Open Letter To Businesses About COVID-19

I am a parent.

I’m a parent trying to survive COVID-19. My google feed is full of helpful articles detailing awesome tips like: forget perfection, live in the moment, enjoy the extra time with your kids, and 30 games you can play with your children. The shear amount of unsolicited advice from all sides is overwhelming. One thing all the advice has in common is shifting the burden onto parents. After all, if we just follow these tips we will finally be able to teach and parent our children while working full time hours.

Parents are 30% of the workforce.

Right now parents are responsible for raising and teaching the next generation while making up 30% of the workforce. All parents work to some degree. Food isn’t cheap… and don’t get me started on hobbies and enrichment activities. Most American families rely on two incomes to cover the enormous costs of raising a child. And right now every parent is working hard to keep their jobs in a suffering market.

But society is not helping. The global pandemic has put a lot of pressure on everything: businesses, health care, food costs, etc.– and that pressure is being shunted straight to parents. Isolated, severed from support systems and daily routines while task after task gets piled on our plates, we are all but drowning in work.

Many families are already overworked, feeling food insecure, and worrying about money. There is no compassion in the system and no one is doing anything to relieve the pressure parents are buckling under.

The average homeschooler only spends between 2-4 hours on formal education a day.

Schools are pressuring teachers to provide full distance learning to their students to cover the same number of hours a student might have spent in the classroom. Teachers are compensating by sending over immense packets and scheduling frequent zoom meetings. At the same time, businesses want parents to work the same hours they usually do at the same productivity level. There are only 24 hours in a day, and yet parents are somehow supposed to assist each child through 8 hours of learning while working 8 hours for their bosses and somehow still feed everyone, clean the house, and get sleep. How? And more importantly, why?

The average homeschooler only spends between 2-4 hours on formal education a day. There just isn’t a need for more. Most of a teacher’s time in the classroom is spent on controlling the class and administrivia. Cut all that out and you are left with about 10 minutes of new instruction and 10 minutes of review. Why do we have this idea that our students at home need to be working a full hour everyday for every class?

Life would be easier on everyone if schools would allow their teachers to send a detailed curriculum with all the lessons and practice encapsulated together (with solutions for the parents to use when they get stuck) so that parents could work with their children at their own pace and send the work back when complete. But teachers aren’t allowed to do that. Why? Because schools, like most companies, are more concerned with getting an 8 hour work day out of their teachers than doing what is right for the students.

A 6 hour workday is just as productive as an 8 hour workday

We also know that a shorter work day has the same level of productivity as an 8 hour day. A lot of time spent in the office is spent socializing with our colleagues. And a person interrupted takes on average 20 minutes to refocus. Working from home in because of COVID-19 still has disruptions, but if we shorten the workday we could potentially get more out of each employee and give them an environment they could actually succeed in.

Take the two income household. If the workday were shortened to 4 hours, one person could work in the morning while the other worked in the afternoon. Because they are not trying to manage the household while working, the person working could cut out all distractions and let their partner watch the kids and take care of the household. A 4 hour work day is even manageable for single parents. They could get up a little early and work, then play with the kids all day, and finish up what they need to in the evening (or during nap time). Businesses would not see much (if any) loss in productivity, and they would safeguard their workforce from burnout.

With a 4 hour workday we could avoid burning out over 30% of the workforce

Why aren’t we shortening the work day? Why are we making teachers (most of whom are parents themselves) work so hard and apply so much pressure to other parents? Because our society treats employees more like machines than people. Businesses believe time put in is more important than quality, so they pay us for our time and not our abilities. In our current situation, all this clock-watching is a recipe for burnout.

The 8 hour workday was created during the labor movement. The idea was the average worker could spend 8 hours working, 8 hours at leisure, and 8 hours sleeping. This schedule assumed women stayed home with the children and ran the household. A worker would not need to worry about cleaning, cooking, childcare, or much of anything else. Things have changed since then. Most families with children have two incomes. Many women are single parents. And at this particular moment, there is no way to outsource any work in the household (daycare, cleaning services, and even restaurants are more or less closed). The assumptions that created the 8 hour workday are no longer valid, and we have study after study to prove that it is too long.

It is time to stop treating professionals like children who need babysitting

Yes it still takes time to do our jobs, but studies show that when a work day goes past 6 hours productivity hits diminishing returns. For those of us lucky enough to be salaried workers who can work online right now, being put in a position of clock watching to appease a corporation feels idiotic when we are trying to keep our families afloat.

It is time to stop treating professionals like children who need babysitting. If you cannot trust your workers to get their work done without watching every minute of their time, you should have hired someone else. You hired us, trust us to do the work. Given the circumstances, reducing the 8 hour day could be the best thing for your workforce. Without a sane workforce, there is no profit. It is time for families to stop shouldering all of the burden, and for companies to behave like the citizens they claim to be.

Related Articles