Week 5

            During the Joan Blades “Living Room” conversation, she announced that the United States is one of three countries that do not give paid maternity leave.  I find that statistic to be disheartening as I have many friends who are at that stage in life and see the lack of options they are given.  Most people think of the United States as a country that is very supportive of its citizens and understanding of our needs, but seriously, one of three countries to not offer an extremely needed employee benefit is ridiculous.  I guess if so many other countries were not offering this to their women, I would not find it as disappointing but something needs to be done about that.  The question is, how?  Again, we are back to the main issue of trying to get the higher up people, to hear the voices of the less privileged, which has always been proven to be a challenge.  How can the U.S. not find a way to provide some type of paid maternity leave (Sreedhar, 2012)?   The Democratic Republic of the Congo pays for 14 weeks of maternity leave, a corrupt and extremely underprivileged country!  Canada offers 15 weeks paid maternity leave or a paid combination of maternity and paternity leave lasting up to 35 weeks (Sreedhar, 2012).  The rest of Joan Blades presentation was less intriguing to me as it did not help me understand how they were directly trying to help, rather than discussing it in front of us.

            During class, we discussed the theory of work adjustment.  This theory identifies the relationship between satisfaction and satisfactoriness.  Satisfaction is the employee’s feelings about the work he/she does.  Satisfactoriness is the employer’s satisfaction with the individual’s performance in the workplace.  I realized this model appears to be very “on point” in my eyes.  So many people I know, may not necessarily love their personal job description, but because they have good benefits and are compensated well, they will stick with the job.  These people learn to perform satisfactory for their employer to ensure their position.  My employer gives fairly constructive benefits and I enjoy working with my clients, keeping my satisfaction up.  Each year, I see I am within the company’s description of satisfactoriness as I regularly have a salary increase as well as positive feedback on my yearly evaluations, making my stay more enticing. 

            I have trouble feeling positive or negative about Guindon and Hanna’s (2002) article “Coincidence, Happenstance, Seredipity, or the Hand of God Case Studies in Synchronicity.”  Yes, I agree that sometimes things are timed well in life and we may happen to have something really bad happen, in which something positive may come from.  With this being said, there are so many small instances in life that we could potentially pick apart and say “well this happened, now what do you want to make of that?”  I may be having trouble with this because I am having personally cannot point out a time that I could relate to this theory.  I would like to discuss this idea along with the three different forms more in class, as reading about them was a little confusing (although the case studies gave me a better understanding). 

Guindon, M. H., & Hanna, F. J. (2002). Coincidence, happenstance, serendipity, fate, or the hand of God: Case studies in synchronicity. The Career Development Quarterly, 50(3), 195-208.

Sreedhar, A. (2012). Only three countries don't parental leave: can you guess which one isn't in africa. Retrieved from http://www.policymic.com/articles/20721/only-three-countries-don-t-offer- parental-leave-guess-which-one-isn-t-in-africa