An Interview with Tom Kochan
By Judi Casey and Karen Corday
Casey: Why does your book focus specifically on working families?
Kochan: Work and family are so intertwined that we have to look at them as one social and economic set of activities. Typically, we have studied them separately and missed the reality that people experience in their lives. We were not speaking to workers as they experienced work, nor were we speaking to families’ actual home lives. I felt it was time to bring the two together, but keep the emphasis on the workplace as much as possible, as that’s where so many of our pressures are located today. I wanted to move away from thinking about working families as blue-collar workers and make the point that today we are all part of working families. This is true of everyone from entry-level workers to high-level professionals; we all find that our work and family lives are intertwined.
Casey: What are the characteristics of America’s working families?
Kochan: Today everybody is part of a working family. There’s no single model; it’s not the old stereotype of the male breadwinner with the wife at home taking care of the family and community needs. That situation represents less than twenty percent of people that work today. We have working families of all varieties, from the sole breadwinner to the majority of families where there are two parents in the workforce, not necessarily both working full-time, but with various working time arrangements. Other possible situations include single parent families where one parent has full responsibility for all work and family needs as well as families where parents are not in the workforce and the children are growing up on public assistance without any role models in the workplace. There are also other variations of working families, from people with partners who have children and are sharing responsibility for them to grandparents and other relatives involved in parenting and economic support. Families are very diverse. Likewise, workers are very diverse; some work part-time, some work full-time, some have situations in which there’s steady employment, and others work from time to time.
Casey: You talk about working families in a “knowledge economy?” What do working families need to do to succeed in today’s knowledge economy?
Kochan: A knowledge economy rises or falls on the basis of innovation; workers use their discretionary effort to add value in the workplace with their knowledge, training, education, commitment, and motivation to do a good job and serve their customers, patients, or clients effectively. To succeed in this type of economy, workers need a solid basic education that imparts technical skills as well as the ability to work with others, lead teams, and communicate effectively. They also need access to continuing education—“lifelong learning” is the term that has become popular. Skills and technologies change and become obsolete much more quickly than in the past. It’s no longer enough to get a good education and assume that you’ll be set for life. A degree can serve as a ticket into the labor market, but maintaining one’s skills requires continuous learning, whether that comes in the form of returning to school, learning on the job, or opportunities through professional associations. People also need the ability to navigate the labor market, to sell one’s skills and know about job opportunities. This is a fluid labor market, which requires people to go out and find where they can use their skills and capabilities, as opposed to moving up or moving laterally to an opportunity within their current place of employment.
This type of economy can add more pressure for families; it requires more negotiation and collaborative planning as to how and when one can move to where job opportunities are located and consideration of both children’s needs as well as a partner’s career. This creates stress. New opportunities don’t always present themselves in predictable ways. These competing needs are all subject to discussion at home.
Casey: How can families be successful, given all these new dynamics?
Kochan: As we just discussed, it requires a lot more communication and negotiation, so there aren’t surprises that effect not only one career, but two. There needs to be more conversation about responsibilities, fears, and possibilities down the road.
Casey: Do you think families are equipped to communicate about these issues?
Kochan: No. Families have to do a lot more thinking about their joint outcomes. If I don’t have health insurance at my job, for example, perhaps my partner has to think about finding a job or choosing among alternatives that will provide that kind of stability and support, or vice versa. Workers also need to become much more aggressive about using options such as flexibility in the workplace and bringing up issues pertaining to working families. If workers put these issues on the table, employers will see that in the competitive labor market, if they want the best workers with the skills they need, they must be responsive to their workers’ realities. I think we’re beginning to see this a little more with our young professionals, but traditionally this has not been a legitimate area for discussion. Even employers have a difficult time talking about the needs of working families out of fear of discriminating against workers with family responsibilities. I think we all need to become better at having these conversations.
Casey: Do you think that families are discriminated against because they have more needs, and maybe employers think it’s “simpler” to hire someone without a lot of obligations and attachments?
Kochan: I think some employers are of that mindset, and you do see some of that in the labor marker. One blatant example is employers who are worried about the expense of covering health insurance, so they look for employees who won’t need family coverage or can be covered in other ways. This doesn’t happen in leading companies, but we see it in some organizations, particularly in the service sector. We also see situations in which organizations discourage long-term employment. They’d rather have temporary workers who may not see their jobs as careers; they don’t want to build the kind of social obligations typically associated with longer tenure on the job such as time off, vacation, and retirement security. It’s a tough workplace in many respects, and employees need to recognize that they must raise these issues for themselves and their peers and let employers know that this is what’s required to have a productive and well-qualified workforce.
Casey: Who are the role models or instructors who will teach these new skills needed by working families?
Kochan: It’s our responsibility as educators. Here at the Sloan school, we are spending more time on work and family issues and how to discuss them in the workplace. We have negotiations classes where we teach a work and family case that gets people to consider these issues in ways they can be comfortable with as they more forward. Professional associations should also focus on the issues. For example, you have so many young lawyers who work these very long hours and have to leave the best law firms because they can’t work there and have a family. No individual can take this issue on, but if the bar association takes a stand, along with various medical associations and the MBA students who work for investment banks and consulting firms, and says, “Look, we’re all interested in a different model of employment,” I think we will see change. If these groups don’t work collectively, it will be very hard. Unions are also working on these issues, to some extent, and I think they need to step up more forcefully and consider the needs of working families as a central part of any labor negotiations.
Casey: So it’s a combination of individual responsibility as well as the responsibility of different structures that support working families to address these issues?
Kochan: Yes. We’ve tried to succeed alone and it doesn’t work. If I voice my needs and you don’t and we’re both competing for the same job or working alongside each other, then I fear that our potential employer or supervisor will look at you as a more ideal employee. That disincentive keeps us both from acting on our own interests; we must work together. This doesn’t mean we have to be out on the streets on strike; that’s not going to work in today’s society or economy. It does mean we should talk about these issues, raising them, insisting on them, and supporting each other in the workplace. Those kinds of behaviors, collectively, will make an enormous difference in the future.
Casey: What’s the role of government?
Kochan: The government needs to recognize that we have a workforce that needs to balance work and family responsibilities, and they need to encourage such behavior. I do think we are overdue to have some sort of paid leave that covers all people who work, not just those who are in professional jobs who are covered through their workplaces. I think there could be minimum changes in public policies around paid leave and flexible work hours where employees have control over the decision to work overtime, but fundamentally, the government should provide a level playing field to raise these issues, discuss them in the workplace, and encourage these discussions.
Casey: Should the government promote the right to request hours, as they did in the U.K. recently?
Kochan: I think it’s hard to mandate flexibility. I respect what they’re doing in Europe, but I think this issue needs to be worked out jointly at the workplace. My preference would be to have local solutions and to protect individuals’ rights to raise these issues without fear of retaliation and discrimination. Even that is hard to enforce from a legal standpoint; there must be norms that develop in institutions to protect people.
Casey: How can academics and researchers support working families?
Kochan: The most important thing we can do is conduct applied research that shows what works and what doesn’t, how to improve the workplace, how to resolve these flexibility issues, and to demonstrate the conditions needed to be productive in a flexible workplace. There’s an enormous need to get into the workplace and use all of our methodological tools to do that work. I would also encourage more experimentation with different kinds of approaches. All of the states could be doing more on work and family issues, be it paid leave or other types of flexibility. It’s time for state level innovation and for us to work with public policy makers to encourage that kind of innovation, evaluate it, and see what we learn. Finally, I think it’s time that we all start working together with business and labor leaders, work and family groups, and public policy makers to figure out what needs to be done and how to more forward on a collaborative basis. We can’t just all do our own things and be ships passing in the night, which is the current state of affairs. I’m very optimistic that we’ll have the Massachusetts Work Family Council in place in 2006, and hope that will be a model for how to move forward.
Casey: What would be the first steps once the council is approved?
Kochan: The first step would be to appoint senior members of the council such as high level executives and representatives from the non-profit sector and from labor. One of the first things we want to do is a survey of Massachusetts employers to get a good baseline on the state of flexibility practices in the workplace today. From there, we can begin to set an agenda.
Casey: What are other concerns of working families in addition to flexibility and paid leave? How about child care and elder care?
Kochan: Yes, child care, elder care, and school hours. Hours of school are likely to become a hot button issue for state policy in the future. Nobody’s work schedule stops at 2:00 when kids get out of school. The idea of the summer vacation worked very well for me when I was growing up on a farm and we were needed to help out there, but those days are long gone for the vast majority of people, and we should think of school years differently. Clearly we’re all sensitive to not overstressing our children, but there are changes that could be made that would lead to a higher quality of education and be better suited to the rhythms of people’s work lives.
Casey: Why has it been so hard for people to step up and affirm that these are critical issues that we must take ownership for and resolve in some way?
Kochan: Historically, work and family has been viewed as a personal issue to be dealt with individually rather than part of the public agenda. Secondly, we’ve become so polarized that people are afraid to raise tough issues at work and in the political arena because they get attacked when they do so. We must become more civil in our public and political discourse and allow people to raise their voices in their own interests.
Casey: We recently interviewed Sandy Burud about her new book, Leveraging the New Human Capital. In this book, she references around 500 studies that demonstrate the benefits of flexible work arrangements. There’s a lot of data out there documenting the health and business benefits of paying attention to these issues, but yet there does seem to be a lot of inertia and polarization. People have very different perspectives about the needs of working families. Do you have any thoughts on how to bridge these differences and get people to work together?
Kochan: I think we need to have more convening forums in which people who see the world through their own narrow perspectives are brought together with others who are confronting similar problems in a different way. It’s our job to bring these stakeholders together and demonstrate that if we work together, we can make some progress. We don’t have enough of that in society today; we are all so specialized and the interest group lines are drawn very narrowly. The trust in institutions is at such a low point that everyone is trying to do their own thing. That needs to change, and that requires leadership.
Casey: Yes, I think leadership is really the key. We need to have an energizing champion who can pull people together under a bigger umbrella.
Kochan: We do need that, and I think that may emerge. Society is so frustrated with the divisiveness in our social and political dialogue. I think some of the people at the local and state levels are beginning to see leadership and are searching for ways to bring groups together. I’m hopeful that in the near future, we can begin to really make some progress.
To contact Tom, please e-mail tkochan@mit.edu.
See also Graphic: Employment Status of Parents from Different Types of Families and Additional Resources Related to Working Families in the New Economy
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