Perry Work Report: work&labour news&research, March 25, 2016

March 25, 2016

Announcements:

Roy Adams: Canadian Honoured with LERA Academic Fellows Award

The award recognizes scholars who have made “contributions of unusual distinction” to a given field. He is only the second Canadian to date to be recognized.

Upcoming Conference: The Sharing Economy and the Future of Work

This one day conference will bring together twenty speakers from academia, government, industry, labour, and law to provide perspectives on what employment / labour / work policies will be required to realize the maximum benefits, while mitigating the adverse risks, of the sharing economy.
Date: June 03 2016
Time: 8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Location: Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registration Required: www.eply.com/tSE_tFoW
For more information visit their website.

And don't forget the Sefton-Williams Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 31, 2016!

 

Follow us on the CIRHR Library Tumblr and on the CIRHR Library Twitter.

Petitioning University of Toronto: Stop Contracting Out!

“University of Toronto service workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 3261 are petitioning for the university to stop contracting out their work. The petition, Stop Contracting Out, was launched after the university transferred cleaning jobs in buildings related to the faculties of law, music, and dentistry to a contract cleaning company.”

“‘We hope the petition will convince the Employer to terminate its contract with Compass and return to its practice of hiring employees who are paid a living wage, with health and pension benefits,’ CUPE servicing representative Leanne MacMillan said. ‘We think regular U of T employees, who have a permanent connection to the campus can provide the type of cleaning which needs to be done. Folks don’t need to worry about turnover, inadequate health and safety training and loss of privacy when you don’t have regular employees doing the work.’”

“The union acknowledges that U of T is attempting to cut costs but believes there are better ways to do so. According to the petition, the entire payroll of CUPE local 3261’s members is 1.2 per cent of U of T’s net income. ‘We don’t think eliminating positions from some of [the] lowest paid workers on campus is a good strategy,’ MacMillan said. ‘We don’t think it actually saves very much money. We don’t know how much U of T is paying Compass. We only know what Compass is paying its employees. We don’t think that reduced cleaning of buildings, offices, classrooms and labs is good for your learning experience as student. We don’t have any issues with the workers who are employed by Compass,’ MacMillan said. ‘However, we think U of T should do the right thing and continue to use full time regular employees to clean on campus.’”

Petitioning President University of Toronto Meric Gertler: STOP CONTRACTING OUT

The Varsity, March 7, 2016: “CUPE local 3261 petitions against contracting out jobs: Members call for U of T to pay workers living wage,” by Rachel Chen

Health & Safety and Compass Group:

“Janet Knox stopped short of calling the Victoria General Hospital dirty, but the Nova Scotia Health Authority President and CEO has ordered a deep clean of the entire Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre.”

“The order comes days after Edmonton resident Shelley Vaughan filed a complaint about the state of the hospital, where she stayed to donate a kidney in November.”

“‘The floors were filthy,’ she explains. ‘There was debris all over the floors, from the time I was in, my whole stay.’”

“Cleaning staff at the QEII are hired on contract from Compass Group Canada.”

CTV News, January 21, 2016: “Deep clean ordered for problem-plagued Halifax hospital”

And if you can’t beat them buy them...

“A private housekeeping firm with a less-than-stellar track record is back in charge of cooking and cleaning at seven Victoria-area health care facilities less than a year after the Vancouver Island Health Authority cancelled its contract for failing to meet performance standards.”

“Health authority officials confirmed Wednesday that Compass Group Canada, which lost the $10.5-million contract last May, has inked a deal to purchase Marquisse Group, the company VIHA named as Compass’s replacement just over a month ago.”

The Globe and Mail, August 24, 2016: “Dropped for shoddy cleaning, company returns to Victoria-area hospitals,” by Brennan Clarke

...Now let’s hear from a Compass Group cleaner:

I have been working at Compass Group part-time (More than 3 years)

“Low pay, no pay rise now since 2010, wanting too much to be done in the time limit given normal clean is two hours but yet if done right would take 2 hours 30 mins. Not enough hours so run on skeleton crew so if someone is sick or on holiday no one to cover them since been there they have cut 100 hours a month just for pure profit for who could I guess.”

Glassdoor: Compass Group [website]

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The Mystery of PhD Support at U of T

“Discussions around the state of graduate student income at the University of Toronto typically center on quantitative issues -- namely what constitutes an adequate level. Less prominent, are questions around the qualitative aspects of graduate student incomes -- the terms by which that income is allotted, in particular the composition of funding and the role of waged work.”

“This report uses new data to address these familiar questions in a comparative way, allowing a comprehensive view of the graduate income landscape at the University. It notes the contours of unevenness in income composition and points toward the implications of these inequities.”

“The report examines three key issues noting critical specific conclusions:

  • Time-to-Completion. Everyone, almost without exception, takes longer than their funding package to complete. Division I, on average, takes markedly longer to finish, while Division III is markedly quicker to finish. This amounts to thousands of years and millions of dollars in tuition cumulatively spent by Ph.D.’s beyond the funding package.
  • Income Composition. While total incomes of Ph.D.’s are relatively similar, the sources of income divide starkly between Divisions I-II and Divisions III-IV. The former disproportionately rely on Employment Income while the latter are disproportionately subsidized by Research Stipends.
  • Employment and Time-to-Completion. Ph.D.’s in Divisions I-II consistently do far more employed work which has compounding effects. There is a direct correlation between longer Times-to-Completion and greater proportion of income from Employment in Divisions I-II. The reverse is true for Divisions III-IV. The more Divisions I-II do employed work for their funding, the longer they delay completion of their degree.”

“These findings largely confirms quantitatively trends that have long been acknowledged anecdotally. In particularly these are that Time-to-Completion is a substantial problem and far exceeds funding packages. There is an unevenness in the forms of graduate support across departments and divisions, with a particular emphasis on income from Employment. And there is a clear correlation with income from Employment and Time-to-Completion.”

Quality of Quantity: A report on graduate student income at the University of Toronto [website]

Quality of Quantity U of T, February 2016: “Unevenness and Inequity in Time-to-Completion and Graduate Student Income at the University of Toronto” (34 pages, PDF)

“All data scraped from University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies webpage API.“

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Public Pension Promises Exceed Ability to Pay

“Twenty countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have promised their retirees a total $78 trillion, much of it unfunded, according to the Citigroup report.”

“That is close to twice the $44 trillion total national debt of those 20 countries, and the pension obligations are ‘not on government balance sheets,’ Citigroup said.”

“For years there have been frequent reports of pension systems rife with pay-to-play deals, improper payouts, overly risky investment strategies and other problems. But the Citigroup researchers looked beyond such scandals and depicted the worldwide accumulation of giant, invisible pension obligations as a matter of simple demographics.”

“Most developed countries had baby booms after World War II, and their populations are now aging and enjoying significant gains in health and longevity. When the boomers first joined the work force, they provided a big supply of labor to support what was then a much smaller population of retirees drawing pensions. Those favorable demographics made it seem that government pension systems could operate forever with minimal funding -- or in many cases, no funding at all.”

“Now that is changing as populations age in many places, and the Citigroup report said the numbers no longer work. More and more retirees are receiving benefit payments every month, straining retirement systems even when the individual amounts paid are modest. And now there are relatively fewer younger workers generating the revenue that is supposed to support those systems.”

The New York Times, March 17, 2016: “Study Finds Public Pension Promises Exceed Ability to Pay”

Citigroup, March 2016: “The Coming Pension Crisis” (127 pages, PDF)

The Economist, March 17, 2016: “When an increase is a cut”

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The Robots Are Coming... For Someone Else?

“The ultimate extent to which robots and algorithms intrude on the human workforce will depend on a host of factors, but many Americans expect that this shift will become reality over the next half-century. In a national survey by Pew Research Center conducted June 10-July 12, 2015, among 2,001 adults, fully 65% of Americans expect that within 50 years robots and computers will 'definitely' or 'probably' do much of the work currently done by humans.”

“Yet even as many Americans expect that machines will take over a great deal of human employment, an even larger share (80%) expect that their own jobs or professions will remain largely unchanged and exist in their current forms 50 years from now. And although 11% of today’s workers are at least somewhat concerned that they might lose their jobs as a result of workforce automation, a larger number are occupied by more immediate worries -- such as displacement by lower-paid human workers, broader industry trends or mismanagement by their employers.”

“Workers whose jobs involve primarily manual or physical labor express heightened concern about all of these potential employment threats, especially when it comes to replacement by robots or other machines. Fully 17% of these workers are at least somewhat concerned about the threat from workforce automation, with 11% indicating that they are 'very concerned.' By contrast, just 5% of workers whose jobs do not involve manual labor express some level of concern about the threat of workforce automation.”

Pew Research Center, March 10, 2016: “Public Predictions for the Future of Workforce Automation”

But maybe that 5% should not be so confident...

“It was not quite a whitewash, but it was close. When DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company bought by Google for $400m in 2014, challenged Lee Sedol to a five-game Go match, Mr Lee -- one of the best human players of that ancient and notoriously taxing board game -- confidently predicted that he would win 5-0, or maybe 4-1.”

“He was right about the score, but wrong about the winner. The match, played in Seoul to crowds on the edges of their seats and streamed to millions online, was won by the computer, four games to one.”

The Economist, March 19, 2016: “Artificial intelligence and Go: A game-changing result”

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Even the Mafia Benefits from More School

“Mobsters with more education enjoy significantly higher earnings, according to a new paper that digs into the history of Italian American organized crime. Just one extra year in school has typically increased a gangster’s income by about 8 per cent.”

“The authors of the paper -- Nadia Campaniello of the University of Essex, Rowena Gray of the University of California at Merced and Giovanni Mastrobuoni of the University of Essex -- want to make it clear that they’re not recommending lives of crime for PhD students. But their research, presented Monday at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in Brighton, Britain, does shed surprising light on the real-world value of school. Among other things, their findings suggest that hours spent in the classroom do generate tangible benefits later in life. That holds true even if your chosen profession happens to be on the wrong side of the law, where nobody cares if you got an A in calculus.”

“Overall, the results were clear: An extra year or two of education was linked to higher incomes for mobsters – much more so than for Italian immigrants in the legitimate U.S. economy. However, the payoff from education varied widely depending on what types of crime a mobster specialized in.”

“The lower-level Mafioso -- the knee-cap breakers and hit men in the FBN files -- derived relatively low returns to education that were roughly in keeping with those of Italian immigrants in the legal economy. In contrast, so-called business criminals, who engaged in white-collar crimes such as fraud, loan sharking and gambling, enjoyed much higher paybacks.”

“The bright spot, at least for law-abiding citizens, is that other research indicates more education also reduces a person’s risk of pursuing a life of crime in the first place.”

The Globe and Mail, March 21, 2016: “Mobster U: Even the Mafia benefits from more school”

“The study by Nadia Campaniello, Giovanni Mastrobuoni and Rowena Gray... is to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in Brighton in March 2016.”

The Royal Economic Society, March 2016: “Did Going to College Help Michael Corleone? New evidence of the benefits of education for ‘business criminals’ - Media Briefings“

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When the Good Jobs Go South

"The fuzzy video, shot by a worker on the floor of a Carrier factory here in the American heartland last month, captured the raging national debate over trade and the future of the working class in 3 minutes 32 seconds.”

“’This is strictly a business decision,’ a Carrier executive tells employees, describing how their 1,400 jobs making furnaces and heating equipment will be sent to Mexico. Workers there typically earn about $19 a day -- less than what many on the assembly line here make in an hour. As boos and curses erupt from the crowd, the executive says, ‘Please quiet down.’”

“What came next was nothing of the kind.”

“The relentless loss of American manufacturing jobs goes back nearly half a century, driven largely by forces beyond the control of any president. The advances of technology, the diffusion of industrial expertise around the world, the availability of cheap labor and the rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse would have disrupted the nation’s industrial heartland even without new trade deals.”

“Nor are tariffs likely to bring many of these jobs back, said David Autor, a professor of economics at M.I.T., who is one of the country’s foremost specialists on the pluses and minuses of free trade. 'We don’t have silver bullets,' he said.”

“When I learned about the impact of trade agreements, the theory was that workers would be ‘released’ into the labor market and hired back at slightly lower salaries. That’s not what happened. And no amount of cheaper air-conditioners will make these workers whole.”

“Manufacturing jobs aren’t like many other positions available to Americans who lack a college degree, [said state Representative Karlee Macer]. For one thing, they pay more, giving the children of factory workers other options if they so choose.”

The New York Times, March 19, 2016: “Carrier Workers See Costs, Not Benefits, of Global Trade”

YouTube Video, February 11, 2016: "Carrier Air Conditioner (part of United Technologies) Moving 1,400 Jobs to Mexico"   

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Employment Rates of Undocumented Immigrants

“Men who come to the US illegally are more likely to be employed than native-born American males, according to a new paper from Harvard University’s George Borjas, an authority on the economic impact of undocumented workers in the US.”

”It’s not a surprise that many undocumented immigrants come to the US to work. But the Borjas study is an ambitious attempt to shed light on how undocumented immigrants in the US have typically interacted with the US labor market over the last two decades.”

“The outcomes are clear. Employment rates of undocumented immigrants are sharply higher than those of native-born American men. Borjas found that 86.6% of illegal immigrants had work compared to 73.6% of native-born males when looking at a sample from 2012-2013. That 16-percentage-point gap shrinks once Borjas controlled for the fact that undocumented immigrants tend to be younger than native-born men. But it remains wide, with employment rates of undocumented workers 10 percentage points higher than native men of a similar age.”

“Undocumented workers now account for roughly 5% of the total US labor supply. Previous work co-authored by Borjas found that their presence has driven down wages of low-skilled US workers in recent years.”

“Borjas’ findings are part of a global story in which the poorer residents of the rich economies, such as the US, have been losing ground as globalization and trade have lifted large chunks of the world population out of poverty.”

Quartz, March 22, 2016: “Illegal US immigrants are far likelier to be working than American men”

National Bureau of Economic Research, March 22, 2016: “The Labor Supply of Undocumented Immigrants”

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Measuring Gig Work

From Erica L. Groshen, Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner:

“While many of these short-term jobs are new, similar jobs have been around a long time in the U.S. economy: substitute teachers, truck drivers, freelance journalist, day laborers in agriculture or construction, on-call equipment movers, actors, and photographers. These jobs are often short term, and many people in these occupations now go online to match up with potential employers. Some people call jobs like these 'gigs,' much like the Saturday night gigs your high school garage band played. At BLS we call these contingent or alternative employment arrangements. What do we mean by those terms? Contingent workers do not expect their jobs to last, or their jobs are temporary. Workers with alternative employment arrangements include independent contractors, on-call workers, or people who work through temporary help agencies or contract firms.”

“Not to brag about being ahead of the curve, but we first examined workers like these in a 1995 survey. We conducted similar surveys in 1997, 1999, 2001, and 2005. Sadly, we haven’t had funding to conduct the survey about contingent and alternative work arrangements since 2005. However, I am delighted the U.S. Department of Labor is funding a one-time update to the survey in May 2017.”

“BLS will conduct the survey on contingent and alternative employment as part of the May 2017 Current Population Survey. That’s the monthly survey from which we measure the unemployment rate and other important labor market indicators. The questions will identify workers with contingent or alternative work arrangements; measure workers’ satisfaction with their current arrangement; and measure earnings, health insurance coverage, and eligibility for employer-provided retirement plans. To be able to compare today’s economy with results from previous surveys, most of the questions will be the same as they were in earlier surveys. We also will explore whether we need to add questions to reflect changes in work arrangements since the 2005 survey.”

US Department of Labor, March 3, 2016: “Why This Counts: Measuring 'Gig' Work“

Quartz, February 23, 2016: “The Scariest Thing about the Gig Economy is How Little We Know About It”

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As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops

“Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?”

“It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.”

“That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.”

“A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines -- for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.”

The New York Times, March 18, 2016: “As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops,” by Claire Cain Miller

The Research:

“Using PSID microdata over the 1980-2010, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably over this period. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution that at the middle or the bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top.”

IZA, January 2016: “Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations,” by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, Cornell University (79 pages, PDF)

“For decades, the gender pay gap has been expressed as cents to the dollar -- a way to represent women’s wages relative to men’s. In 2014, women reached a new high in pay equity. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it was 79 cents to the dollar.”

“If that doesn’t sound like much progress, that’s because the ratio of women’s to men’s earnings cleared 70 cents back in 1990. Progress since then has amounted to less than a dime. And it’s even worse for women of color. In 2014, black women earned 66% of what white men earned, and Hispanic women earned 59% compared to white men.”

“But the existence of the gender pay gap cannot be chalked up to a singular factor. There are a myriad of obstacles that women face which add up to this stubborn shortfall: caregiving expectations that limit women’s hours at work and men’s time at home, pay gains that disappear as women age, wage differences between traditionally male and female jobs, and plain old wage discrimination against individual women. These different ways of looking at the pay gap and how it is measured may yield fresh insights into how public policies can narrow it.”

Third Way, March 18, 2016: “A Dollar Short: What’s Holding Women Back from Equal Pay?”

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What's Holding Women Back from Equal Pay?

“From founders to funders, Silicon Valley prides itself on its meritocratic ethos; however, new research from MIT finds that organizations with meritocratic values are often the worst offenders of bias, specifically as it relates to gender.”

“Authors Emilio Castilla and Stephen Bernard found that organizations with meritocratic principles favor men over “equally performing women” via higher bonuses and favorable career outcomes. Conversely, when the authors stressed organizational values that emphasized individual autonomy (and not meritocratic principles), they found no statistical significance in the difference of bonus amount awarded by gender.”

“Their work supports previous research, which finds women and minorities are paid less than white male peers - even when they have the same job, supervisor, human capital and performance evaluation score. Castilla and Bernard conclude, ‘Merit-based pay practices in particular may fail to achieve race or gender neutral outcomes.’”

Why does this happen?

“It appears that when managers work for meritocratic organizations, they believe they are more impartial, and thus (unknowingly) give themselves permission to act on their biases. And when people view themselves as unbiased, they are less likely to self-scrutinize.  Castilla calls this, ‘the paradox of meritocracy.’”

World Economic Forum, March 21, 2016: “The paradox of meritocracy”

World Economic Forum, March 8, 2016: “These are the jobs where women’s wages still lag behind”

Administrative Science Quarterly, December 2010: “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations” (link to Open Access version)

The Atlantic, December 1, 2015: “The False Promise of Meritocracy”

The Huffington Post, March 21, 2016: “Even At A Company Obsessed With Fair Pay, Women Make Less Than Men”

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Pregnancy Discrimination in the British Workplace

”Three-quarters of pregnant women and new mothers experience discrimination at work and one in nine lose their job as a result, government-commissioned research has found.”

“The report suggests that pregnancy discrimination, which is illegal, has risen significantly since 2005, when 45% of women said they had experienced such discrimination.”

“The research, published on [March 22, 2016], found one in five mothers said they experienced harassment or negative comments in the workplace related to pregnancy or flexible working and one in 10 said they were discouraged from attending antenatal appointments.”

“The results, which equate to 390,000 women experiencing discrimination across Britain, were described as shocking by Maternity Action. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (ECHR), which commissioned the report with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, urged the government to take urgent action to address the problem.”

The Guardian, March 22, 2016: “Fifth of women harassed at work over pregnancy or flexible hours, report finds”

UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, March 22, 2016: “Pregnancy and Maternity Related Discrimination and disadvantage” (30 pages, PDF)

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India's Sticky Floor

“In India, gender wage gaps are higher among lower earning workers and steadily decline towards the higher end of the wage distribution.” 

“Thus, in contrast to the glass ceiling observed in much of the developed world, we see the existence of a 'sticky floor' in India, in that gender wage gaps are higher among lower earning workers and steadily decline towards the higher end of the wage distribution.”

“This is true for all RWS [regular wage salary] workers, as well as separately for rural and urban workers. Using standard definitions, we find that the sticky floor became 'stickier' for RWS women over the decade. Breaking up the wage gap into explained and unexplained parts, we find that not only is the bulk of the gender wage gaps discriminatory, but that the discriminatory component is higher at lower ends of the distribution.”

“Possible reasons for the ‘sticky floor’:

  • Men are perceived by employers to be more reliable vis-à-vis women. As women move up the occupation structure and gain job experience, employers become aware of their reliability and may perhaps discriminate less.
  • Women working at the upper end are more likely to be the urban educated elite, working in managerial or other professional positions. These high-wage earning women are more likely to be aware of their rights and might be in a better position to take action against perceived discrimination.
  • Whether in the public sector or the private sector, most high paying jobs will have written contracts with predefined clauses for basic increases in salaries, year on year, thus making it harder to discriminate across genders.
  • [In] a situation where an employer is paying a regular wage to a woman with no education working in an elementary occupation, a typical example of a worker at the bottom of the wage distribution in the Indian context, [it] is easier for the employer to discriminate..., as these jobs might be outside the jurisdiction of labour laws.”

Quartz, March 18, 2016: “Forget the ‘glass ceiling’ -- Indian women must worry about the ‘sticky floor’ instead“

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Committing to Effective Whistle-Blower Protection

“Whistle blower protection is essential for safeguarding the public interest, for promoting a culture of accountability and integrity in both public and private institutions, and for encouraging the reporting of misconduct, fraud and corruption wherever it occurs. While many countries are increasingly developing legal frameworks to protect whistle blowers, more can be done to mainstream integrity and promote open organisational cultures. This report analyses whistle blower protection frameworks in OECD countries, identifies areas for reform and proposes next steps to strengthen effective and comprehensive whistle blower protection laws in both the public and private sectors.”

OECD iLibrary, March 16, 2016: “Committing to Effective Whistleblower Protection” (216 pages)

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OECD Labour Force Statistics 2015

“This annual edition of Labour Force Statistics provides detailed statistics on population, labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by gender, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, employment by sector of activity and part-time employment. It also contains participation and unemployment rates by gender and detailed age groups as well as comparative tables for the main components of the labour force. Data are available for each OECD Member country and for OECD-Total, Euro area and European Union. The time series presented in the publication cover 10 years for most countries. It also provides information on the sources and definitions used by Member countries in the compilation of those statistics.”

OECD iLibrary, March 4, 2016: “OECD Labour Force Statistics 2015" (248 pages)

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Book of the Week

Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community, by Riche J. Daniel Barnes. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 229 p. ISBN 9780813561981

From the publisher: "Popular discussions of professional women often dwell on the conflicts faced by the woman who attempts to ‘have it all,’ raising children while climbing up the corporate ladder. Yet for all the articles and books written on this subject, there has been little work that focuses on the experience of African American professional women or asks how their perspectives on work-family balance might be unique. Raising the Race is the first scholarly book to examine how black, married career women juggle their relationships with their extended and nuclear families, the expectations of the black community, and their desires to raise healthy, independent children. Drawing from extensive interviews with twenty-three Atlanta-based professional women who left or modified careers as attorneys, physicians, executives, and administrators, anthropologist Riche J. Daniel Barnes found that their decisions were deeply rooted in an awareness of black women’s historical struggles. Departing from the possessive individualistic discourse of ‘having it all,’ the women profiled here think beyond their own situation -- considering ways their decisions might help the entire black community. Giving a voice to women whose perspectives have been underrepresented in debates about work-family balance, Barnes’s profiles enable us to perceive these women as fully fledged individuals, each with her own concerns and priorities. Yet Barnes is also able to locate many common themes from these black women’s experiences, and uses them to propose policy initiatives that would improve the work and family lives of all Americans."

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