Words&Dirt

Modern America faces a labor crisis that is both practical and existential. Even as new kinds of work are rapidly being created, we can’t adequately educate and fully employ the workforce we already have. Worse, we’ve created a system where elites have almost exclusive access to intellectually challenging and meaningful work opportunities, with everyone else scrambling to produce enough income to make it through the month. To get out of this mess, we need smart people to craft new social and political frameworks that can lead to actionable solutions.

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family represents a sincere but only partially-successful attempt to fill this need. Her main critique of American work culture is that we don’t value caregiving the same way we value competitive, income-earning work. “The person in a couple who stays home will be valued less than the person who goes to the office,” Slaughter writes. “We value people of either gender who invest in themselves more than we value people who invest in others” (78-9).

Arguing with passion and intelligence, Slaughter proposes that we pivot away from competition and toward care, taking on “obstacles created by the combination of unpredictable life circumstances and the rigid inflexibilities of our workplaces, and lack of a public infrastructure of care” (14). But normal folks “can’t do it on our own,” she insists. “We have to exercise our collective political power to change the system” (231). This is an ethical and admirable goal.

I agree with almost everything put forth in Unfinished Business. Slaughter’s thinking helped me articulate some of the finer points of my current lifestyle, and for that I’m deeply grateful. I’m a college-educated guy in my late twenties who happily took myself out of the workforce to support my fiancé and aging mother at home. This situation also affords me what I consider a better lifestyle than I’d have if I were working. At this point in my life, I have no career-based ambitions, but plenty of personal ones. I’m not sure if this makes me one of the men Slaughter depicts as being “strong enough to take risks, break the mold, and prove themselves in new roles [that] can define a new frontier,” but I do know that staying home keeps my family and me happy and healthy (145).

I also know that my reading of Unfinished Business is colored by the choices I’ve made and the home-based life I hope to keep living into the future. But taking these personal biases into account, I still believe there are some objective ways in which Slaughter falls short of her purported ambitions. The first of these is her inability to escape her position as an elite careerist. This is a fault openly acknowledged by Slaughter, but that doesn’t change the fact that her book addresses the problems of elites more than the problems of working class or poor Americans.

Unfinished Business is crowded with discussions about how to effectively “make partner,” land a “C-suite” executive job, or gain a promotion. Buzzwords abound, but there is comparatively little discussion about the problem faced by the vast majority of struggling Americans: getting a job in the first place, and then keeping it. It’s hard to fault Slaughter too much for favoring the world she comes from, and she does make a few noble attempts to highlight the needs of non-elites, but the majority of her workplace examples and career advice are geared toward elite citizens and institutions.

There also doesn’t seem to be a place in Slaughter’s vision for people uninterested in pursuing a career. Her thoughtful discussions of caregiving are focused on professionalized forms of childcare, teaching, and eldercare. Within these constraints, Slaughter does a great job of outlining problems and proposing solutions. She also argues that it’s legitimate to a be full-time parent, but is less vocal when it comes to the difficult problem of attaching a concrete economic value to that decision. Slaughter claims that “broader life ambitions are just as important as your career ambitions,” but what if I don’t have any career ambitions (192)? What if I don’t want a job, and prefer to stay home, tend the garden, and makes things easier for rest of my family? Does that make me a valuable caregiver, or a leech? I’m not being coy here––this is a live question for me, one that I haven’t been able to answer with any certainty for more than two years of self-chosen unemployment.

Despite advocating for a better “work/life fit,” Slaughter still buys into one of the great lies of modernity: that “professional” work should be locked in a binary, oppositional relationship with the activity of experiencing and enjoying life (186). Beyond jobs and caregiving, there’s a whole world out there to be explored, and a new virtual world being created every instant. Even an efficient and flexible balance between office and home doesn’t leave much time or energy for taking a walk, playing a game, or taking a moment to be grateful for just being alive. If we’re talking better worlds, I want one where those moments matter as much as anything else, if not more.

My personal views on careerism aside, I realize that the vast majority of Americans both want and need a vibrant career. How do we help those people? While I sincerely hope that most of the ideas and propositions in Slaughter’s book become mainstream, there are three glaring flaws in her perspective that severely restrain her reach.

Arguably, the single best way to support caregivers across this country (professional and otherwise) is to decouple healthcare from employment once and for all. America’s lack of nationalized healthcare for all citizens is an embarrassment, but apparently not one that Slaughter would have us rectify. She lays out a 12-point “infrastructure of care” that would undoubtedly provide more support and flexibility for families and caregivers (e.g. affordable childcare and eldercare, paid leave, financial and social support for single parents, etc.) (232-3). None of these solutions, however, would do as much good for America’s most vulnerable citizens as comprehensive, universal healthcare. Yet Slaughter is silent about this prospect, begging the question: How serious is she about fixing the inequities she so plangently rejects?

This question becomes even more critical when considering another of Slaughter’s blind spots: technological unemployment. It’s possible that Slaughter doesn’t see technological unemployment as a credible long-term threat to the livelihoods of American citizens, but there’s no way to know because she ignores the subject altogether. Slaughter writes optimistically of the “care economy,” which is rapidly expanding and will provide a sizable chunk of new jobs in the coming decades (240-4). But she doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that many of those jobs could be automated shortly after their inception, nor does she demonstrate how we can provide the training workers will need to stay ahead of the technological curve.

This failure to take up what is a primary concern for many forward-thinking economists is another indication of Slaughter’s elite myopia. Though this trend may not hold in the coming decades, technological unemployment usually decimates jobs from the bottom up, disadvantaging the least educated and skilled among us. It may not matter much for people with doctorates and law degrees (yet), but technological unemployment is a very real problem for scores of workers, right now.

Since Slaughter refuses to address technological unemployment and universal healthcare, it’s no surprise that Unfinished Business doesn’t advocate for a guaranteed basic income. Yet thinkers like Martin Ford have recently suggested that a basic income is the best (and perhaps only) way to keep America from becoming more of an oligarchy than it already is. A modest basic income would provide financial flexibility for families, allowing lead parents to stay home with their kids, or at least work one or two fewer jobs. It would also grant creative people a foundation of security, making it easier to develop a new interest, take classes, or jumpstart an entrepreneurial enterprise.

Universal healthcare, technological unemployment, and a basic income are titanic issues that will require sweeping action and a willingness to challenge the American status quo. Slaughter doesn’t want to go there. She would rather nibble around the edges, throwing more money at superficial programs without addressing the underlying causes of American stagnation. Slaughter is an accomplished and compassionate woman, and Unfinished Business is a valuable book, but America needs more. If we stop here, we’re left in a situation where big change is off the table, but big talk is easy. If we commit to care, America “can be exceptional once again,” Slaughter says, trotting out the most overwrought line in modern American rhetoric (247).

Perhaps, but unexceptional solutions won’t get us there.

Rating: 7/10