You Pay For Slack Either Way
Upfront costs now, or sickness and chaos later
Back in December, I posted about how disruptive sick children and the need for childcare are to the operations of “normal” jobs. Shortly thereafter, my house entered the Time of Ear Infections (me included) and, as I write this, we heard that the heat broke at school and we need to pick up our eldest.
Resiliency in the face of unexpected sick days and minor emergencies requires redundancy, and redundancy costs money. Building up slack looks wasteful until the day it’s needed.
I asked you for your thoughts on these two questions:
Have you ever worked somewhere that deliberately tried to build up slack, rather than use everything to full capacity?
What’s the best way you’ve seen a business (or a volunteer organization) cover for unplanned absences?
Kevin pointed out that budgeting for slack is normal… as long as it’s for machines, not people:
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!)
This puts me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Hymn of the Breaking Strain,” excerpted below:
The prudent text-books give it
In tables at the end
'The stress that shears a rivet
Or makes a tie-bar bend—
'What traffic wrecks macadam—
What concrete should endure—
but we, poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature,
To warn us or make sure!
As Mary pointed out, part of the work SAHMs (and Ds) do is being flexible and adaptable. Being a homemaker and a caregiver is a lot of work, but it’s work where the parent has a little more ability to adjust as needed.
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.
A neighborhood with a critical mass of SAHPs is closer to being able to sustain what O. Carter Sneed calls “the network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving that must exist for any human being to survive and flourish.” At any given moment, someone needs, and someone can give.
Back in the conventional work work, let me share a medley of comments on part-time work. First, from Amy:
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.
Rita explained how her part-time law work makes her life and her practice’s smoother:
This exact argument has been my pitch for why I should be valuable to my law firm even though I want a reduced schedule. My practice area is periodically very busy, and when my normal workweek is 32 hours, I can pick up 10-12 additional hours much more easily than someone who is already working 50 hours, and then I am happy to be "slow" in the slow periods and not bill unnecessarily just to keep my hours up. Or I can work full time for a quarter to help cover for someone on maternity leave, and then I'm happy to hand off the work when they come back.
[…] Notably, my ability to be the slack in the system at work is made possible by redundancy at home as well. My husband is primarily a stay-at-home dad (with some very part-time/self-employed work when he wants), and we also have a part-time nanny. So I have lots of backup when I'm very busy at work, and when I'm home more, it's "extra" time to spend with my kids, do projects, etc. over and above the day-to-day housework and parenting.
Finally, let me close with this comment from Melissa:
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.
This is why I keep jumping up and down and yelling about why we need a child tax credit in this country. If it seems like everything is breaking down and nobody is competent, it is because our system has, for almost 50 years, been focused on eliminating "waste," otherwise known as slack in the system. Just-in-time supply chains, made possible by the huge increase in computing technology and communications in the 1980's and free trade agreements a decade later, meant that nobody has much inventory anymore. So, if a huge container ship plugs up the Suez Canal, there are instant shortages.
The same thing has happened to families. I do think the feminist movement in the 1970s was well intentioned, and has improved lives in many ways, and I well remember how miserable my mother and other women were when there really wasn't any alternative to being a housewife, especially once you had kids. It didn't take long though for the idea that mothers could work to get to mothers SHOULD work outside the home, for a paycheck. The flood of women into the workforce in the '70's and '80's created downward pressure on salaries, which kicked off a vicious spiral where we got to a point where it was no longer possible for one average wage earner to support a family.
The reason I am such a loud proponent of the child tax credit, and I think it is a much better use of public money than funding daycare, is that daycare just simply does not scale to the level we would need it at if every 2 parent family had both parents in the workforce. I'm not talking about the kinds of jobs that upper income educated people have--doctors, lawyers, writers, etc. will almost always find it preferable for both parents to pursue careers. But think about the WalMart manager, or the millions of other routine and not great paying jobs that the vast majority of the people in the US do in order to support their families. Most jobs are routine, inflexible, stressful, and offer mediocre compensation. Why not let each family decide how they want to allocate their time? I firmly believe that the monthly stipend given to families for each kid would more than pay for itself in the following ways:
1. Families with middle-ish incomes would probably find that they net out better by using the tax credit funds to allow one parent to stay home full time, or at least part time. This would alleviate shortages of child care for families who made different decisions.
2. Reduced burdens on elder care systems---the flexibility created by a society with more one-income households has more resources to do the invisible and unpaid work of taking granny to her doctor's appointment, picking up her groceries, and checking on her. That allows her to stay independent longer, and reduces the need for paid caregivers.
3. More availability for community involvement--clubs, churches, PTA, school volunteering, etc. Part of the collapse in community engagement is the grinding work schedules that working class people endure. The on-demand scheduling in health care and retail is brutal. If you never have a consistent day off, you can never commit to joining a club or doing a volunteer shift
4. Upward pressure on wages--if there are fewer people who need to work, then employers have to stop exploiting their labor force. They will have to pay better, be more flexible with schedules, and be less picky about who they hire.
5. Better overall mental health, and possibly better parenting outcomes. If your career involves saving babies or curing cancer, the chances are the intrinsic rewards will beat chasing toddlers, mopping up spills, and taking granny to her appointments. But if your career is managing a Starbucks, being yelled at because somebody's triple almond milk half caf macchiato didn't get the caramel drizzle like in the picture, then chasing your own toddlers and caring for your own granny is probably more fun--at least you can put the toddler in time out if they yell at you.
It makes me so angry when people look at the child tax credit as if it's welfare--as if people are lazy and entitled. Our society needs some slack.
Thanks for the timing of this reader round-up. We’ve recently been considering the pros and cons of a few possible future scenarios for our family, and this was a hugely helpful reminder today-- to intentionally factor in the importance of slack, flexibility, and adaptability as part of the various value propositions at stake. I feel wiser and more grounded for having been reminded of this, at this particular moment.