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Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life

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This book is for anyone who feels that life is complicated and getting more so all the time. In clear language Drago gives data to show that Americans are working more and defines 3 important gaps Americans face: a care gap, a gender gap, and an income gap. These are interrelated, of course, as Drago makes clear. And he contributes to our understanding of the gender gap by expanding it to include the gap between women who are involved in actual care work (whether paid or not) and those successful in professional jobs and hence not directly involved in care. He anchors his discussion in three norms, all of which contribute to these gaps: motherhood, ideal worker, and individualism, and supports his discussion with both data and stories. A particularly interesting formulation is his definition of balance, by which he means involvement in all three of paid work, unpaid work, and leisure. He describes the kind of social infrastructure necessary to support such balance for all people in our society and ends with a work and family bill of rights. A great discussion of the challenges we all face.

Written by Robert W. Drago (Professor of Labor Studies and Women's Studies, Penn State University), Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life is not a self-help book for the individual, but rather a scholarly examination of the modern societal problems of the care gap (too many children, elderly, and disabled, particularly among the poor, are not getting the care they need), the gender gap (women are forced to choose between success in their careers and providing adequate care to their children, or any other form of care work for low or no pay) and the income gap (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer). At the heart of these problems is not just cold hard economics, but also societal norms - the "motherhood norm" that insists women should provide care for little or no pay; the "ideal worker norm" that conditions employers to expect their workers to put in long hours up to an inhuman level; and the "individualism norm", a society-infused belief that the government should not help those needing care. Striking a Balance prescribes society-wide remedies to these growing problems: paid family leave, early childhood education and child care financing, guaranteed health insurance, and a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation, and the simple importance of allowing men and women from all walks of life to have their voices heard. Extensively researched, Striking a Balance: Work Family Life is a persuasive academic treatise about the need for social change, and highly recommended for reading for not only college library shelves, but also anyone looking for a better understanding of why the government needs to pay more attention to minimum wage, health care, and paid family leave issues.

This excellent analysis of the current state of working and trying to live at the same time in America is a great wakeup call from the overwork hypnosis reining for too long. Unlike in other advanced nations, we've never had a real national conversation about the impacts of large numbers of caregivers in the workplace and skyrocketing workweeks. Drago makes those repercussions of work without end very clear, in imploding families, skyrocketing health costs and absentee lives. Armed with a trove of research, he shows us not only the downside, but also a way out, when we can see the unconscious norms that skew our value system and sanity--the ideal worker norm, the motherhood norm, and the individualism norm. This much-needed book should should be required reading for every exec, congressperson, and presidential-candidate policy guru in the land.

This is one of the best sociological books I've read in years--which is saying quite a bit, since the author is an economist! Bob Drago's latest book is both scholarly and eminently readable. He pulls together the best analysis of the challenges confronting women, families, and workers--which pretty much includes all of us, now doesn't it?--with the most enlightened thinking about what we need to do to change the structures that produce those challenges. The book is written in very clear prose and presents a persuasive argument that gets right to the point. I think just about any reader concerned with social problems (the working poor, strains on families, gender inequalities) will find plenty of cause for optimism here. And readers who just want to make sense of why life is so hectic for themselves, their co-workers, family members, and neighbors will come away from this book with a clearer understanding and ideas for action. I highly recommend this book.

Bob Drago has long been recognized as a leader in the work-life balance world through his work with Take Care Net and on the Work and Family Bill of Rights. After decades in the wilderness, many of us have reached a shared vision of what does and doesn't help us to lead balanced lives. Drago captures this new consensus, explains why it has taken so long for us to reach this point, and provides a blueprint for change. Anyone stressed about their own lives, and what to do about it, should read this interesting, insightful, wise, and humorous work, and then join with Drago and others to change things.

written by a true scholar in the work/family domain, this book captures twenty years of research, including the most current. Further, it is eminently readable for scholars, practitioners, and working parents. sensible and empathic.

Bob Drago offers a provocative, analytical, yet lively read, which should appeal across several audiences. Striking a Balance achieves its own careful balance of academic research, practical work-life strategies for employers and communities, public policy advocacy and personal reflection. It systematically lays out the underlying source of our persistent work-life conflict--the inherent incompatibility between three dominant norms in the US--being an ideal worker, being an ideal mother (parent) and being a self-sufficient individualist without need for public supports. Our lack of commitment, from the single employer-employee relationship level to the whole nation, to help workers and working families successfully facilitate all their roles and responsibilities, has opened three "gaps." The first is the "care gap," where half of those needing care in the US are not receiving it sufficiently. The second is the "gender gap," which here is less about the differences between men and women's than about the differential earnings of mothers who engage in professional-managerial careers vis-à-vis those who provide direct care to their own children or relatives as unpaid work (or as underpaid employees). These gaps will persist as long as those three norms prevail. The ideal worker norm, internalized particularly among professionals and managers--that career success requires total commitment of time, energy, self-identity toward work--has been increasingly reinforced by high rewards to its display, the "income gap."

Households now face constraints not only of time and money, but institutional obstacles quite far outside their direct control, some of which may be subtle and even sub-conscious. But imbalance is more than personal, it is social. Thus, the potential solutions are workplace by workplace, occupation by occupation, state by state and even grander in scale. Drago focuses on a few, although they do get us only so far, such as reduced hours options for professionals (including academics), community-based coalitions of constituencies to provide or subsidize child care services, California's successful employee-payroll-funded paid leave policy. The success stories all have in common a strategy of adopting more "inclusive processes," a nascent norm of employee involvement, but a more holistic view of workers. Drago draws on many smaller scale successes as a cause for optimism about closing the gaps at the national level. While being practically useful, Drago's contribution is more than another "how-to" or "self-help" book. His sights are set at addressing the sources of our ailments, not just the symptoms, and a future of greater balanced lives for the greatest number.