In her essay, “Win-Win Flexibility,” Karen Kornbluh explains the need for workplace changes due to changing family structures. Kornbluh explains that norms have shifted from a traditional family consisting of a breadwinner and a homemaker to what she coins a juggler family. According to Kornbluh, a juggler family is characterized by, “two working parents or an unmarried working parent” (323). By making changes, traditional work schedules can be altered to increase flexibility and better accommodate juggler families. In addition to the shift in family structures, parents are now working longer hours and have limited opportunities to take time off or change their work schedule. As a result of long, inflexible hours, many working individuals find it difficult to care for children or provide care for elderly or ill family members. Due to this, large sums of money are spent on childcare each year, and many children still do not receive the level of care that they need (Kornbluh 323). …show more content…
To better care for children and other family members, working individuals need access to quality flex-time or part-time jobs.
Kornbluh explains that such jobs are scarce. When flex-time or part-time jobs are available, they are typically not viable options for families because they do not provide benefits, the potential for career growth, or adequate wages (Kornbluh 323). As a result of this, parents are forced to work full-time jobs with long hours. These jobs are very demanding and rarely provide paid leave to care for newborn children or family members with failing health. These factors further validate the need for increased flexibility in work
schedules. To combat the previously discussed problems associated with a traditional work schedule, Kornbluh proposes a flexible work schedule consisting of, “annualized hours, compressed hours, flex-time, job-sharing, shift working, staggering hours, and telecommuting” (325). Incorporating these into an employee’s schedule would consist of preparing a written application detailing the change to be made, and the impact it would have on the employer. The change would then be made by the employer except in the case that it would cause significant, negative impacts on the company or the employee’s performance (Kornbluh 325). The modifications to increase flexibility in schedules would not result in the loss of pay, benefits, or the potential for job growth. By incorporating flexibility into work schedules, juggler families will be better equipped to provide for their families not only financially while giving children and other family members the time and care they deserve. “Win-Win Flexibility” addresses a relevant issue that affects many families, and it outlines a potential solution to the addressed problem. To ensure her audience fully understands the issue at hand, Kornbluh uses statistical evidence to frame the problem. By bringing specific statistics regarding the number of hours worked by parents, the lack of opportunities for leave, and the negative impact of inflexible work schedules on children, Kornbluh supports her claim that schedules of working parents need to change. The statistical evidence provides concrete evidence, and it helps to persuade the audience that action must be taken to combat the problem of long inflexible schedules. Although the statistical evidence given by Kornbluh supports her claim that the schedule of working parents needs to change, the amount of statistics presented has the potential to distract from the overall purpose of the essay. Even though many of the statistics are intriguing and shocking, the sheer number of statistics used may result in disinterest from the problem and proposed solution. The essay may have been more effective if only highly relevant statistics were used, and the remaining evidence was summarized. By doing this, the problem would be adequately framed with solid evidence, and the audience would not lose sight of the proposed solution’s purpose.
The inability to achieve “work-life balance” has become a major focus for workplace equality activists. When this topic is brought about it is primarily used to describe how woman cannot have a work and home life but instead are forced to choose. Richard Dorment took on this point of interest from a different perspective in his article “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All” published with esquire. Going against the normal trend he describes how women are not the only ones put into the same sacrificial situations, but instead that men and women alike struggle to balance work and home. Dorment opens up by saying “And the truth is as shocking as it is obvious: No one can have it all.” In doing so Richard Dorment throws out the notion that one
Employers state that childcare issues cause more problems within the workplace than any other family-related issue. Frequent absences and tardiness can be associated with employees’ family caregiving responsibilities, as well as decreased job satisfaction, increased intentions to quit, and increased stress and strain while on the job. The number of families with two working parent...
At what point does work life start interfering with family life to an extent that it becomes unacceptable? Is it when you don’t get to spend as much time with your family as you would like, or is it the point where you barely get to see your family due to long hours at work? Is it even possible to balance work with family life? Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, believes this balance is impossible to achieve in this day and age. In contrast, Richard Dorment, the author of “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All”, believes that there will never be a day when someone will have it all, certain sacrifices will always have to be made. Both of these articles are similar in the respect that they both examine balancing a demanding career with raising children. The two authors’ views on the subject differ greatly, especially regarding how gender roles have a significant impact on our society.
Society’s definition is conflicting when it comes to who can have it all. By balancing work and family, Slaughter believes both men and women can have it all. However, she argues that it is impossible with many type jobs to maintain
Previous generations have a strong belief of keeping work and home life separate; that work is for work and home is for play (Rampell, 2011, para 21). Today’s professionals do not seem to abide by similar beliefs, constantly crossing the borders of one into the other. While many recognize this as an issue that could result in employees being less productive, it has actually resulted in them accepting that their work may run late into the evening or even into the weekend. I agree with this completely in that I grew up being taught that business is business and personal is personal; you leave your home life at the door. But now times have changed, and my weekends are no longer dedicated to my home life, but for work, because I attend classes during the week. Also, in my line of work in the Allied Health industry, it is a requirement to work off hours. Long gone are the days of working nine to five, Monday through Friday; technology and the demand of wanting affairs done and done as soon as possible, has made it so the “work week” is now 24-7. “Jon Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard Institute of Politics, said, ‘Some experts also believe that today’s young people are better at quickly switching from one task to another, given their exposure to so many stimuli during their childhood and adolescence’” (Rampbell,
Through the summary of “The Emotional Geography of Work and Family Life” (1996), the author, Arlie Russell Horchschild, demonstrates that American’s that are employed full time, are working more and more hours, regardless of the price in family time. Over the past several years, the workforce has changed dramatically throughout our society. Today a typical American’s mindset is to produce more hours in a workday, to provide and support for their families. However, taking care of ones family, in addition to working, causes stress on an individual. The consequences are resulting in a work/family conflict.
Working women with families are often lead to inhabit several different lives all at once. In article “The Second Shift,” Arlie Hochschild discusses how women who have families and work are often subjected to having to stay a full time housewife along with their job, creating basically two sets of work, as the author calls it, the Second Shift. I think that the authors’s style of using many studies and examples helps to strengthen his points. Although he doesn’t directly express his opinion of the issue as much which weakens it to an extent but also helps to have the reader form their own opinion using the issues discussed. His use of vocabulary helps to express his opinion onto the issues discussed as it shows to be more sophisticated whenever he writes on supporting his own side of the issue. Hochschild doesn’t wait to get to the point when discussing the topics. He uses many studies and facts to help argue his points and is used efficiently, but also in a way it’s also ineffective as the lack of studies and facts that have used that would even try to support the other side of the discussion. I agree to the author's argument of how even families should continue evolving along side with the economy, to help couples to support one another as equals, rather then opposites with specific assignments.
In Letha Scanzoni’s book Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of Marriage and Family she observes that a wife’s duty was “to please her husband...to train the children so that they would reflect credit on her husband”(205). Alongside the wife’s duties Scanzoni provides the husband’s duty to “provide economic resources”(207).These expectations have long been changed, since then these have become common courtesies. Today, we see less and less of the providing father, homemaking wife and respectable children family structure. We are now seeing what sociologists call the senior-partner/junior-partner structure. Women and mothers are now opting for the choice to work and provide more economic resources for the family. This has changed those expected duties of both men and women in a family scene. A working mother more or less abandons the role of homemaker, to become a “breadwinning” mother, and the father stays his course with his work and provide for the family. Suzanne M. Bianchi in her book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life comments on the effect of mothers working and the time they spend in the home. “Mothers are working more and including their children in their leisure time” (Chapter 10), now that ...
The family faces many challenges and must overcome many obstacles. For each problem that arises there is some type of solution. However, the solution to a problem might not come easily. What might be beneficial for one family could be a problem for a company or another family. In modern America men and women are both encouraged to be in the work place and to prioritize their careers. Jobs have become more demanding and time consuming. This stress poses a threat to families, especially new parents. Offering parental leave has numerous benefits for individuals and families, but creates challenges for businesses. This paper will discuss the benefits of parental leave for families, the challenges businesses face because of parental leave, and my
Work-life integration is a constant battle among many women in the United States; the demands in the household and in the workplace are increasing on a daily basis, more often than not leaving women out of the workplace. The article “A Framework for Promoting Women’s Career Intentionally and Work-Life Integration” gives us the women in the workplace, exposed. What young college women are being told and what actually happens when a family starts becoming an option. We are introduced to models in which young women can benefit from, for example the Kaleidoscope Career Model, created to explain the differences between the careers of men and women and how women can focus on three very important concepts such as, authenticity, balance, and change.
In today’s society the relationship between one’s occupation and one’s family life is drastically different than what society viewed in the 1950’s. In the 1950’s the stereotypical family consisted of a working father and a stay at home mother (Hertz and Marshall 2001). This view has altered throughout the years, however there is still traditional stereotypes in today's society. The expectations for a dual-parent household in society today think that women should stay home and care for the kids, while the men earn the majority income in order to support the household. However since the 1950’s, Rosie the Riveter was a symbol for women’s right to work, and ever since women have been a crucial part of the working world and enjoy being productive and independent.
As large numbers of married couples work outside the home and have parenting responsibilities, their multiple roles have grown. Therefore, the combination of work and family roles generates a spillover of stress in these two areas. Balancing work and family is both a female and male issue. The demands of work pull them away from family intimacy, while the demands of family pull them in. Either extreme can be problematic for individuals and their intimate relationships.
Moreover, the importance of work, study, and family roles of women and how they combine them all to get a thorough understanding of their expectations are discussed. Data from prior research concerning the challenging task of women being able to balance work and family. The article discusses how these efforts to balance the competing demands of both family and work frequently result in work-family conflict, and how several studies have shown that women experience more work-family conflict than men (Markle, Seward, Spencer, & Yeatts,
A significant component of an employee’s well-being in today’s world is the ability to maintain a healthy balance between their profession and family life. As the prevalence of dual income families has increased, so has the idea of maintaining the responsibilities at home, as well as, ensuring one is productive at work. The attainment of work-life balance continues to be a prominent standard not only for employees in the workforce, but also for the organizations that employ them (McMillan, Morris, & Atchley, 2011). Work/life concerns are dominant across all cultures and can involve individuals of every gender, occupation, income level, and age. Moreover, in the 2007 SHRM Job Satisfaction Survey Report, “flexibility to balance life and work issues” ranks as “very important” for 52% of total respondents and 48% of HR professionals (Frincke, 2007). This small sample of research findings suggest that the work/life issues facing employees and organizations are far more widespread than we may think. This paper will go into a further analysis of the topic of work-life (family) balance; specifically defining what it is and its various components, outcomes and effects on an individual’s well-being, and examples of work/life programs that employers may implement within their organization.
6 “Flexible Working Time and Family Life: A Review of Changes:, McRae, Susan. 1989, Oxford.