Married women are able to make up an average of 20 per cent of lost family income after their husbands are laid off.
By Aaron Burnett <aaburnett@dal.ca>
Posted: Feb. 22, 2008
Some family dynamics change after a husband is laid off. Photo: stock.xchng.
Married women are able to find ways to pick up portions of lost family income after their husbands are laid off, a new study suggests. The Statistics Canada study found married women whose husbands were laid off made up an average of 20 per cent of their husbands’ previous income five years later. The study did not measure husbands responding to layoffs experienced by their wives.
“There are a couple of ways in which they did this,” says study co-author Yuri Ostrovsky. “First, if the wife didn’t work before the layoff, she took up a part-time job or started working. The other way was to increase working hours.”
Beth Johnston, a news reporter with Halifax’s new Metro newspaper, says she’s had to increase her hours since her husband was laid off nearly two weeks ago and sees no sign of it changing anytime soon.
“I’m working a lot more,” Johnston says. “I had been working four days a week and now I’m working five days and so far, since we’ve started, I’ve been working twelve hour days.”
Johnston was previously a reporter for the Halifax Daily News. She met her husband, one of the paper’s chief copy editors, during her 10 years of working there. When Transcontinental Media announced the closure of the Daily News, Johnston was one of the few offered a job with Metro, but her husband is now out of work.
She didn’t get a raise with her new job to offset the lost family income. “They didn’t have to,” she says. “We were all desperate for work.”
Ostrovsky says part of the reason why he undertook the study was because of a lack of data on family income loss. “There’s a considerable amount of research devoted to individual earnings losses, but very few people look at the family’s earnings losses.”
Ostrovsky says it’s important to consider how a family’s income earning differs from an individual’s because families make financial decisions differently than single people do.
“We have way more people to worry about,” Johnston says. “If it’s just you, you know you can provide for yourself. But when you have kids who have a certain lifestyle, it’s a lot more pressure.”
Jan Myers, a human resources instructor at Dalhousie University, says she isn’t surprised by the results of the study because family dynamics affect how a person functions in the workplace.
“Several studies have shown that if one partner is getting a substantial income, the other will often pursue something more for enjoyment than money,” says Myers. “But when you suddenly only have one breadwinner, that may change dramatically.”
Myers says some women have access to certain family benefits in their workplaces that may help them make up some of the lost money. She also says family considerations are one of the reasons an increasing number of women are unionizing.
Johnston says her and her husband’s new job situations have also changed some of the dynamics at home. “I’ve had to leave the home stuff for him, he’s had to pick up the slack that way,” she says. “Any chores that I would normally take responsibility for, like groceries and laundry, has fallen to him completely because I’m working extra hard.”
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