I'm an engineer, and in heavy industry most machines and infrastructure are generously overdesigned in order to handle unforeseen stresses. From a bean-counting point of view, this is "wasteful," but it's common practice. It's a shame that workforces can't be put together in the same way, with an intentional "overhire factor" on top of the theoretical bare minimum staff headcount. (We should treat employees at least as well as we treat our machines!)
We just recently had (I'm nervous using the past tense, it might not be over) a very stressful month mostly with kid related things. I'm really grateful for my husband's job flexibility, grandparents who made themselves available and are overall helpful people (not meddling, overbearing, judgmental, etc), and local friends who volunteered to help. I know a lot of moms don't have the advantages that I have - many of my friends have husbands who work at the office 8-5 pretty strictly, or who travel a lot, or have parents or in laws who aren't able or willing to help or are too nosy, or they are new to their area and haven't made local friends.
Many of my local friends are stay at home moms and, except for nap time, tend to have a lot of flexibility when they can bring their kids. One of them has my toddler and her own son at the local park right now. Another took my toddler and her toddler to the library a week ago so I could go to the hospital to see my son (who is, we think, fine now). I work/study part time and because of that I end up declining requests for help more often than I would like. Being part of the SAHM help economy is a wonderful thing (largely because it's informal and unregulated) and I wish I could contribute to it more.
I have lots of thoughts about this as I start my work day two hours earlier than usual to cover for a coworker on vacation! I will try to be concise . . .
My father owned a small business in a tourist town when I was growing up, and he hired teenagers as summer help (including eventually all of his kids, though this was not required of us). Our standard workweek was 30ish hours, usually 4 8s or 5 7s. I think this was for a lot of reasons, but one of the outcomes was slack in the system; if someone wanted to make more money that week or that month there was usually a shift to pick up while someone was at football camp or on vacation or whatnot.
Regular readers of Other Feminisms will know I am always banging on about part-time work (because I am myself a part-time worker) and while I don't think part time work is always the solution and I fully acknowledge the way corporations have used it to deny people things like health insurance, I'm always curious as to why, when labor laws make it so easy to deny people benefits for part time work, it isn't a more frequently adopted option for building slack into systems where slack is needed? My own employer benefits tremendously from the ability to pay me hourly and zero benefits except for 401(k) contribution. I'm quite confident that I'm about as profitable to their bottom line as my salaried coworkers whose health insurance they are buying, AND on days like today I am literally the slack in the system; it's much easier sell to get me to work an extra 10 hours this week on top of a base of 25 than someone who already regularly works 40. In many labor markets (though perhaps not the current one) there are people who, for a variety of reasons, can accept a more variable income and are willing to buy their own health insurance on the exchanges.
Dec 9, 2022·edited Dec 9, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
Im on a five month sabbatical that required years of planning for slack. 1. I share a job with another woman and we legitimately co direct an organization 2. Over the past two years we created manuals for everything 3. We had frank discussions before i left about what balls would and could drop 5. We increased the length of our internship program from 1-2 years before i left so my intern would be in her second year 4. We raised enough money in advance to be sure my fundraising responsibility could go on auto pilot.
I felt good about this because, i argued, sabbatical is biblical. The land had to lay follow to regenerate but presumably God wasnt asking people to starve. I've been trying to mentor other organizations in creating sabbaticals and also im seeing them show up in corporations
Answering the direct question before adding an ancillary comment: Have I ever worked somewhere that deliberately built up slack? No. I'm almost 37 years old and I've worked at schools, publishers, restaurants (both sit down and fast food, front and back of the house) and offices. I did work a government job where there was slack, but it didn't feel like it was a deliberate choice on the part of management, it just felt like a sort of neglect had allowed inefficiency to build up. In a parallel job for the same branch of government, there was zero slack and overtime was just expected.
All of this puts me in mind of Marilynne Robinson's essay on the sabbath as a form of inefficiency. She points out that in a world of mostly subsistence living, giving all your workers a sabbath day meant paying them 7 days worth of food for only 6 days of labor.
I really appreciate you putting "wasteful" in quotes! The rail companies - and American companies generally - are sacrificing people (and families!) at the altar of short term profit. These companies wouldn't feel any 'pain' if they reintroduced slack. The only 'pain' would be investors seeing slightly smaller returns.
As far as an example, I work for a small never-for-profit company that sustains itself by building technology through partnerships with organizations who might otherwise spend more money building a custom tool in house. We then provide what we build at cost to mission aligned organizations. Like the company you described, we work to document everything, cross train folks, and otherwise introduce (even more) slack. We also have unlimited PTO & a minimum requirement, plus family medical, dental & vision. I don't think this would be possible without our sustainable model! Not because I don't think the money is out there, but because in for profit world investors are out for the highest possible return (and don't generally care about the human cost) and in the nonprofit world there are entrenched ideas that 'overhead' is 'bad'.
I generally think we've become too used to the idea that our pleasant day to day is predicated on greed and exploitation. Like in LeGuin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas we *know* there is misery somewhere responsible for our joy. But it absolutely doesn't need to be that way - it's a fixable problem. I think pushing back on these systems (like you do!) is a vital part of the fix. I also think that workers leveraging their power is the quickest & most effective path to a solution. Strikes! Unionizing! Pickets! Boycotts! Imo that's how we get the future we need.
I don't have any examples; I just want to say I really appreciate you drawing out this idea because I feel like "flexibility" has become the end-all-be-all of family-friendliness at work, where "flexibility" means "it's okay, we will generously allow you to work from 8-11pm." (Before we got actual parental leave, my employer put out a 74-page handbook on "workplace flexibilities" for having a baby, like the flexibility to beg your fellow workers to donate their vacation time to you and the flexibility to take leave without pay.)
The closest I've experienced was actually working in international development, in an org that had a fairly predictable busy/slow pattern (driven by the agricultural cycle). We actually wrote it into our performance metrics, that being able to "ramp down quickly" and recharge a bit during slow periods was a key skill
Which is good on an individual level but doesn't address the sick kid problem -- pretty sure you can't order your kids to stay healthy until planting's done
The best approach to this problem is, of course, to have moms do what they are made for and actually want to do, namely stay home and care for their children. It is our consumption culture that drives the "moms must work" mindset, and an almost total, if implicit, bias against seeing value in this most valuable of all "professions".
I do understand the difficulty of trying to do this in our society that expects both parents to work and as such the economic society is predicated on that, but I've also seen moms go to amazing lengths to stay home, and I've seen the rewards in the children who are raised by an at-home mom.
Why anyone would want to turn over the care and raising of their children to another is beyond me. Only a parent truly wants and strives to provide for what is best for her child. Only a parent can instill her values into her children, and only if she is intimately involved in their every day, all day, care. We have voluntarily returned to using orphanages, with the exception that the children go home to sleep each night! Orphanages that were rightly seen as a very inferior, insufficient way to raise children.
Our society has lost the idea that adults are supposed to sacrifice their desires to the needs of their children. This is reflected in everything from abortion to divorce, gay "marriage" to in vitro designer created children.
Sorry I’m late to the replies, but I wanted to chime in because this resonates with me deeply, in a way I didn’t expect. When I first read this post (and when I’ve read related threads/discussions in the past), I thought of it as largely a problem of extreme capitalism treating workers as faceless cogs in a machine. I assumed it would be an issue primarily for large, for-profit entities.
But then I remembered an experience I had earlier this Fall. I lead a cultural/religious organization, and Fall 2022 was our first semester offering actual programming. (The first person plural in that last sentence is fictive/aspirational, as you’ll see in a moment.) My organization is part of a larger organization that has been around for a while, but I am the only person focusing on and responsible for my “branch,” so to speak.
One day early in the semester, I was feeling pretty sick, but one of our weekly programs was scheduled to meet that day. There was literally no one else I could ask to lead the program that day: not one of my coworkers with the larger organization, and not one of the participants. But because the group had just started meeting, I also didn’t want to cancel the meeting and lose what little momentum we’d started to build.
That experience helped me solidify a goal of working toward having a second staff member at my organization, so that it doesn’t all rest on my shoulders. But in order to make another hire, I need to have enough financial support coming in to be able to promise them a reasonable salary. So even at a small organization driven by ideals rather than profit, the ability to build in redundancy comes down to - surprise - money.
(Worth noting that in this example, I was the one who was sick, not a child needing my care. I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on how this changes when the sick individual is the worker, who can perhaps work through their sickness, vs. another loved one who needs the worker’s care. Another reason I’ve set a goal of hiring another staff member is to make it more viable for me to have children someday.)
I'm an engineer, and in heavy industry most machines and infrastructure are generously overdesigned in order to handle unforeseen stresses. From a bean-counting point of view, this is "wasteful," but it's common practice. It's a shame that workforces can't be put together in the same way, with an intentional "overhire factor" on top of the theoretical bare minimum staff headcount. (We should treat employees at least as well as we treat our machines!)
We just recently had (I'm nervous using the past tense, it might not be over) a very stressful month mostly with kid related things. I'm really grateful for my husband's job flexibility, grandparents who made themselves available and are overall helpful people (not meddling, overbearing, judgmental, etc), and local friends who volunteered to help. I know a lot of moms don't have the advantages that I have - many of my friends have husbands who work at the office 8-5 pretty strictly, or who travel a lot, or have parents or in laws who aren't able or willing to help or are too nosy, or they are new to their area and haven't made local friends.
Many of my local friends are stay at home moms and, except for nap time, tend to have a lot of flexibility when they can bring their kids. One of them has my toddler and her own son at the local park right now. Another took my toddler and her toddler to the library a week ago so I could go to the hospital to see my son (who is, we think, fine now). I work/study part time and because of that I end up declining requests for help more often than I would like. Being part of the SAHM help economy is a wonderful thing (largely because it's informal and unregulated) and I wish I could contribute to it more.
I have lots of thoughts about this as I start my work day two hours earlier than usual to cover for a coworker on vacation! I will try to be concise . . .
My father owned a small business in a tourist town when I was growing up, and he hired teenagers as summer help (including eventually all of his kids, though this was not required of us). Our standard workweek was 30ish hours, usually 4 8s or 5 7s. I think this was for a lot of reasons, but one of the outcomes was slack in the system; if someone wanted to make more money that week or that month there was usually a shift to pick up while someone was at football camp or on vacation or whatnot.
Regular readers of Other Feminisms will know I am always banging on about part-time work (because I am myself a part-time worker) and while I don't think part time work is always the solution and I fully acknowledge the way corporations have used it to deny people things like health insurance, I'm always curious as to why, when labor laws make it so easy to deny people benefits for part time work, it isn't a more frequently adopted option for building slack into systems where slack is needed? My own employer benefits tremendously from the ability to pay me hourly and zero benefits except for 401(k) contribution. I'm quite confident that I'm about as profitable to their bottom line as my salaried coworkers whose health insurance they are buying, AND on days like today I am literally the slack in the system; it's much easier sell to get me to work an extra 10 hours this week on top of a base of 25 than someone who already regularly works 40. In many labor markets (though perhaps not the current one) there are people who, for a variety of reasons, can accept a more variable income and are willing to buy their own health insurance on the exchanges.
Im on a five month sabbatical that required years of planning for slack. 1. I share a job with another woman and we legitimately co direct an organization 2. Over the past two years we created manuals for everything 3. We had frank discussions before i left about what balls would and could drop 5. We increased the length of our internship program from 1-2 years before i left so my intern would be in her second year 4. We raised enough money in advance to be sure my fundraising responsibility could go on auto pilot.
I felt good about this because, i argued, sabbatical is biblical. The land had to lay follow to regenerate but presumably God wasnt asking people to starve. I've been trying to mentor other organizations in creating sabbaticals and also im seeing them show up in corporations
Answering the direct question before adding an ancillary comment: Have I ever worked somewhere that deliberately built up slack? No. I'm almost 37 years old and I've worked at schools, publishers, restaurants (both sit down and fast food, front and back of the house) and offices. I did work a government job where there was slack, but it didn't feel like it was a deliberate choice on the part of management, it just felt like a sort of neglect had allowed inefficiency to build up. In a parallel job for the same branch of government, there was zero slack and overtime was just expected.
All of this puts me in mind of Marilynne Robinson's essay on the sabbath as a form of inefficiency. She points out that in a world of mostly subsistence living, giving all your workers a sabbath day meant paying them 7 days worth of food for only 6 days of labor.
I really appreciate you putting "wasteful" in quotes! The rail companies - and American companies generally - are sacrificing people (and families!) at the altar of short term profit. These companies wouldn't feel any 'pain' if they reintroduced slack. The only 'pain' would be investors seeing slightly smaller returns.
As far as an example, I work for a small never-for-profit company that sustains itself by building technology through partnerships with organizations who might otherwise spend more money building a custom tool in house. We then provide what we build at cost to mission aligned organizations. Like the company you described, we work to document everything, cross train folks, and otherwise introduce (even more) slack. We also have unlimited PTO & a minimum requirement, plus family medical, dental & vision. I don't think this would be possible without our sustainable model! Not because I don't think the money is out there, but because in for profit world investors are out for the highest possible return (and don't generally care about the human cost) and in the nonprofit world there are entrenched ideas that 'overhead' is 'bad'.
I generally think we've become too used to the idea that our pleasant day to day is predicated on greed and exploitation. Like in LeGuin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas we *know* there is misery somewhere responsible for our joy. But it absolutely doesn't need to be that way - it's a fixable problem. I think pushing back on these systems (like you do!) is a vital part of the fix. I also think that workers leveraging their power is the quickest & most effective path to a solution. Strikes! Unionizing! Pickets! Boycotts! Imo that's how we get the future we need.
I don't have any examples; I just want to say I really appreciate you drawing out this idea because I feel like "flexibility" has become the end-all-be-all of family-friendliness at work, where "flexibility" means "it's okay, we will generously allow you to work from 8-11pm." (Before we got actual parental leave, my employer put out a 74-page handbook on "workplace flexibilities" for having a baby, like the flexibility to beg your fellow workers to donate their vacation time to you and the flexibility to take leave without pay.)
The closest I've experienced was actually working in international development, in an org that had a fairly predictable busy/slow pattern (driven by the agricultural cycle). We actually wrote it into our performance metrics, that being able to "ramp down quickly" and recharge a bit during slow periods was a key skill
Which is good on an individual level but doesn't address the sick kid problem -- pretty sure you can't order your kids to stay healthy until planting's done
The best approach to this problem is, of course, to have moms do what they are made for and actually want to do, namely stay home and care for their children. It is our consumption culture that drives the "moms must work" mindset, and an almost total, if implicit, bias against seeing value in this most valuable of all "professions".
I do understand the difficulty of trying to do this in our society that expects both parents to work and as such the economic society is predicated on that, but I've also seen moms go to amazing lengths to stay home, and I've seen the rewards in the children who are raised by an at-home mom.
Why anyone would want to turn over the care and raising of their children to another is beyond me. Only a parent truly wants and strives to provide for what is best for her child. Only a parent can instill her values into her children, and only if she is intimately involved in their every day, all day, care. We have voluntarily returned to using orphanages, with the exception that the children go home to sleep each night! Orphanages that were rightly seen as a very inferior, insufficient way to raise children.
Our society has lost the idea that adults are supposed to sacrifice their desires to the needs of their children. This is reflected in everything from abortion to divorce, gay "marriage" to in vitro designer created children.
It is a sad world we live in.
Sorry I’m late to the replies, but I wanted to chime in because this resonates with me deeply, in a way I didn’t expect. When I first read this post (and when I’ve read related threads/discussions in the past), I thought of it as largely a problem of extreme capitalism treating workers as faceless cogs in a machine. I assumed it would be an issue primarily for large, for-profit entities.
But then I remembered an experience I had earlier this Fall. I lead a cultural/religious organization, and Fall 2022 was our first semester offering actual programming. (The first person plural in that last sentence is fictive/aspirational, as you’ll see in a moment.) My organization is part of a larger organization that has been around for a while, but I am the only person focusing on and responsible for my “branch,” so to speak.
One day early in the semester, I was feeling pretty sick, but one of our weekly programs was scheduled to meet that day. There was literally no one else I could ask to lead the program that day: not one of my coworkers with the larger organization, and not one of the participants. But because the group had just started meeting, I also didn’t want to cancel the meeting and lose what little momentum we’d started to build.
That experience helped me solidify a goal of working toward having a second staff member at my organization, so that it doesn’t all rest on my shoulders. But in order to make another hire, I need to have enough financial support coming in to be able to promise them a reasonable salary. So even at a small organization driven by ideals rather than profit, the ability to build in redundancy comes down to - surprise - money.
(Worth noting that in this example, I was the one who was sick, not a child needing my care. I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on how this changes when the sick individual is the worker, who can perhaps work through their sickness, vs. another loved one who needs the worker’s care. Another reason I’ve set a goal of hiring another staff member is to make it more viable for me to have children someday.)