessarily wrong or as hilarious as you think: “spouse” is clearly not the same as “mother”. And that doesn’t even go to the merits of what looking after a child entails.
But should I–or any other individual employer–agree to take on the costs of allowing them to do those things?
I find it interesting that the default assumption throughout here seems to be that employees-with-no-lives provide the greatest value to employers, always, which strikes me as a little questionable.
Re the whole “Men would love to be at home” thing, I’m very sure there are a number of men who would genuinely prefer to be at-home parents/homemakers. That’s probably not the same as the set of men who say they would genuinely prefer that, but people who talk about a Dream Job they’d do in a red hot minute (“man, I’d love to ditch this boring office job and go work as a fishing guide in Montana!”) somehow don’t actually try and end up in their Dream Job. Probably because, like most of us who imagine an idyllic career other than what we’re doing right now, they realize on some level that the fantasy is much better than the reality of such a job. As far as quitting one’s job to be at home, that means giving up money, status and, let’s face it, power. As well as a chunk of IQ points when the kids are really little.
I’m also sure there are women who would never choose a SAHD as a partner because The Man Is Supposed To Make The Money. There are also women who understand that the guy who says “man, I’d love to be kept!” doesn’t have a fucking clue about what being an at-home parent really entails, and what she’s going to get out of the arrangement is doing all the breadwinning AND virtually all of the housework AND the lion’s share of the childcare.
My first thought on this conversation was that, at least before I have kids, I would love to have a stay-at-home partner. It would be awesome to have someone else who would have time to do all the errands and cleaning and everything like that. (I say this as someone who is planning to use my first day off in a long while today to pretty much clean my entire apartment, because, despite what FlyLady might say about it, I really don’t have time or energy to work and keep the place looking nice.) After having kids, I think I’d want to stay home with them, at least part-time, so that’s something that would have to be figured out with hypothetical future partner.
Mythago opines thusly:
“… doesn’t have a fucking clue about what being an at-home parent really entails, and what she’s going to get out of the arrangement is doing all the breadwinning AND virtually all of the housework AND the lion’s share of the childcare.”
—
The statement is quite sexist and absolutely untrue if you look around at the growing number of men who have custody of the children. If they’re taking care of the kids on their own, they probably know what it’s like to take care of kids.
And women who want to quit work know exactly what staying home is all about and work hard there, but men who want to quit work don’t have a fucking clue and they will be lazy. Gotcha.
InsertNameHere: You’ve twisted what Mythago says into something rather different. She didn’t say anything about all men, just about men stupid enough to think that being a Stay-at-home-dad is the same as being kept. I don’t think she thinks any different of women who think being a stay-at-home-mom is a life of paid leisure. I think the main difference is that, for all that there’s a shift underway, women are statistically more likely to have come from a background where they were educated on just how much work full-time parenting and housework is.
In addition to what Eytan said, married women do *more* housework than they did before they were married. Married men do less. This holds true even when both partners work outside the home. So it stands to reason that guys who are socialized to think of a lot of the housework and childrearing as “the woman’s job” either greatly underestimate how much there is, or will continue to expect their wives to do big chunks of it even if they (the husbands) are staying home. Not because they’re lazy or they’re jerks, just because they haven’t been expected to notice it or do it.
Mythago: re the whole “there are men who would love to be at home” thing.
No one here is saying what you claim we’re saying. You have a choice here: You can engage with real people in an actual discussion about gender and success metrics, or you can bloviate about phantom slackers.
My mother was the stay-at-home parent while pursuing a part time writing career. She’s a brilliant writer and critic, and I take after her in inclination if not talent. Generally speaking, when I express this to anyone, including women who will go on and on about wanting a “stay at home spouse,” I’m told “but you’re so smart! You’d be wasting your potential.”
I fail to see how raising kids while pursuing a creative career is “wasting my potential,” except inasmuch as it “you’re not falling into my standard male success metrics. Danger! Danger!”
I’ve resigned myself to full-time career work: nothing else to be done, really. If I was willing to find any woman who met those conditions (career-oriented, stay at home spouse) I probably could, but I’m picky enough about other traits and something had to go. Sad.
In a broader sense: I see among my friends, over and over again, women who claim to want support spouses seek out men who are career-driven and work-focused, because that’s the social model of attractive men*. A man who has traits that they’re putatively looking for — domesticity and likes kids — is seen as “settling” even though he has the traits that their looking for. I can only explain this as falling victim to the “women must marry up, or at least across” success metric.
If women are going to be able to enjoy success in the workplace, a man to support them needs to be seen as a mark in their favor, not a personal failure. The “women must marry up” message is a means by which society harms women, and pushes them away from success.
yrs–
–Ben
* I realize that this could be taken as a “why won’t women like me!” rant. It’s not. (pointless crap redacted)
I think it’s the “always.” The default arises from averages or likelihoods, not perfect adherence to a particular rule.
People with complex lives can do well in a variety of which allow for flexibility, many of which involve solo practice or some sort of equivalence. If you don’t have a boss, you can do what you want. And if you’re good enough to sell your work by the painting/hour/project/mile/page then you can also make your own decisions about production.
And obviously, the variance between people is huge. Brilliant and hard-working Mary may be able to get more done in 20 hours/week than Slacker Sam can in 40 hours/week.
But generally speaking, one of the main requirements for workers is that they work where and when the employer wants. That’s even more true at lower end positions, of course.
The cultural influence over marriage between men and women of disparate incomes cuts both ways. It’s true that men rarely choose to marry women who make more than they do. But it’s also true that relatively few women are attracted to men that make less than they do. If that’s to change then both men and women have to change.
And it’s my guess that this is not something you can attribute to a property of a specific culture. While there are always outliers, I propose that if you look into it you’ll see this kind of attitude across most cultures. To say that society pushes people in this direction is perhaps looking in the wrong direction. People create society; society does not create people. Finding that this kind of attitude is pervasive across human societies (as I think you will) would suggest to me that this is pretty much hardwired into people from our creation. That doesn’t mean it cannot be changed, but it does mean that it’s a much different task than people might think.
Ron, “relatively few” is a very unspecific term. But in 29% of couples in which both spouses have paying jobs, the wife earns more than the husband. (source). 29% is a minority, but it’s a pretty sizable minority.
Ben @27: Uh, you *do* realize that it was james who portrayed being an at-home parent as lying around eating bonbons, didn’t you? And as for bloviating, well, nobody but you and james has suggested that being an at-home parent is wasting one’s “potential”. If you’re interested in something more than MRA-style Bitches Be Gold-Diggin’ rants, then we can have a discussion; otherwise, not so much.
Ron @29: Hence the well-known cultural phenomenon where musicians, artists and highly-placed (but low-salaried) politicians bitterly gripe about how women won’t give them the time of day, while electrical engineers and proctologists can hardly walk into a Starbucks without the baristas throwing their panties at the poor guys. Oh, wait.
Calling the income and career gap in marriages “hard wired” is not just laughable anthropology; it’s a comforting lie that lets us avoid looking at the whole question of why people make as much money as they do, the benefits and drawbacks of marrying ‘up’ or ‘down’, and of course the intersection of social class and income. Why look at those things and ask hard questions when we can just shrug and say, yo, that’s the way we evolved, back on the savannah when our ancestors didn’t actually have “incomes”?
But generally speaking, one of the main requirements for workers is that they work where and when the employer wants. That’s even more true at lower end positions, of course.
Since we’re talking about “Really Good Careers”, we’re not really talking about lower-end positions, but the sort of job with upward mobility and high pay where your hours are not strictly limited by work laws or overtime – and in fact, may not be limited at all.
“Ron, ‘relatively few’ is a very unspecific term. But in 29% of couples in which both spouses have paying jobs, the wife earns more than the husband. (source). 29% is a minority, but it’s a pretty sizable minority.”
——–
I wonder what the specifics are in those cases. “Marrying up” also includes marrying someone with substantially more assets than you, and I could picture a retired guy who works 10 hours a week to keep busy – but who has very substantial assets and retirement income – with a wife who has somewhat more earned income.
I think Paul McCartney and Heather Mills would have been part of the 29% – both worked a bit (she had some modeling jobs and work for her causes, and may have even had more earned income) – although most would say that she “married up”.
If a civil-rights attorney making $45K a year with a string of awards and commendations for her work marries an auto mechanic who makes $60K a year, is she “marrying up” or “marrying down”?
True. But at that point it is is even MORE of a problem if you have time limitations, because you don’t get a work credit for them. If I’m a large firm paying an eager associate $150,000/year, I want them to work their ass off, and I’ll selectively avoid people who look like they can offer me 20 hours/week fewer than their peers.
Though when it comes right to down to it, I really don’t get why you appear to disagree that “employees-with-no-lives provide the greatest value to employers” is usually true. After all,
And it makes sense. There is a lot of unjustified discrimination out there–but there’s also a lot of justified discrimination out there, as well. I know a few employers who are forced to give disability accommodations, for example. It costs them a SHITLOAD of money, which is far more than it would cost them to hire and train someone else who didn’t require expensive accommodations. Similarly, I know a few folks who once hired active military members: USERRA requires that they keep their job open for five years while they’re in the military, and hand it back on their return with the same level of seniority that they would have gotten if they had stayed.
Both ADA and USERRA serve valuable societal goals. Both of them also cost employers a shitload of money, and go against the interests of employers.
Inconvenience costs people money. Why deny it?
(You personally are not in this category, but there seem to be some folks here who have trouble admitting that a program can be beneficial to society AND beneficial to the employee AND really suck for the employer, who is paying for it all.
It’s one thing to say “people who are responsible for childcare have trouble getting work.”
It’s entirely another thing to imply that people who are responsible for childcare are employee-equivalent to people who are NOT responsible.
“If a civil-rights attorney making $45K a year with a string of awards and commendations for her work marries an auto mechanic who makes $60K a year, is she “marrying up” or “marrying down”?”
—-
Probably neither because the difference in income is so slight – but it sounds like someone with a real chip on her shoulder about skilled trades (if she looks down on him and his work, why did she marry him?). And that comment is coming from a fellow attorney.
What sort of accommodations are that expensive? The only thing that I can think of that would be an ongoing expense would be an interpreter or other aide, and most of the one-time expenses are either relatively cheap (buying a special desk or chair or something) or are things that, to me, any business should be doing anyway (make sure that the physical environment of the business is accessible to people with physical disabilities.)
Special hours.
Special software.
Frequent leaves for personal or medical reasons.
Inability to do certain tasks.
Extra equipment.
Inflexibility.
And that’s by no means all of them; the list really goes on. Many people are unaware that it includes also accommodating mental disabilities, and that “illness” is also, often, a covered disability. So is pregnancy, in some states.
Without snarkiness: Have you ever been on the employer side? People often don’t understand how expensive it is to deal with this stuff.
Take the big one: Flexibility. This cost is really undervalued. Scheduling is huge. People whose disability mean that they take frequent and unplanned late/sick/leave days are INCREDIBLY expensive to deal with unless you just to happen to be somewhere that workers are fungible AND there is a good workaround for last minute stuff.
People sometimes say “oh, it’s not that expensive, hire a temp.” Seriously? No. If a worker makes $20/hour salaried, a temp usually costs more than that. More to the point, it can literally take months, and require tens of thousands of dollars, to properly train an employee–the temp has none of that. And you have to find them, hire them, give extra supervision, etc.
Same with emergencies: If Bob is out sick, then it’s good to be able to tap Mary to cover for him. But if Mary’s accommodation prevents her from covering–if she can only work a limited job, or can’t use anyone else’s desk, etc.–then that is a cost.
Imagine I hire Jane, and after a year she takes some sort of long leave–maybe she’s having a kid, maybe she’s having brain surgery, maybe she’s going to detox, maybe she’s in an institution. That could quite literally cost me my business.
Sure, Jane doesn’t get paid (provided that she’s on unpaid leave, that is.) But I’ve spent a year training her, since most attorneys are valueless when they first get hired. And I need to retrain her replacement–assuming I can find one, assuming I can get them to work for the same amount, assuming all sorts of things. Sometimes I have to pay for some of Jane’s benefits during that period. And then, when I am finished (or in the middle of) retraining Jane’s replacement…. well, I have to re-hire Jane. Even if I like the replacement better, I still have to rehire Jane. Though of course, Jane might then need more training herself.
And after all that I can’t actually guarantee that I’ll rehire Jane–I can’t do everything possible to plan around her return–because we don’t have indentured servitude thank god, and therefore there is nothing to prevent Jane from telling me one day before her return date, after I’ve already fired her replacement, “thanks so much, I’m moving to Timbuktu.” Even if she knew from the beginning that she was moving to Timbuktu. Even if she smirked when I fired the temp. So long, sucker.
And of course, that happens. It happens all the time. Hell, I even direct people to do it. If you say “I’m pregnant, should I quit?” I’ll tell you “Nope; you should go on FMLA leave as late as possible, because they can’t fire you until you do, and then you can delay the decision as long as you can, and maximize your benefits.”
The ADA is what it is: if you don’t want to be covered by the ADA, then don’t run a business that falls within ADA guidelines. Same with FMLA.
But it irks the hell out of me when folks claim that it isn’t a huge enormous burden on employers.
If a civil-rights attorney making $45K a year with a string of awards and commendations for her work marries an auto mechanic who makes $60K a year, is she “marrying up” or “marrying down”?
My wife has an M-Eng from MIT and a PhD from Hahwah, and just landed a tenure track professorship in one of the top ten. I get my hands greasy up to the elbows at least once a week, and my business makes, in a bad year, hmm… about three time her future salary (ten times what she’s getting ’till June).
Who married up? We chose our goals when we were still at the Institute, and we are still happy with our choices. She provides us with security and medical insurance, I am free to take risks and stay hungry. Housework? Pfft, excuse me for not being particularly respectful towards work that can be hired done for 500 a month.
But when we have kids, we both want to be the one primarily taking care of them. We are both saying that we would put our careers in a lower gear… but I know it would be much easier for her than for me, if only because my income is very dependent on how much effort I put in. Her hard work is only rewarded by professional recognition, as far as I can tell. Still, we both view being able to raise our kids as a luxury, not an obligation, and at the end, it will be probably decided by basic economics.
My gut feeling is that in most families, that’s how it gets decided: when there are new burdens, they end up with the spouse who can better shoulder them without harming the family. And you have a under-earning husband with a fragile ego, you may end up with a higher income wife doing dishes. Short term stability, but likely long term disaster.
And as to who married up? I’d have to be fooling myself not to notice that her colleagues think that she married down, even as they drive their rattling sedans and complain about the economy/housing bubble/etc…
Sure it’s a burden. So is paying taxes, and keeping buildings up to code, and paying at least minimum wage, and filing paperwork, and a million other things that are part of the cost of doing business. I don’t see why that particular one seems to be treated as something “extra” while the rest are just things you have to do if you want to run a business.
And no, I’ve never been on the employer side of it, though I know some people who are. I’ve always been on the needing-accommodations side.
I don’t see why that particular one seems to be treated as something “extra” while the rest are just things you have to do if you want to run a business.
Because businesses are in competition with each other. Taxes, minimum wage law, paperwork – these are constants across an industry and the odds are extremely high that all of your competitors have exactly or near-exactly the same costs you do.
Individual employees, however, are granular and vary widely. Say you have a five-person law office, and I have a five-person law office, and we’re otherwise absolutely identical and – just for simplicity in the example – we’re the only two law offices in town. We each lose a paralegal in a tragic canning accident. Now Joe, the guy who needs accommodations that end up costing $40,000 a year, comes to me for work, while Jane (Joe’s twin sister, identical in every way except for not having a disability) goes to work for you.
I have two-and-a-half legal choices. One, I can jack up my rates to compensate for the $40,000 a year in costs. Two, I can accept that the business will be $40,000 less profitable every year. Half-an-option, I can mix the two strategies.
If I do the first one, I end up losing business to you as bargain-seekers (who are not interested in how nobly I obey the law and hire the disabled) go to your now-slightly-cheaper law firm. If I do the second one, there are a variety of outcomes. If we were making $10 million a year in profit, I probably won’t care. If we were making $120,000 a year, then my income has been cut by a third.
It’s obviously a lot more complex and messy out in the Real World ™ but the example shows the basic conceptual problem. All the businesses have to obey the law, but the ones that don’t happen to hire expensively-disabled people (or which subtly or unsubtly push those people away, whether legally or illegally) end up being advantaged over their competitors. Unlike taxes, disabled individuals don’t spread themselves uniformly and evenly across each enterprise.
Clearly, the answer is to kill all us disabled folk off, because we’re only costing good JAAAAAAAHB producers important cash that could have gone to finance a sixth Lexus. It’s not like any of us have useful skills that might not be found elsewere – say, like if a disabled person were to be a four-language translator or something *cough*me*cough*. Much better to reach for the proverbial ice floe, just kinder, really.
Oh woe is they. It’s so hard being wealthy enough to start businesses employing people. I don’t know how they cope.
You know, it’s not only women who deal with cultural pressures about spouses and income.
Research suggests that a heterosexual marriage in which the woman makes more than the man run an increased risk of divorce. And men in these marriages are more likely to rate themselves as unhappy than the women are.
I was in private practice doing a lot of couple therapy when the dot com bubble burst the second time, and during the lead up to the housing crisis. Women who lingered on the unemployment lines were, understandably, stressed out, anxious, and so on. But men who lost their jobs, as a whole, took it much harder and more personally. Even with supportive spouses saying to them “we’ll make it, I’m working, you’ll get something,” the shame and self-loathing of men who were “failing” to fulfill the provider role was epic.
Anecdotally, I have found it exceptionally hard to date men who have less education or make less money than I do (and I’m very much a middle income earner, though I have a PhD). Even if I don’t care (and I frankly don’t, as long as they can appreciate and be supportive of the things I have to do for my career), it often becomes clear that they do.
Most accommodations cost nowhere near that much. I just looked up some numbers, and though different studies have gotten somewhat different results, the ones listed here (mostly just chosen because it was the first easily readable, non-PDF one I saw) are approximately what most of the studies have show — most accommodations cost less than $500, and almost all cost less than $5000. And for small businesses, there are tax credits of up to $5000 for costs of accommodations.
Ruchama, I have no idea what the actual distribution of expenses is; I’ve never had to offer accommodation. (Probably because mostly I hire 1099 contractors who work from home, and who make their own accommodations.) G&W was saying it was high for the person he knew, so I was going with his example.
CaitieCat, no, I don’t think we should put disabled people on ice floes. I think ice floes should be reserved for people who engage in sarcastic hyperbole in response to neutral explanations of conceptual issues.
Privileged and class-centric /= neutral, but then that’d be hard for you to see, without, y’know, wanting to look.
Never mind, obviously I can’t know anything about this, only being a disabled person. I can’t meet your lofty perch of being objective and neutral, I guess. I would contend that’s because there’s no such thing, but I’m sure you’ll equally quickly dismiss me with that experiential opinion, just as you’re dismissive of everyone else’s.
CaitieCat, I wrote about the impartial economics of differential cost. If it is “privileged” to know something about economics, then I suppose I am privileged.
I don’t object to (or even argue against) the idea that you know something about this. I object to you characterizing my description of an economics concept as being tantamount to desiring to conduct eugenic genocide.
As for “not wanting to look” – examine your own assumptions, please. I have never formally filed for benefits or sought accommodation (being self-employed) but I could be fairly described as being disabled, on multiple grounds.
Because all of those other things are more likely to benefit the employer, directly or through a fairly predictable indirect link. The cost of doing business is balanced by the benefits of doing business.
Hiring people who you don’t want to hire, and/or keeping them when you don’t want to keep them, and/or providing them things you don’t want to provide, has essentially zero benefit to the employer: the benefits accrue primarily to the employee, and secondarily to the population of potential disabled employees, and even more remotely to society at large. (Obviously, if it DOES have benefit to the employer, they can pay for whatever they want.)
A one-time accommodation–“I need an ergonomic chair” or “Install Braille or large, raise lettered directional signs and elevator controls”–is not necessarily that expensive. The ongoing ones are really expensive.
That study isn’t necessarily wrong, but I don’t think it’s accurate in the context of this discussion.
I don’t have time to delve into study design but I suspect they’re using “accommodation” to mean very different things. “Stick up a sign in Braille” or “install a lever handle on the bathroom” are cheap, one-time, accommodations. nobody complains about them. As you can probably see from my post, that’s not the type I’m talking about at all.
They also appear to only be looking at the physical cost and not all of the other costs. Just the accommodation PROCESS (setting up, monitoring, etc.) can take a lot of time.
It’s a lot cheaper and easier for a huge company. If you’ve got 1,000 employees at a single location, you can usually find someone who needs duplication and transcription done: “Modifications of job tasks: i.e. allowing a blind office worker to substitute transcription and duplicating duties for proofreading and filing.”
But there are only so many “can’t lift over 15 pounds” employees that you can have in your file center, if your average box weighs 25 pounds. And when you have only 10 people who work there it’s a lot harder: you may only have 1-3 people who do a given task so switching them is a lot harder to do.
Riiiight.
That is exactly what I meant, when I said “We probably all agree that every one of those (with the exception of “watch their TV show”) are socially beneficial, admirable, and/or generally good;” and when I said “Both ADA and USERRA serve valuable societal goals;” and when I said that I would advise an employee client to take advantage of all available statutes.
wait–no, it’s not what I said, at all. As you clearly know. That was obnoxious.
The statement “ADA acts to transfer benefits to disabled people, the costs of which are disproportionately borne by their employers, therefore creating economic disincentives to hire disabled people” is true irrespective of your disability.
If you disagree, I’d love to hear why. If you think the statement is inherently biased, I’d love to hear why as well. But if you’re going to accuse me of wanting to kill off disabled people, then i don’t have much of a polite response.
Um. I don’t think you have much idea about business ownership. Lots of business owners aren’t wealthy at all.
how delightfully patronizing. Does it matter that I do, in fact, own a business myself? That I came to this point because of having to deal with this kind of bullshit pennypinching crap from managers giving themselves bonuses far larger than my salary every year? That I cannot, yet, employ others, because building a business without ANY startup capital takes a long time? That I don’t have any startup capital because see above re: shithead managers who worried more about their bonus than my ability to make a meagre living?
That you incredibly privileged people are acting as though it’s a nothing to just toss off a lawsuit, get one of your lawyer friends to do it maybe, when once again you’ve completely Romneyed yourselves away from the reality of people who AREN’T in the middle class or above?
Any of those things ring a bell? Or do I not get to be angry, again, at the incredible dismissiveness of saying that someone is “neutral”, when their agenda is only different from mine in that mine makes a difference whether I starve in the streets or not, while to you lot it’s a polite exercise before fucking CANAPES?
Holy mother of the flying spaghetti monster itself, but you people are fucking DROWNING in your class privilege, and you’re utterly blind to it, congratulating yourselves on the shaky-legged moral high horse that you can be objective about it, not like us people stupid enough to get ourselves disabled.
Wow this post really blew up since I earmarked it for commenting last night O.o
What I saw in the cartoon was commentary on bias *in the hiring process* that is unstated because employers are supposed to be equal opportunity for all regardless of whether they have uteri or children. For example, during my most recent job search, I existed as a 30 year old childless but obviously married female (because of my compound name and wedding band), fresh out of grad school. It is quite common in my (highly technical, requiring long work hours) field to find bosses notorious for only hiring unmarried, male postdocs* (I need more than two hands to count the ones that I know of at my current institution alone). Of course they don’t say so, but it’s pretty obvious when an entire workgroup is the same exact demographic (ironically, productivity is quite measurable and has been studied in my field and this seems to offer zero productivity advantage – and maybe even a disadvantage according to the latest data). No one said it to my face because that would be illegal, but I can’t be sure I wasn’t offered jobs because the boss didn’t want someone who might potentially have a child – that I wasn’t judged based on my merits but rather some fiction in the PI’s head regarding the possible future contents of my uterus. Especially after some of the questioning I got at one of my interviews, for which I was by far the most qualified candidate out of a small pool. It’s all unstated, but it still happens, and quite frequently.
So it’s that sort of situation I saw the cartoon depicting; I saw it as more depicting the hiring process than benefit packages. But hey, most people in my position are ineligible for benefits up to and including FMLA because we’re forced to be “contractors,” so maybe I just don’t see that side of the equation.
*To confound it, these PI’s frequently also only hire postdocs on a J-1 visa, so they can be threatened into not complaining about unreasonable workloads – another thing I’ve seen with relative frequency.
A business owner who must pay to accomodate an employee’s disability, all else equal, is at a competitive disadvantage to otherwise identical business owners. This is true.
It is also true that this can seem unfair, a stoke of fate, a bolt from the blue. It has nothing to do with merit.
To a person with a disability who has suffered greatly, perhaps even gone hungry, because employers have passed [coin toss] him over, this problem which employers have can seem like a first-world problem, because a business failing pales in importance to a human being suffering. This is true.
Such a person might even express rage, because to that person, this is a very personal question, and the sight of people talking about it academically is triggering.
The people hit by that rage might be offended at how they are characterized when the rage is expressed.
All of these things are true.
Grace
Thank you, Grace, for showing the aptness of your name. I apologize for being intemperate; it is, as you say, something of a hot button for me when people express that taking the business owners’ side is somehow “neutral”.
I do stick by what I said, though, about privilege: the discussion seems to be centring people who have options, which for various reasons is by far not the majority of people living with disabilities. And assuming that I couldn’t possibly be a business owner just…gah. I’ve poured heart, lungs, kidneys, a good chunk of spleen and probably 90% of my epidermis into making it possible to live off what I earn by my skills (as opposed to my current day job that makes up the difference, 30 hours a week of data entry, because oddly, companies are strangely reluctant to hire someone who uses a cane during their interview. Suggesting that I don’t understand because I don’t have skin in the game – well, my skin went a long time ago, I’m on to other important organs now.
I would also like to point out that, despite my self-definition as disabled (which concurs with my doctor, to be fair), I manage to push myself once a week to play soccer with a bunch of other 40-year-old moms. I take a lot of pills to do it, and I don’t do anything else the day of the game, but I do it.
This, of course, clearly demonstrates (hint: it doesn’t at all) that I am able to work a full-time slate of hours, and am thus ineligible for disability payments.
Now, if I were to do four days a week of vigorous physiotherapy and exercise on machines, I’d be alright, because that exercise is allowed for disabled people. Doing something I love, and have for more than forty years (I’m 46 this summer, have been disabled since a drunk driver’s error of judgement 25 years ago), is worth to me not being on the public purse.
But it means I live on…well, someone above said they wouldn’t feel bad about something they could hire someone to do for $500 a month. That would be something like a third of my monthly budget. I am fortunate to have found a day job where they’re content with my very efficient six-hour day, especially as I do as much work as the full-time people, but only have to be paid for six hours of it instead of eight.
See, where you oh-so-objective business-siders go wrong is that you assume that disabled people are a drag on productivity. Objectively, I input as many or more deals than anyone else in my department, I have a higher rate of successful work (it involves applications), and thus make the department MORE money than any of my colleagues. And I do it for 75% of their salary.
So who’s the drag on productivity, exactly? See, I don’t go for endless smoke breaks, and I don’t have long lunches – because my pain is usually so bad at work that I can’t eat until I get home and can do something about the nausea. I arrive at $HOUR_START, and I leave at $HOUR_FINISH, with no more than the minimum 30 minutes of paid break. And I don’t wander around the building chatting with people. And I don’t spend my time on chat programs. And I only look at my e-mail when I’m between deals, and then only for priority.
Et c., et c.. Why do I do these things? Well, partly they’re an adaptation to my disability, in that most of the productivity singularities I’m eschewing would require me to get up and walk around, which I only do if/when I have to. Partly they’re work habits generated over years of hearing how disabled people are unproductive and useless, how beneficent a company is to hire us, et c., et c.. Partly they’re because if I’m not better than everyone else, I will be seen as inherently less productive, simply because my cane is hanging on my cubicle wall. Don’t tell me I won’t; I’ve been there.
I’ve been constructively dismissed when the boss didn’t feel like letting me have flex hours (I had no public contact in that job, and very little interaction outside e-mail with other employees). He knew he couldn’t just sack me for being disabled, but he bounced my hours around, and did everything else he could to make the workplace unpleasant, so I would want to leave.
Why not sue? Well, at the time in Canada, there was no legal ability to allow contingency-only fees for lawyers (this has subsequently changed), meaning if you wanted any form of justice requiring the speaking of legalese, you had to pony up right up front for it. I leave you to imagine how much money I had in the circumstances, after several months of being dicked around about my hours and so on.
Oh, also, raising two kids at the same time. Well, two until I took in a foster child. And her brother, eventually.
It’s the same old thing: for women to be hired (as noted above), we have to be not just better, but WAY better than the male candidates. For a disabled woman, I have to be better than all those women who are being better than the men.
So please don’t tell me how much I don’t know about being disabled in the workplace, maybe, huh? And put this in your account and make it fungible: when my business reaches a point of being able to hire, I plan to go out of my way to seek candidates who live with disabilities.
Someone has to show some humanity somewhere.
Mm. Also, in my second-last comment, I made an ableist comment (about being “utterly blind” to privilege).
I apologize for that, to anyone I hurt or offended.
Ironic (and annoying for me) that I should get that wrong on this post.
Quote me where I took the *side* of anyone, and I’ll send you $500 to augment your monthly budget.
Or I would, if I wasn’t scrambling this month to pay my $375 rent on a single bedroom in a shared house. Fortunately my landlady is cool. It must be because I give her all the spare canapes from the board meetings where we figure out how to fuck over the disabled.
The assumptions-per-word figure on your posts is in the stratosphere, CaitieCat. And I don’t appreciate it. There are times when I’m rich as hell, by world standards if not by Bill Gates standards, and there are times when I’m poor as fuck. It’s funny how in both of those times, analysis of how differential expenses can burden a business comes out the exact same. It’s almost as if my personal status, or emotional state, have no bearing on whether the analysis is right or wrong!
I can understand that this is a very heated — and heathworthy — subject. And I hesitate to ask this.
Nonetheless, everyone, please try and dial it back a few notches.
I’LL KILL YOU FOR SAYING THAT.
Oh, wait, I guess that might be perceived as overheated. My bad.
Sorry for messing on your carpet, Amp.
I’ll drop the thread. Thank you to those who engaged in good faith.
InsertNameHere @36, where on earth did you get the ‘chip on her shoulder’? Nowhere did I say the civil-rights lawyer looked down on her husband.
gin-and-whiskey @35: The short answer is that “has no life/can work any hours” is not synonymous with “produces quality work” or “brings value to the employer” or “increases profitability”. (Which would a law firm prefer: Bessie the worker bee, who is unmarried, childfree, has no social life and can be in the office anytime and all the time doing paperwork, or Bob, who has kids and occasionally has to work his schedule around them, but also is a champion rainmaker? You know it’s Bob.)
But I want to get back to Amp’s cartoon. It doesn’t show a woman looking at a schedule that says ‘childcare only available 9-5’ while the Good Careers! sign says ‘must be able to work 8-6.’ It doesn’t say ‘must be available 24/7, no maternity leave.’ It doesn’t, really, say anything about whether if she got in the door the woman would be able to do the job as the employer requires. What it does show is that she can’t even get in. The cutout is of a male, from the profile seemingly in a suit, and from the head shape possibly middle-aged. She can’t even fit through it, kid or no kid. The entryway is deliberately designed for a particular type of employee, yet it claims to be “equal opportunity”.
And it would be disingenuous to suggest that employers really-o, truly-o only hire on merit: that if you can do the work and put in the time they don’t care if you’re male, female, trans, black, Jewish, whatever. You know the “2 am” rule, right? On the one hand, it sounds like a vague but neutral test as to whether somebody’s a good fit. On the other hand, it’s a handy excuse to hire people who are like oneself and fit into one’s comfort zone.
Also, Sebastian @39? Really? If you’re going to have that much contempt for housework because you can hire a maid to come in weekly for a few hundred bucks, I offer this advice: Neither you nor your wife should stay home. Because, on the Top Ten Ways To Convince Your Spouse You’re A Fucking Asshole is “express disdain for what they do, no matter how difficult, repetitive or time-consuming, and especially if it’s done so you don’ t have to bother with it.”
I mean, you could probably get a blowjob for $50 a pop too, but I don’t know that after making love to your wife you’d want to snort about how little you think of her because you could hire a professional for less than your monthly latte bill.
Amp:
That number is larger than I would have supposed. But that number encompasses all (and only) married couples, who by definition are well past the point of initial attraction and gone through processes in their lives that may well have changed their relative incomes from their initial state. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the time from initial contact up to the point where the decision to marry (or otherwise make a long-term commitment) occurs.
Mythago, I’m not talking about hookups/one-night stands, I’m talking about women looking for a long-term partner. Politicians with low income? For one thing, their position translates into power, which is what this is all about. Secondly, here in Illinois and in every other state I’ve lived in most politicians don’t depend on their public salary as their sole income. At the county/state level (Federal politicians are hardly low salaried) they are generally lawyers who have a substantial law practice that is fed by the political influence they have.
As far as the flip side goes, how would the barrista know what someone walking in does for a living? They may not throw their panties at them, but if they met them in a social setting, after getting my MS in a medical school I can tell you that most young male doctors who have the available time don’t suffer for a lack of sexual partners. And based on what I know about my son (B.S. Mech. Eng.) neither do young male engineers.
CatieCat, I know a few small business owners who have (or are contemplating) hiring people. They’re far from wealthy. Most people who work for someone else in this country work for a small business owner with relatively few employees and who doesn’t pay him or herself huge multiples of what they’re paying their employees. If you wait until you’re wealthy to hire some employees you’ll probably never actually get wealthy.
RonF, if you try and contort your argument any further you’re going to throw your back out. From initial attraction to marriage and…then what? Attraction doesn’t matter anymore, people’s genitals fall off? “Hard-wired” attraction and preferences in a mate are separate and never-overlapping sets?
By the way, this backpedaling about attraction vs. marriage rather undercuts your own argument that women are not “attracted to” men who have a lower income.
If they’re not a retail business, and they have fewer than 16 employees, then the ADA doesn’t apply to them.
There are state equivalents to the ADA which kick in (depending on your state) at as few as 6 employees.
Also, for some protective statutes that’s “employees,” not “full-time-equivalent employees.” IOW: if you have multiple employees who work only a few hours, they’re all covered. It mitigates against part timers.
And of course 16 (much less 6) isn’t as many as it seems, depending on what type of work you do.
And then they are married and outside the scope of the comment I made describing the well-known phenomenon that women tend to be more attracted to (and in the context of my comment) marry men who make more money than they do. The existence of this phenomena is not particularly controversial.
Now, once they are married the woman may well start to make more money than her husband, but by that time they’re already married and the assertion still holds regarding their initial attraction and marriage. And yes, often in such cases there’s a strain on their relationship that results in a loss of attraction/sexual desire or even divorce – again, from both sides, not just from the man’s.
So, why is that? Because of something unique to American culture? My use of the phrase “hard-wired” is to say no – I think it goes beyond any one culture. I think it’s rooted in the origins of our species. Can that change? Certainly on an individual basis it can. There are numerous couples out there that are a) happy and b) have the woman as the main breadwinner. But it’s not a general phenomenon, and if you want to change that you need to understand what causes it.
It would be helpful if you could point to some reliable source of hard numbers that support your claim.
RonF @64: Merely insisting that something is a fact, is true, or is not controversial does not make it so. And, again, you seem to think that attraction ends at marriage, which is a very sad point of view.
RonF:
You can think it all you like, but that doesn’t make it so. The study of Anthropology is chock full of instances where Anthropologists declared something universal, only to find a counterexample, or declared something “natural” which turned out to be more … ah, “nurtural” than they had believed.
Upstream, you also said…
…which is an overstatement so sweeping as to be absurd. It’s like saying that chickens create eggs, but eggs don’t create chickens. Eggs don’t create chickens in one sense, but chickens develop from eggs. Likewise, to a great extent, people develop into the people they are to a very large extent because of the society which raises them. To believe otherwise is to postulate coincidence on a massive scale.
Grace
Ampersand:
Does that make we who are engaged in it heathens?
Grace
Groaaaaaaaan. :-p
RonF, the very simple response is this:
In a comparatively undeveloped society, the average physical differences between men and women (and women’s status as child rearers) mitigate towards certain divisions of labor. When a baby’s main food is gotten through nursing, and when the main food for the family is gotten through something which is helped by brute strength (hunting, farming, whaling etc.) and when infant mortality is high enough that having a lot of babies is important for species survival, then this makes a lot of sense. (Even so, there are plenty of places where the women do a lot of work)
In a developed society such as the U.S., this “standard” model (which was never actually that standard) is not true. There’s no reason that a man can’t give a bottle as easily as a woman. There’s no reason that a woman can’t work in an office as easily as a man. There’s no reason to ask a woman to have as many kids as possible in the hopes that some of them will live to adulthood.
This situation has only been true for a relatively short time in human history. It is–unsurprisingly–very difficult to change the effects of thousands of years (literally) of doing things a particular way. It would be entirely unrealistic to expect that. Hell, there are still people running around who think that some god-thing created the earth a few thousand years ago, or that people were made of clay. For all I know there are still people who think the sun spins around the earth. It’d be pretty hard to expect a short term societal change.
Mythago, I’m quite interested in an explanation of the thought process that enables you to twist my words to come to that conclusion.
gin-and-whiskey:
This is true to an extent, but the extent is often greatly exaggerated, especially in pop psychology circles.
Pre-agricultural cultures (and note the dubious hierarchy implied by the ‘pre-‘) were very different from what most people picture. Depending on habitat, they worked about 4-6 hours per person per day. Plenty of them lived into their 60s. The men often topped 6 feet, at least among peoples where genetics permitted that. If memory serves, upwards of 80% of calories came from the “gatherer” part of “hunter/gatherer”, despite Pop Psych’s heartfelt love for, and manic concentration on, the hunters. Gathering is an activity which the average woman can do as well as the average man, and while nursing or in between nursings, and certainly while toting a baby. In fact, while gathering, nursing infants and children would only need to be with a milk-producing mother at intervals, and could easily be in a man’s arms or slung from a man’s shoulders at other times.
On the flip side, in the modern day we have these things called “machines” which largely eliminate the difference between men and women. For some reason, carpentry seems to come up a lot in these discussions, with the example of shouldering a square of shingles up onto the roof. Yes, a male carpenter is more likely to be able to shoulder it and go up the ladder. A female carpenter is more likely to sway it up with a rope, and less likely to sustain an injury doing it. Combat and certain kinds of emergency services are the only remaining places where innate differences matter, and even in those cases, it’s best to fix the problem by setting a standard and letting whoever can pass it do the job, rather than by declaring women to be ineligible because Theoretical Average Woman might not be able to do the job.
Oddly, it was when agriculture hit that people started working 12-hour days, and average differences between sexes began to matter more. Agriculture is hard, back-breaking work. The ONE thing it has going for it is that you can store the result, and so agricultural populations experience fewer swings in abundance and starvation. Also, agricultural populations can therefore sustain a hierarchy, which means the development of an upper class you might be able to aspire to somewhat (especially by marrying up). So upward aspiration and less frequent hunger are the benefits of agriculture. The cost is doubling the length of the workday.
Food for thought.
Grace
“But I want to get back to Amp’s cartoon… What it does show is that she can’t even get in… The cutout is of a male, from the profile seemingly in a suit, and from the head shape possibly middle-aged. She can’t even fit through it,… The entryway is deliberately designed for a particular type of employee, yet it claims to be “equal opportunity”.”
Amp could probably clarify what he means, but I’d really be surprised if it’s that. Feminists make a lot of good points about how woman are disadvantaged in the workplace. But it is ridiculous to suggest that companies deliberately design positions for middle aged men, and then follow up by lying and putting false branding on the adverts. People don’t have to stress equal opportunities on adverts, if they do it’s an active decision and I think they are usually nothing if not sincere.
There is a lot of nostalgia in feminist thinking where people recycle stuff that may well have been true in the 60s without realising the world has moved on. The main development here is that HR has been professionalised and has adopted ideas like job evaluation and equal ops as core tenants. To work in HR you have to learn this stuff and sit exams on it to qualify. It’s also worth mentioning that HR also skews 75%+ female, so certainly in corporate hiring, most job descriptions are passing through someone very aware of these issues (and who likely have or will benefit from these sort of accomodations herself) before they’re signed off.
“For some reason, carpentry seems to come up a lot in these discussions, with the example of shouldering a square of shingles up onto the roof. Yes, a male carpenter is more likely to be able to shoulder it and go up the ladder. A female carpenter is more likely to sway it up with a rope, and less likely to sustain an injury doing it.”
——
I think the term there is “roofer” (if you are talking about shingles), which I did in the summers during college. Your suggestion is absolutely lacking in real-world practice. I don’t know what else to say. I guess if you have 5 guys or a huge winch helping you “sway it up with a rope”, then maybe you can accomplish it in 10 times the amount of time it takes to just carry a box of shingles up, but your suggestion shows more about you – and your lack of real experience in the world – than it does about the allegedly stupid men who continue traditions.
As a side note, it is almost exclusively men who introduced all of these machines and techniques and the rest, so to present an alleged smart woman who uses a technique that the allegedly stupid men won’t use – although it is faster and prevents injuries – is ridiculous. There are admittedly lots of stupid men, but if they see it saves plenty of time and prevents injuries, they would start using it.
If you really believe in what you are saying, tell me more specifically how you “sway it up with a rope” in practice so that I can understand it (do you know how heavy a box of shingles would be at the end of a rope?). Is it something like “you just push a button and it’s up there”?
Sorry, I should have said, “builder”.
It’s true that my building experience is sadly limited and out of date. I’ve never worked professionally in the building trades.
I first shingled a roof (together with my mother) when I was in grade school. On houses of family and friends, trading labor, I’ve helped raise frames; chainsaw round timbers into tight joints; raise walls; put up rafters; deck the roof; roll out bituthene; nail down shingles; rough in window and door openings; put in the finished windows and doors; paint the exteriors; paint the interiors; put up drywall, then spackle and paint over it; stucco the interior and exterior with various types of “mud”; the electrician install the breaker panel and then wired all of the circuits from the panel to the outlets (and then watched it all pass inspection); build exterior stairs for emergency access and egress to an apartment inhabited by elderly people who had trouble walking; installed leech field, septic tank and septic pipe from house to tank; run PEX from manifold to fixtures; installed the manifold; installed the fixtures; pulled and repaired well pumps; etc, etc, etc.
Except for earth-moving most of my building experience is with hand-tools and small power tools. I’ve never used a powered winch.
I’ve gone up ladders with materials over by shoulder (and haven’t fallen yet, not doing that). I’ve also hauled them up on a line. The last time I recall using a rope-and-gin-pole was about five years ago, when a friend of mine and I used a gin pole to get a lot of lightweight material up onto the roof. That wasn’t shingles, but I’ve done loads just as heavy with a rope, and I’ve gone up ladders with shingles in my hands. Each bundle weighs, oh, 50-75 pounds. A sack of concrete weighs 80, and I don’t recall a bundle of shingles being heavier, though it’s a bit more awkward. It’s doable, especially if circumstances help with the leverage, like being able to walk away with it down the deck on the opposite side of a gable roof. (I made a units error, earlier, through not having worked as a pro: a ‘square’ is a larger measure of shingles. I was thinking of a ‘bundle’, of which about three make a ‘square’.) The gin pole we used five years ago we lashed together out of three smallish trees which we dropped and limbed with my chainsaw. They were straight, so they were probably maple or oak. Definitely not birch, beech, hemlock or white pine. The longest one stuck up above the peak of the roof, and we tied the pulley to it, ran a rope through the pulley, and tied the rope to what we wanted to bring up. My partner prepped the loads and tied the rope on (we only found my rope with the hook on it later), and then I hauled them up, and when I had his knot up against the pulley, I reached out with a stick I made by trimming a beech sapling (beech grows every whichaway and doesn’t like to split, so when I trimmed it I left one of the lower branches a few inches long to make a hook) snagged some part of the load (usually the rope it was tied with, but sometimes a handle), and pulled it over to where I was standing, where I set it down and untied it.
That time we didn’t bring shingles up, and if we had, the geometry would have made it dicey without a block-and-tackle. However, I own a block-and-tackle, and if we had needed to, we could have raised bundles of shingles that way, too. Or, we could have run my come-along through the pulley and winched them up. Or, he could have tied them on, scooted up the ladder, and then we would have had two people hauling away.
There are lots of ways to get a job done, and when you’re working alone or with only one other person, there are lots of opportunities to be creative and to learn from experience.
But it seems to me that what really offended you was your notion that I said men are stupid and women are smart. I didn’t say that. I didn’t imply that. You’re free to infer it, but I didn’t put it there. I also didn’t say that hauling something up with rope is faster than just carrying it up. It’s usually not, although if you’re shifting a lot of supplies, once you get your system set up, whatever it is, it can work out that way by the time you’re done. But it’s usually not, which is why people like to shoulder or hand-carry supplies up ladders; it gets that particular task done quicker. Heck, I like to carry things up ladders; it’s a satisfying physical challenge, and I enjoy my agility. But it’s also true that going up a ladder one-handed will result, over time, in more falls than going up a ladder two-handed.
But hey, you don’t have to believe that I don’t have any building experience. Doesn’t bother me; I was there.
Grace
Grace Annam,
Despite telling me about my alleged motives and lots of extraneous information about building stuff, you haven’t told me any more specifically how it’s better to “sway shingles up with a rope”. How is the rope fastened to the box? Who’s on the other side of the rope if it goes through a pulley? You? Do you know how heavy it would be? How can a single person accomplish the lifting, positioning on the roof etc.?
How is all of this faster than just carrying the box up the ladder?
If another guy is helping you “sway it up with a rope” (either pulling or positioning), why doesn’t HE just carry the box up the ladder for you?
This will be my last post on this (sorry it’s off topic, but I have to call bullshit when I see it). So you can either tell me specifically what I asked, write another irrelevant wall of words or just ignore this.
InsertNameHere, either stop acting like a condescending annoying person or leave this blog. Your choice.
You didn’t ask. You demanded that I
Which I did. Now you want more details. Sure.
Really? Um, okay. If they’re still bundled, then in my experience there’s plastic strapping running around the bundle much like a gift-wrapped package. You can lift the bundle with it by hand, so you can tie off to it and lift the bundle with a rope, too.
If they’re loose, then you stack them and run the rope around the stack like you run a ribbon around a package. Best to tie it with a separate length from the one you’re using to lift, first because it’s good practice and second because over time the rope will abrade where it turns corners around the bundle, and you don’t want to use that rope for lifting.
Asked and answered. See my omnibus reply @75, paragraph 5.
Asked and answered. See my omnibus reply @75, paragraph 8.
Also, just to be perfectly clear, since I was originally talking about a worker’s physically capabilities: if you can’t carry the box up the ladder, then it’s a lot faster.
Promise?
Grace
RonF @71: You presented fake facts about “attraction”, then hastened to differentiate between “initial attraction” and the moment of marriage, and now you’re finding it more convenient to pretend I’m twisting your words than to address the many holes in your arguments. If you really think you’re being misrepresented, I highly recommend you review your own posts, particularly with an eye to the astonishing claim that women are “hard wired” to get warm in the pants if a man’s paycheck is greater than their own.
Did InsertNameHere really just play the “men built and invented everything so shut up you ungrateful, leeching bitches” card?
@mythago
No, he said that the machine-based techniques in construction were invented by men, so it would make no sense for there to be such a technique, better than current approaches, yet for some reason only used by female workers. The characterisation of who invented what may be wrong, and Grace has said that the machine-based technique isn’t uniformly better (e.g. it’s slower). But the argument still has nothing to do with the “ungrateful bitches” spin you’re trying to put on it (not to mention that, obviously, no one used the term “bitches” except you).
Actually, Jebedee, “it is almost exclusively men who introduced all of these machines and techniques and the rest” is certainly a point relevant to the discussion. InsertNameHere didn’t specify that he was talking purely about particular machines used in construction work. Did he call women ‘bitches’? Nope. Instead he pretended that Grace Annam was commenting on, or characterized, male construction workers as “stupid” and female construction workers as “smart”.
The we-invented-all-this-for-you is a pretty common trope among MRAs, and given the baseless assumption that all machines, techniques and so on were invented by men alone, seemed to be riffing off that trope. (And I may be jumping to conclusions here, but there was an MRA who used to post over at Hugo’s who also talked about how he worked summers as a roofer during college.)
I work in automotive manufacturing and design.
In my experiences the doorway to ‘really good careers’ isn’t the front door to the building, it’s assignments and recognition once you’re in. THIS is where being a parent (single or other) really bites down hard.
You can get a good/decent job doing engineering work on widgets. Where I’m from it pays 40-80K depending on experience and takes 15-20 years to top out. You can sustain a middle class lifestyle with hard work a little bit of luck and some good fortune. The usual week is 40-55 hours. The “really good career” that the managers and executives have takes luck, good fortune, and everything else.
When I expressed interest in a promotional opportunity my bosses boss told me a story of how she and her family were in Disneyland and she spent the entire break on the phone. She’d mute so she could stand in line with them and than contribute more while they were on the coasters. She told me that she’d respond to emails late at night/early in the morning while the family slept and that she skipped Epcot entirely one day due to an emergency. She said I had the potential to move up but that I should be careful what I was asking for.
It’s like the old joke about law school/consulting. A “really good career” is a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie.
Is this cartoon saying that it’s hard or impossible to be a single mom or disabled and get an entry level job with the potential to grow? If it is than I think amp can do better. I mean he usually comes with *great* stuff.
Just my 2 cents.
also, for modern america, where does the ability to lift really heavy things (packs of shingles) fit in to getting a really good career? Outside of professional athletics I mean.
Male roofers and haul shingles faster than female roofer…roofing is still not a really good job…and I think they have the shingle supplier lift them to the roof with a hoist anyway.
joe, you can’t get to those opportunities if you can’t get in the door in the first place, no?
And while the pie-eating joke is true, I don’t notice many lawyers/consultants saying “Fuck this, I’m going to quit and take up a leisurely job as a grocery checker.” Pie-eating pays pretty darn well.
“And while the pie-eating joke is true, I don’t notice many lawyers/consultants saying “Fuck this, I’m going to quit and take up a leisurely job as a grocery checker.” ”
The number of ex-lawyers exceeds the number of lawyers by something like a 2:1 ratio. I would say that on balance, lawyering is a pretty awful career and contrary to popular belief, doesn’t always open up lots of other jobs just because you’re a lawyer. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and certainly not a smart woman with children. The semi random two week periods where you are going to have to work 100+ hours for no extra pay aren’t going to be good. (And even among those who stay lawyers, many say they do it only to pay off the enormous loans, which hearkens back to a previous conversation around here somewhere).
The number of ex-lawyers exceeds the number of lawyers by something like a 2:1 ratio
By ‘ex-lawyers’ are we talking, the number of people who have JDs vs. the number of people employed as attorneys? Or by “ex-lawyers” do you mean people who are former practicing attorneys?
I also wouldn’t recommend it to people whose attitude is “I dunno, I can’t figure out what else to do with a liberal arts degree, and it pays pretty well, and it’s just like on TV, right?”, either. On the other hand, it beats the almighty hell out of working minimum wage without health care.
For a family of four, an income of $30,000 or less qualifies you for Medicaid. So the number of people who are working minimum wage jobs and don’t have health care and who couldn’t get it, is pretty small if not zero. (There are variations from state to state, and it IS possible to use up your eligibility, so there may be some people who’re going into year ten of the same minimum wage job who can’t get public health care. But the overlap between that population, and the population who could feasibly expect to take up a career in the law, is again minimal.) The majority of the people working minimum wage but not on Medicaid are preserving their eligibility for when they have health problems, or just aren’t in need of health coverage (young and strong) so they don’t bother.
I apologize for waxing pedantic, but so much of the health care debate goes off-track because people talk about the people in need as though they have characteristics X, Y, Z when in fact most of them have A, B, C. The group of people without health care coverage in the US, mainly, is the group of people who make too much for Medicaid but not enough to afford good insurance on the market and not enough to pay fee-for-service for anything but the most elementary care. I expect to get yelled at for saying this, but I will keep saying it because it’s true: poor people aren’t the target of health care reform. Lower-middle-income people are.
I don’t know about former lawyers, but consulting is a notoriously revolving-door occupation for the people who are successful at it. Most consulting involves thinking for people who either won’t or can’t do it for themselves, or whose institutional structures are so fouled up that only outside thinking can be validated. Even when well-compensated, this type of work is wearying. People tend to make their pile, line up a few pleasant golden-envelope clients, and move to Aruba.
@Mythago 84
I agree, you have to get in the door as step 1.
So you want a good career as a professional? Okay, first you get hired. You make it past the interview, with a kid, because you’re smart and hard working and have the right background. And because the HR departments at large companies try hard to keep the managers from breaking the law by being too racist/sexist. And maybe you stretch the truth when they ask you if you can work extra hours from time to time with little notice.
Now you want to move up. First you have to do well at what you were hired to do. This is a gimme. We’ve already established that you’re smart and motivated. Of course you won’t let your health/kid/quasi hostile work environment hold you back. Next you need to be trusted with more critical projects. This is easier if you fit the cutout. If you don’t fit the cutout you get ‘stuck’ in your entry level position.
That was my point. Not that hiring discrimination didn’t happen but that even if it doesn’t happen there are structural obstacles that make it harder for someone that isn’t a company man.
I’d love to see amp do a ‘toon on this…one that really makes it clear that everyone in the story is acting in a reasonable way. No malice on the part of the boss is required. But ymmv
I feel like I should point out that not any job in your field is a really good career. Obviously someone working as a laborer for 12$/hr isn’t going to be sympathetic to the plight of a degreed lawyer/engineer/scientist so maybe this is my privilege speaking but:
Really Good Career != adjunct/contract review/drawing checker
RonF, InsertNameHere, and Robert:
I think you raise an important point, and I wasn’t very clear in my post. I don’t think business should make special allowances just for women. I think that SAHDs deserve opportunities, too. I was just saying that in general in our society, when employers refuse to accommodate their employees’ other obligations, women disproportionately suffer because they are caregivers more often than men are.
I’m not saying men shouldn’t get the same benefits; in fact, I believe that if they did take more time for their families, there would be less stigma attached to doing so. And it doesn’t have to be family-related, either. If someone wants more time for volunteering or going to school, why not? As long as the work gets done, it doesn’t matter how many hours or which hours they show up at the office.
When businesses offer their employees flexibility, parental leave, sick leave, part time, etc., most studies find that these employers save much more than they spend on these programs. Yes, it varies depending on the employer and the program, but in general, employers’ costs are offset or even outweighed by increased productivity, increased retention, better client/customer relationships, better public image, better recruiting, and less absenteeism. More profit, not less. If you’re looking at business strategy alone, offering employees the chance to have more of a life, whether that’s taking care of kids, parents, school, or whatever, makes a lot of sense.
Which people never do. Ever.
It continues to amaze me that so many folks are simultaneously certain that only they are able to set their own values… but that they can set the values for everyone else.
The simple question
“Is someone a valuable employee?”
is really dependent on the question
“Are they doing what their employer wants them to do?”
If they do what the employer wants, they’re a valuable employee.
If they don’t do what the employer wants, they’re not a valuable employee.
If I said “no problem–all those parents can just outsource their childcare. Stick ’em in daycare, and a nanny can cook dinner” people would (rightly) object en masse: “we don’t WANT that to happen!”
That’s normal. Parents don’t only consider profits. Even if a nanny is $20/hour and you earn $30/hour, at some point you actually want to see your kid. And you might want to have some leisure time as well.
Employers don’t only consider profits, either. They work there too, most of the time. What employers want is someone to do what they’re told, because that is what makes life easier for the employer. Whatever that is, we just want it done (assuming it’s not illegal, immoral, etc.)
Even if it is illegal immoral etc. we still want it done our way. I’m a notorious stickler for demanding that all murders done on behalf of the company follow the protocol guide. We wrote it for a reason, people! I want those corpses tagged with the full eight-digit project code or damn it, you will not get paid the termination bonus. I mean it!
That’s easy for you to say, Robert. Do you realize that project-code toe-tags have been on backorder for the last three months? And nobody’s bothered to update the protocol guide to let us microchip them instead, even though we have a closet full of microchips.
Also, Fred keeps eating my lunch, although I have clearly marked it with my name. Free-range soylent green is not easy to come by, I tell you.
Thank you for raising those concerns. We value your input and I will task someone with investigating these statements and finding out the current state of the corpse-tagging systems.
Oh, and you’re fired.
Ledasmom, I think you just got spanked by the Invisible Hand.
No one is arguing that “valuable employee” is up to the employer to determine, based on whatever criteria they feel are important. If you want to define valuable employee as “shows up 20 minutes early, never takes a sick day, and can have an intelligent conversation about water polo,” that’s fine. But you started off with value in financial terms–that disabled employees (or parents, or people with other responsibilities) provide less *monetary* benefit. When it’s pointed out that that isn’t necessarily the case, it’s not fair to change the terms so that we’re now not talking about monetary benefit, but about whatever the individual employer decides that they value.
And that is, usually, true.
Of course it’s not ALWAYS true–but so what? “Always” is pretty rare. We’re talking about group averages here. The variance in a group doesn’t (in this case at least) defeat the underlying relevance of the averages.
Moreover, this is a relative issue. Write down an imaginary employee–whatever qualifications you want. Then add a disability/obligation/commitment/whatever. Is the resulting imaginary employee more or less valuable?
I don’t think that’s changing the terms. From an economic perspective “wants” and “monetary benefits” are basically the same thing, at least in the context of the employment relationship. So It’s inherent when you discuss culture or happiness or job satisfaction or all of those various terms.
In other words: Employer “wants” turn into paychecks.
It’s entirely personal. Given two equally qualified associates, Lawyer John will pay more to the one who is willing to work extra hours. But Lawyer Mary has a good sense of humor–she’ll pay more to the one who is funnier, even if they have to leave early twice a week.
Maybe Mary could hire a boring-but-productive associate and leave early to watch Leno: she might be richer that way. But it’s her business, not ours. We shouldn’t be able to make Mary hire a boring associate.
Similarly, maybe Lawyer John would be more productive if he hired multiple people who worked for 30 hours/week. But that’s his business.
John and Mary’s preferences are valuable, as in real-money valuable.
“Or by “ex-lawyers” do you mean people who are former practicing attorneys?”
I mean former practicing attorneys. My understanding of the naming convention (which could be confused) is that people with JDs who don’t pass the bar aren’t called lawyers. (Which btw is yet another ding against the schools who produce JDs without lawyers. Being a lawyer, on median earnings gets you a middle-middle class job. Being a JD without being a lawyer, not even that.)
“On the other hand, it beats the almighty hell out of working minimum wage without health care.”
Ok, but that is a really weird way to draw out the options. Pretty much anyone who could go through the trouble of law school for 3 years and pass the bar and put up with the obnoxiousness of 90 hour work weeks could do so without paying a hundred grand or two, and get the same or better median earnings (with health care!) in a large number of other middle class jobs.
I’m not objecting to the idea that having pay and health care is better than not having pay and health care. I’m objecting to the notion that most lawyers should be considered ‘having a really good career’.
“I was just saying that in general in our society, when employers refuse to accommodate their employees’ other obligations, women disproportionately suffer because they are caregivers more often than men are.”
Maybe I’m taking this too literally, or maybe my anecdotes just run counter to the trend. But in every place I’ve ever worked, women were accommodated for taking care of children far more than any other personal accommodations were allowed. People have a category for ‘mom needs to do stuff for kid’ that they don’t have for ‘single gay man has to take his HIV+ friend to the hospital’. Now were they accommodated *enough*? I don’t know. But I’m certain, that as a single person, without children, I ended up doing quite a bit of not-additionally-compensated work covering for parents of both sexes (though mostly women) at organizations where their valid desire to take care of their children was honored at least to some extent, while my analogous accommodations were not.
Now, at the organizations where I worked, they wouldn’t have agreed that taking my HIV+ friend to the hospital was analogous to needing to get off work an hour early every Wednesday because of soccer practice. Who is this ‘friend’? Is he my lover? If not, why am I taking him to the hospital? Friends aren’t ‘children’.
My point is not to get into an oppression contest or whatever. My point is that businesses often don’t accommodate personal needs well. But they at least have a mental category for “child needs” that sometimes might allow for empathy and accommodation that is actually more than the accommodations they allow for other issues.
Then the argument that it’s not fair that she have to make reasonable accommodations for a disabled employee sounds a lot like the argument that she shouldn’t have to hire someone of a different race or sexual orientation. If that’s what she values, who are we to tell her otherwise?
Sure. Those are arbitrary standards, though.
We distinguish between “you don’t want to hire Mary because you strongly dislike Mary” and “you don’t want to hire Mary because you strongly dislike Mary, which is in part because of her race/gender/membership in a protected class.
But we distinguish on moral grounds, not economic ones. Because from the employer’s perspective, the cost of “working with someone you dislike” is unrelated to the social perspective of the rightness of your likes/dislikes.
Of course ,we CAN tell employers to do something. We can tell racist employers to hire POC; we can tell sexist employers to hire women, etc. We can also tell POC employers that they can’t distinguish based on racism, and we can tell female employers that they can’t refuse to hire men whose out-of-work activity demonstrates severe misogyny. And so on.
But whatever it is we decide, it doesn’t change the underlying cost-to-employer analysis.
And that’s pretty much the whole argument. We can decide that the ADA is a good thing–I agree with that. But saying that the ADA is a good thing, has zero to do with whether or not it has economic costs.
I’m not objecting to the idea that having pay and health care is better than not having pay and health care. I’m objecting to the notion that most lawyers should be considered ‘having a really good career’.
Why? Because a lot of people go into law without thinking much about whether they would enjoy the work, or, really, anything other than ‘hey, it pays well and I hear you can use a JD in all kinds of other work’?
And yes, businesses do have a mental category for ‘mom taking care of kids’. That mental category is usually ‘this is somebody who is now off the fast track.’ Certainly many employers are joining the 21st century, and are starting to become better about not just direct family obligations but other personal needs like sick friends. But there’s a reason that among the female attorneys I know, one bit of career advice is “Never work for a firm where all the partners are men with stay-at-home wives.”
Robert @87: I’m sure a lot of failed lawyers can get other white-collar jobs; I just don’t have much patience for the “oh this is SO HARD.” Yes, it is hard and sucky to spend 80+ hours doing paperwork during a litigation push. It is a lot easier than spending 50+ hours a week on your feet waiting tables. i.e., perspective.
gin-and-whiskey: I’m really getting lost here with the complaints that this stuff has a cost for employers. Yes, it does. You’re not really arguing that there is a moral right to unrestrained profit, I hope?