Work-Life Balance: Why Millennials Get Hit Hardest
Even with (or maybe because of) the proliferation of apps and technology to help workers connect with their jobs round-the-clock, finding a balance between work and life is getting harder, according to a new report from Ernst & Young.
The study finds that about half of managers worldwide work more than 40 hours a week, and 40 percent say their hours have increased over the past five years. In addition to technology shifts, the “always on” work culture reflects lingering effects of the recession that has left fewer employees handling larger workloads.
The balancing act is particularly difficult for millennials, who are becoming managers just as they enter into parenthood. U.S. millennial parents are the most likely to have a spouse that’s also working at least full-time, and they’re the less likely than older generations to have taken a career break when having children.
Related: 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Work-Life Balance
More than one in four millennials is working more after having children, compared to 13 percent of Gen Xers and 16 percent of boomers. Millennial parents place a high value on flexibility, and say that a flexible schedule would make them more engaged, less likely to quit, and more likely to work flexible hours. Even so, one in six says they have suffered a negative consequence for working a flexible schedule.
More than half of those surveyed said that they would make job and career changes in order to find a better work-life balance. Those findings echo the results of a CareerBuilder survey released last year which found that a third of workers don’t want a leadership role because they don’t want to sacrifice work-life balance.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
