to think dual person 'full time' worker family households should never have become the norm?

[workingdilemma]

Was thinking about the other thread talking about tax credits etc.

Around 40 years ago, as a society we'd reached a point where one person working in a household was enough to support a young family.

Now we've ended up where it's pretty much required to have both working full time to be able to afford the same lifestyle - mainly due to the insane 'cost' of housing.

It would have been far better to have had both people in a couple working perhaps part time to allow engagement with the world of work, and also a healthier work/life balance.

Why did we end up like this? Was it all an orchestrated plan to keep the debt cycle going - after all, you can lend on two incomes now for a mortgage. Lovely jubbly for the debt pushers. Is that why the banks and governments encourage this?

I dunno, but I do yearn for a better way to deal with the problems we're having now then everyone demonising each other.

YANBU. A system where one partner works and one looks after the kids has been the accepted norm for generations and if done correctly should be the best for the children.

The problem is a simple one, property prices!
That's it really, if housing was cheaper then people would have more chance of being able to live on one income. (It doesn't help that people seem obsessed with skyTV and 50inch flatscreens, new cars, 2 holidays a year and all the rest of it.)

It's such a weird attitude. I don't understand the hate towards part timers, when I worked part time there were always snide comments from full timers. I had a conversation once that went along the lines of

"I wish I could work part time, it's easy for you"

"Well you could..."

"No I couldn't. I'd get less money!"

"Well I get less money for doing it. That's the pay off"

"I still think part timers have it easier"

"Try it out then, you're perfectly able to"

"No because I like the money"

THEN YOUVE MADE YOUR CHOICE. Stop moaning that other people have made a different one

What about the person working hard at home making-do and mending/looking after other people (thereby saving the tax-payer money), having a greener lifestyle (thereby saving money on having to repair environmental damage)

And if someone is working hard (in paid employment) for 12 hours a week and someone is working hard (in paid employment) for 35 hours a week, then the person working 35 hours a week is overall working harder (in paid employment) that the one who is working 12 hours a week overall.

That is absolute rubbish. Work is swapping time for money. If you two people work equally hard per unit of time, then they are both working equally hard regardless of the overall amount of time spent.

Thats gcse physics.

The hard working 35 hours a week worker is working longer hours. They might or might not be working harder throughout the week.

I have never once been jealous of a part timer. It tends to mean they have 15 nappies to change a day not 4. I know which I'd rather do. I returned to work 2 weeks after the babies were born for a rest! Better to be treated like a God in the office than a domestic slave at the mercy of the new baby, toddler and 3 year old - our set up when the 3rd was born.

So for me, the one who works the hardest (in paid employment) should get the most benefit in terms of salary, opportunities and promotion (within their paid employment)

I quite agree. But your suggestion that it is always going to be the fulltime worker is ludicrous. It would also be illegal and discrimination if it was proven that a harder working person (per unit of time) was passed over for promotion in favour of a less capable or dedicated full time worker. Difficult to prove in practice, but certainly against the rules.

My DH and I live in a newly gentrified but was a cheap part of London. we are both in our mid forties and both earn around £34k a year. There is no way we can afford to buy larger flat in our area, and as we both getting on a bit are unlikely to earn any more than we do now. Indeed my DH has just been made redundant. There is no way we could afford our very small flat on one income, and we can't afford a better place on two incomes. We could afford to live in somewhere like Hastings and commute to our jobs in London but then we would never see our daughter and would have to pay a fortune in after school clubs and train fairs. I really believe that it's good for children to see both parents working, but I also believe it's really good for them to spend time with us too!
i really think that our capitalist society will be the end of us. I hate it. Working all the hours there is to make shareholders richer. Is that really what life should be about?

Lotus - if you don't like babies, I'm surprised you had so many of your own but you know how you feel if you're forced to "change nappies all day"? That's how some of us feel if we're forced to do a high stress career. Different things suit different people. Neither is wrong

Well that was honest. (smile) You'll not be the only one who feels like that. Doesn't mean you should be rewarded or valued more than someone who likes being at home changing 15 nappies a day. Or someone who doesn't particularly like it, but is exclusively breast-feeding. It's so annoying when full-time workers who work out of choice make themselves out to be morally superior who people who don't.

dilemma - what do you think of the green party's 'citizen's income' idea? (I don't know what effect it would have on house prices - that's why I'm asking)

I increased my hours from 4 to 5 days earlier this year and can honestly say that - measured by energy spent - I probably work less hard overall now. The more time I spend at work, the easier it is to complete all the tasks I need to complete, both because they're spread out over more time and because I'm not having to catch up on what I've missed.

I'm also not spending a day looking after children on my own or catching up with housework. DH and I share all childcare and housework between us at the weekends, so I do less of it overall than I used to.

The "norm" of one parent staying at home is a historical aberration for all but the richest of families! Jeez, we're not that far away from when families could only survive by sending their children out to work. Stop idealising the 1950s & 1960s--they were extraordinary times & not the norm. For the majority of the past, working class mothers had to go out to work to feed their children. They had a much poorer standard of living than most people today. The main difference is that back in the 19th c, family and community networks were much stronger and the children were cared for by family. Now many children go to daycare.

In lots of cultures it is very normal that grandparents look after children and parents go to work (sometimes in other countries) to earn money to support the extended family.
At least we see our children at bedtimes!

Andrew I didn't say the workplace should discriminate against older people, just that the notion of discriminating equally between men and women by age rather than by sex made a bit more economic sense to me in the face of rising intergenerational inequalities.

Poorer standard of living but better quality of life in some respects. Surely there's a problem when both parents work long hours in stressful jobs, commute, have children in daycare and still don't have a good standard of living?

In rural areas -ie most areas before the industrial revolution, 'going out to work' would have involved working on the land at your home. Different pressures.

People worked from sun-up to sun-down, whether agricultural or industrial. Who would choose to go back to living a hundred years ago (unless you could be one of a small number of rich people.)? You wouldn't even get me back to the 1950--women locked in the home, racial and colonial oppression, laws against homosexuality.

I loved being pregnant, breastfeeding and babies but babies for about 2 hours a day is just about right and worked fine for us all. Expressing milk at work is a bit of a faff but doable and I'm very glad I did it - I've never fed a baby from a bottle.

I don't think I've referred to moral superiority although I would say there is a political obligation on women to work until we own more than half rather than 1% of the planet's wealth. A personal decision to stay home damages other women and your own daughters.

That would be okay in the winter then? And not too different from the hours worked by some people now!

Surely you can have a society where it's not necessary for both partners to work full-time to make ends meet without reverting to racial and colonial oppression, laws against homosexuality; those attitudes aren't relevant.

dilemma - what do you think of the green party's 'citizen's income' idea? (I don't know what effect it would have on house prices - that's why I'm asking)

Honestly - i think its well meaning but it won't work. Its another example of state involvement in a market. The consequences are not easy to quantify, but they rarely end up good imho.

Personally - i like the idea of a safety net only. For people who are disabled, lost their jobs, lost their partner and have kids etc.

Everything else - housing benefit, tax credits etc - i would ideally abolish. I would raise the personal allowance to a living wage for the whole family unit - whatever that maybe - so no-one pays any tax until they can cover their living costs for their family.

Tax credits, hb - corporate subsidy. So get rid. In time the market must adjust - globally - so that employers everywhere pay fair wages to workers.

Might be idealistic, but its got to be better than the monster we have now.

That might suprise some people who would have probably pegged me a 'lefty'. I don't think we have any capitalism or democracy in the strict sense any more - everything has been terribly corrupted. Its cronyism and a plutocracy.

If I had to work full time our house would collapse and so would I .

Lotus, that's very interesting. Do you like spending more than 2 hours a day with your older kids? I know some people prefer kids as they get older.

Also surely you can understand that while that is what you liked to do not everyone wants that. Some people prefer to spend more than 2 hours with their kids

I disagree with your political obligation argument. It's about equality of opportunity - as long as women have the opportunity to work, it doesn't matter if 10% or 85% choose to. It's about giving people the choice

Rogue: you can't pick and choose. That's the reality of the past (the whole package of life; women could stay at home, but they were also forced to resign as soon as they got married.). We are where we are: it isn't some capitalist or government conspiracy. It's a product of very complex, transnational circumstances. Trying to pick it all apart and put the economy back together into a perfect world is one hell of a challenge.

A personal decision to stay at home damages other women and your own daughters Sexist.

That's outrageous. The problem is that so many men are unwilling to spend time at home because they fear loss of status, boredom or lack of promotion meaning that unless both partners are willing to work full time the woman is more likely to stay at home full-time. As women are apparently still often paid less for doing the same work as men they feel it makes sense for the man to work longer hours than them.

OP didn't say and I'm not saying it either that women should stay at home. This is about both partners having a reasonable work/family balance.

Like it or not, by working full time you are depriving someone else of working part-time.

dilemma that was an interesting reply. thank you. (I don't know what the answer is to your problem. I'm lucky to live in an area cheaper than the south east and not mind not working full-time.)

workingdilemma the issue with raising the living wage or the personal allowance as you suggest is that most households are not raising families for their entire working life. The living wage for a single person or a child free couple is considerably lower than for a couple or single person raising children. To inflate wages and depress taxation as you suggest would likely lead to unnecessarily high unemployment, public finances in a more depressed state than currently and reduced GDP. It may even increase the disparity between 2 income and 1 income families which your Op seeks to address.

I'm not saying that life is 'easy', but aiming for some idealised past when people could 'live off one wage' is chasing something that was only possible due to extraordinary (global) circumstances that can never be recreated.