butchersapron
Bring back hanging
6 writers there. 5 oxbridge. The other is a former editor of an oxbridge magazine.
Urban v's the Commentariat
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crossthebreeze
Well-Known Member
A friend of mine has recently been ill — the kind of ill where your life becomes a blizzard of appointments, tests and treatments; where doctors think you are an “interesting” case. She says it’s a cruel double blow: a heap of extra admin when you already feel rotten. Managing her diary and endless paperwork is making her feel unproductive at work.
She’s not the only one. Dire predictions of sky-high jobless figures after the credit crunch never came to pass. Britain doesn’t have an unemployment crisis. Instead, it has a productivity crisis. The latest figures show that more of us are in work; we’re just not getting more done. Productivity has slipped back to where it was before the financial crisis.
Economists offer dozens of competing explanations, from simple bad management to the grand and pessimistic prediction that innovation has stalled. However, the figures sent my mind in a different direction. Has anyone totted up the sheer amount of life admin that we do and considered what it might be doing to us in return? An economy built for working men with stay-at-home wives has had to adjust, shrieking and wailing, to the reality of dual-earner households and single parents.
The sheer effort involved in managing the lives of others — whether young children or elderly parents — eats up our concentration and our leisure time.
The problem is made worse by the trend in business to offload as much effort as possible on to customers, often under the guise of “convenience”. But the self-checkout queue doesn’t feel all that convenient when three of the tills are out of order and someone is locked in a mortal battle with the remaining one over how to weigh an individual banana. Big companies love call centres because they’re incredibly efficient — but only for them. Provide slightly fewer than the necessary number of advisers and you’ll never have one sitting idle. Instead, your customers will waste hours of their own time listening to the music from BA adverts in the 1990s.
Online forms are another time-suck. Some still refuse point-blank to accept that you might not have a home phone number, forcing you to make one up and hope a stranger in Wanstead doesn’t receive a call about your furniture delivery. Online ticket systems force you to jump through hoop after hoop, before mysteriously timing out when you finally enter your credit card details. And any modern version of the Labours of Hercules would find far harder tasks than cleaning the Augean stables: try getting hold of a living, breathing human at Amazon. Or navigating a price-comparison website.
This life admin often hits women harder. In 2013 Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, became the poster girl for corporate feminism, advising working women to “lean in”. They had to get their (male) partners to do more and try harder to have it all. Then, in 2015, her husband, Dave, died suddenly. Sandberg was left to juggle a high-flying job and two young children.
Her new book, Option B, contains a fascinating statistic: among middle-aged adults who lose a spouse, 54% of men are in a romantic relationship a year later, compared with 7% of women. In Britain widowers are twice as likely as widows to remarry within five years. Those numbers hint at a hard truth: we go easier on men who feel they can’t cope with running a household and holding down a job. Of course they need a partner in life, we say. (See also fathers who “babysit” their own kids.)
Life admin feels so draining because it is barely recognised, let alone valued. There’s no Oscar for best carer or award for nappy-changer of the month. In March the author Bruce Holsinger collected examples of male authors thanking their wives in their book acknowledgments. One in particular took the biscuit: “My wife typed my manuscript drafts as soon as I gave them to her, even though she was caring for our first child, born in June 1946, and was also teaching part-time in the chemistry department.” (Want to bet that poor woman also had to listen to her husband moan about how tiring it is to write a book?) It’s hard to imagine such a dedication being written now. It shows how some of the pioneers of literature and science were able to get so much done in their chosen field: that was all they did.
What can be done? Proper recognition helps. The Office for National Statistics has recently begun to analyse its data seriously, reporting that the estimated value of unpaid childcare in 2015 was £132.4bn. That’s more than the annual NHS budget. Honesty also helps: researchers only recently discovered that the most leisure-starved group were mothers, because early studies classed childcare and housework as “leisure”. (Those studies were largely carried out by men.)
Of course there is one obvious solution to the difficulty of juggling full-time work and life admin. In the end I told my friend that what she needed was simple: a wife.
She’s not the only one. Dire predictions of sky-high jobless figures after the credit crunch never came to pass. Britain doesn’t have an unemployment crisis. Instead, it has a productivity crisis. The latest figures show that more of us are in work; we’re just not getting more done. Productivity has slipped back to where it was before the financial crisis.
Economists offer dozens of competing explanations, from simple bad management to the grand and pessimistic prediction that innovation has stalled. However, the figures sent my mind in a different direction. Has anyone totted up the sheer amount of life admin that we do and considered what it might be doing to us in return? An economy built for working men with stay-at-home wives has had to adjust, shrieking and wailing, to the reality of dual-earner households and single parents.
The sheer effort involved in managing the lives of others — whether young children or elderly parents — eats up our concentration and our leisure time.
The problem is made worse by the trend in business to offload as much effort as possible on to customers, often under the guise of “convenience”. But the self-checkout queue doesn’t feel all that convenient when three of the tills are out of order and someone is locked in a mortal battle with the remaining one over how to weigh an individual banana. Big companies love call centres because they’re incredibly efficient — but only for them. Provide slightly fewer than the necessary number of advisers and you’ll never have one sitting idle. Instead, your customers will waste hours of their own time listening to the music from BA adverts in the 1990s.
Online forms are another time-suck. Some still refuse point-blank to accept that you might not have a home phone number, forcing you to make one up and hope a stranger in Wanstead doesn’t receive a call about your furniture delivery. Online ticket systems force you to jump through hoop after hoop, before mysteriously timing out when you finally enter your credit card details. And any modern version of the Labours of Hercules would find far harder tasks than cleaning the Augean stables: try getting hold of a living, breathing human at Amazon. Or navigating a price-comparison website.
This life admin often hits women harder. In 2013 Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, became the poster girl for corporate feminism, advising working women to “lean in”. They had to get their (male) partners to do more and try harder to have it all. Then, in 2015, her husband, Dave, died suddenly. Sandberg was left to juggle a high-flying job and two young children.
Her new book, Option B, contains a fascinating statistic: among middle-aged adults who lose a spouse, 54% of men are in a romantic relationship a year later, compared with 7% of women. In Britain widowers are twice as likely as widows to remarry within five years. Those numbers hint at a hard truth: we go easier on men who feel they can’t cope with running a household and holding down a job. Of course they need a partner in life, we say. (See also fathers who “babysit” their own kids.)
Life admin feels so draining because it is barely recognised, let alone valued. There’s no Oscar for best carer or award for nappy-changer of the month. In March the author Bruce Holsinger collected examples of male authors thanking their wives in their book acknowledgments. One in particular took the biscuit: “My wife typed my manuscript drafts as soon as I gave them to her, even though she was caring for our first child, born in June 1946, and was also teaching part-time in the chemistry department.” (Want to bet that poor woman also had to listen to her husband moan about how tiring it is to write a book?) It’s hard to imagine such a dedication being written now. It shows how some of the pioneers of literature and science were able to get so much done in their chosen field: that was all they did.
What can be done? Proper recognition helps. The Office for National Statistics has recently begun to analyse its data seriously, reporting that the estimated value of unpaid childcare in 2015 was £132.4bn. That’s more than the annual NHS budget. Honesty also helps: researchers only recently discovered that the most leisure-starved group were mothers, because early studies classed childcare and housework as “leisure”. (Those studies were largely carried out by men.)
Of course there is one obvious solution to the difficulty of juggling full-time work and life admin. In the end I told my friend that what she needed was simple: a wife.
So not as bad as the headline suggest. But how the fuck does someone basically write a piece about unpaid labour - listing the massive amounts of paperwork and appointments needed during times of personal crisis, and how infuriating personal admin often is, companies that make things harder for consumers (and workers, though she doesn't mention this) for their own convenience and cost-cutting, the massive amounts of unpaid labour that go into raising kids and caring for the sick and elderly and the gendered division of labour for this - and use her sick friend as an example ffs - and conclude that the main issue resulting in this is work productivity (rather than, you know, stress or poverty or grinding down any enjoyment in life or alienation) and the source of the problem is not capitalism itself or even any fundamental problem with women's gendered role within the system, but just that the system hasn't adapted very well to women having jobs yet, and that all that needs doing about all this is better statistics (and ha ha stressed out women just need to get wives)??
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Plus she doesn't look at the other factors of why productivity is down such as underresourcing or bad management.
lazythursday
Averagely-Known Member
Basically she fancied writing an article about all the work we have to do that isn't officially work - a great topic - but decided to hang it on a convenient news hook of productivity figures when really that's a stupid place to hang it.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
II did a search for her name and productivity earlier - she's done a fair number of pieces on the idea without once seeming to get that it means...MORE WORK. Maybe she's eyeing up post-journo management jobs after she has finally been found out.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Having a go at the clickbaityness of the headline is fair game though, no?
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
In a more meritocratic society she would be less upset because she would be more used to disappointment.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
There was a great article by one Helen Pidd in the Guardian moaning about the lack of black faces in the audience at the Manchester Arena We are Manchester concert .
seventh bullet
sovietwave
Pronounced thuuuper.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Well, after an internet search, the Sydney morning herald thought it was 'compelling' (review was balanced, looked at the weak points as well), Kirkus Reviews described it as 'polemic writing at its thoughtful best', Foyles Bookshop gave her a very positive review, the Financial Times reviewed that book and others as part of an article about feminism and trump, and certainly didn't bash it by any means, but these articles aren't from today, they're from 6 to 8 weeks ago at least.
No obvious bad review for bitch doctrine that I could see.
No obvious bad review for bitch doctrine that I could see.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Did stumble across her Patreon info - she currently gets over $4k a month from 624 sponsors to write articles, which will be on top of the money she gets paid by magazines and newspapers for her work.
It's great - people who want to read her bollocks can now pay her directly, and she's no longer compelled by economics to chase commissions from newspapers and magazines. Notice you haven't heard much from her lately? This is why.
last time I looked, four people paid her $250 a month. Mad.
The Pale King
Well-Known Member
Butchers on the money here: "That's precisely the giggly amn't i naughty everyone headline and subheader she would write or ask people to write though."
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Why an USDAW lanyard - or doesn't it matter? He's just Paul Mason.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
Because John Kiriakou couldn't make it
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
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