I’m counting down the days that I have left at work before I go on parental leave (24 to go!) Both that and the thought of the different kind of labour which awaits me got me thinking about the nature of work, specifically the role it plays in people’s lives.
In previous posts, I have been bothered by the focus on the career / motherhood question that appears to be heavily slanted towards elite women. In this post, I will be guilty of a certain narrowness of frame of reference too, as I am going to talk about the role of work for me: someone who has the luxury of choosing what kind of work I might do, even if I'm not compelled to become a CEO or political leader.
Before reflecting further on my own working life, I do want to draw attention to some recent research on the inequalities among working women. A 2013 British Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) study found that the gap between women who have a university degree or professional qualification and those in low or unskilled work was a whopping 198 per cent (for those born in 1958) narrowing to 80 per cent (for those born in 1970). By comparison, the gap between professional men and men in low or unskilled work was just 45 per cent (for those born in 1958) rising to 61 per cent (for those born in 1970).
Dalia Ben-Galim, the associate director of IPPR, comments "many of the advances for women at the top have masked inequality at the bottom. The ‘break-the-glass-ceiling’ approach that simply promotes ‘women in the boardroom’ has not been as successful in changing family friendly working culture or providing opportunities for other women to advance. Women are still concentrated in low-paid and often part-time work. Women with lower qualifications and those who have children at a younger age are finding it harder to secure good jobs and opportunities at work."
Work, then, is a feminist issue, and comprehends so much more than the fantastical notion of ‘having it all’. I believe a feminist approach to work should be about changing the paradigm of what work is like: transforming working environments so that women are not unfairly penalised for having had limited educational opportunities, for becoming - or not becoming - mothers, for not wanting to work round the clock or conform to old-school leadership models (a particular pet peeve of mine: bullying bosses are bad news whether they are male or female). I believe this transformation would enrich the lives of male workers too.
When I was young and naive, I remember saying to a co-worker that she shouldn’t work past the hours she was paid for - she routinely worked an extra hour or so at the end of the day so, as she put, ‘she could feel she was on top of the job’ - because it meant our employer was ‘stealing from her’ i.e. by working extra for nothing, the company was taking a free-ride on her labour. Needless to say, I don’t think she appreciated my two cents. But in my way, I was alluding to something that much greater minds than me have traversed at much greater length: as a worker, rather than employer, the thing that you have to ‘sell’ is your labour power (regardless of whether it is physical labour or intellectual labour). An employer ‘buys’ your labour power, but, even among the well-recompensed, at a much lower cost than what he/she/they will profit from it. This is (very) basically how power operates within capitalism.
The job I was doing at the time I gave my well-meaning but not well-received advice, was not something at which I planned to make a career. I was on a working holiday in London, so the work I was doing had a larger function: to pay my living costs, yes, but also to help me enjoy my ‘OE’. While I didn’t slack off, ambition was definitely not the driver of my working-life at the time. For my colleague, however, work helped her provide for her family, and she wanted to progress as far as she could with it, even if it meant putting in some unpaid overtime. However unconsciously, she calculated that the extra effort would pay off for her in long-run.
When I grew up and started working in more career-oriented jobs, I became much less sanguine about my work-life balance without really thinking about it. This was complicated by the fact that my chosen career involved ‘flexible’ work that didn’t always require being in an office. Many aspects of it were enjoyable, challenging and rewarding, so much so that it didn’t ‘feel’ like work. Suddenly, work seeped into evenings and weekends. After some soul-searching about whether the trade-off was worth the increasing lack of a personal life, I decided to leave the career path that I was on.
Since I left that career path, I have been fortunate to engage in work I felt was both socially important and personally satisfying. However, I still hadn’t quite learned all I needed to about work-life balance. One particularly demanding job resulted in a serious overuse injury that can still flare up during particularly stressful working periods.
In this post, however, I want to reflect a little on how pregnancy has affected my attitude towards work.
During my first pregnancy, I worked full-time. I didn’t often work evenings or weekends (learned my lesson there, but I did make the odd exception) but I certainly worked about 110% during the day to make sure that I didn’t work evenings and weekends. The primary reason for that was not ambition, but passion: most of the work I was doing was not only challenging and enjoyable, but had a sense of making a difference too. Indeed, just before I realised I was pregnant, I put my utter exhaustion down to over-work. My manager encouraged me to use some of my stock-piled annual leave. It was a few days later that I took a pregnancy test and discovered there might be another reason for the way I was feeling...
That first time, being pregnant led me to ease up a little at work. I knew from previous experience that stress and over-work can have physiological consequences and it was now important that I not only not inflict them on myself, but also on my growing foetus. Again, I did not slack off, but I started saying ‘no’ to more things, asking higher-ups to prioritise what they wanted me to do in the time available, making sure I had at least a 30-minute lunch-break every day and didn’t just eat at my desk and so on.
The sky didn’t fall in. As far as I can tell, no-one thought any the less of my ability to do my job. And I saved myself some unnecessary stress. Being pregnant gave me the incentive to be more protective of my self at work, to set boundaries and realise what a healthier attitude to work could have been all along.
This time around, I am in a slightly different position. I work three days a week in paid employment, and try to avoid saying that ‘I don’t work’ the other days (because, census-takers, it most certainly is work). Once I was back at my job, and especially before a job-share partner was found to share the full-time role with me, it took me a while to realise that I wasn’t a full-time worker anymore and adjust my work-habits accordingly. Early on, I even made arrangements to come in for an ‘important’ meeting on one of my non-work days. Watching the clock with increasing anxiety as I listened to others witter on, I made that the first and last time I worked outside my nominated three- day week.
Because when you work part-time and come in for a meeting on a non-work day or take some work home ‘just so it gets done’ (how my former colleague would smile at me now!), you could - and should - be being compensated for it. After the first time this happened, I realised what my younger self already knew: I might earn brownie points for dedication, but I certainly wasn’t earning any money. The person I was cheating was myself, and - if I continued to do this - my family. I agree with Guardian columnist Zoe Williams' exhortation that women part-time workers should not be apologetic for the fact they work part-time and should, instead, lobby hard for their own interests.
There has been a further twist in my working life while pregnant this time round. Through the whole course of my current pregnancy - and well-beforehand too - my organisation has been going through a review process that is, next week, to culminate in the final announcement of a re-structure that will mean some people will lose their jobs. A substantial portion of those who don’t will, however, have their positions ‘disestablished’ and will then go through a process of being ‘reassigned’, ‘redeployed’ or made ‘redundant’. It’s a salutary reminder that whilst one may be working to pay the bills, to do something meaningful, to achieve work-life-balance, or even to try and ‘have it all’, those in positions of power ultimately have the ability to determine whether you work at all.
In some respects, assuming that I keep my job, being pregnant at this time gives me a kind of ‘get out of jail free card’. By that I mean, I will shortly be taking just over a year’s leave from what is likely to be an unhappy, uncertain and difficult time for my colleagues. When I return to work, the blood will have been spilled and - hopefully - cleaned up, and I will be able to assess whether I want to stay there or look elsewhere for a job. Of course, I am not suggesting that looking after a new-born baby is not work or that it’s an easy option. But, in my current work environment, it does give me just that: another option. Score another point for the value of work-life balance.
But work-life balance for an individual doesn’t solve the collective problem of inequalities at work: working that out requires a major transformation of all our working environments.
