Burden of Unpaid Labor on Women During covid assignment

Assignment Task

Introduction

Sonja and Lorraine are product managers from different companies, in separate geographical areas, who are responsible for collaborating on a long-term project. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sonja, Lorraine, and their teams worked onsite in their respective companies’ offices and periodically used videoconferencing technology to hold meetings. Their offices were both required to close at the beginning of the pandemic, and everyone has since been working from home. Sonja and Lorraine now meet regularly via videoconference to coordinate the teams’ work and to keep the project on track.

Sonja was uncharacteristically late for today’s meeting. She apologizes to Lorraine and explains that she had been helping schedule a vaccination appointment for a relative. Lorraine is surprised, as vaccinations are not yet widely available in her area and she recently had difficulty securing a COVID-19 test for herself.

The Meeting

The meeting gets underway. The first item on the agenda is the project’s timeline, which was established before the pandemic required a transition to fully remote work.

Sonja expresses concern about her team’s ability to meet the next deadline. The reasons for being behind schedule are, for the most part, unrelated to the employees’ skills or quality of work. One of her team members has unreliable Internet service, which limits their ability to access the company’s intranet and join the videoconference meetings in which team members report on their assignments and make important decisions about the project. To ensure this employee has the materials they need and to keep them up-to-date on the latest team developments, Sonja has had to devise innovative workarounds that she has now been asked to share with other project managers in her company. Another of Sonja’s team membersrecently quit her position when the other family in her children’s remote-learning pod relocated and she had to take over school duties full time. “I wish I could have offered her more flexibility with her schedule,” says Sonja, “because she was the most senior and most productive member of the team. But I don’t have much latitude there.” The company does not plan to fill the vacancy on Sonja’s team; instead, she explains, it is expected that she will pick up the additional work herself. “My boss knows I live alone. I think the assumption is that I don’t have any responsibilities or commitments outside of work,” she says. “But on top of everything else I’m doing, I’m volunteering at the food bank two evenings a week and most weekends. The pandemic has created so much need in the community.”

Lorraine empathizes with Sonja and expresses concern about her own team’s ability to meet the next deadline as well. But the reason her team is falling behind schedule, she fears, is her inability to manage the team as she did before the pandemic. “I am being pulled in so many different directions now,” Lorraine says. “And I have little time for my actual job.” Recognizing the skill with which Lorraine maintained her team’s cohesiveness as they shifted to remote work, the CEO of her company tasked her with company-wide team building and morale maintenance. What was presented as a short-term responsibility has continued for over a year and now consumes considerable time as Lorraine arranges virtual happy hours, town hall meetings, and employee recognitions. Meanwhile, many coworkers outside her team now turn to her when they need to vent about their pandemic-related frustrations and fears. “I spent 30 minutes yesterday listening to a man on another team complain about his inability to get his work done because he has to ‘help care for his kids,’ to use his phrase. The whole time I was trying to ignore the cat sitting on his keyboard and the baby crying in the background. I love my actual job, but I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” says Lorraine.

Given their similar concerns about their teams’ performance and the upcoming deadlines, Sonja and Lorraine begin to brainstorm how the project might be scaled back or the timeline revised to accommodate the current work realities. Before Sonja and Lorraine can devise a plan, however, Sonja receives a phone call from her neighbor, who lives alone and has limited mobility. The neighbor’s groceries have been delivered ahead of schedule, and she needs Sonja to bring them in from the front porch before they spoil or are stolen. Sonja and Lorraine end the meeting, with plans to resume the conversation tomorrow.

Addressing the Challenges of Unpaid Labor

As Sonja and Lorraine experienced, it can be difficult to know who or what should change to address these challenges. Some people might advocate for government intervention, such as the universal childcare that was provided in the United States during WWII to allow women to work in factories (Herbst, 2017). That type of governmental infrastructure, which currently is available in some countries, could create a safety net that would allow both parents to continue working. Others might argue that companies and employers are responsible for offering flexible work schedules that allow employees adequate time to both work and care for families, or for offering benefits that meet the changing needs of employees. And still others might state that it is only the responsibility of individual employees to resolve their need for healthcare, childcare, eldercare, or community involvement.

However, when an employee must leave the workforce and stay home to perform critical unpaid labor, a person or family has less spending power and the economy suffers (Alon et al., 2020; Edwards, 2020; Kulic et al., 2020). Household spending constitutes 70% of the U.S. economy, thus making the issues of workforce, domestic responsibilities, and spending crucial considerations for a stable economy. Furthermore, the physical and mental health of employees, especially women who are shouldering a larger burden of unpaid labor, affects employee productivity (Seck et al., 2021), as was

demonstrated in the example of Sonja and Lorraine.

Like many workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sonja and Lorraine faced complicated challenges related to unpaid labor and paid work as they and their colleagues confronted multiple obstacles to fulfilling professional deadlines and work expectations while simultaneously caring for themselves, families, and neighbors in unanticipated ways. As managers and as employees themselves, Lorraine and Sonja were forced to deal with how the pandemic and other crises place increasing demands on workers, especially women. Their experience offers an opportunity to consider how companies, government, and society can learn from this pandemic experience to better prepare for future times of crises and support workers during such times.

Evaluating from a critical thinking perspective if the most suitable leadership approaches have been used and if they were used correctly and sufficiently and linking them to what learnt in the course ? Intext citation? With 6 references?

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