The Collapse of 2008-? has resulted in many employers having a lot of extra office space. What to do with the cubicles of the fallen? Why not turn the aggregate vacant space, at least 15 percent in most cities, into nurseries for babies?
Currently a majority of U.S. college students are women. A significant and growing proportion of people in the U.S. with advanced degrees are women. Let’s look at the investment in a typical woman with a master’s or professional degree. Figure 12 years of public school at $15,000 per year and 7 years of university education at $80,000 per year (tuition plus the foregone income). That’s $740,000 of capital paid in from a combination of public and private sources.
Now let us suppose that our example woman gives birth to a child. At a minimum, she will want to be with her child every two or three hours to breastfeed. What are her options? She can choose career and leave the baby with a nanny or daycare center for a solid 9-hour block every day. She can choose the baby and quit her job. She can try to split the difference by working part time. In any case where the mother gives some priority to the baby, society loses some of its return on that $740,000 investment. This reduces GDP and, more critically right now, the government’s tax base.
Why should the mother have to choose? We have literally skyscrapers worth of empty office space in every major American city. Why can’t part of the average white collar workplace be set aside for an infant nursery? The mother shows up with her nanny and spends 10-11 hours at work (still being paid for a standard 8). The nanny stays with the kid in the nursery; the mother walks over when the nanny notifies her that the baby is ready to nurse or whenever the mother feels that she wants to see the baby. Thus the mother will have spent 2 or 3 hours during the course of a working day over in the nursery with her baby. She has still worked a full 8 hours but not in one stretch.
Thanks to the efforts of politicians and activists, working women have all kinds of rights that they didn’t have formerly. In many cases they have the right to be hired preferentially over a better qualified male (“affirmative action”). They have the right to sue an employer for not paying them equal wages to what men doing similar jobs are paid. They have the right to sue an employer for permitting loutish men to run around the office making lewd remarks. Seemingly every right has been secured except for the one that would matter the most to working women: the right to continue one’s career without separating from one’s cherished infant.
Another obvious option is telecommuting. Many white collar jobs don’t really require on-site presence, only inertia keeps this industrial-age practice alive, along with managerial insecurities.
Having had 2 children and worked full-time I can honestly say that this scenario sounds like hell on Earth. Sounds like the worst of both worlds for the mother. 11 or 12 hours at your workplace not counting your commute with child and probably nanny. Not entirely in the moment at work or with your child. I can’t imagine anyone choosing this hybrid hell.
Your proposal is sensible, but, because a working woman who goes through the non small bother of pregnancy, childbirth and child care is actively increasing the amount of young people who will end up paying my pension in 30+ years from now, I think she should be allowed to have a 8 hours day *inclusive* of child breaks.
I know there is the idea of importing large numbers of young people from poor countries to replace our dwindling numbers, but, for a number of reasons the problems caused by such plan might out-weight the benefits. Giving working women the ability to have as many kids as they wish with the least of bother looks like a better solution in any term.
Similarly, could vacant houses be repurposed as assisted-living centers or group homes for the elderly, under the auspices of local churches or similar religious or civic organizations?
Fazal: I think that two things have prevented the Brave New World of telecommuting from developing as a technologist might have predicted. One is the poor quality technology. I’ve been in a conference room where an entire wall was virtually opened up into a room 20 miles away. People in that other room appeared life size and were much more compelling than a face in a box (monitor). The second thing that impedes telecommuting is the inability of most managers to write. Without clear written instructions it is easy for people to wander off track. It is easier for a manager to see when someone is doing something other than what was intended if the worker is physically present.
Katherine: I talked to a bunch of moms with academic-style jobs and they all liked the idea. They wanted to return to work, but they did not want to deal with the mechanical hassles of a breast pump and they did not want to be separated for such long periods from their baby. A lot of them are married to techie/science-ie/nerdy husbands. So maybe the idea of 11 or 12 hours per day away from this guy was part of the appeal….
Federico: Good point!
Ken: I’m not sure that vacant houses are any kind of asset. Most of them are in regions of the country that we have written off, e.g., Detroit. Most old people already have some sort of housing and Americans already occupy more square feet per person that our economy vitality truly justifies (even if space were free, we are probably not productive enough to heat and cool so many residential square feet; it does not make long-term economic system for an unemployed American to occupy more square footage than a working guy in China).
This is a great idea. I spent five years writing about commercial real estate, and it occurs to me that I never once heard an office developer or landlord brag about space for on-site child care — they were much more proud of total square footage, restaurants and cafés, housing, hotel, environment/energy savings, etc.
Fazal, the woman will still need someone to watch after her child, wherever she works. Telecommuting does not mean working less for the same pay (in my experience it means working more), and infant children are very time consuming.
As a father of two sons, the second one being 4 weeks old, I compeltely agree with Katherine. Note that, mothers do breastfeed at night, spend quite some time with fathers carying the baby around to sooth baby’s tummie during nights. Time patterns of all this are quite unpredicatble. Now imagine mother commuting somewhere with a baby after a sleepless night….
Our country provides one-year paid leave of absence from work for all mothers. If a mother still finds the time and energy to work, she is then free to choose to do so.
Phil, next time you’re in Sunny San Jose, stop by 488 Almaden. It’s right near the convention center. This gleaming 18 floor, $100 million office tower has been completely empty since it’s completion at the end of the first dot-com bubble almost a decade ago.
When I first read the headline, “nurseries” brought to mind greenhouses and visions of vibrant flora overflowing the confines of drab upholstered cubicle walls and I thought, hey, what a great idea!
Shadowhillway: I believe that the Ford Foundation, unconstrained by competition, built a combination office/greenhouse in the mid-1960s: http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID004.htm . I agree with you that it is a great idea, but I don’t believe that it will expand GDP.
My wife works from home as an account manager for a software company from home, she loves it, because she can spend time with our young son and earn a really good salary. Her work requires business travel once in a while, but not too much.
Working from home is ideal, but the nurseries are already implemented in countries like Norway and Sweden, where most companies have on site daycare and very generous maternity leave making it very easy for women to have a family and still be in the work force. This is why Norway and Sweden have a relatively high birth rate compared with the rest of Europe.
This reminds me of an idea I have had about using hi tech offices as schools for high school and maybe elementary school, with various staff members teaching one class each per day. Surely the typical hi tech office has people capable of teaching math, and most likely of teaching the various science classes. And if the technical staff didn’t feel good about teaching English and history, there should be other staff members who did.
I for one would enjoy, and find stimulating, teaching one class per day.
And it could be a great experience for the kids to have a variety of
involved teachers.
Lack of affordable daycare hits the uneducated especially hard. Many times children in these cases are left with unattentive relatives or friends. Daycares are hard to find and expensive, leading many to choose to be unemployed–why work at McDonalds and give 50% of your paycheck to daycare when you can stay home and make just as much?