Household Labour (household + labour)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


,I'm Home for the Kids': Contradictory Implications for Work,Life Balance of Teleworking Mothers

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2008
Margo Hilbrecht
This study explores the experience of time flexibility and its relationship to work,life balance among married female teleworkers with school-aged children. Drawing from a larger study of teleworkers from a Canadian financial corporation, 18 mothers employed in professional positions discussed work, leisure and their perceptions of work,life balance in in-depth interviews. Telework was viewed positively because flexible scheduling facilitated optimal time management. A key factor was the pervasiveness of caregiving, which could result in ongoing tensions and contradictions between the ethic of care and their employment responsibilities. The ideology of ,intensive mothering' meant that work schedules were closely tied to the rhythms of children's school and leisure activities. The different temporal demands of motherhood and employment resulted in little opportunity for personal leisure. Time ,saved' from not having to commute to an office was reallocated to caregiving, housework or paid employment rather than to time for their self. The women also experienced a traditional gendered division of household labour and viewed telework as a helpful tool for combining their dual roles. Time flexibility enhanced their sense of balancing work and life and their perceived quality of life. At the same time, they did not question whether having the primary responsibility for caregiving while engaged in paid employment at home was fair or whether it was a form of exploitation. [source]


Household-level Impacts of Dairy Cow Ownership in Coastal Kenya

JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2004
Charles F. Nicholson
This study uses heteroskedastic Tobit and Censored Least Absolute Deviations models to examine the impacts of dairy cow ownership on selected outcomes for a sample of 184 households in coastal Kenya. The outcomes examined include gross household cash income, gross non-agricultural income, consumption of dairy products, time allocated to cattle-related tasks, number of labourers hired and total wage payments to hired labourers. The number of dairy cows owned has a large and statistically significant impact on household cash income; each cow owned increased income by at least 53% of the mean total income of households without dairy cows. Dairy cow ownership also increases consumption of dairy products by 1.0 litre per week, even though most of the increase in milk production is sold. The number of dairy cows has no significant effect on total labour for cattle-related tasks. However, in contrast to previous studies, labour allocation to cattle by household members decreases and labour requirements for dairy cows are met primarily by an increase in hired labour. Dairy cow ownership results in relatively modest increases in payments to hired labourers and the number of hired labourers employed. The large positive impacts on income and the substitution of hired for household labour in cattle care suggest that intensification of smallholder dairying can be beneficial as a development strategy in the region if disease and feed constraints are addressed. [source]


The Measuring Rod of Time: The Example of Swedish Day-fines

JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2 2007
LINA ERIKSSON
abstract,Time is money', Benjamin Franklin's ,Poor Richard' tells us. But instead of converting time expenditures into monetary equivalents, it makes more sense in many cases to convert money into temporal equivalents. The difficulty in putting a monetary value on time in unpaid household labour, when adjusting the National Accounts, points to the problems of the first approach. The advantages of the latter approach are illustrated by the Swedish system of specifying criminal fines in terms of the number of days the offender would have to work to pay them off. [source]


Drawing out strengths and building capacity in social work with troubled young women

CHILD & FAMILY SOCIAL WORK, Issue 1 2008
Robyn Munford
ABSTRACT This paper compares the experiences of a group of marginalized young women with two groups that remained socially engaged. Drawing from a qualitative study of young women aged between 13 and 15 years, we identify four areas (understandings and experiences of well-being, use of space, making wishes, and emotional and household labour) that illuminated the ways in which marginalized young women articulated their experiences differently from those young women who were still engaged in mainstream social life. Drawing on Ungar's work we consider the ways in which marginalized behaviours, which are typically interpreted as socially disruptive and troubled, can also be read as efforts by young women to create a consistent set of social meanings in their lives and to cement reliable relationships around them. Rather than wholly negative, we suggest that these socially disruptive and troubled behaviours should be understood as having health-enhancing qualities, given the wider contextual challenges the young women faced, and as being the best choices they could make given their circumstances. Social work and support that assists young women on the margins needs to actively engage with these health-enhancing qualities and to come to a sensitized understanding of the way in which these young women understand their interpersonal worlds. [source]