While COVID-19 spreads across the United States, the best thing that most of us can do is self-quarantine. Companies across the country have closed their offices so people can work safely from home. K-12 schools, from San Francisco to New York City, have shuttered to thwart the spread of infection. We can expect more school districts to follow suit, as the CDC now recommends schools close and stay closed for the next eight weeks to protect our population; President Trump has recommended closing schools, too.
That means means the 57 million children in our educational system could soon be home all day, in the same houses and apartments as their working parents. In the United States, where more than half of familieshave a pair of working parents, and 23% are headed by single moms, this is an unprecedented crisis. How do we watch and educate our children while also clocking in the current 47-hour workweek?
Here’s a proposal: We don’t.
I’m not saying we go on strike. (Though companies that can afford it might consider adding a few months of paid leave for employees.) We should keep working, but work a whole lot less so that we can support our children a whole lot more. And that applies to everyone, with kids or without.
I recognize that I’m making this argument from a position of privilege. I’m a salaried, staff writer, not working hourly or as a freelancer. My checks will keep coming even if my output temporarily dips. Meanwhile, more than half of full-time employees in the U.S. are hourly. Nearly 2 million of those employees make minimum wage or less. Already, many of these jobs are being cut.
Which is all the more reason that we need to ask less of ourselves as professionals and less of each other as coworkers. It’s time to phone it in, literally and figuratively, to both protect our world and nurture the next generation.
THE RISE OF OMNIPRESENT PRODUCTIVITY HAS ALREADY SQUEEZED US DRY
It’s no secret that we live in a nonstop work economy, which has both necessitated and enabled new tools to make sure we can and do work all the time. Over the past decade, omnipresent internet connections, Slack, Office 365, Google Docs, and Zoom have made it easier than ever to collaborate with peers from thousands of miles away . . . or just from home! Telecommuting grew 159% between 2005 and 2017, but taking a meeting in sweatpants doesn’t change the fact that a third of Americans routinely work more than 45 hours a week, and nearly 10 million people work more than 60. (Note that Americans work about an hour longer per day than people do in Europe.)
In the United States, we work about 8% more hours than we did in the 1978. Doesn’t sound like that much, right? It’s actually about 150 hours, or three full weeks of work added to each year, by back-of-napkin math.
Over this span, all those aforementioned tools really did make us better employees. We’re six times as productive as we were in the 1970s, even though we only make 11.6% more for the work. This capitalist paradox has been referred to as the “The Productivity-Pay Gap.” Employee compensation hasn’t grown alongside corporate profits.
What does this have to do with COVID-19? You hardly need to go full Bernie Sanders to recognize that we are beholden to a life of too much work, reinforced by companies that profit off of enabling that work. That arrangement is not really working for our society on any given Monday—90% of Americans report being at least somewhat burned out at work—but it is entirely unsustainable in a world where tens of millions of Americans are working from home while watching their children.