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I came across this column I wrote in 1998, and for some reason it felt so relevant that I thought I would share this trimmed version (with a Billy Joel headline).
When I quit full-time work, a major factor had been the desire to spend more time with my infant daughter. I had been a journalist for more than ten years; the demands were enormous. Every single day brought something new, some crisis to be resolved before deadline.
For those who have worked behind the scenes, as editors, sub-editors, production and press staff, the day doesn’t end when the last full stop is plonked on a story. That’s when it begins.
As time passed, and public holidays became publication days for all the newspapers, the grind became more intense. With the opening up of more media houses, and thus, increased competitiveness, the race was dominated by different rules.
Second-guessing the competition became doubly important; scoops were more urgent, and resources were split up to cover wider ground.
Journalists would curse the erratic environment, bitch about shorter deadlines, sloppy editing, lack of sleep; everything. But still they would philosophise (smugly) that it was the nature of the profession.
We were a special breed. No nine-to-five jobs for us. We were part of that select group of professionals like the medics and the security services, who were on duty all the time.
Now, industries have grown up all around us with the same mandates for its practitioners. You are on duty all the time.
Competition has become so intense that good professionals are measured by the amount of time they are prepared to stay on the job every day and every night.
Traditional nine-to five, eight-hour jobs are things of the past, except in purely clerical positions… and government offices.
(I know that is still so because just recently I went to the Licensing Office on Wrightson Road to renew my Driver’s Permit. It was just before 3pm and the clerks were bemused at my presence.
They spoke kindly to me as if I were an alien of some ignorant sort, and advised me not to ever try that stunt again as the cashier closed at 3pm and nothing else was processed after that.
Indeed, the clerks already had their bags on their shoulders as they prepared to leave, and advised me to do the same.)
In the past few months, I have talked with many business professionals about their work schedules and the demands of their jobs. It has left me in awe.
People are at their desks by 6am and they handle scores of issues before they pack up for home at nightfall. Meetings at top companies are scheduled for 7.30am, not once in a while, but weekly.
Members of staff at all levels are regularly called to stay until nightfall to finish up some project that has suddenly got a new deadline.
Companies are accepting briefs to perform miracles overnight; and they are not acquiring additional resources, or setting up systems to deal with this trend—they’re expecting more of their employees. What’s happening here?
The other day, as I contemplated the flurry in one advertising agency to meet a quite scandalous deadline, I asked why they had not set a more realistic date for delivery. Everyone looked incredulous at my stupidity.
What? And possibly lose the account?
I don’t understand it. Surely it is better for a client to have a product that has been thoughtfully created, than to have a super-express delivery full of oversights and lacking planning?
It’s alarming because daily I see where huge chasms are being created in other important spheres of life—chasms for whole families to slip into.
How on earth can we see it as sustainable development when what is being created is a business environment that precludes the notion of its employees as members of families?
When a mother has to attend a meeting at 7.30am and her six-year-old child has to get to school for 8.30am, what are her options? What happens to her two young children when she is expected to stay at work until nine o’clock every night?
Even if she has a wonderful babysitter, when is she supposed to find time to be with her children? When they are asleep?
Generations have grown up, thrived even, under the care of grandparents and other relatives. But the nuclear family was not as common as it is now. There is no longer easy access to those familial facilities.
Not only that; our children today are growing up in a high-speed age. Technology has provided them with a range of passports to all sorts of strange, new worlds. Even as we struggle to keep apace ourselves, it is still our responsibility to prepare them for it.
You can’t be there for them all the time, but no parent should have to abdicate the responsibility for caring for their children to others, not on a full-time basis.
It is hard, particularly for the increasing number of single-parent households, to cope with the demands of earning the daily bread and trying to be a good parent at the same time.
It must be doubly hard for those who work at semi-skilled or unskilled tasks. The pay is bad, the hours long, benefits are next to nothing.
Family life is suffering, under attack from all fronts. The impacts will be catastrophic.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
