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Book Review
| Barbara Pocock, The Labour Market Ate My Babies: Work, Children and a Sustainable Future, Federation Press, Sydney, 2006. pp. x + 244. $44.95 paper.
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| The title and cover of Pocock's new book The Labour Market Ate My Babies: Work, Children and a Sustainable Future will leave you in no doubt that this topic is en vogue. The title and plain white cover with brightly coloured cans of 'baby' food crawling across the middle appeal to a young, trendy audience. Pocock's text continues this appeal with an accessible text that will interest and be understood by all readers. This accessibility underlines Pocock's concern that issues of care and work need to be discussed not only by academics and researchers, but by all concerned: the workers of today and the future. |
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The Labour Market Ate My Babies takes the theme of tension between work and care responsibilities from Pocock's earlier The Work/Life Collision and looks at them from a different perspective. In The Work/Life Collision Pocock established the tension between work and care that has been caused by changes in labour force participation, particularly the entry of women into the work force. Her argument was that culture and social institutions lag behind actual changes to household structure and labour force participation. This 'lag' is creating tension between people's work and their care responsibilities. The Labour Market Ate My Babies explores this tension and how it is exacerbated by the labour market. The labour market structures our work and care patterns. This is a market with a voracious appetite for consumption, and it consumes our young. It is the experience and expectations of Australian children and young people that Pocock investigates in The Labour Market Ate My Babies. |
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The book is divided into nine chapters. The introductory chapter establishes the importance of young people's experience, not least of all because this is rarely researched. Today's young people are those most affected now and into the future by the rapid change that has occurred in work patterns over the second half of the twentieth century. Pocock introduces the ways in which the market has pervaded our lives, influencing the way we think about things (cost/benefit analysis for example) and making us more reliant on the market for goods and services that we once used to perform or make ourselves, particularly the care of dependents. This is supported by her discussion of commodification and decommodification of labour, and how we are becoming more dependent on the market instead of family or public structures for support. |
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The following seven chapters carefully build an argument around our increasing reliance on the market for support and the negative affects this has on our young people and our future workforce. They each examine one of seven ways in which Pocock asserts the market affects our lives: work, households and sustenance; money/time trades and the work fetish; work effects spill onto kids; work feeds guilt; future work and commodification; commodified care; early onset, work/spend cycle. Pocock analyses material from focus groups of young people from varying socio-economic backgrounds to determine the experience of children and young people and their expectations for their own future work/care patterns. She exposes the negative side to our dependence on the work/spend cycle and the pressure that places on parents' time. She finds that while young people understand the reasons why parents work, and the necessity for it, they would rather have more time with their parents than more material or monetary goods. |
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This research makes apparent that the lag identified in The Work/Life Collision is nowhere near resolved. Young women in the focus groups expressed the desire to be able to work and raise children with their partner taking an equal share in care and domestic work. This would require changes to the way we work, allowing more and different kinds of leave, and more flexible modes of work. However, while young men expressed this as the ideal situation, they did not think that work practices would be flexible enough to allow for it and assumed they would be the sole breadwinner with a female parent taking on the sole caring responsibility. |
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While The Labour market ate my babies has a very youthful and trendy appeal, it is a well constructed book that builds on themes established in The Work/Life Collision. It presents theory and analysis to explain and explore the increasing concern with balancing work and personal responsibilities. It brings to the fore that work/life balance affects not only the current workers, but the young people in their care. The Labour Market Ate My Babies is a timely reminder that if balance, and a sustainable labour market is to be achieved, then 'work/life balance' needs to be the topic of more in depth social debate and change rather than jargon bandied about by employers and in the media. |
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| Auckland University of Technology |
KATHERINE RAVENSWOOD | |
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