"Skilled" Occupations

Megan McArdle:

Being a stay at home mom is hard, cont'd: There are a couple of commenters and emailers who declare that I have no idea what's involved in being a stay at home mom--not merely the childcare, but the cleaning, the laundry, the bills, the scheduling, arranging for repairs, and so forth. These people seem to be under the impression that I have a staff of ten or twelve, or perhaps live in the magical fairy world of single people where my air conditioner has not just broken, and the bill-paying gnomes show up once a month to organize my personal finances and regrout the bathtub....

I have put in my time as both a remunerated and an unpaid childcare worker. I am familiar with the operations involved, and rest assured, I can do all of them except breastfeed (right now, anyway). And just to put everyone's mind at ease, I do know at least enough to put the formula in the bottle and the strained peaches in the dish that your child is about to throw onto the floor.

I have, believe you me, endless respect for the fantastic amount of labor required to care for a child, and my hat is off to each and every one of you who has voluntarily undertaken this herculean task. But it is not "skilled" labor in the sense of "something comparatively few people know--or can quickly learn--how to do." It is particularly not "skilled" when we are talking about childcare, rather than parenting. Their job is to tend to your child's physical needs and keep him or her occupied. You still have to do the trickiest part of raising a decent human being.

There is a disconnect here. But looking after children is (a) physically demanding, (b) emotionally wearing, (c) mentally challenging, (d) easy to do badly with small lapses of attention, and yet (e) badly remunerated. In this it differs from nearly all other occupations that fit one or more of (a) through (d), which are relatively well paid because getting the work done is important and few people can do it well. But looking after children is different--very many people can do it well, not because it is easy to do but because it is one of our core human competences: we are driven to learn how to do it well at a deep, basic, powerful level to an even greater degree than we are driven to learn how to throw rocks to hit small moving animals. Thus looking after children is different from skilled occupations--it pays poorly because the supply of people who can do it is not small. And looking after children is different from unskilled occupations--it is hard to do because it is (a) physically demanding, (b) emotionally wearing, (c) mentally challenging, (d) easy to do badly with small lapses of attention.

Comments

[Ken Houghton]

This should lead us to the obvious conclusion: stay-at-home m/o/t/h/e/r/s/ parents who re-enter the workforce are clearly "skilled labor," and should be compensated as such and hired as such.

[Adam]

Shorter Megan McArdle: Meeeeeee!

Can we stop paying attention to her now?

[lark]

The "baby bust" afflicting so many advanced economies is in part a response to the fact that motherhood is an economic catastrophe in many cases.

[Andy B]

I don't see that those criteria distinguish skilled from unskilled labor. For example, working a cash register is (b), (c), and (d). Isn't the usual definition of skilled labor more like "something that requires significant investment of resources in training"? We could certainly distinguish that economic definition of skilled labor from a non-economic definition on the order of "a job one does better if one has more training/experience", which does successfully distinguish low-plateau jobs like working a cash register from high-plateau jobs like computer programming. But McArdle is talking about the economic definition.

[trotsky]

It's almost as if it's the kind of job people do for love instead of money.

[Frank Dean]

In response to Andy B, looking after children does require a "significant investment of resources in training." Being able to do something that is (a), (b), and (c), without small lapses of attention is in most cases the product of countless hours of effort on the part of one's own parents.

[jerry]

"badly remunerated."

If stay at home mom means that there is a dad who is at work that earns the dollars used within the family, well, I consider mom to be extremely well paid then.

Frankly, my job sucks, most of the people I work with suck, I dislike the commute, I dislike the basic industry, it is a job not a career, it does not pay well, we are under constant threat of being fired, ....

I do love my kids, and I would give anything to be able to stay home with them and do nothing more than keep house, and raise them.

So if badly remunerated means you think stay at home moms are paid nothing, well, you're wrong. If it means that mom and dad have to share a salary and that most likely neither mom or dad thinks they are being paid enough, well that I can agree with, but so what, that is apparently the human condition.

There is some notion among the tenured as well as among the young and recently graduated and/or the modern feminists that everyone that is employed has a career. This is not true. Most of us, regardless of how many degrees we have, have jobs and not careers. Most of us are underpaid. Most of us would prefer to do something different at various times. And most of us have reasons why we can't drop what we are doing and step out of the race and onto the highest level of Maslow's pyramid.

[allan_in_upstate]

Megan McArdle is like a dictionary definition of callow youth.
So is Ross Douthat.
So is Marc Ambinder.
Wait, there's a pattern here ...

[Paul G. Brown]

"...it pays poorly because the supply of people who can do it is not small."

Like acreage on the editorial page of the Washingon Post, natch?

[Robert Waldmann]

Diamonds and Water or think of another phrase for it, you who are so good with words.

You argue that child care workers are poorly paid because child care is too important to be a rare skill in a surviving species of mammals.

Actually, you know, from an evolutionary point of view, females are selected if they keep their kids alive and males are selected if we keep them alive or make lots and lots of them.

I understand that seducing women requires immense skill (I have never done any such thing on purpose).

[You have, I presume, done such a thing accidently?

How is E., and how are Marina and Cathy these days?]

Yet, aside from the occasional probably mythical gigolo, it isn't paid at all.

[sidereal]

"And looking after children is different from unskilled occupations--it is hard to do because it is (a) physically demanding, (b) emotionally wearing, (c) mentally challenging, (d) easy to do badly with small lapses of attention."

Any discussion of the labor quality of mothering is going to be incredibly fraught with emotion for obvious reasons, but it's worth trying to be as rational as possible (in this context. In the context where you're talking to your wife, other constraints obtain). My wife and I have 2 children and she took a long break from her career to stay home for them, so I feel well aware of the relevant issues.

a) should be clearly unrelated to the question of whether labor is skilled or unskilled (and in fact more often applies to unskilled labor. Skilled is less work if you can get it). b) is proportional to the degree to which the job involves dealing with other human beings, which is mostly orthogonal to skilled/unskilled considerations (see: cash register).

This is where I start to get into trouble. Unless you're homeschooling your kids in Mandarin, parenting is not c) mentally challenging. Kids are not complicated, they are just incredibly repetitive and tireless. Making sure their energies are focused on positive activities is a job that requires enormous energy and attention, but it doesn't require brilliance or training.

I'm not sure what to say about d), since 'badly' is completely subjective. It is obviously possible to 'raise' children successfully with a functioning television and otherwise almost no energy expended if you define success as survival to adulthood. Is that 'badly'? By evolutionary standards, that's pretty successful. By the standards of modern, cosmopolitan society, that's probably pretty bad. But even so, raising children that are functioning citizens is actually hard to avoid doing.

All of which to say, despite the enormous respect I have for stay at home parents, it's low-paid because it's not skilled labor.

Also, it's a bit of a dodge to say that parenting is high-skill in some absolute sense, but prevalent in humans due to evolutionary requirements. By that argument, walking upright is also high-skill labor, since it's mechanically very complicated, but humans have evolved to do it well. Skill-level of labor assumes humans as humans.

With that out of the way, now I have to go buy my wife some flowers.

[albatross]

The main reason childcare is poorly compensated is one she also discussed around the same time: because it will only be purchased if it's not too large a fraction of the lower-earning parent's income. Otherwise, one of the parents will stay home, and longer term, fewer families will have children if they really can't survive on one income. It's similar to the question of why housekeeping and yard work and similar stuff is mostly low-paid labor: because if it becomes too expensive, most people (other that very rich or very sick people) simply do it themselves. Get the lawn service price far enough down in price, and I'll pay someone to maintain my yard or clean my house or watch my kids or drive my car. You can see this in the way middle-class people in poor countries so often hire people to do these things, and the way that first-world countries lost this pattern as wages in general went up. (What was that quote from Agatha Christie? "I never expected to be so poor that I couldn’t afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car.")

As the skill level goes up (teaching your kids French or Calculus or Piano, fixing an electrical problem in your house), so does the wage, because it's hard for me to substitute my own labor for the expert. (Really, my demand becomes more inelastic, because while cleaning my own house isn't so hard, rewiring my own house looks pretty difficult and somewhat dangerous.)