Thursday, June 19, 1997

American homes losing battle with corporations over time, author says

By ELLEN FORMAN / Sun-Sentinel, South Florida

The executive proudly recited from his company's long list of worker-friendly, family-friendly benefits.

On-site child care.

Healthy cafeteria food.

Free massages.

As listeners at this corporate responsibility seminar in New York silently swooned over the thought of back rubs, an attendee from Europe had a question.

Did this successful yet nurturing company, he asked, ever insist that its workers actually go home for family dinners?

Whoops. Timeout.

"To be honest with you, that's not really something we've been able to figure out," the executive said. "We're still struggling with it."

And there's the rub: No one has a handle on time. Time for family. Time for play. Time for a life of one's own.

Time, argues sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is the central issue in American corporate life today.

It's not whether mothers should work, how many hours they should work, or whether they're working for fancy cars or to put food on the table for the kids, she says.

Hochschild has been furiously battling those perceptions ever since an excerpt from her book, "The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home & Home Becomes Work" (Metropolitan Books, $22.50), appeared in The New York Times Magazine and set off a firestorm of debate.

The core issue, Hochschild says, is whether the pull of the office is so strong it's hard to leave even when you should. And whether success in today's corporate world comes at the expense of family.

"The real war, the more important war, is going on between American companies and American homes," Hochschild says from New York, where she was on a recent book tour. "American homes are losing."

To balance their dual obligations, working moms are having to apply Industrial Age timesaving measures to their home lives, Hochschild says. They're hurrying their kids through frantic schedules and outsourcing tasks like birthday parties. In many instances, home has taken on the feel of the old-fashioned workplace with its time-punch cards.

Meanwhile, Corporate America lures. New management styles have made many workplaces more pleasant and rewarding places to be, with participatory management, rewards and even the occasional on-site back rub.

But with those perks has come the not-so-subtle message that corporate success takes lots of face-time: early mornings, late nights and the occasional weekend or two.

When she set out to write her book, Hochschild wondered: What if workers had a choice about the time they put in? What if a company offered flex time and part-time schedules, so that workers could balance their work versus family responsibilities?

To explore that question, Hochschild, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a mother of two grown children, went into the field. She spent several summers studying the men and women at an American company known both for its success and its progressive family policies. To protect the anonymity of those she interviewed, she gave the company the pseudonym of Amerco.

Her findings, published earlier this year, surprised her. Rather than seeking the sanctuary of home, Hochschild found, many women were doing what men traditionally have done: choosing to put in long hours, even when they didn't need the money. Among eligible employees with children 13 and younger, only 3 percent worked part time, 1 percent job-shared and 1 percent worked from home.

Hochschild's conclusion: Home and work have effectively switched places. Work has become a sanctuary for many, with interaction among friends, mutual respect and support, and positive feedback. Home - especially for the time-pressed parent - has become a place of stress, where "quality time" is micromanaged and there's little appreciation for a family crisis averted or a house cleaned.

A recent survey of 1,446 working parents by Boston-based Bright Horizons company-sponsored child care centers confirmed Hochschild's findings: 85 percent of those surveyed said home sometimes feels like a workplace, with women feeling that way far more than men.

And 58 percent said that work very often or occasionally feels like home. It even offers some of the intrigue of daytime soaps: with best friends and swapped confidences, sexual attractions, rivalries and retribution.

"Time is being pumped into work and out of homes," Hochschild says. "It kind of snuck up on us, and we're not really actively stopping it."

With the issue of working mothers already a societal flashpoint, Hochschild's book held a potentially disturbing premise. And the media jumped right on it.

Shortly after the book's publication, U.S. News and World Report featured a story titled "The Lies Parents Tell About Work, Kids, Money, Day Care and Ambition." The cover illustration was of a diaper pin with a tearful little duckie on top. The message: Women don't need to work, but do so to attain "the good life," complete with travel and a color TV in every room.

The very idea infuriates Hochschild, who fired off an angry letter to the editors of the magazine after seeing the article.

She was "horrified" at the use of her work to justify the premise that mothers are working for frivolous reasons as they ignore the more important work to be done at home.

"I'm saying, 'Choice, schmoice,' in a way," she says. "This is a book about cultural context in which people make choices."

In the end, Hochschild found, the goal of a more balanced life often dies for lack of a powerful advocate.

The men at the top have the power to create a family-friendly work culture, but no real desire to do so. Advocates of family-friendly policies have little authority to implement them. And supervisors and managers are often hostile to anything that takes away from the job.

It's up to parents, men and women, Hochschild says, to demand a workplace that speaks to the needs of families. True change will demand a broader commitment, Hochschild says.

"I'm not recommending people commit career suicide," she says. "There's a limit to what we can do privately."

But as she writes in her book, small groups of people can make effective, self-governed changes in their schedules to get the work done while meeting family responsibilities.

"This isn't rebuilding from the ground up," she says. "There are ongoing experiments that exist in the U.S. today."

Meanwhile, she offers this advice to corporations: "Meet your budget, get the work done - but get smart about new win-win arrangements that allow workers to get out the door, and reward supervisors for doing that."