- I'm Janet Gornick,
this is Heather Boushey
as you probably figured that out.
So I'm just going to take a few moments
for some introduction.
And I'm actually, let me mention
that I'm playing double duty this evening.
I am both, I should say
I'm playing triple duty.
I'm introducing us.
We're efficient around here.
I'm introducing us and
I'm asking questions
and I'm also going to be
answering some of them
because we're conversing together so,
I'm just going to do whatever I feel like.
It's really my pleasure
to be hosting this program
though, which is brought to
you by The Graduate Center
Public Programs in
partnership with he Luxembourg
Income Study Center.
One of the research centers
here at The Graduate Center.
I think most of you
probably know, but for some
who maybe are new and for
the livestream audience,
let me just mention where you are.
You are at the CUNY Graduate Center.
This is a doctoral granting
campus of the City University
of New York.
We have 24 campuses here in New York City
and this is where most
of the graduate degrees
are granted.
The Graduate Center is a
school of Arts and Sciences.
It's a center for applied
and theoretical research,
and very much a platform for
performance and conversation
and lectures.
That's a big part of our
engagement here in New York City
is public programming.
So, I've had the great
pleasure over the last
three years of partnering
with Karen Sander
and Jake Gullan and
others here in overseeing
a number of programs
related to inequality.
So this one is, at least in more or less,
in that area as well, so
it's really been a pleasure
and I hope that you will enjoy what we're
going to do.
So let me tell you a little bit more.
I'm going to introduce, as I said,
I'm Janet Gornick, I'm
professor and political science
and sociology here at The Graduate Center
and I'm the director of
the Luxembourg Income
Study Center.
The Luxembourg Income
Study, which is now known
as LIS as a cross-national data archive
in Luxembourg that enables cross-national
research on poverty and inequality.
And we have a satellite office here
at The Graduate Center.
This is Heather Boushey as I said.
You know, Heather is executive director
and chief economist at
the Washington Center
for Equitable Growth and
she's a senior fellow
at The Center for American
Progress in Washington D.C.
She got her PhD here
in New York City, yay,
from tTe New School for Social Research
and a Bachelor's degree
from Hampshire College.
Before her current position
at the Washington Center
for Equitable Growth, she
was at the Joint Economic
Committee in Congress at
The Center for Economic
and Policy Research and
also at the Economic Policy
Institute, these are some
of the great progressive
think tanks in Washington.
She was co-author, an EPI for
their flagship publication,
The State of Working America.
Heather grew up in a
union family in Mukilteo?
- Mukilteo.
- Mukilteo, Washington.
And her family roots
inform her work as I think
she will tell you.
So, I wanna say just a
few more words by way
of biography and I'm
going to indulge myself
in a biography of Heather that's also
an autobiography and
you'll see why, I hope,
in a moment here.
Because, and I'm saying
this because I think,
I want you to know a little
bit about the context
of this conversation and the substance.
I've known Heather for many years.
I think we figured about
20 years when she was
a graduate student at The New School.
For many of those years,
we both worked on what
I often call work family
policy, she prefers
the term work-life policy,
and over those many years,
our work shared a lot of commonalities.
We've both paid a lot of
attention to the same policy
areas, paid family leave,
the regulation of working
time and child care, other forms of care.
We've both spent years in Washington D.C.
In the middle of the
sausage making, way before
graduate school, and Heather after school.
We both tend to see the
world through economic eyes
although she more than I.
And our overlapping lives then meant
that we, over the many
years, have been I would say
20 panels together.
So I hope we're going to find something
to disagree on so we don't
bore you all to death
but, so we've appeared for many years.
Heather's work was on the
U.S. and mine has been
comparative, again, in
the same policy areas.
In the last five years we've both shifted
our work, we're both
running research centers,
focused on income inequality.
Though shifts I think took
place for various reasons.
And moving from work family policy
into income inequality
took us into new types
of data, new intellectual
and policy communities,
new questions and a
different set of meetings
and conferences and I often note, that now
when I go to meetings
on income inequality,
there's only one person there whom I knew
from my prior life in work and
family, and that's Heather.
It's nice to see her, as I often tell her,
but that's not why I'm telling you this.
My point is that these two
intellectual communities
interact far too little.
It's this large community of research
and to some extent activism
on work and family,
which has really developed a great amount
over recent decades.
It's a community
overwhelmingly full of women,
something we'll talk about, I think.
And I would say it has
historically paid too little
attention to class,
although that's changed
in recent years.
The world of income inequality scholars
where we both find ourselves today,
one could make the mirror
comment, overwhelmingly male.
But I think it's a
world and a conversation
that has largely missed the
importance and the complexity
of work family or work-life
conflict and especially
issues related to care.
These two communities, these
two intellectual worlds
should interact but they
don't anywhere enough
and my great hope is that Heather's book
is going to change that
because she's bringing
these two conversations
together and she's one of
the rare scholars who thinks
about income inequality
inseparably from questions
related to work and family.
So that's where we are.
So I'm really delighted to have her,
with this wonderful book,
which I was going to
hold up but all of a
sudden, I don't have it,
but I think some of
you probably do have it
and it's for sale, as you'll see.
So here's what we're gonna do,
we're right on time.
From about 10 past seven
to 7:55 we're going to
talk about the book.
I have a number of questions that I'd like
to ask Heather.
Of course I'll throw in my
own thoughts a little bit
here and there but mostly
we want to hear from her
and her thinking in relation to the book.
Around 7:55 we're gonna open up for Q&A,
from you all, so we want
to give you a chance
to ask questions and there are going to be
some microphones, thank you, Karen.
I'll hold that up again in a second.
And at 8:15, Heather's
gonna sign some books
and they're for sale.
And the book is called,
Finding Time: The Economics
of Work-Life Conflict.
You can see it right
here, Heather Boushey.
And I'm afraid just to
demonstrate in edition,
the smallness of our world.
I was actually asked to
review the book for science.
So first of all, it's quite thrilling that
this book would be reviewed in science.
I was, for her, yeah,
you're right, for her.
Well, I mean actually,
I think for all of us,
that science thinks this
book is worthy of reviewing,
is really marvelous.
And I was very happy to
be asked to review it.
I did actually say, I
know her, do you really
want me to review it?
So they asked me if I could be objective
and I said that I could.
So I reviewed it.
And so a copy of my review,
which will be published
next week, the galleys are
on the table out there.
So, it did give me the
opportunity to read the book
extremely carefully.
So, there are a few things about the book
I didn't like so we'll see
if we can get to those,
so, not really, but a little bit.
Okay, so here we are.
So, Heather, no, we see
things aa little bit
differently which we'll get
to in just a few moments.
Okay, so Heather, let me
turn, after that lengthy
opening, what I'd love
you to do is take about
three minutes, if you
would, and tell the audience
here, what the book it about.
What are your main claims?
- And thank you all for coming,
and thank you, Janet.
And I especially enjoyed the biography,
autobiography of your introduction
and I wanna start there
with the three minutes
about the book.
Because I, like Janet, I'm thinking a lot
about inequality.
I'm an economist and you
know, if you think about
the biggest economic
trends in the United States
over the past few decades,
it's been this very big
income squeeze, this rising
inequality and the squeeze
on family incomes.
And that's one big trend that's happened,
but of course, it's
happened alongside this
squeeze on family time.
We've seen women moving out of the home
and into the labor market
alongside this squeeze
on incomes and these two
things are interrelated.
In many ways, family has
coped with the stagnating
wages, especially of men,
by having women put in
more hours of work.
I'm not saying necessarily
that it's causal,
I think there's a lot
of reasons that women
have moved into the labor market because
it's been, especially middle-class
and upper middle-class
women who've increased their
labor force participation.
But what I talk about in the book is that
without those added hours
and then the added rising
earnings of women, families at the bottom
of the income distribution would've seen
their incomes fall even
further than they did
between 1979 and today.
Families in the middle-class would've seen
their incomes fall, although they did grow
a little bit, about 12% or
so, they would've fallen
had women not increased
their hours and earnings.
And professional families
would've seen their incomes
continue to rise, but
not rise the sky-high way
that they have.
So the added employment
of women has really made
all the difference in thinking about these
inequality trends, but
all of this added work,
has led to this time squeeze for families
and it's happened within a policy context
that's made for families
that don't look like
what families look like today.
So, I argue in the book
that, that the bulk
of our social policy, I mean
this is not an argument,
this is a fact, the bulk
of our social policy
around time use can all be traced back
to the new deal, the Social Security Act,
the Fair Labor Standards Act,
the National Labor Relations Act.
These are the key pieces of legislation
that's still bound, that still provides
the boundaries for the
rules that govern time use.
And wonderful pieces of legislation,
spear-headed by the first
woman cabinet secretary,
Secretary Perkins who was the first person
to be a secretary of
the Department of Labor,
the newly implemented agency.
But done in a time of
when they weren't thinking
about care work, they were
thinking about overwork,
minimum wages, the Social
Security Act of course,
is about how do you get
people income when they're
not gonna work again
because they're retired
or because they've lost
a job through no fault
of their own and you're
trying to get somebody
through this time period,
but not thinking about the ways that the,
the fact if you have
no one at home, today,
what kinds of policies do you need?
So, I talk about this, that, you know,
those policies presume that
there's this silent partner
at home that does all the care work
and the workers can
just go about their day
presuming that somebody
else is going to pack
their lunch and do their
laundry and take care
of the kids, and that
doesn't, that's not true
anymore, but they're sort of doing this
in this policy context
that hasn't adapted.
So what we need to do is rethink this.
I make a lot of arguments in the book
that this isn't just
about economics or policy,
but femininely it's about politics,
that when we think about
the income squeeze,
because it's a time pressure and because
it effects how we live our daily lives,
I see sort of, is we're
looking at the political
climb and then people feeling frustrated,
they're not just
frustrated about not having
enough money, they're
frustrated about the added hours
they have to do and they're
not getting enough money
and nobody's helping them.
There isn't any support
for any of that work
and we haven't addressed
this lack of the silent
partner at home anymore.
We haven't come to terms with the fact
that the American wife is now actually,
in most families, the American worker.
So those are the big themes.
As an economist, I talk about
the economic implications
of dealing with these issues.
And I look at the policies that we need.
I break them down into policies for when
we need to be here at
home, policies around
paid time off, paid sick
days, paid family leave,
policies when we need to be there at work
but we need to make
that work for families,
predictable schedules, access
to workplace flexibility,
continued rules on
overwork, mandatory time,
part-time parody, policies around care,
both for children and for elders.
I probably talk more in
the book about eldercare
than childcare cause I think
we know about childcare
a lot more than we know about eldercare.
And then I make an
argument about fairness,
that because we live in
this world that isn't made
for families as they live and work today,
there's a lot of
discrimination against people
that have care responsibilities
and it's really,
we need to also come to terms with that.
We have a work world
that presumes that you
don't have care responsibilities
but most people do,
how do we cope with that?
And then I argue a lot
that there are positive,
economic implications of
dealing with these challenges.
- Great, that's a great
segway into the first,
thank you, Heather.
For the first question
that I wanted to ask you,
you sort of touched on this already,
but one of the things
that, for those of you
who have had a chance
to read the book or even
take a look at it quickly,
you'll realize that
the book is framed around
an economic argument,
with ideas, economic
ideas, and as Heather notes
in the book, a lot of the
discussion out in the public
world is sort of about other things,
about family well-being, about fairness,
about social cohesion,
kind of asking question
about why are we as a
country, for example,
not nicer to families?
But your argument is really very much
an economics argument and
so my question to you,
I know you're an economist, but I know
that you think in a very disciplinary way.
Did you write the book
as an economics book
because that's your natural
instinct or was that
a strategic decision to
get a policy audience
more comfortable?
What makes you hopeful that anyone cares
about logic, economic or otherwise,
in the political world
that we live in today?
(Heather laughs)
- Well, yes, I could be delusional,
but I don't think so.
I wrote the book, I came
at it from an economic
perspective, I mean,
primarily because I am
an economist and I've worked
a lot with the advocates
that push for these
policies over the years
and am often the only
economist in the room
in those circles and I'm
often in all these economic
rooms where nobody's thinking about time
and they're not thinking about care
and they're not thinking
about these massive changes
that have happened for
families up and down
the income spectrum.
And so, I really, I mean, kinda
like in your introduction,
for me I felt like it
was a mashup of my two
different worlds that I have
been a part of for so long,
that we can't ignore the, the fact
that employers want this unbounded time
and that there are real
economic implications
all throughout the economic cycle in terms
of labor supply and labor
demand and profitability
and family consumption
that are all effected
by the lack of dealing with addressing
work-life conflict.
So, I came at it because I think there are
these very serious economic implications
but there were a couple of other things
that really motivated me.
I would say that there were three.
One is that I was really
tired of reading about
these issues on the Style pages.
Now, I love reading the Style pages
of the magazines and the newspaper,
it's great, but it's really
frustrating, you know,
month after month see
these really important
issues around how people
are supporting themselves,
showing up in that
section of the newspaper
rather than in the business section.
And so I wanted to make
this economic argument.
Second, one of, another frustration, I,
I don't know if we all write books because
we're frustrated about
things but certainly,
that was the case for me.
Another was that, a lot of
people, when they're talking
about the economic
implications of dealing with
work-life conflict, a
lot of people will say,
okay, we need to make the
business case and when you
go out there and when
advocates are trying to push
for policies, you'll hear
policy makers push back
or the business community push back,
but this isn't good for business.
And I talk a lot in the
book about Christine Quinn,
if you indulge me in a quick story here,
cause it was a seriously motivating point
for the book.
In 2010, in New York City,
there was this campaign
for paid sick days.
And the advocates had
lined up the majority
of the city council and
Christine Quinn was,
you know, she said she was progressive.
She was a city council
leader, she said that
she wanted to be the next
Mayor but she wouldn't
bring up paid sick days for a vote.
This was a bill, if my memory serves me,
it was either five or
seven days, seven days
of paid sick days,
allowing workers to earn
a few days of paid sick
days a year, right?
This is not going to destroy capitalism
as we know it, but in
her statement for why
she wouldn't bring it up for a vote,
she said, this is a really important,
and I'm paraphrasing,
I quote it in the book
but it was something like,
this is really important,
it's nice to have, and
I really wanna do it
but I just can't because,
my doing so would threaten
the viability of small
businesses in New York City.
And that's an argument
about maybe an individual
business, but that's not
an economic argument.
Economists, we're supposed
to take into account
what's happening, not
just inside of one firm
that's looking at the immediate cost
tomorrow of a policy change,
but the whole economy,
what is this going to do to families?
What's this going to do to consumption?
What's this going to do to
Labor supply, labor demand?
If every firm has to do
this then you're leveling
the playing field.
So the argument, we for
too long have been trapped
in this very small
argument about what's good
for the economy that's very narrow.
And I feel like these
are the perfect issues
to say, we haven't been
thinking about the economy
as economists would
be, we've been thinking
of it in this very small supply side angle
and so that was, so, I
wrote an economics book
using the policy issues
that I know something about
but some days it felt more like they were
an example of a bigger economic argument
rather than the other way around.
- Okay, so let me ask you
then, talk a little bit
about how you decided
which policies to focus on.
So, we know, you begin with, sort of,
what's the problem, what's broken?
And we, it's many
things, you talked about,
time poverty, economic insecurities,
stress, inequity,
regressive wage structures,
and so forth, and so, you've proposed
this institutional fix
which basically includes
various forms of paid
leave, New York State
just passed paid leave, as some of you
probably know.
The regulation of working
time and of course, care.
So, talk to us a little
bit about why those three
and why only those three,
and I say that again,
you'll forgive a little autobiography,
Heather knows this, so
I myself wrote a book
many years ago, the
same three policy areas
but comparative and a lot of people said,
well you didn't talk about healthcare,
you didn't talk about
housing, you didn't talk
about actually even the tax system,
you didn't talk about transportation.
All of these things effect our capacity
to balance work and "life".
So, how did you decide what was in
and what was out?
Does this reflect your notion of either
the real policy priorities or political
feasibility or are you talking to the next
administration, what are you doing there?
- Yeah, well these are all good questions.
Yes, I mean, I think that,
so one thing that I would add,
so there are three,
so the policy around paid time off,
the policy around scheduling,
policies around care and
policies around fairness.
So I talk a bout family responsibilities,
discrimination, just make
sure that we add that one.
Cause I do think it's really important.
But, each of these is about,
it's in some way about
time and about dealing
with the loss of the
silent partner at home.
And so that was my
entry point and thinking
about what the new deal
gave us in terms of
allowing families to both
do what we need to do
to earn the income we need to support
our families and have
enough time to provide
the care and love and attention,
all the good stuff that
happens inside families
every day, so my entry
point was thinking about
that intersection right there,
and granted there's a lot of other things
but I do think there is a concise list
of policies that are about that time use
and about dealing with
the fact that there's no
longer, in most families,
up and down the income
spectrum, only about a quarter of families
with children actually have a full-time,
stay-at-home, caregiver.
And that of course is a remarkable shift,
but it's that shift that I'm
trying to really address.
So, and then onto the political question.
I was trying to lay out a policy agenda
for policy makers who
want to deal with this
and was very hopeful.
I tried to get the book
out before the start
of the 2016 campaign cycle.
I think I did okay.
Like, you know, it's been
available for a few weeks but,
but because I saw these
issues coming down the pike
and I know that we will
get to this, you know,
hopefully later on in the questions,
but it seemed to me that this bucket,
there's a lot of energy around them
and we can see the
intersection and so thinking
about this as a package, you can't just do
one of them, you have to do all four
and so I wanted to make it clear,
it's not just one, you have to do all four
of these together in order
to really make a difference.
If you have a policy
platform, this is what
it needs to be.
- Okay, actually, why don't
you take a moment or two,
I realize, I'm sort of
presuming that people know
what the policy package contains.
So, talk about, so leave
of course enable people
to stay home a bit,
childcare and other forms
of non-family care enable
people to leave home
and then obviously
working time is going to
reorganize some of the
demands on their time.
And I know the fairness
piece is in there as well,
Heather's particularly
interested in discrimination
against caregivers as well as against,
we know much more about
gender, that's sort of,
I think, most of you are
probably more familiar with that.
So, talk a little bit
about though, this package
is going to balance the
capacity to stay home
when needed, to leave
the home when needed,
is it going to be
maximizing people's choice?
Is it good for, is the
policy package designed
to help parental employment
or child well-being?
Or, tell them a little bit
about the policy package
and what it would all look like in place.
- So, I mean, you've summarized some of it
but to kinda put it into
a little bit of context,
right, we need, if there's nobody at home,
you need to be able to deal in times when
somebody's sick, a kid's
sick, or your elder parent's
sick, or whatever, sick kids, sick people,
you need some sort of,
or you have a new child,
you need to be able to do all the things
that if you had somebody at
home, they could deal with.
So I think it, one sort of
way of thinking about it now
is that, for some of the need is that,
you know, it used to
be, of course, the case,
if you had a stay-at-home
mom, a stay-at-home wife,
right, when in America
assume a heterosexual married
couple and assume a stay-at-home wife,
as they age and as his parents become sick
and needed caring or
like, the Aunt or somebody
in his family needs care,
then she, because she
would have this time, would
be able to provide this care.
And so, the policy
package has to deal with,
not just the children,
but anything that that
silent partner, that
person at home used to have
the capacity to do, so what
is it you need to be able
to give people who actually have jobs,
a little bit of time off,
knowing that they can get
their job back, and
ideally not losing pay,
so that they can stay-at-home
and provide that care.
So that's sort of the first bucket.
The second though is that, around hours,
you know, what's remarkable of course is,
as we've seen more
caregivers go into work,
we've also seen the rise
of unpredictable schedules,
we've seen it be very
difficult for workers,
especially low-income
and middle-class workers
to have any control over
their schedules at all.
So, those workers that
have access to workplace
flexibility tend to be those at the top,
so, but, you know, and I'm sure everyone
in this audience and
watching has had that one day
where it's like, if you
could just, you know,
make your schedule work a little bit,
then everything could
fall into place, right.
If you could just get
off work an hour early
to pick your kid up after
work or find some way
to adjudicate it then
everything else could work.
So giving workers some
control over schedules
or at least having a predictable schedule,
which is now so important,
especially for low-income
workers is the second bucket.
And the care issues which
I think are well known,
but I think it's important
to note that it's not,
it's about access but
it's about affordability
and quality and there are
significant labor supply
implications and even
labor demand implications
for the kinds of quality care we have.
So those are the first three buckets.
And then the discrimination
piece is somewhat obvious
that we should not be
discriminating against people
who have care responsibilities.
And Vermont and San Francisco
are two of the places
that have been experimenting
with family responsibilities
discrimination legislation,
which is very exciting to see.
- Right, exactly.
Okay, so what I was
hoping, and I think you got
a bit of that, to get
a sense of the package
and sort of the theory and
the framework that Heather
has put together as
she thinks about what's
the problem that we're trying to solve,
rather the set of problems.
So, let me turn your attention, Heather,
now to policy and politics
a little bit more directly.
In the book you've
written a lot about subbed
national policy development,
meaning of course,
policies at the state and city level,
which is where most of the
activity is taking place,
by the way, in most of these
policy areas, in the U.S.
So we've got, now we've had
various forms of essentially
maternity pay in five
states now, we have paid,
some form of paid parental
leave in about five states
and a number of things
are happening at the state
and city levels.
So, I have been concerned
for a very long time,
well let me back up just
to say, you're quite
praising a lot of these local programs,
cause they deserve, I think.
But I've been concerned
for a very long time,
in the U.S., as advocates
and policy makers
are building our very rudimentary system
of workin family, that we're doing it
at the state and local level,
I digress to say something
that most of you probably
know, we're way behind
the rest of the world in almost all of
these policy areas.
They're mostly national and they're really
widely established, in
particular all through Europe,
but here we have almost
nothing at the national level,
our laws are simply silent
on many of these things,
or they're meager or both.
So a lot is happening at
the state and local level
and Heather gives a lot of examples.
So, my question is, can you help me
be less worried about this.
I worry if we develop things
at the state and local
level, that we'll never get
them at the national level
and that will introduce
new forms of inequality
because then, people often
say, as sort of a facetious
comment for kids, if you
want to have a good life,
you know, you want to
choose the right parents,
so you want to choose the right parents
in the right state also, in this country.
- San Francisco.
- Or the right city, right,
cause if you have the right
parents in the wrong
state in this country,
it's worse than the other way around.
So, there's incredible
inequity across the states
and cities, okay, I'm giving a speech here
a little bit, but what
activists will often say is,
if we develop it locally,
it will trickle up,
think about the new
deal, but there are other
examples, like for example,
temporary disability
which was maternity,
where we had five states
in like 55 years and we
didn't get a sixth state.
So, I worry it's not spreading laterally,
it's not going to trickle up, and so,
when paid family leave
was passed in California
and all the advocates were
popping champagne corks,
I was crying in my office.
- Oh, oh no.
Oh, well, so.
So, let me give you some optimism
on two different kinds of fronts.
So first, I, well let me
just start off by saying
I a hundred percent, I mean,
I work in D.C. so I think
federal policy making
matters and we're one nation
and we can't be giving
people different standards
and rights in different
parts of the country.
I don't think that's sustainable because,
especially because these
things are so important.
So, I think we should
have federal solutions.
One thing that I'm so
excited about this book,
when I started working
on Work-Life, sort of,
when I was dedicating
my intellectual energy
to it full-time was in
about 2005 and I was like,
I really wanna focus on this.
And when I started, you had to look abroad
for examples of, in all
areas that I'm looking at,
you had to look abroad for good models.
By the time I finished the
book, every single policy
idea that I talk about
in this book is in place
somewhere in America.
And every time I think about it,
it sends chills down my spine because it's
an amazing accomplishment and so,
one point is that, in
a time when there is,
you know, we have this
perception of this horrible
political disfunction, you
know, nothing's happening,
we haven't been able to do
anything for working families,
I would like to point
out that the bright spot
in this, in the political
outcomes is policies
around work-life.
We have seen enormous accomplishments.
And that's really, there's
something very powerful there.
It's really compelling to people.
It's compelling to
politicians, it's compelling
to voters, and we've been able to make it,
people have been able to make it happen.
So, that's on the plus side, right?
It's demonstrating success
and, as an economist,
it's super exciting because
now there's all these
places we can study and we
can say, what the economic
impacts are and push
back on people who say,
well we can't do it
cause it's a job killer.
I say, no, actually, this state's done it
and this city's done
it, and we can show you,
you don't have to go to France.
You can just go to California, New Jersey,
or Wisconsin, all sorts
of places for different
kinds of policies.
So that's one point.
I'm glad that you mentioned
temporary disability
insurance cause it is
the perfect, sort of foil
for this which is that, in
the 1950's, five states,
California, New Jersey,
Rhode Island, New York,
and Hawaii, all implemented
temporary disability insurance
programs that allowed individual
workers to take up to,
in some cases, it depends on the state,
the rules a little bit
different, but about
a year or so leave if you
have your own illness,
and that included, that
includes leave for pregnancy,
for maternity recovery.
Well, it's very exciting
because the first new
social insurance programs that we've seen
in the United States
since then had been states
that have added on paid
family and medical leave
for, to do baby bonding,
to care for a new child,
and to care for another family member
in a number of states.
California, New Jersey, Rhode Island,
now New York as of this
week, and we haven't seen
Hawaii do this yet, but Hawaii's program
is different, I don't
know that we will see them
going the same way.
But I say that because the only states
where we've seen paid family medical leave
have been the states that
have this long-standing
program that they could
latch onto to create
this new system, because
creating paid family medical
leave is very complicated,
it requires a whole structure
to identify eligibility
and administer benefits.
So think we're actually
at the end of the line
on, I think, and I know
there's state advocates
who I'm sure if they're
watching or in the room,
would be very frustrated
that I would say that,
but I think we're at the end of the line
in terms of getting states
to adopt paid family
medical leave and I think
it puts a lot of urgency
and pressure on Congress to act.
And there's great legislation
that's been introduced
that would provide 12 weeks
of paid family medical leave
just like here in New York state,
the legislation's actually very similar
at the federal level to
what you all just did here.
And I think it's putting
a lot of pressure there,
so I think that we can learn from it.
There's a lot of great
examples, but I think
you're right that there's
an end point to it
and I think that, I think
that now is the moment
to be really pushing at the federal level
to say, you know what, we've
learned as much as we can
and now we need to make
this happen because
if we wait a decade or
two, then it'll be like
TDI and it'll never happen.
So, there's urgency which
is why I finished the book.
- Well, that was, as I
said, that was a cheerful
take on the TDI story,
because that was a long
50 years between the time
that nothing happened
and then nothing else happened.
I think what worries me
though, in all seriousness,
with this paid leave
and we're both sort of
policy geeks watching this very carefully.
My concern is 20 years
from now that 15 states
will have excellent
social insurance funded,
paid family medical
leave, 15 states will have
mediocre paid family leave, and
20 states will have nothing.
And we know which 20 states those will be.
- See, I think that it's so
hard to setup a new system
and it's so costly.
And Washington State
passed paid parental leave
back in 2007, they passed it in 2007
and they still have not implemented it
because they can't figure out how to pay
to setup this new system.
I actually think it's very,
D.C.'s trying to do it
and you look at their legislation,
how much it's going to cost, it's like,
oh, my goodness, it is
ridiculous I think to do,
it doesn't make sense.
It's not a good use of public funds
to be setting up these stand alone systems
and so I think there will be pressure
to do this, because how it's also,
it's shown how politically powerful it is,
how potent it is, but also in the favor of
the end of the line, there's been,
there's over two dozen, maybe more than,
I mean there's definitely
more than two dozen,
I don't know if it's three
dozen yet, places that
have passed into law paid sick days,
also New York once Quinn
didn't become Mayor
and you got Bill De
Blasio, it was like one of
the first things he
did was gave, you know,
signed into law paid sick days.
All these other states and
cities and now the number
of states has done this
as well, but a number
of states have actually then implemented
what they call preemption
laws where in Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, through a ballot initiative
that passed like over 60
percent, a ballot initiative
in Milwaukee to get paid sick
days and Governor Scott Walker
was like, no, no, you city,
you don't have the right
to implement paid sick days,
we're gonna preempt you.
And there's a number of other
states that have don that
and that's been very
frustrating which also pushes
for federal legislation.
So I think there's a
lot of pressure pushing
towards the federal now and a lot of,
a lot of energy building
off this state excitement,
so I hear you, I hear you on this.
- I hope so.
I think she's enormously optimistic, but,
no, I hope so.
I must say, during the eight years
of the Bush Administration,
in all seriousness,
it was all useless to
push towards pay leave
at the national level
so, you may know this,
the Family Medical Leave
Act which is unpaid
was the first law signed by Clinton-Gore
and it looked as if, I
think when we all thought
that Gore was going to
be the next President,
he was arguing that they were going to put
wages in the Family Medical Leave Act
and that was a great moment of hope.
Of course, that didn't
happen, but all the activism
shifted to the state
level and so, I think,
you know, it's an important question.
And actually, historians
are actually divided
on whether state level
policy making trickles up
or crowds out at the federal level.
So, I hope you're right.
I appreciate your, the
logic of your answer.
- Well, this is the first,
I mean, I've only been
in Washington since 2000,
but this is the first
Presidential election
that we've ever seen where
paid leave is actually
a campaign issue, and
it was a campaign issue
on the Republican side
until Rubio was forced out.
I was so bummed when he was forced out
because he actually had
a paid family leave plan,
so, I mean, this is the
first time it's been
elevated to that level
and I think it's because
both the urgency but
because of the (mumbles).
So, that's another.
- I hope so, I hope so.
Let me ask you then about politics.
A couple of more questions.
Talk to us about social activism.
This has also been a
great political paradox
in this country, a lot
of political scientists
have been very perplexed as to why
American families have
complained so little
and have accepted this incredibly
meager policy landscape.
One of my concerns has been, of course,
this is a cliche, I've
written a couple of papers
called, Why Aren't
American Parents Screaming?
One of my concerns has
always been, and this is,
again, a very cliche
observation, has been an activism
in this area, you've
pretty much hinted at this
with the Style pages, has fallen to women.
What's causing that?
What's causing consequence?
How do we break out of that?
- Yeah so, a number of years ago,
I was, we formed a group of,
activists and scholars
thinking about work-life
issues and we did a couple of retreats,
kinda planning like the
agenda for what we wanted
to see happen.
And there were about 15
of us and the coordinator
had us go around the
room and talk about how
we got here.
So it was one of these
moments, you're cankering
around, you don't really
expect, you don't really,
you know, some of these
things aren't really memorable
when you do these kinds
of little exercises,
but this one was really
remarkable because every single
one of us, to a one, I
would say 2/3 came from
a union family or were
union organizers before
doing work-life issues and the other third
either came from a
family of social workers.
And I thought that was really remarkable
because this basket of
issues, while important
to unions has not been at the forefront
of what the union
movement has been pushing
in terms of policy.
You know, there's the Labor
Project for Working Families
which has done great work
and they have supported
these issues at the state
level but at the federal level,
there hasn't been sort
of the idea that this is
the number one, I mean, I
think some of it is about
the entrenchment pushing
back on new deal policies,
but that there is, there
has been this sort of push
by a bunch of people who are like,
we need to bring this into this community.
I think that one of the,
I mean it's an ongoing
frustration to me that
it is primarily women
when I work on these issues,
it's actually one of my
hopes that by writing
a book about economics,
that I can convince some
economists and some men
who want to have a highly
competitive, productive
economy to see the full force of this.
It's also my hope that by
pointing out things like,
you know, the United States now has lower
labor supply both of men and women
than almost every other OECD country
and that's new and
scholars think that that is
a no small part because
we don't have these kinds
of policies.
That's a pretty disheartening statistic
because you can't have a vibrant economy
if you don't have people
at work and if you're
wasting all this talent.
Another study that I cite, I feel like
almost very talk I give, this study
by Peter Klenow and three other authors
and he's at the business
school at Stanford,
they found that looking over the period
from 1960-2008, that
between 16 and 20% of U.S.
economic growth was
because of the opening up
of professions to women and minorities.
And that's just one
study of a lot of studies
that show that you want
people in the labor force.
We know that growth is caused
by people getting out there.
And so, my hope is that
by making that argument,
you can get more men into it.
But I will say that, a
lot of the women that I
know that are in it, are in it because
they see these profoundly as labor issues
not as women's issues, so, that's my--
- Yeah, and I think everybody knows,
it's been a very, I think a real drag
on activism that so many of these issues
got tagged as being women's issues
which obviously dooms them politically
and I noted in all these 20 million panels
that we were on together,
usually the audience
would be 98% women and I had
one very interesting experience, I just,
to say this that I was
giving a talk in Washington
many times about looking at
models in other countries
and had been on a number of
panels with Heidi Hartman
who was the President of the Institute
for Women's Policy Research and usually
they were called working
family or gender equality,
or women at work and how we're gonna make
this better, and we
would go into these rooms
over and over again, full
of women, which I always
thought was a really
big political problem.
And I was invited to a panel
that the Economic Policy
Institute organized
with Heidi, we gave the same talk
and they called the thing,
it was in Washington,
it was called, the Problems
of low-wage earning households
and I walked in, the room
was full of men and it was
the same panel, it was just relabeled.
So, I think it was very, very interesting,
I agree with you completely,
but I think we've really
caused ourselves, I frankly
think, this is my view,
I actually don't know
what you think about this.
I've lost a few friends over this.
I was very disheartened
by organizations like
Moms Rising and these political
activist organizations
using the language and
imagery of maternity.
I think it was really a
problem and I know others
share that view, but I don't
know if you do actually.
- I, I mean, I call it
work-life, primarily
for that reason, I want
to focus on how this
is about time.
This is, I mean, the
labor movement was founded
on the notion of taking
peoples time back, right?
That's, this is what, this
is what this is about.
It's about time, it's not just about women
and it's not, we can't make
it about gender even though,
so women have changed how
they spend their days,
but it affects everybody.
It affects men, children,
the elderly, everyone.
So I always talk about families or time
and trying not to make
this into a gender issue,
even though it
disproportionately affects women,
some of the negative
repercussions and some of
the policies, but I think
actually what's encouraging
is that,
(laughs)
wow, okay, so I'm going to say,
what's encouraging is
that things are so bad
that what you see now and
what, in a number of years
ago the families in Work
Institute which is here
in New York City, Ellen Galinsky's shop
actually found that men are
reporting more work family
conflict than are women
and that is a remarkable
statistic and I think that some of it has
to do with the elder issue
that I mentioned earlier,
you know, if you're caring
for an aging parent,
you know, if you're a
guy, your wife isn't going
to be able to do it cause
she's not going to be able
to take time for, you know,
because she's got her own
job and she's got her own parents so,
men are increasingly taking
leaves that are closer to
parody to do elder care.
So that's a remarkable,
so it made things so bad,
right, that men are frustrated as well,
and that's a good sign I
think, for social change.
I have so many quotes in the book from men
and from especially high profile men.
The Obama Administration has been great
at getting men out there
and talking about it.
Jason Furman, who's the
current chair of the Economic
Advisor's just took six
weeks of paternity leave.
It was great although
I saw him at an event,
he was not speaking but
he was at, you know what,
he was speaking actually at an event.
I was like, oh has he got all this time
I'm on paternity leave, I
was like, that's awesome
but what are you doing here?
But the fact that he did
it, the administration
let him do it and there have been a number
of high profile men who have talked about
the challenges of
addressing work conflict,
I think is all a good sign
because we've made this,
we've made this a gender neutral problem
for families.
But whether or not we can
come to a gender neutral
solution I think is
still, still out there,
but fortunately in America
we like gender neutral
solutions and the policies
that we've implemented
so far have all been, you
know, equally available
to men and women, so.
- Thank you, okay,
great, let me put you on
a, we're going to get to
some questions fairly soon,
but I wanna ask you to talk a little bit
about your take, well you've been saying
this already a little
bit, but let me reflect
back to something I
noted this in my review
of the book is that you're very generous.
I think you can hear this and here I'm now
the kinda hard bitten
pessimist on the side chair
but, you're very generous.
In my reading, as I read your assessment,
you blame underdeveloped institutions,
public and private
employers and public policy,
bad habits, timidity, the
lack of sound thinking,
I kept thinking while
I was reading the book,
she's way too kind, way too optimistic.
Do you think that you may,
Heather's often arguing,
if only people knew more, if they thought
in economic terms, if they had the data,
if they looked at these
nice policy models,
it's very kind.
So I kept thinking, is
it possible that you've
understated more nefarious
forces like greed
and misogyny, maybe we have lousy policies
and practices in this
country because the people
in charge are nasty and sexist.
(laughing)
- Well, yes that's probably true as well,
but I think it's a fair,
it's a fair assessment,
you know, I live and work in Washington
and try to affect how
we're thinking about policy
and it does seem like
focusing on what we can do
rather than what we can't
is where my head goes,
and you know, I struggled a
lot, so when you write a book,
people ask you, when you're
thinking about sort of,
and you're trying to sell
the book and you're trying
to get somebody to publish
it, there's a lot of questions
about who, what the argument
is and who's the bad guy?
Right, who's the bad guy?
And so I actually spent a
lot of time thinking about
who the bad guy was in my
book and what I actually
came down on was that,
I thought the bad guy
was people like Christine Quinn who were
working with a failed economic model
but pitching it as
though it was just some,
some, you know, some nasty
medicine that we have to take
for the better of us all, right?
That, oh, we just can't
do things that matter
because that's just a job killer.
So, what, so then the
question is, if you think
that this sort of, this failed thinking,
which you kinda correctly identified
either timidity or
institutions, but it's also
this failed economic model is your enemy.
Who's fault is that?
Is that nefarious sources?
Well, in some cases, yes and I talk a lot
for example, about one
of my favorite examples
from the book is this,
this restaurant owner
in California who, when
they were arguing about
the Family Medical
Leave bill in California
went on the record in
the newspaper saying,
well, if you implement this
I'm gonna go out of business.
There's just no way I can
sell hamburgers or whatever
and made these sort of
very audacious statements.
And then of course, I looked him up,
I looked up a bunch of
these quotes and in a lot
of cases, that this one
was really, just the quotes
were the best, seven
years later he sold his
obviously successful restaurant to another
small business owner who
had also been in business
over the entire time period
and was clearly expanding,
right, so, the sense that
there are these people
out there that are
selling us a bill of goods
and saying, we're just doing
it because it's good for you
and they're tapping into
peoples fears, right?
Because we are living in this period
of massive income inequality and Americans
are being squeezed and this growing gap
between productivity and family income
and we're told all the time, well we just
can't really do anything
about it because if we did
anything about it, it would even be worse.
And so, so that's who I
think, I think the bad guy,
I mean it's not a person,
but it's an ideology
that's just wrong and so
what I was trying to do
was give people who were
trying to push back on that,
quite frankly, an ideology,
trying to give them
some actual economic
evidence so that people
could push back against those individuals
who may, they may know
better or maybe they don't,
maybe I'm guessing that Christine Quinn,
if we talked to her she
might understand that that's
actually a failed economic model.
So, I hear you but I, yeah, so.
- I don't think Christine
Quinn believe that argument.
I think she wanted to
be Mayor and she thought
that Bloomberg would
support her if she took
that position, but if anybody knows better
you can correct me.
I don't think she believed
that for a minute.
- We shouldn't have
leaders that are selling us
a bill of goods like that.
You know?
- That's true.
And actually if I can just add, Heather,
the story about California
is very telling.
Our colleague, Ruth Milkman, I don't think
she's here but here at The Graduate Center
wrote a book with, Eileen
Appelbaum was a colleague
of Heather's, was, and they
evaluated the California system
which was passed in 2002 and in fact,
the point being that
employers were screaming
that this was going to
put them out of business,
this is a paid leave program that is 100%
employee financed, low paid
and short and they still
thought the state was going
to come to a crashing close.
But years later, just like the evaluation
of the Family Medical Leave Act,
employers were almost
entirely positive about it,
so I think Heathers point
is exactly right there.
There's a sort of phobia about regulation
but in fact something
like 90 or 95 percent
of employers in the first evaluation
of the Family Medical
Leave Act said it had
no negative effect on
productivity or profits
and it seemed to raise
morale and reduced turnover.
So I think, there I do think
she's absolutely correct
that the shortage of
information is really causing
havoc in political circles.
Let me just close with one last question.
This is really more sort of speculative.
As I've mentioned, I've done a lot of work
on the same policies, studying then across
the rich countries that
I'm often giving talks
and people usually ask or often ask,
from the audience, what
the hell is going on
in the United States?
Why, and I put up all
these graphs with childcare
across countries and then there's the U.S.
With nothing, you know
and Paid Family Leave
with the national level,
the U.S. is literally
falling off the charts, literally.
You know, annual guaranteed paid days off,
the U.S. has zero.
Part time parody, the U.S. has zero.
So there's so many things
that are just missing here,
so why, what's going on here?
So, anybody who's taken
sort of social studies 101
knows that it's a very long story
that the U.S. has weak social policy
and small government
is sort of referred to
as American exceptionalism,
not the kind of
American exceptionalism
that other people talk about
but in any case, when you
get to work family policy
or work-life policy, we're
exceptionally exceptional.
I mean, we do have social
security, we do have disability,
we do have public education,
we do actually have
some social programs,
here we are just unlike
almost any other rich
country, why is that?
What's, what do you think are the sort
of primary factors that are
holding it back in the U.S.?
- Yeah, so, I think that
one, was when we implemented
the basket of policies in
the 1930's that are still
the foundation.
We did so, you know,
just 12 years after women
had gotten the vote, as I mentioned,
they were spearheaded by Francis Perkins
who was the lone and
first Cabinet Secretary
of a brand new agency.
She pushed the policies that she could.
She knew that we needed all the things
that we talked about
here for the most part,
were things that, if
you read the fantastic
biography that Kirsten
Downy did, I mean she knew
that these things were important.
She herself was a working mom.
But none of it really got in there.
So I think one is that,
those laws laid out
the institutions that we have and the ones
that we've been living with
and defending ever since.
So I think that, so one is
there's a path dependency
and then two, as we've sort
of looked to change things
in the years since, what I
hear a lot is that those,
because that's what we
have, that's what's there
and that's what we should have.
And I think it's been
hard for people to kind of
open their minds and say,
okay well the Fair Labor
Standards Act is really
important in overwork
and you know, the prohibition
against child labor
and minimum wage are really important,
but that's not the only
legislation we need
around ours.
And I think there's both
the fear of opening it up,
because what could happen.
But there's also a sense, no,
no, these are our standards
and everything else is just a frill
or it's not, it's not as fundamental.
I think we've had a really
hard time in policy circles
coming to terms with that.
And then I would layer
on two other things.
I mean, one is that for
better or for worse,
the feminist movement in the United States
and the activist that it
focused on as basket of policies
have been single mindedly
committed to gender equity.
And so, I think there have been moments
where had they said, no, it's okay,
we're just going to have maternity leave
which is what most of
Europe did of course,
just leave for mom's, that
maybe if the community
would have said, okay,
that's fine, we don't need
gender equality, we
don't need it for dad's,
we don't need it for caregiving,
that maybe that could've
happened, but, no, they
fought for the Family
and Medical Leave Act
which covers men and women
to take equal amounts
of leave for care giving
for children and for ailing family members
and I think that that
was really important.
I wonder though, whether or not, you know,
in a different world, because
Europe, you see Europe
it was more sort of, there's
a word for this but more
focused on the family, more focused on
on allowing women that time.
And I think that's sort of the last point
is how that's really tied up
in, and I talk about this a lot
in the book, right, it's a time squeeze
and for a lot of families,
that's, you know,
working isn't fun and you're
seeing this income squeeze
and women are in the labor market because
they have to be, maybe they
want to be but they also
have to be and it's very
stressful and I think
there's a deep ambivalence
in many parts of America
about both the role of women and families,
and also, because it's so
stressful, there is this
collective fantasy that
women can just go home,
that we can have that silent partner back,
that she would, that we
could, if we could just
get better on the economics
that we could have
that back, so I think
there's, that I think
is on the, sort of on
the conservatives side,
I think you see conservative
voices not entering
into this thing which
I see as so profound,
I mean it's about children and families
and sick people, this is
like, what could be more
about family values, but
I think there is this
ambivalence that is preventing
people from seeing it
in that way.
So I think it's like, I
guess sort of four different
issues, we, yeah.
- I'll just add a few to those and then
we'll open it up for questions.
Cause actually I think
the religious right,
frankly, in this country has created a,
pushed a countervailing
force because of the concern
about intruding on families.
That's been a big voice against
institutional childcare.
I think also the inequality
itself is a problem
because we have such a high,
high end and what does it do,
it enables families to
exit the public grid.
So you have private childcare, you finance
your own leaves, you
can do almost anything
in which case, you know,
this sort of infrastructure
really erodes.
I think the mommy wars in this country
are still more vitriolic than they were
in most countries in Europe
and finally, my own answer
to this question, I think
that there's an obsession
with long work hours.
A pride about long work
hours that's really, really
deeply a part of American
political culture
that is definitely missing
in other countries.
It's just simply traveling
and chatting with people,
you'll realize that I often
note this sort of stylized
fact that, you know, if you meet somebody
on a Monday morning or
at a party in the U.S.,
and what did you do this weekend?
Oh, I worked the whole weekend.
Oh, my God, I was up
in my office and I was
so busy.
My experience as someone, I
do a lot of work in Europe,
people don't say that.
It would be viewed as
highly unseemly to brag
that you worked all weekend
when you meet your colleagues
on Monday morning.
That's anecdotal but I
find it really widespread
and just to say this, that
David Brooks wrote a piece
in the New York Times
some years ago as I'm sure
some of you know, he is
a conservative columnist.
The working hours data came out.
Every year the IOL puts
out working hours data
and it showed that Americans
worked the longest hours
in the Western world.
We used to be just below Japan
but now we've surpassed Japan.
This is for those who
are in the labor force.
And I wrote a piece in Descent that said,
isn't this terrible, you know, we're all
overworked and falling apart and he wrote,
with the same numbers, are
we proud to be Americans,
look at how industrious we are.
We work so hard and as
a result, GDP per capita
is 40% higher than Sweden
where they work ironically
about 40% less, right.
So, progressives were sending me emails
and saying, they were confidential emails,
I read David Brooks, what's
wrong with what he's saying.
I know there's something wrong with it
but I can't figure out what it is.
I think the fact is the
idea that long work hours
are a problem, that time has value,
hasn't penetrated, even
a lot of progressive
communities in the U.S.
And it hasn't helped.
Anyway, that's my theory about,
our many theories in addition
to what Heather said.
On that note, we have at least 15 minutes,
maybe 20, so let's just
turn it over to you
all for questions.
Somewhere there's a microphone.
Jimmy, are you handing them out?
I think what I will do actually,
so I can see, maybe just come over here.
I guess go ahead in the back there.
In the white sweater, yep.
There's a microphone coming.
- [Female Attendee] Okay, thanks.
So, I had some red flags on some questions
that went off throughout your talk.
One of them was, like who pays,
who pays for, these ideas sound great,
but is this gonna be just another case
of unfunded mandates and
there are questions about,
I know you're pro federal solutions,
but what about state
sovereignty and people's,
you know, freedom, and
when you were talking
about approaching this
issue as an economist
and that people were
complaining that it would be
a job killer, well I
understand looking at it
from a very global mobile perspective,
not you know, on a molecular perspective
but as a practical matter.
What do we do with that
small business owner
that goes out of business
because they can't take
another unfunded mandate?
You know, you walk down
Main Street and I go into
a lot of, you know, small towns and cities
in Connecticut and I see a
lot of empty storefronts.
I mean, what do we do
about something like that?
And with regards to like
David Brooks, he's like
conservative light.
I mean, I think a lot of
people wouldn't really
consider him like, a
conservative, but I am interested
in these things that I just mentioned
and I too was very
disappointed to see Rubio
leave the landscape
because he did have this
in his platform.
- That's a great question.
So, first on the small business one.
I mean I think that
what's kind of remarkable,
I mean, so first to note, we've seen this
economic decline in the
absence of these policies
so just from the starting
point, it's hard to argue
that this, that addressing
this issue didn't cause
the decline that we've seen
and I think you can actually
make an argument, if we
had addressed some of these
issues, maybe things would've
been a little better.
I mean, that's, we don't
know because we can't go back
and relive the past, but
we can say that this isn't
addressing these sorts
of issues is not what
caused the decline on
Main Street across America
or you know, a lot of
the, the income inequality
that we've seen or the
stagnating male wages,
or you know, the challenges.
So I think that's sort of
the first place to start
but I think your question
about small business
is so important because
we want to, I mean,
small business are our, an important part
of our economy and I have
like three or four answers.
So, first, in a lot of
ways small businesses
are already dealing with
a lot of these issues
but they're not dealing with
it with a lot of support.
So, one of the things that we learned
about the California and
other states that have
implemented these state
wide insurance programs
is that small businesses
said this is actually
good for us because most small businesses
and I mean I actually now can say this
because I run a small business, I have
22 employees and I have
employees that have,
you know, I mean I haven't
even done this for that long
and I've already had employees
go out on maternity leave
and I mean, it's amazing
how many people have family
health problems.
This is one of the
things that I've learned.
And people need time off, right?
And you know, you can't as a,
as a human, right, looking
at somebody and saying,
no, no, I know that
you just had your baby,
but you need to come into work tomorrow,
we can't do anything.
I'm like, clearly I'm
not going to do that.
And when you talk to
small business owners,
they already have to cope
with the absence of people
when they're sick, right?
And so what the social
insurance programs do
in the states that have them is say,
okay, you already have a
problem, small business owner.
So deal with that problem
whatever way you were
dealing it but we're
going, we the state finance
through a tax on employees
only, we're going to
deal with the income problem
that your employee has.
You know what it does?
It makes it more likely that that employee
is going to come back
to you when they're done
with their leave, which
is what we've learned
from these states.
So that's a win-win
for the small business.
They already had a problem.
You're solving a little
bit of it by giving their
employee income and that employee is now,
statistically more likely
to return to work for you
which means that you don't
have to retrain somebody.
So you haven't lost an employee
who's presumably valuable.
So, I mean, the other
thing is that a lot of
these policies are already
being done in, you know,
many work places around the country.
Part of what I talk about in the book
is that as Janet mentioned,
they're being done
for workers at the top,
but they're not being done
for the workers at the
middle and the bottom.
And a number of years ago,
I worked with a colleague
of mine to look at all
the studies we could find
on the cost of turnover.
And what I wanted to know is, does it cost
more to replace an employee
at the top than at the bottom?
And I wanted to know a
number of things but that
was one question and what
we found looking across
all these studies is that
the cost of replacing
an employee is about the
same in terms of percentage
of somebody's salary for
somebody at the bottom
of the income distribution
as it is all the way
up to about $75,000 a year.
So until you get to really
specialized employees,
where you know, the
cost to replace perhaps
a particular kind of
professor in a particular
kind of a field, that
may be more expensive
than replacing a line
worker or a fast food worker
or something.
But the reality is that
turnover is extremely expensive.
All the policies I talk about in the book,
the reason that firms do it on their own,
number one reason, it reduces turnover
and one of the things
Eileen Appelbaum talks about
she does a lot of
interviews with employers
and a lot of times, especially
in larger businesses,
the HR function is
separate from the other,
you know, from other
parts of the organization
so that cost of turnover
isn't actually calculated
into the cost of implementing the policy.
Well, that makes no sense.
And I get, I'm on the
Twitter feed of the Harvard
Business Review and I
swear to God, I feel like
every other day there's some HBR article
that's talking about
the productivity effects
of policies like this that sort of
acknowledge the time
constraints of workers
and a lot of times are aimed
at professional workers,
but I know from the
literature that this goes
up and down the income ladders.
So, I take your question
very, very seriously
and what I can tell you
is that there's a lot of
economic evidence that this is good for,
that, yes, there are costs
that a small business
or any business has to face.
They're facing it anyways, what you want
to give them is more tools and you also
want to level the playing field.
So it's not just you that might be giving
workers your, you know, paid sick days.
We know that firms that
offer paid sick days
only let people take
like two or three a year
so this is nothing.
But if people don't come
into work with the flu,
they don't get everybody
else sick and so that's
a productivity gain.
So there are these ways
of thinking about it
that kind of open up the
broader sort of effects.
It's a long answer but--
- Let me just add two quick points
and that is that as I think you know,
I, especially, this is really evident
when you look at the European models,
which I think are really very wise.
There are carve outs for small businesses
in many cases.
So often times, so for
example, the right to request
flexible hours in many
countries, there's carve outs
for business of five and 10 and maybe 15.
It is true that when
businesses are very tiny,
sometimes it's hard
but in the U.S. I think
there's a sort of a
also kind of a political
obsession with small business.
The Family Medical Leave
Act threshold is 50.
That's way too high.
There's no reason in the
world to be having a carve out
at 50.
The other thing, I would
just say is that advocates
I think it's true of
Heather and, academics
and advocates are very rarely supporting
the unfunded mandate model.
That's sort of an Americanism,
so what does that mean?
That means an unfunded
mandate, you tell employers
you must pay the, the leave of workers,
you know, you must pay, you must pay.
The European models are
social insurance financed.
The California model as most of them are.
The unfunded mandate is
usually a very bad idea
because it puts really bad, first of all,
if you screw employers, that's not really
gonna help in the politics.
But also, it creates
incentives for employers
to discriminate against workers they think
are going to use these leaves.
So, that's a real mistake
and I will just add,
we were just looking,
Heather was in my office,
the San Francisco law
was just passed this week
which tops up the California
Social Insurance Leave
which pays 55% of wages, that tops it off
to 100 with an employer
mandate of that other 45,
I applaud that they're trying it,
but is is problematic.
So that's not normally
the way that we do it.
That's what I would say.
The European systems almost never work
on the unfunded mandate and I think that's
a real misperception that adding leave
means that employers are going to pay
for their own workers.
That's really, almost
never what we would be
calling for.
Other questions, I think
we saw in the back.
- [Female Attendee] The action
to a notion of the ideologies
of time, my studies of
law firms show where
the billable hour is
the way in which people
are paid and the more hours you work,
the higher your salary
or your take in the firm.
And then I did a study
with some of my colleagues
here, on part time work in the law, both
government work and private law firms.
And we found that anybody
who worked part time,
it was as if their IQ points
had dropped precipitously
like 25 points, so they
were, and especially for men,
forget it for men.
The men in particular suffered terribly
if they wanted to go
in part time and almost
therefore we could hardly find any people
to interview.
So, how do you deal with these ideologies
that are embedded in our social structure
and our work environments,
that prize time, their also, Jerry Jacobs,
Kathy Gerson had done work showing also
the ideologies of time and productivity,
so I think we have a different culture
than the countries that you pose as models
and I wondered what your
reaction is in terms
of trying to make changed in term of that
overall ideology?
- Certainly, I mean,
you know, as Janet said,
the United States has some of the longest
work hours and those
are concentrated among
some of the highest
played employees and so
this is a particularly
professional worker,
or professional family issue which I talk
a lot about in the book.
I look at middle-class families,
low-income families, and
professional families
separately because they're
different challenges
around time and this is really the big one
for professional families and typically
you don't have just one
person, you have two
people putting in these
long hours and I'm glad
that you mentioned that there are enormous
part-time penalties, not just for women,
but for especially men
that choose part-time work.
So, yeah, I mean there, I
mean, so my response is,
yes, this is an enormous cultural problem.
You are seeing, I think
that there are indications
that people are making,
especially younger generations
are making different kinds
of choices where they can,
I would point to some recent
research by Claudia Goldin
who points out that women
have been more likely
to enter, when they enter professions,
to enter the kines of jobs that give them
a little bit more structure and
less, I don't know if the right word
is individual responsibility
but they're more likely to,
for example, if they're
a doctor to join an HMO
or a hospital group, then
they are to do something
on their own because
it allows them to share
some of the burden of the time commitment
with their colleagues
in a way that going out
on their own doesn't do.
Maybe they're sacrificing
income, but they're getting
some control over their time.
So, we're seeing a lot
of that but I do think
that, the other thing
we know is that as women
have entered certain
professions, the time quotient
has gone up, right?
So, that's been, it's been a barrier
that's tried to be sort of imposed,
like how are you gonna, how do you prove
that you're this awesome
professional worker
when it's really hard to
show your productivity
professional worker and it does seem that
in America we've decided
to show this by FaceTime
by being in the office.
So it's certainly a
cultural hurdle but you see
everywhere, frustrations
with that and I think
it's incumbent upon us
to be thinking about
solutions and I think work
flexibility is one of them.
But it's a bigger cultural conversation.
- Let me just add to
that to say that I think
those of us who work in
this field are often noting,
there are really three very
different axis of change
that we're interested in.
One is policy change,
one is changing employer
behavior, and one is cultural change.
You know, people "do gender",
I know you know that.
That Cynthia Epstein
has done a lot of work
on these questions.
People do gender, they do long work hours,
so I work in the policy of
that three legged stool,
my interest is mostly in policies,
I think Heathers is as well but, I think
speaking for both of us,
we're not really policy
determinists, I mean,
I think that we think
policy is important but these other things
all have to happen at the same time.
I think what's interesting
though is institutions
affect culture and those affect employers,
in other words, all
these affect each other
and there are many, many
policies, so for example,
anti-discrimination, it
takes a long time off
and you know, to see it's
effects but let me just
close with one example.
There are some policies in
this area that have almost
instantaneous effects on peoples behavior.
And one of them in fact
is paid leave for men
that can't be transferred
to their female partners.
And there are lots of
cases of this, in fact
in Iceland, we have a real Icelander here
by the way in the front row.
In Iceland which has the
most gender egalitarian
leave law in the world,
although in my vies,
not gender egalitarian enough, but it has
an unusual structure to American ears,
not so unusual in Europe,
this is what it has been
for a long time.
Three months, this is for
a heterosexual couple,
in this model, three months for her,
three months for him, three
months that they can share.
When the leave that was
given for him was no longer
sharable, in other words there used to be
a sharable portion, men could take it
but then it switched so
that it was basically
if they didn't take it it was lost.
The men's take up rose
from something like 17%
to over 90 overnight.
And that, granted of
course, everybody's always
saying are they going to conferences,
are they fishing, what are the doing?
- But still--
- The research shows
there's not too much of it,
they think they're going
to go fishing and play
and then they discover that children need
to be cared for and in
fact they're caring for
the children, that's what mostly,
the ethnic graphic research is showing.
But the point of all this is that
there is some areas here
where when the policies
shift, peoples behaviors shift instantly
and that has an instant
affect on what's going on
in the family.
So, I think there's a lot of inner play,
culture in Iceland is
always driven to policy
development and employers react as well,
so I think none of us think culture
doesn't matter.
I think that we think that policy helps
to--
- I'm very proud that Maria Shriver
did a blurb from my book here.
I worked on a book with
her a number of years ago
where we, that's what we were working on
was culture change.
But thinking about
these issues, so I think
there's a lot of people
sort of, trying to push this
but I would echo what you just said
about Family Medical Leave, if it's paid,
men think it's for them and the only way
to get gender equity in the workplace
is for men to be taking that leave.
Otherwise, his wife has to do it all
and she's got a job too, so, you're seeing
that I think in the
states of habit as well,
it's not as remarkable, but--
- You're right, absolutely.
I think we have time
for two more questions.
One there, right there.
- [Female Attendee] Thank you.
You've talked a lot about
families and I wonder
if you can say anything
about how the changes
in conditions since the 70's affect people
who live alone, who are
responsible for all their own
income and all their own
housework and if they want
to have a support network
outside of their coworkers
they have to go out and find it because
it's not built into
their home life and then
I'll also say my ANOK
data shows that employers,
because they can suck single people dry
in that way, I'm wondering
if that contributes
to discrimination against people who have
caregiving responsibilities.
- Yeah, so, my friend Rebecca
Traister just wrote a book
called, All the Single
Ladies, which if you're
interested in that
issue, I would recommend,
I have not had a chance to read it all yet
but I've heard her talk
about it and I'm sure,
I'm like 99% positive it's amazing.
But I, I'm glad that you brought it up
because we are seeing this rise in singles
both at the young age
but also at the older age
and people need just as much time off.
It's why I called my book,
The Economics of Work-Life
Conflict, rather than
Work Family Conflict.
Sort of acknowledging that
everybody needs time off
and that this shouldn't
be policies that are
just for people, especially
the policies around
scheduling, they shouldn't
be just for people
that have care responsibilities.
Everyone should be able
to take advantage of them.
So, I think it's an important framing
that we see this not just about care,
which is really important
but about control over time
that allows us to do the
things that we want to do
with our life which is
why we're presumably
getting a job so that you
can actually have a life.
So that would be my comment on that.
- And also, of course as
you know, I'm sure you know,
people who live alone often
have care responsibilities
for their friends and chosen
kin and elderly parents
and so I think that's
also something that people
haven't realized until recently, that care
isn't just for children,
everybody knows that
but policy makers sometimes forget.
Who has the last question?
It's right here.
- [Female Attendee] I just
want to know (off mic),
even if we get a President
who is for these policies,
how can they get through.
I mean I've, I think this
is part of the ideology,
people think it's an entitlement.
And people don't like
to vote for entitlements
and given the nature
of Congress these days,
what's gonna happen there?
- Yeah, so you would need, so, two things,
one, as Janet actually
mentioned, the first piece
of legislation that
President Bill Clinton signed
into law was the Family Medical Leave Act.
The first piece of
legislation that President
Barack Obama signed into
law was the Lilly Ledbetter
Paycheck Fairness Act.
There's a theme there.
Which is that they were
two pieces of legislation
that was targeted at the base.
I think that you're gonna
see a lot of pressure
if you have a democratic
President to focus
on this basket of policies
and to do something
fairly quickly because
if a Democrat is elected
into the White House in 2016,
it will in no small part
be because of people
voting for that person
because they care about these issues.
A friend of mine said a
lot after the 2012 election
that one out of every three voters who,
people who voted for
Barack Obama was a woman.
So one out of every
three voters was a woman
who voted for Barack Obama, sorry.
So, that's like a, so
women's votes really matter
and they've been mattering
more and more for Democrats.
So that served one point.
But obviously this isn't going to happen
just from the White
House, it has to happen
from Congress and I think
everything will depend
on what the composition in
the Congress looks like.
There have been moments
where there's been pressure
on Republicans, a number of years ago,
not once but twice, the
house passed legislation
to give federal employees
paid parental leave.
The first time it passed,
50 Republicans voted for it.
The second time, like 30 something odd,
this was in the late 2000's, so the house
has become a little bit,
the Republican Caucus,
the house has become more conservative,
so there's been a
decrease in that overtime,
but I do think the fact that Rubio
and then of course, Eric
Cantor had also come out
and talked about issues
around workplace flexibility
and work-life balance issues.
So, I think you're seeing
more of an attention.
I actually just did an event
at the American Enterprise Institute,
which is definitely a more conservative,
D.C. based think tank.
It was a panel with four
of us and one from AI,
one was Douglas
Holtz-Eakin who had advised
the McCain campaign and,
when that was a campaign
a number of years ago and
then Bel Sawhill and I
sort of representing
more progressive views
and Senator, oh, my gosh, this is on tape
and this is embarrassing
because I'm blanking
on the name.
It will come to me in a moment.
I'm just blanking out because I know
it's being taped and
I know it's important.
- We'll edit the tape.
- Yeah, Republican, but talking about the,
I mean she gave the most
eloquent speech I had heard,
I mean, just, I was
like, I was rapped about
equal pay and the need for paid leave.
I mean, every single, every single reason
and message and, Senator Fischer, just,
we were 100% in sync, now of course
the way that we would approach solving
these problems differed but the fact,
the fact that we are in agreement
that there's a problem, and
that we need to solve it
and that this is the
responsibility of the Senate
was, I mean this is, this
is an enormous seat change.
I think in terms of the
potential to do something,
so I remain optimistic in no small part
because I've seen change over the length
of period of time that
I've been in Washington
thinking about these issues.
So, I don't know, I
think you might be able
to get the Senate to do something.
Maybe would it be exactly what I wanted.
No, but progress is progress.
Bu the house, eh.
- Well one thing that
should raise your optimism,
if we have a Democratic President, is that
Heather will be at the
table because she will be
at the table, she is at the table.
They listen to her in Washington.
I don't know that the
long term result will be
but, she's part of the
conversation and has had
a really big effect, not just on research
but also on the actual policy discussions
in Washington.
On that note, amen,
Heather, thank you so much.
And, thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you so much, Janet.
It's been really fun.
