I Tried to Quit My Job Because of COVID. Instead, 32-Hours Became “Full-Time” in Our Organization.

By Erin Matson

On July 7, 2020, in a pit of exhausted pandemic despair that felt known only to parents of young, semi-literate elementary school children without child care or nearby relatives, I tried to quit my job as co-director of an abortion access advocacy group. I wept silently in bed. How was this happening? I knew the decision meant this career would be over, and I loved my job. But something had to give.

“Stop,” my co-founder and co-director said. “Let’s take a few deep breaths.”

“This organization needs you, our movement needs you, and I need you,” she said. She was kind enough not to articulate that she was saving me from myself.

Growing up, work was venerated to a degree that I have, with growing age, sought not to replicate. Mom worked as a writer in public relations and came a long way from giant bows, shoulder pads, and early window dressing jobs. Dad left the corporate world to lead workshops and give career advice from his favorite easy chair. My parents taught me to take work seriously because they loved to work.

I can be experienced as intense, because I love to work. That has been the case for nearly 20 years in multiple careers. “You’re always working,” my husband once whispered as I got into yet another Twitter thread while I was, theoretically, not on the clock.

There’s a dark side to that, and I’ve bottomed out more than once, always finding it easier to extricate myself than to reset expectations. One job I left replaced me with five people, highlighting an unmet need for a wellness check and right-sizing my responsibilities. Another particularly abusive arrangement had me working 80-hour weeks with deferred paychecks. All of this happened before I became a parent and then, then I truly experienced the breathtaking WTF of meetings after 5 p.m. and weekend conferences.

Before the first plague year I hadn’t envisioned a sobbing daughter who needed help with first grade math problems during the middle of my conference call. Through the end of the 2019–2020 school year, I got up at 3 a.m. and didn’t make time to brush my teeth until I got through the entire work and school day. I tried to focus on Zoom calls with colleagues who said my daughter was so cute as she sat a few feet from me needing a teacher who could give her attention on her level. I knew, by summer, that I could not do that again for another year.

I grieved during dinners, dripping tears onto my pasta, knowing the statistics about how difficult it has always been for women to reenter the workforce after leaving to take care of young children. With Facebook posts of former classmates leaving their jobs, and email announcements of resignations in my field, I saw my generation of moms getting screwed by a hostile child care environment. Women, it seemed, did not matter.

So let’s fast forward a year. I am now a sole executive director, and my co-founder is now honorary chair of our advisory council. I observe a strict two-meeting per day limit. Work is great. But more interesting is what has happened for the organization.

All full-time staff are invited to work 32 hours per week at full pay, and everyone observes it. And you know what? We do better work this way. We’re better people when we are encouraged to get a life, not a work/life. I will always be grateful for the second chance my colleague gave me, in substantial part because of the pride I feel in the decisions I’ve made over the past year to invest in the well-being of our team.

As far as working goes, less is more, so long as wages are not cut. They shouldn’t be; we actually raised salary bands in 2020. People are more productive and valuable to an organization when they aren’t overextended and underappreciated, which is the norm in United States office culture. Employers need to step up and cut hours, raise wages, and cut the nonsense about forcing people back into the office when office workers have proved over the space of more than a year that we can be quite productive from home.

I’m so happy I still have my career. I love what I do, and I have more I want to achieve. And now, just as much as I’m an advocate for reproductive health, rights, and justice, I’ve become an advocate for working less. Creating space to breathe fosters better thinking, happier teams, and is superior to the bottomless pit of online platforms that further intrude on personal time. There’s a strong business case for reduced hours. The moral case is better.