Productive Roles in an Older Society (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Unpaid Productive Activity Over the Life Course
Unpaid Productive Activity Over the Life Course
Pages 73-109
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From page 73... ...
Even without a resurgence in births, as the babyboom generations reach retirement age we shall have fewer paid workers and probably fewer aggregate paid work hours available relative to the total population to be fed, clothed, and housed. These factors put unpaid work particularly the possibility of more mutual and self-help among the elderly in our populationin a new perspective.
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From page 74... ...
For those who also work for wages we could argue that they rationally equate their marginal returns in the two kinds of activity, but there are diff;culties with this approach. Many people, particularly among the young who do the most unpaid work, claim to want more work than they can find; others get higher overtime wages than their regular wage.
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From page 75... ...
Among the data presented here on hours spent in various unpaid productive activities are the following: For some activities difficult to attribute to individuals, there are data at the family level: volunteer work for organizations (for example, churches and charities) , time helping friends and other individuals, and repairing houses or cars.
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From page 76... ...
. Some 30 percent of families reported giving some such time, again with a few giving a lot, and a crude estimate of the aggregate for 1973 was 2 billion hours, as compared to the 6 billion hours donated to · ~ organizations.
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From page 77... ...
Of course these are different generations or cohorts and there are undoubtedly memory biases, but substantially more expected to increase their volunteer work than reported having done so (Barfield and Morgan, 19691. A major implication of these findings is that it is not available time that seems to drive philanthropic activity but abilities and purposes.
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From page 78... ...
But they may also be spending more time earning a living or looking for more paid work. The other implications of the data are that paid work and unpaid work do not appear to be interchangeable and that the reduction in paid work hours with age, even after retirement, does not appear to lead to any substantial increase in volunteer work.
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From page 79... ...
They covered the year 1964, asking separately and specif~cally about the following: Percentage Yes 100 Work around the house, such as preparing meals, cleaning, and straightening up 50 Painting, redecorating, or major housecleaning 78 Sewing or mending (women only) 25 Growing own food 24 Canning or freezing 25 Anything else that saved you from having to hire someone else to do it 46 Volunteer work without pay such as work for church or charity or helping relatives 17 Taking courses or lessons (investing in self)
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From page 80... ...
When the residuals from that analysis were examined in a second search, which included some potentially endogenous variables like home ownership, only home ownership and a measure of achievement motivation mattered. Because the crude separate quantification by brackets makes quantitative analysis difficult, and because we have more recent data on home production, we turn to the Pane]
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From page 81... ...
There was no apparent substitution of time no negative correlation between paid work and unpaid work. (Indeed, there was a positive correlation that disappeared when we took account of age, sex, marital status, a working wife, and home ownership.)
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From page 82... ...
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From page 83... ...
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From page 84... ...
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From page 85... ...
Indeed, without question there is a need to collect such information. PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITIES MEASURED AT THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL Housework Housework hours for regular cooking, cleaning, and the like are clearly dominated by family composition and, among families with two adults and not more than one child, by the wife's absorption in paid work.
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From page 86... ...
2,943 hours 690 cases FIGURE 1 The housework hours of families as determined during interviews conducted in 1981. and about having children and about when the children leave home; but individuals inevitably grow one year older each year and many other family changes are in large part determined by social and legal forces.
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From page 87... ...
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From page 88... ...
There are practically no dynamic effects in this case except for changes in "others," which is partially an artifact of the circumstance that an increase or decrease in "others" often means a spouse and without a spouse there cannot be a wife to work for money. A change in the housework hours has no effect on the wife's paid work hours in the dynamic data, leaving the suspicion that the static negative correlation between housework and the wife's paid work hours is spurious, resulting from omitted variables.
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From page 89... ...
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From page 90... ...
Adding child care explicitly increases the estimates of unpaid work for married men and women.
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From page 92... ...
as includ · paid employment or self-employment; · commuting time; · strike or unemployment time; · time lost from work by illness of self or others; · housework and child care (including time given in return for child care) ; · volunteer work for organizations (church, charity)
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From page 93... ...
Hence we Took at housework, paid work, and the total supply of productive hours, in which we include commuting time and hours lost from work because of strikes, unemployment, or illness of self or others. From the individual's point of view that total is what it takes to earn his standard of living, even though society may only see the benefit of the hours that are paid for plus the housework.
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From page 94... ...
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From page 95... ...
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From page 96... ...
Able 11 shows the average changes for men and women in their paid work and housework, and for comparison the average level of hours for the year between the two measuring the change. It is clear that paid work increases for only a few years, then falls off at an increasing rate, which is dramatized by our selection of age ranges.
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From page 97... ...
There is a pervasive myth that many people who would rather keep on working are forced to retire, in spite of a variety of studies over many years that show most people retire from paid work as soon as they can afford to, and rarely regret it (Streib, 1971; Parnes, 1970; Morgan, 19801. The elimination of compul
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From page 98... ...
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From page 99... ...
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From page 100... ...
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From page 101... ...
. The dramatic increase in this measure with age raises questions about the productive potential of an older population if no attention is paid to these physical limitations.
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From page 102... ...
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From page 103... ...
With older people housework time tends to spread out and take up available hours while younger people may even be doing several things at the same time. The main issue, however, is not measurement and analysis but seeking ways to allow, encourage, and facilitate increased productive activity among the elderly.
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From page 104... ...
There are serious difficulties with the notion of increasing the altruistic unpaid work of older people. If there is no reciprocity or return benefit, the burden is likely to be quite unequal because of the unequal capacities and preferences of older people.
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From page 105... ...
A larger group or community can have more special skills available, can afford to invest its members' time in working out equitable and efficient arrangements, and can achieve economies of scale. It can also allow subgroups of friends to provide social support to each other without insisting that everyone get along swimmingly with everyone else.
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From page 106... ...
It seems likely that removing all the barriers to more productive activity among the elderly will do a great deal of good. Because many things can inhibit the process or cause changes in the issues at hand, we need coordinated, multifaceted, comprehensive programs that solve all the problems.
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From page 107... ...
We know that a mixture of economic incentives, combined with inertia and emotional attachment, makes staying in the family home attractive unless alternatives appear that offer a solution to several problems at once: · protection against outliving one's savings; · protection against being financially devastated by a medical or other emergency; · protection against inflation; development and maintenance of a social support network; · provision of opportunities for increased productive activity in a variety of ways; and · provision of opportunities for social and economic interaction in a community but maintaining privacy when desired and control over some indoor and outdoor space.
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From page 108... ...
We must take some longer leaps, and in that kind of activity, preliminary research will be of little help. SUMMARY We have shown that there is little reason to expect increased productive activity among the elderly under the present system of living arrangements, tax laws, and expectations, particularly the expectation that some work we do must be performed with little or no compensation.
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From page 109... ...
. "Effects of Changing Family Composition on Housework and Food Consumption." Journal of Consumer Research.
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