Click Here to Go Directly to the Story
Register/Subscribe
Home



DECEMBER 27, 2000

WORK & FAMILY
By Pamela Mendels

Should Working Parents Work Less?
It's a cruel quandary: Working hard for your family means seeing less of them -- unless Don Browning can persuade parents and employers to embrace a 30-hour week


  STORY TOOLS
Printer-Friendly Version
E-Mail This Story

Related Items Finding Time When Little Is Left

 Why Isn't Everything Enough?
POLL INSTANT SURVEY >>
My company provides sexual-harassment prevention training:

Periodically
Once, when the employee is hired
Never
Not sure

VIEW POLL RESULTS >>
  PEOPLE SEARCH

Search for business contacts:

First Name :
Last Name :
Company Name :

PREMIUM SEARCH
Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts

Search by Zoominfo
Don S. Browning is intrigued by an idea that he would like you -- the business owner, the manager, the employee -- to consider, too. It may sound outlandish, but please hear him out. His proposal: a workweek with a cap of 60 hours for couples who are employed. That is, a combined total of no more than 60 hours of paid work per week for Mom and Dad.

Browning is not a woolly radical economist. Nor is he a union boss or a shill for the leisure and entertainment industries. Quite the contrary. He's an ordained minister (Disciples of Christ), professor of religious ethics and the social sciences at the divinity school of the University of Chicago, and co-author of From Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion and the American Family Debate. As such, he is deeply concerned about what's happening to American families in an age when the expression "time deficit" needs no explanation to those who divide their lives between working outside the home and scrambling to find the time to care for children or other relatives.

Browning worries that the long hours demanded by modern work in a global economy mean too few hours devoted to the proper upbringing of young people. "It comes down to the question: Can we design a society where everyone isn't working to death all the time, especially when they have children?" he says.

FAMILY CEREAL.  Browning has been chewing on the possibility of scaled-back working hours for several years. Among his influences was historian Benjamin Hunnicutt's 1996 book Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, a history of the rise and fall of a 30-hour workweek at the cereal company in Battle Creek, Mich. Kellogg Co. began the 30-hour week in 1930 as an altruistic corporate effort to spread work around during the Great Depression -- four shifts of six hours replacing three shifts of eight. But the schedule quickly gained popularity with employees, who enjoyed having extra nonwork time in their lives, Hunnicutt found. So popular, in fact, that the 30-hour week lingered in a few of Kellogg's departments until as late as 1985.

In a telephone interview, Hunnicutt told me about one family that benefited from this arrangement. They were blue-collar workers in the 1950s who set their schedules so that the husband worked a late-night six-hour shift while his wife worked a six-hour morning shift. That meant dad got the children ready for school, and lots of whole-family time became available between the hours the kids came home and went to bed.

Like Browning, Hunnicutt, a professor at the University of Iowa, worries about the time deficit and its effects, not just on family life but the well being of the community. "We watch TV, and we go to work," he says. "The front porch is empty."

STAND EASY.  A Kellogg's-style work schedule apparently still sounds attractive 70 years, and many economic cycles, after the Depression. Last September, Browning co-directed a conference of experts and others interested in family issues that was assembled by the American Assembly, a nonpartisan group affiliated with Columbia University that explores U.S. policy issues. [I was invited to take part, but declined.]

At the meeting's conclusion, participants issued an 18-page statement with a number of recommendations on how to strengthen the American family. Among them: exploring 60-hour workweeks for families. "I can't tell you," Browning says, "of all the ideas in Culture Wars and in the Assembly, this is the one people always pick up on and want to talk about."

Browning acknowledges that instituting a 30-hour week would mean an adjustment, to say the least, for employers. "We realize it puts a strain on some businesses," he says. But he's calling on employees, too, to consider whether the economic rewards of mother/father full-timers are worth the price of missed moments with family. "There has to be a cultural ethos that values it," he says. "There has to be a philosophy of marriage, a philosophy of children, a philosophy of leisure to make people want this, and make some of the financial sacrifices that come along with a 60-hour, rather than an 80- or 90-hour, work week."

FAMILY MATTERS.  Browning is not asking for corporations or government to issue a sudden decree: There Shall be Reduced Working Hours! For now, he would be satisfied with the beginning of a national conversation on the issue involving individuals, business people, policymakers, community activists, and, yes, those who speak from the pulpit.

Lots of questions need to be posed in that argument. Chief among them, perhaps, is whether businesses and employees can possibly afford shorter working hours -- and whether the well-being of children and community can possibly afford to do without them.

As you approach the New Year, why don't you resolve to jump into the conversation?


Pamela Mendels is a writer for the Careers section of Business Week Online. Her Work and Family column appears the last Monday of every month in Small Business.
Back to Top

[an error occurred while processing this directive]


Copyright 2000, Bloomberg L.P.
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Media Kit | Special Sections | MarketPlace | Knowledge Centers
Bloomberg L.P.