Concept Paper

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Race, Class, and Work-Life Balance: Exploring Intersectionality in the Domains of Work and Care
Funded by the UW Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies

In 2005, the HBCLS undertook a major initiative to expand scholarship, activism, and awareness on the subject of caring labor. The caring labor initiative not only produced a major conference, but also was the seed of many productive conversations across faculty and graduate students from various departments across campus. This proposal seeks to continue with the spirit of the caring labor initiative by organizing a focused working group to generate a research and an activist agenda after two year’s time.

Specifically, the working group will consider race/ethnicity, class, and work-life integration, looking closely at the ways race/ethnicity and class shape individuals’, families’, and communities’ ability to balance work and care responsibilities. The working group would have two concrete goals. First, it will develop a research agenda to address the notable gap in work-life scholarship on how race/ethnicity and class status shape individuals’ experiences in navigating the spheres of employment and non-work obligations.Second, the working group would forge close ties with community members, with the intention of developing agendas for research and action that inform, and are in turn informed by, the everyday experiences of those involved daily in this balancing act.

Related literature

Both the academic and popular literatures document numerous points of conflict between work and care, examining in particular the ways that work and “life” can be prone to “spillover” into one another (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985; Hochschild, 1997; Lambert, 1990). Examples of this “spillover” can include negative impacts on individual, family, and community well-being from unpredictable or over-time work schedules; and reductions in workplace performance, stability and even diversity in response to the demands on employees’ to fulfill caring responsibilities at home.

Much of the public discourse as well as academic literature on this subject have also focused on workers and families that are middle and upper class, often dual income, white, and enjoying employment in the professional and managerial tiers. The current and growing interest about the so-called “opt out revolution” – the movement of some highly-educated, professional women out of the workplace and into home-based care of dependents – exemplifies this focus. It also typifies the jarring omission of considerations of race/ethnicity and class in working mothers’ and families’ choices – or, more pointedly, lack thereof – about balancing their “earner” and “carer” roles (Belkin, 2003; Story, 2005). These processes, as well as their interpretation by scholars, are necessarily heavily conditioned by the racial/ethnic, cultural, and class perspectives of not only research subjects, but also researchers themselves.

Recently, several studies have begun to contribute novel insights about the distinct challenges faced by low-wage, low-skill workers with respect to balancing the demands of work and life amidst limited personal and employment supports (England, 1996; Lambert & Haley-Lock, 2004; Lambert, Waxman, and Haley-Lock, 2002; Kossek, Huber-Yoder, Castellino, & Lerner, 1997; Tilly, 1996a & b). Yet few scholars to date have considered the intersectionality of class and race/ethnicity with respect to these issues (Sidel, 2006, offers one newer movement in this direction). Indeed, while considerable research exists on predictors and effects of race- and class-based residential, educational, occupational and other employment segregation and discrimination, for example, comparatively little is understood about the work-life experiences of professional working parents of color, or of working parents who may be racially marginalized and employed in marginalized low-wage, low-skill jobs. Moreover, differences in racial, ethnic, and cultural identity among parents and workers – as well as in economic and political status – necessarily shape choices and resources for navigating “work” and “life” in ways not yet sufficiently reflected in research and advocacy. The central goal of the proposed working group, then, is to address these scholarly and practical gaps in knowledge by convening a set of academic researchers and community members who will be tasked with building a research agenda, as well as set of community-accessible educational events, around these critical work and family issues.

Working group organizing entities

1. The working group will convene a regular meeting principally staffed and led by faculty and advanced graduate students whose task will be to create an agenda for both new research and action on the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and work-life integration. This agenda will include planning potential collaborative analyses of secondary data sets, new data collection projects, and pursuit of external funding for research and educational activities. The group will purposefully identify diverse academic collaborators from across multiple disciplines and UW units – for example, experts on race/ethnicity; on class and low-wage employment and poverty; on families, parenting and child development; and gender, job training, and career development. In this respect, the working group will pursue a consciously multidisciplinary perspective as it seeks to “cross-fertilize” ideas between scholarly areas that do not typically interact. The group proposes to further the HBCLS caring labor initiative, while introducing a specific target of race and class issues, as well as diversifying the types of paid labor considered.

2. The proposed working group will establish a second, overlapping entity with local activists and other community members whose expertise and own work and life experiences position them to inform research and educational initiatives on gender, race, class, and work-life concerns. The purpose of this unit is to both inform the development of new research as well as plan community-based action events. In the first year, this will include a bi-monthly roundtable speaker series, featuring presentations and discussions by both community members and academic researchers. These sessions will take place on a day and time the group identifies as being optimally accessible to participants, and will be advertised and open to the public. A faculty member, with the help of the allocated RA resources, will coordinate the two entities. In Year 1, the Faculty Coordinator will be Prof. Anna Haley-Lock; in Year 2, the working group participants will appoint the Coordinator.

3. One concrete product of the roundtable discussions/conversation series will be a one-to-two day conference that will take place in the spring of the second year. A possible model for this conference is a small-scale version of the recent Caring Labor (2005) and Union Democracy Re-Examined (2006) conferences, in which a small number of academic researchers from around the country come together with activists and community experts to discuss the topic at hand and produce a continued agenda for research and activism.

Information about the activities of the working group and products it produces will be posted to new website, intended as a “clearing house” and a center for information on these issues. Further, a listserv will be created and maintained to keep academic, activist, and community members connected to the activities of the working group.

References

Belkin, L. (2003). The opt-out revolution. The New York Times, October 26.

England, K. (1996). Mothers, wives, workers: The everyday lives of working mothers, in England, K. (Ed.), Who Will Mind the Baby? Geographies of Child-Care and Working Mothers, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 109-22.

Greenhaus, J. H., & Beutell, N. J. (1985). Sources of conflict between work and family roles. Academy of Management Review, 10(1):76-88.

Haley-Lock, A., & Bruch, S. K. (Forthcoming). Workplace and workforce considerations in access to employment opportunity. Accepted for publication in D. Engstrom & L. Piedra (Eds.), Our Diverse Society: Race, Ethnicity, and Class, Washington, DC: NASW Press, June 2006.

Hochschild, A. R. (1997). The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, New York: Metropolitan Books.

Kossek, E. E., Huber-Yoder, M., Castellino, D. Lerner, J. (1997).  The working poor: Locked out of careers and the organizational mainstream? Academy of Management Executive. Issue on Careers in the Twenty-first Century, Winter:76-92.

Lambert, S. J. (1990). Processes linking work and family: A critical review and research agenda. Human Relations, 43(3):239-57.

Lambert, S., & Haley-Lock, A. (2004). The organizational stratification of opportunities for work-life balance: Addressing issues of equality and social justice in the workplace. Community, Work and Family, 7:2, 179-95.

Lambert, S., Waxman, R. E., & Haley-Lock, A. (2002). Against the odds: A study of sources of instability in lower-skilled jobs. Working Paper of The Project on the Public Economy of Work, School of Social Service Administration, The University of Chicago.

Sidel, R. (2006). Unsung Heroines : Single Mothers and the American Dream, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Story, L. (2005). Many women at elite colleges set career path to motherhood. The New York Times, September 20.

Tilly, C. (1996a). The good, the bad, and the ugly: Good and bad jobs in the United States at the millennium. Unpublished working paper of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Tilly, C. (1996b). Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs In a Changing Labor Market. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.