Poor Little Rich Professional
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Study finds higher-status workers experience most work-life interference
Who’s worse off: low-wage workers or successful professionals? The former, on every measure you can think of except one. In the case of work-life interference—the feeling that your working life is spilling over into your home life, causing stress and impeding your other responsibilities—workers with higher status jobs appear to fare worse than their under-paid counterparts.
According to new study in the December issue of the American Sociological Review, workers with more authority, decision-making latitude, skills, and earnings report higher levels of interference between their work and home life.
This seems counter-intuitive. Workers with higher status jobs have more resources at their disposal: paid sick days, emergency savings, perhaps even an assistant or two. Surely, they’re better equipped to deal with other aspects of their lives than a worker who has little to no control over his work schedule or the funds for a reliable babysitter, for example.
But resources come with responsibilities and, often, strain-inducing strings attached. Yes, workers with status and authority command higher earnings and enjoy certain freedoms. They also tend to experience more pressure, commit longer hours, and encounter more interpersonal conflict at work Having control over one’s work schedule is likewise a double-edged sword. Theoretically, it’s a great resource that allows workers to manage their work and personal lives as they see fit. In practice, it usually comes with very high expectations about workplace commitment.
As a result of this high-status paradox, employees in otherwise enviable positions are more likely to claim work impedes their home life, their family responsibilities, and their social and leisure activities. They’re more likely to think about work when they’re not technically working.
If I actually had a life (and a real job), I might be the poster child for the condition. As a Ph.D. student, I have almost complete control over my working hours. I should thank my lucky stars! Instead, I feel like I could always be working, that my potential output is infinite, and that, dammit, even though it’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday my cube-mates are still typing furiously and I shouldn’t be the first one to go home.
It’s no secret that most professionals are devoted to their work. We often blur the line between work and life intentionally. And since we all have to work, and it takes up a good part of our time, this isn’t a bad strategy. But, as the authors of this study remind us, it isn’t a stress-free one. And, in the extreme, the “work devotion” strategy may very well be detrimental to the other important aspects of our lives, like our health and personal relationships.
I know what you’re thinking. Poor little rich professional. You’re right: low-wage workers face far more dire problems. Like, you know, poverty. I’m not arguing that we all get low-status jobs or give up job control.
Although, now that I mention it, many European countries have strict laws concerning how many hours employees are allowed to work, thereby effectively abolishing one aspect of job control for some groups of workers. One result of this approach is that even Europeans in very high-status jobs, like management consultants and bankers, have no qualms about going home at a reasonable hour or taking four weeks off for vacation. Everyone else is doing it, so the pressure to prove your dedication to the job is relaxed for all. (Check out a related debate about European vs. American ”holidays” in The Economist.)
So what does this study really tell us? Work will continue to interfere with our home and family lives, especially, as it turns out, for professionals, until those at the top of the employment food chain—managers, supervisors, VPs—eschew the cult of work devotion and impossibly long hours. That’s a tall order in a crappy economy. But devotion and productivity are not the same thing. In the last decade, for example, workers in Belgium, Norway, France, and the Netherlands, where five- and six-week vacations are the norm and work weeks are much shorter, have been more productive in output per hour than workers in the United States. Some amount of work-life interference is inevitable, but there are ways to minimize the worst of it. I’m talking about collective action and progressive public policies– not America’s traditional areas of strength, I’m afraid.
If work isn’t working for those of us at the top of the jobs food chain, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with the system? And isn’t it time we did something about it?
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Technology has made it worse. If someone can be reached, they should respond and immediately — whatever time zone that call or message is coming from and arriving to (try 3 or 4 a.m. in NY when your writer or caller is in the Mideast. This happens in our home.)
My low level retail job had a huge benefit. When I left the store, I was gone, free, clear until the next shift. Too bad the pay sucks.
“…have been more productive in output per hour than workers in the United States”
It seems that many Americans are too busy being “multitaskers” to care about productivity. IMO, multitasking has evolved to mean “I do two things slowly and incorrectly at the same time”
While most Americans feel they have no free time, studies often point to the opposite http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/home.htm
and if you say you work too much, you end up believing it.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sloan Network, Yelizavetta Kofman. Yelizavetta Kofman said: Poor Little Rich Professional: Stress and higher status jobs http://tinyurl.com/yd8jbt9 @trueslant [...]
There is a huge problem in staging this type of comparison. While it makes sense to scrutinize the way in which a person’s professional identity impacts the ways she is able to conduct her non-work “life,” it makes utterly no sense to set up working professionals as objects of pity and, moreover, to do so in contradistinction to the lifestyles of low-income employees. The fact that this is not obvious is lamentable, to say the least.
Again, this is not to contradict the valuable work this blog performs in analyzing the troubles particular to the professional class. What is bothersome about this piece in particular, though, is that it does this work in this unfortunate compare-and-contrast way, attempting to reorganize our previous assumptions that workers with large incomes fare better “than their under-paid counterparts.” What is the value in this sort of comparison? Can’t the same topic still get a fair treatment without the reader necessarily having to change his former assumptions about the plights of the working class?
There is a problem, too, with the terms operative here. This sense of “interference” is rife with issues because it is, itself, coded by certain class valences. I can’t imagine that, for instance, a working mom with three kids working two minimum-wage jobs much thinks about maintaining a work-life balance; her efforts are probably more directed toward making ends meet. Rich people likely report that work effects their leisure time, their family time, their evenings and weekends because they are accustomed having to these things in the first place. The study you site might as well report that the professional class reports far more frustrations with incompetent boat mechanics.
It comes down to the type of language, the sorts of discourse, to which certain people have access. A lot of this access is governed by class. A doctoral candidate should understand this. Professionals, white people, men, the wealthy, and the economic carnivores to whom you refer in your jarring conclusion all produce languages which other groups (low-income working moms, say, or the serially unemployed) couldn’t conceive of producing.
Think of it this way: there aren’t a lot of poor people coming home and saying things like, “it really sucks to make $8.00 an hour serving fast food or doing data entry or fixing other people’s stuff, but at least I don’t take my work home with me.”
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I’ll try to respond to some of the issues you address.
With regard to the problem of this kind of comparison. Yes, it was an attempt to frame the issue in some kind of admittedly attention seeking way. Maybe not a great choice. But I tried to clarify that on a relative scale of problems, professionals have it made. AND the actual article (which I don’t fully cite, actually: it’s called “When Work Interferes with Life: Work-Nonwork Interference and the Influence of Work-Related Demands and Resources” by Scott Schieman, Paul Glavin, Melissa A. Milkie) does compare high status and low status workers.
I was not “attempting to reorganize our previous assumptions that workers with large incomes fare better ‘than their under-paid counterparts.’” I do say that high status workers fare better on the issue of interference; this is the argument the study I’m writing about makes (though I really am not critical about their arguments and should probably have been). I think it is important to think about the way work is organized for professionals and how professionals internalize their positions and that organizational structure. Essentially, if so many professionals are reporting so much interference, why don’t we do anything about it? I’m not asking–or certainly didn’t intend to ask– the reader to change his assumption about the plights of the working class.
If you believe me about that, and I hope you do, then to answer your question about what the value of this sort of comparison is, my answer is this: people understand that the interests of low-wage workers are not necessarily aligned with those of corporations and capitalism, but most people think that professional interests are well served by success in the American corporate system. This study hints that perhaps this isn’t always the case.
Interference is not my term. But it is not the same as “balance,” as you seem to imply. It was probably used by the authors to try to get away from the idea of balance, which as you point out is not realistic.
You also seem to take offense because in your eyes leisure time, family time, evenings and weekends are luxuries (like sail boats). I don’t think they should be, however naive that may be.
It’s an uphill battle trying to convince people these issues are important. We don’t even have good terminology for it (work-life balance is a ridiculously poor estimation of what people are trying to get at when they use that term). I probably didn’t help by seeming to pit low-wage workers against higher status workers (though that’s not what I was really doing, I just thought the comparison might make some people think twice). But I stand by the idea that it’s at least important to think about the implications of work/non-work interference.
In response to another comment. See in context »