What counts as relevant experience in l'age moyen?

As Caroline Kennedy throws her hat into the ring to take Hilary's Senate seat the question arises, what counts as work experience in l'age moyen? The work paradigm dictates that unpaid work is of less value than paid work. So if Caroline Kennedy has spent most of her adult 'working' life as a volunteer raising millions of dollars for charity, sitting on boards etc., does that count for less than Barack Obama's work, albeit paid, as a community organizer? What's the difference really?

Gender is the great divide in this instance. As a man, Barack could not duck out of the workforce for a few years to raise his daughters and devote his work energy to volunteer work in the form of community organizing. He was a full time, paid community organizer. His wife made the big bucks as a hospital executive. I imagine childcare was arranged for their children although it probably cancelled out his income.

Here's where the work paradigm affords women a legitimate alternative to paid work but with a catch. As a woman you can raise kids and work as a volunteer for a period of time or, if your household income permits, the rest of your life. The catch is when Caroline or Franca or Nancy want to apply for paid work the validity of that time as a homemaker/volunteer is called into question.

Jeffrey Tobin, a writer for the New Yorker and CNN political commentator, was quick to comment that for most of her life Ms. Kennedy has been a homemaker. He admitted that she had raised millions of dollars for public education in New York, written a couple of books etc., but really she was just a homemaker. As a low paid community organizer Barack took a few hits for the relative obscurity of his work, but by and large he was able to position it as a platform for negotiation and activism that propelled him to the White House. Seems to me Ms. Kennedy is attempting to do the same - the difference is he was paid, she was not (in fact, she did receive $1 per year from the NY Board of Education for fundraising).

Let's face it, about 25 - 30% of women continue to stay home with children full time and a greater number take extended time out of the paid workforce to raise their children. Many spend a portion of that time raising money, volunteering in the school or participating on community committees and boards. Women often return to paid work in l'age moyen (children are of an age and women are ready for the next phase of their lives). Do any of these women leap forward in their careers when they decide to return to paid work as a result of this broadened life/work experience? Hardly. It is simply discounted and by and large you have to make up for the lost time by returning to your pre-leave role or starting anew. The work paradigm rewords continuous years of work with access to influential, well-paid jobs. This paradigm negatively affects a woman's ability to build wealth in the 2nd half of her life which in turn, affects her ability to prepare for a secure retirement.

So can the paradigm shift to recognize the variety and depth of experience acquired by l'age moyen regardless of the venue? It is quite possible that leadership requires broader thinking and wider exposure than what is currently seen in the paid workforce. Would all leadership benefit from folks having spent an equal amount of time out of the paid workforce? Could this financial crisis (caused mostly by short-term greed) have been avoided if people in leadership roles were better grounded in raising the next generation and building functioning communities?

I don't think Ms. Kennedy should be anointed Senator because she is a Kennedy, but I object to her qualifications being discounted simply because she has not been in the paid workforce.

It's official, this is my 4th recession

Shockingly, it is my 4th recession. Not something to celebrate but at least I now know that it is not the end of the world as we know it.

The first one in the early '80s affected those of us who graduated from university arts programs with essentially no 'job skills' (as we were told time and time again). Yes, we were the first unemployeable, educated and hapless generation who picked our way through crappy jobs until things picked up in the late 80's. Then just as you established a degree of compentency, bam, the real estate/high interest rate crash of the late '80s early '90s sucked the life out of jobs and, more positively, the real estate market. Time to buy that first fixer-upper. That one was a doozy with fear lasting for many years. So, that recession was followed by the prosperity of the late 90's until, yep, the tech crash of 1999/2000. Happily, that didn't affect so many of us and at that stage, those of us just entering 'l'age' were experienced and able to skirt around the problem, surviving the blip with careers roughly intact. (Although I believe it changed work forever and heralded in an age where self-employment and contract work may be a safer bet than throwing your lot in with a single employer.) And here we are again, the 4th recession with everyone comparing it to either the Great Depression or at least the prolonged and wide-ranging recession of the early '80s.

So, that's roughly one per decade although this decade is showing two. The first one was relatively minor affecting one over-inflated sector and the 2nd is longish and structural like the biggies of the two previous decades.

This one seems to be based on debt, debt and more debt. Unfortunately, those of us who were trying to save a pittance for our old, non-pensioned age have been caught as well. It begs the question, is there any point in saving for old age when the earnings gained over the growth periods are wiped out by the inevitable recession? Is there any chance that we all won't be working in one way or another anyway? The one I really wonder about is if we should be bothering to save for our children's post secondary education when the economy will probably be so desperate for an increased tax base to pay for all the services needed by a non-pensioned cohort that they'll be throwing jobs at high school graduates just to get them working and paying taxes. Now it's all about graduate school and multiple degrees that incur huge debt (for either parents or kids), prolong adolescence and staves off the activities that are normally associated with adulthood including big ticket spending on homes and family stuff. I suspect education will be free or cheap because it will be mostly online and geared to getting kids in and out.


What really pisses me off about recession culture is the role the media plays in creating an environment in which fear overrides good sense and reasonable living. With all that is newsworthy and under-reported waiting to find a voice, all we hear about is how the recession may affect jobs, shopping and food banks. Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? What is the media's role in feeding deflation? In this the 4th time around, it seems to me that the culture of recession mostly robs us of any sense that we have some control over our lives. Markets spin out of control (financial or real estate) and then the snowball begins to roll. It's always better to talk to folks who don't pay attention to the news, they continue to live their lives, christmas shop, have people over for dinner and give to food banks.

Should we, as the economic braniac, George W. advised after 9/11, just go out and shop?