Last month's SC front page revealed the risk home/work conflict poses to Sydney Anglicans' spiritual and relational wellbeing. It sparked questions from a number of pastors. JEREMY HALCROW, co-author of the research paper, provides some more answers.

The possibility that Australian marriages are being harmed by workplace pressure should be a matter of great concern. Work pressures on family life has increased since the 1990s. When women first began participating in the workforce in the 1970s, this led to a reduction in standard working hours. However in the past 15 years, many full-time workers are now working over 50 hours a week. Issues such as Sunday trading and the increased casualisation of low skill and blue collar jobs have also added to the pressure on family time.

Research from the United States indicated that evangelical Protestants might be insulated from the level of work/home conflict experienced by the rest of the population. Their strong belief in the Bible has led them to retain traditional workplace arrangements and gender roles. We also found a significant connection between strong Christian belief and positive relational wellbeing outcomes (Cameron 2005). These pieces of evidence led us to expect that strong Christian belief and belief in the authority of the Bible may limit home/work conflict.

We could not have been more wrong. We found absolutely no connection between home/work conflict and strong Christian belief, or frequent church attendance or belief in the authority of the Bible. This was surprising particularly as retirement-age Australians have stronger levels of Christian belief, and this age group are out of the child raising age group where the impact of work pressure on family life is greatest. In other words, when we correct for age the result for Christians looks even worse.

This result may trouble church leaders. It appears that even the most conservative Australian Christians are enmeshed into mainstream work practices, which we have seen harm married life. The picture grows even darker when we consider Clive Hamilton"s Affluenza thesis, which may suggest that Australian Christians are as wedded to overconsumption and materialism as their neighbours.   

Our interrogation of the 2002-2003 Wellbeing and Security Survey (WSS) found that nearly half of Australians (45%) report that work "always' or "often' conflicts with their home life. In comparison nearly 42% of strong Christian believers reported an equally high level of home/work conflict. This is not a statistically significant difference. Other noteworthy research findings include that:

a)home/work conflict is linked to poor outcomes across all relational wellbeing indicators.

b)home/work conflict becomes worse as Australians become wealthier with those who earn over $100,000 the worst off.

c) despite the apparent damage being done to their marriages those people experiencing high levels of home/work conflict are far more likely to want to work longer hours not less. In fact 67.2% of people who always experience home/work conflict want even more hours work.

Perhaps Clive Hamilton's thesis makes sense of these facts. Our materialistic mindset makes us believe that if we worked harder and earned more, we can buy our way out of our relationship struggles and into the "Australian dream'. But in truth, if we earned less and worked less, our lives would be relationally richer. 

The weakness of Hamilton's work is that he offers no antidote to our spiritual malaise.
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email debate

TIM FOSTER (All Souls Leichhardt):  Hi Jeremy, I don't agree with your conclusion that home/work conflict is driven by materialism, though that maybe part of the equation. It is a complex area, which particularly touches on gender issues. I would expect there are a host of issues around women's expectations, gender roles, kids in child care.

>> JEREMY HALCROW: Tim, the article in SC was brief, due to the space limitations of a newspaper, and does not cover all our findings. We looked closely at gender issues. 

A plethora of research shows that working mothers carry most of the family's domestic responsibilities, and although there is evidence to suggest fathers want to play a more active role in their children's lives, they are not picking up duties such as cooking and cleaning.
So it is no surprise that we found that conflict over gender roles is a significant issue for those women who regularly experience conflict between their work and home life. (see graph).

However I would want to emphasise that there is no difference between the genders as to the extent to which they experience home/work conflict. It is a big issue for both working men and working women.

>> THE REV MICHAEL KELLAHAN (St Paul's, Carlingford):
Jeremy, I'm looking through the home/work conflict paper for a weekend workshop I am preparing for church. Your finding that those people who experience such conflict actually desire to work longer hours gels with relationships I have observed. My explanation has not been that materialism is the cause, as you suggest, but that

a) people feel powerless to change " there are very few models of Christians downshifting from successful careers.

b) men know the grief they get at home when they are under pressure " much better to stay at work where you are recognised and valued as the guy who will stay late and do more. Of course that is a vicious spiral, and in the end they probably don't even bring much value to their company considering what it does to their family life.

How do these anecdotal observations stick up against hard data? 

>> JEREMY HALCROW: Michael, your observation that many high-income earners are stuck in a spiral where they gain increasing personal satisfaction from work at the expense of their family life is backed by a range of research, including ours.

However there are two additional, pertinent facts to note:

1. It is high levels of home/work conflict that is directly linked to marriages lacking in security, intimacy and harmony. Longer work hours are not directly linked to poor relationships. Working more than 45 hours a week is a problem because it often causes conflict with home life. But not everyone who works long hours experiences such conflict. Researchers have shown, for example, that some men in very high status jobs may well work extraordinarily long hours, but because their wives make a decision to commit full-time to support their husbands in that position and the wives are publicly recognised for that supportive role, these couples do not experience home/work conflict.

2. It follows that while high income earners working very long hours experience home/work conflict more often than other workers, it is by no means exclusive to this group. In fact we also see that nearly 50% of people working 30 hrs a week "always' or "often' experience conflict between their home life and work (see chart below). This group would include mums working part-time and working class dads in our new casualised working environment. It is unlikely these workers desire additional hours work because they gain greater status and thus personal satisfaction from working more! This is why I think the issue is people living beyond their means " stuck in credit card and mortgage debt-traps they feel forced to work more but are also paying the price relationally and spiritually.

>> MICHAEL: Thanks for that Jeremy. Carlingford is a fascinating place to think about this. Sydney real estate is forcing people to think very carefully about where they buy. There is a lot of pressure to live in the right area, the right school catchment etc. Yet there is a high price for some of these decisions. Some marriages are put under pressure, some families are delayed or smaller than what people might otherwise want, some are enduring jobs that take them away from spending time with the family they love, and church can be just another call on my very scarce time. It's hard not to see a parallel of sorts between entering a massive mortgage and selling yourself into slavery!

It would of course be easy to be Pharasaic about this and say anyone with a larger mortgage than mine is guilty of grave sin. But the dangers of stupid responses mustn't stop us thinking through a distinctively Christian response " so that we're not just swept along, living by the same values as our city.

>> MICHAEL: Hi Jeremy, just wanted to thank you again and let you know how the weekend had gone. I fear I left people in a bit of despair on Saturday as we worked through some of your material. On the Sunday we did a bit better and were able to start sketching out a Christian response (see box on page 14). What was perhaps most helpful was putting this on the agenda, naming it as an issue that deserves a biblical response. Of course, its not rocket science to say conflict between work and home will affect marriages. Time is the currency of relationships " where we spend our time is a crude measure of the people/things we value. We certainly didn't solve the issue but hopefully it will get us talking as a congregation about the where, when, why and how of change to our busy-ness.

This is a real BBQ stopping issue " we'd all considered it but not from a distinctively Christian perspective. As we started to do that we could see how we could offer hope to our non-Christian friends. We could agree with them that this isn't the way things should be, but we could go further and say why and that there is a better way. If lives change and Christians live distinctively among the "pagans', then it can only make the gospel more attractive.
Look forward to the report being published.

>> THE REV CAMERON MUNRO (Denham Court):
Jeremy, your research raises some interesting questions for Sydney pastors.

From my limited experience ministering in western Sydney, my feeling is that materialism is only part of the problem " a significant, but not exclusive, part. Although I agree with you that ordinary workers do not desire additional hours work because they gain greater satisfaction from working more! " What they do get is a job. "If you won't work the long hours someone else will!" And you can't pay a mortgage without a job.

But then again, the power of advertising is such that people on modest incomes see Plasma TVs and HSV Commodores as something they need.  There is a great perception of middle class disadvantage that seems to be fed for electoral gain " politics of greed and fear.

Should pastors being doing more to encourage people to live within their means? With housing prices the way they are, should we actually be encouraging people to leave Sydney?

Something Brian Rosner puts his finger on in Beyond Greed is the necessity for generosity to "desecrate the idol'. Essentially materialism is idolatry ¬ and this needs to be shouted long and hard.  God will not tolerate rivals.

Perhaps, pastors need to be making an effort to be better models of home/work balance. How many of us work 70 hours plus a week?

The research is published as part of the Healthy Relationships Kit and is available from Moore Books or Anglican Media for $20.