American families
Interview: MIT Sloan School of Manageme---Kochan, Tom---Professor / Academic
>> our next guest says the job market is finally coming back after two years, but the american worker still feels job insecurity and pressure on wages, as well as the need to produce long hours. tom kochan is professor at m.i.t. sloan school of management, plus the co-director of the institute for work and employment research, and he’s recently published a book entitled “regaining control of our destiny―a working family’s agenda for america.” thanks for joining us today, tom. appreciate it very much. the first chapter of the book i read, entitled “enough is enough,” and you say it’s time for american workers and families to reverse the disastrous course, your words, that the country is on, time for american families to stand up and say enough is enough. doesn’t sound like a rosy picture.
>> well, i think it is time for families to stand up. they’ve had a disastrous decade or two. they’ve been working longer hours for about the same amount of pay as they were working at the beginning of the 1980’s. so, that’s not really a record to leave to the next generation. we’ve got to turn this country around, and it’s up to working families to take the action themselves to do so.
>> ok. in a second, we’ll find out what that action might be, but while you brought it up, in terms of the number of hours, your research shows that working families, the average two-parent family is now working―or the hours, excuse me, of the average two-parent working family have increased by 15% between 1985 and 2000 and those two parents are working over 3,800 hours a year, the equivalent of two 40-hour jobs, and this is the part that really grabbed me, more than any other country in the world.
>> that’s right.
>> what is going on? why are we working so much?
>> well, we simply have to work more hours because our average hourly earnings have not gone up. if families want to get ahead today, they need two things -- they need two parents working and two parents who have good educations. those families with those characteristics have done very well in recent years because they’ve added more hours to the labor force, and they’ve gotten ahead while everyone else has either fallen behind or stayed about where they were for the last 15 or 20 years.
>> one of the reasons it’s often argued that families are working more, the obvious one would be just simple greed or desire to have a better standard of living, and the other is to offset the increase in taxes that have gone up exponentially this century or over the past 100 years, let’s say. your thoughts on that.
>> well, i think there are demographic factors at work. clearly, more women want to have careers today and they want to have a balance between work and family life. i don’t think taxes or necessarily greed has really played much of a role. it’s a combination at the lower ends, people have to work more hours, work two jobs or have both parents in the labor force
>> but why do they have to work?
>> well, if they want to send their children to a good school, get the higher education that they need in order to succeed for the next generation, if they want to live in a community that has a good public school system, then they simply have to have the income that’s necessary to live there and have a decent standard of living. some of us are able to send our children to private schools and to good colleges and universities, but we still have to make sure that the average working family today has the same opportunities, and that’s where we’re failing.
>> you actually quoted a student who i guess summed up your thoughts nicely in saying that every generation it seems is more living to work rather than working to live.
>> that’s right. and i hear this from our students all the time when we start talking about work and family integration or balance between work and family lives. there’s a real thirst for being able to have a good career, to make a contribution to society, to their employers, to have a good career, but at the same time, to have the time necessary to raise a family and not have to make a choice between the two. so, i believe that the next generation of young professionals are going to revolutionize the workforce and are going to demand much more flexibility, much more responsiveness than those of us in the past have been able to get in our working lives.
>> i think it was interesting, too. you said the more things change the more they stay the same in that the working family now is similar to as it was in the farming family times in their sort of overlap. that struck me.
>> that’s right. well, i grew up on a family farm, and our family and work lives were all the same. we invented 24 by seven i think before that term ever was coined because you worked together as a family unit, you learned to cooperate, you learned responsibility, you learned leadership, you learned that there should be psychological and personal rewards from hard work. then we went to the industrial era, and you separated. people went to the factory to work and they lived at home. they had a bread-winner and a home make, and we divided up this set of responsibilities. now we have both parents back in the workforce, the technology that moves back with us to home and on vacation and is with us 24 by seven, and so we are in a different economy and it’s time we update our policies to match that economy.
>> speaking of time, tom kochan, we have to leave it there. thank you very much.
>> you bet.
>> from m.i.t. we’ll look at anheuser-busch’s results.
