Labor Policy Is Family Policy
Support for American families won’t be impactful unless it considers our new labor dynamics.
By John Ehrett, writer and attorney in Washington, D.C. and former chief counsel to Senator Josh Hawley
America needs more babies! Once a niche concern, the pronatalist call to arms seems to be everywhere now, from the pages of the New York Times to shady transhumanist confabs. Young Americans are starting families later and later—that is, if they marry at all. They’re having fewer children—if they have them at all.
The consequences are already being felt. In the near term, a looming “demographic cliff”—that is, a shortage of new students—threatens to financially devastate higher education. That’s just the beginning. Given current trendlines, America, along with the rest of the developed world, stands to enter a future of fewer workers, fewer taxpayers, and, most importantly, far fewer families and human connections.
This will be a grim future. An ever-more-childless future will be a poorer future, as health systems struggle to find young staff to care for an aging public. It will be an angrier and more ideologically extreme future, as partisan political concerns—no longer buffered by the demands of family life—become more and more central to individuals’ identities. It will be a future brutally polarized along gender lines, as South Korea has witnessed. And it will be a more decadent and reckless future, as the incentive to invest in long-term projects, like infrastructure building or scientific moonshots, collapses: what does it mean to think “generationally” if there’s no promise of future generations?
Is there any way out of this death spiral? Perhaps. Over the last few years, a coterie of intellectuals—mostly on the center-right—have begun exploring ways to course-correct. Of course no one can be forced to have children, but public policies can certainly make family formation and growth easier, or at least less intimidating. As journalist Marc Novicoff summarizes:
[Pronatalist conservatives] generally advocate for a three-pronged approach to lifting the birth rate. First are cultural nudges, which mostly entail spreading the word that kids are more blessing than burden. Second are supply-side housing-reform policies, intended to make it easier for would-be parents to afford a place to raise a family. … Finally, there are economic incentives, which resemble the types of family-friendly welfare-state policies familiar to Northern Europeans: child allowances, baby bonuses, long parental leaves.
On the one hand, these are valuable ideas. They are, at the very least, welcome departures from a strict laissez-faire ideology that’s largely indifferent to trends in family formation, and that opposes pro-family policy interventions (“if the human race dies out, so what?”). Or, in a more Malthusian key: why not “decrease the surplus population” and reduce demands on public systems? But they’re ideas that remain firmly within the consensus of centrist policy thinking, which broadly treats the family as one mode of a larger, privatized “civil society.”
Why, for instance, is labor policy never part of these conversations? Is that a bridge too far? Apparently so.
The “Realignment Right” would seem to be a logical home for an alternative. And indeed, the need for labor policy and family policy are common New Right refrains. In my experience, though, these often take the form of two separate “discourses.” On the one hand: labor policy is important because it keeps wages high and keeps jobs stable, which allows workers to provide for their families. On the other: family policy is important because it reduces the financial burden that comes with having children. In short, the New Right affirms both labor policy and family policy, but doesn’t stress the interaction of the two. And it seems to me that the differentiation of these two discourses reflects, unconsciously or otherwise, a tacit gender polarity. That is to say: labor policy is for men; family policy is for women. In a conservative intellectual environment that’s spent years defending the difference of maleness and femaleness as a positive good, over against progressive efforts to abolish “biological sex,” dichotomies like this can feel straightforward.
But this is a mistake. Rightly understood, labor policy is family policy.
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Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir Maid (later adapted into a popular Netflix miniseries starring Margaret Qualley) chronicles her struggle to support herself and her daughter as a single mother after fleeing an abusive relationship. Echoing Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Land captures in painful detail a maze of unstable work arrangements and shady dealings, which come to define her sojourn through the housecleaning industry.
Despite her own willingness to work hard, Land finds herself constantly caught in vortices stemming from the sheer irregularity of the work she’s offered. “My schedule had about five or six houses rotating on it, but those were all bimonthly or even monthly cleans, meaning most of my paychecks had about twenty hours total for two weeks,” Land recalls. “I couldn’t get another job because my schedule varied from week to week, so I got caught in a bind of waiting for more hours to become available, no matter what the job might be.”
This sort of work turns out to be a trap all its own, preventing those caught in it from developing community roots, establishing long-term relationships, or making plans to get ahead. When there’s uncertainty about where and when the next work opportunity will arise, there’s uncertainty about everything else. And no parent wants to bring more children into a situation like that. What Land is capturing here is a form of the “giggification” of work”—the larger economic transition away from long-term jobs to piecemeal contract arrangements, a shift especially pronounced in low-wage sectors
This is a transition feted by some corporate interests, like Uber and Lyft, as offering the “flexibility” that workers want. And in a remarkable irony, that very same line is echoed by Tim Carney in his recent book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. “[L]abor laws that make part-time work a legal minefield for employers also make family-friendly jobs scarcer,” writes Carney. “California, for instance, has an overbearing law called AB-5 that largely outlaws contractor arrangements. Labor unions want to limit who can work as an outside contractor, citing abuse of the rules by employers. These abuses definitely happen, but every ‘protection’ for a low-wage worker guaranteeing full benefits and overtime pay also threatens to eliminate a flexible ad hoc job.”
This is, of course, a familiar free-market line: just let workers choose the low-paying gig if they want it! And to be fair, some workers undoubtedly benefit from gig flexibility. But it’s very far from clear that this benefit obtains at scale, when every job has been “giggified.” In part, that’s because all sectors aren’t created equal. The shift away from traditional jobs has led many employers to jettison longstanding worker protections, like health insurance and pension plans, originally intended to compensate workers for the effects of hard labor on their bodies over time. No one doing hard labor today will be getting the same gigs at age 70, meaning that the future for younger workers in these fields increasingly looks cloudy. Families, conversely, are lifelong commitments—with lifelong obligations that require contexts of stability.
Unstable, ad hoc work arrangements, with tenuous benefits and poor labor conditions, create conditions under which the basics of family life—dating, marriage, and childrearing—feel impossible. And curiously enough, this seeming impossibility is a problem mirrored at the opposite end of the income distribution—where a cutthroat, feast-or-famine ethos has led to work cultures that are all-consuming. As Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits has written,
According to one measure, the share of male employees working more than forty-eight hours a week increased by roughly half between 1970 and 1990. Another measure reports that the share usually working more than forty-eight hours per week rose by half again between 1980 and 2005. The trend is particularly pronounced at the extreme of hard work. Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of couples (both without and with children) who jointly worked over a hundred hours per week increased by roughly half.
Do these sound like conditions conducive to family formation? Perhaps the wealthy can afford to have kids, but they certainly cannot enjoy or prioritize them.
Hence, a bitter paradox. Many working-class Americans want more work, but are prevented from getting it by irregular scheduling arrangements and other downsides, to which they must submit if they want to keep the jobs they have. By contrast, elite Americans have plenty of work, but it consumes their lives. Nothing about this dynamic is “pro-family”—not in the least.
No one-off baby bonus is going to fix this broken system. Only a shift in America’s culture of labor can do that. Only a shift that is willing to break down the consensus of piecemeal policy thinking that has infected the Right for decades.
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Birth rates, of course, are cratering all across the developed world. There’s no quick fix: Europe is much more robustly unionized than America, but has witnessed a similar downward trajectory.
But that doesn’t counsel in favor of giving up. It simply means that some outside-the-box thinking is required. And that should entail reimagining labor policy in terms of its impact on the family-policy goals conservatives cherish.
With a bit of reflection, it should surprise no one that union jobs, and most especially the stability they bring, are probably more conducive to the realities of family life than an economic system characterized by cycles of job-hopping, gig arrangements, and irregular hours. Traditionally, a healthy family life involves residence with a particular spouse and particular children in a particular place over an extended span of years. To have a family—to assume its obligations—is to make a choice to live in a way characterized by predictability, duty, and ongoing responsibility. Living such a life becomes vastly more difficult when work is irregular, unstable, or totalizing.
But anecdotes and punditry aren’t the only reason that conservatives ought to see the connection between labor and family policy. Empirical evidence supports the connection between pro-labor policy and pro-family outcomes. A 2014 study employing longitudinal data found that “union membership is positively and significantly associated with marriage”—a trend explained in large part, the authors argue, “by the increased income, regularity and stability of employment, and fringe benefits that come with union membership.” Another study found that unionized employees enjoy far better family health coverage: “Companies with 30 percent or more unionized workers are five times as likely as companies with no unionized workers to pay the entire family health insurance premium.” And the same is true of family leave policies: when compared to “hourly workers who take leave, 46 percent of unionized workers compared to 29 percent of nonunionized workers receive full pay while on leave.” These kinds of policies may not inspire family formation among those who are otherwise hardened against it—but they reduce the barriers for those who want families, but are afraid that it’s impossible.
Something like this offers a vision for a new version of labor policy without the old class-war rhetoric—a vision not so much about an eschatological worker’s paradise, but about securing the conditions under which it’s possible for families to form and live good lives. As Stiven Peter has recently argued, placing the accent on “developing the best conditions for the development of children” offers a potential path forward for cultural consensus even across entrenched partisan lines. Conservative policymakers and intellectuals, if they are concerned with the future of the family, must take seriously the economic forces that are making family lives seem so unattainable.
At the very least, pro-family conservatives and pronatalists—even those skeptical of the “Realignment Right”—should not concede the labor question to a Left that seems little interested in promoting marriage and childrearing (and, increasingly, seems ambivalent about the continuation of the human species). Across the income spectrum, the way Americans work shapes the way Americans live, and the decisions they make. No family policy worth its salt can neglect this.