Should I Stay or Should I Go Now: Wives' Participation in the Decision to Move for Their Spouses' Jobs

Abstract

In the United States, there is a national job market for employment, especially professional or managerial employment. When looking for a job or being considered for advancement within a company, individuals are competing with other job seekers nationwide, not just those in the area or within the company. Also, as more and more companies expand and become national--even global--possibilities within a company are geographically widespread. More and more people are asked or expected to relocate to other areas of the country in order to take a job, keep a job, or advance in a job. Hodson and Sullivan (2002) pointed out that more than half of all moves in the United States are believed to be work-related and that "promotions, new job responsibilities and even just job retention are sometimes attached to geographic moves" (p. 79).This study examined families with heterosexual, married spouses in the professional middle class and upper middle class whose employers have come to regard employee corporate relocation as commonplace and normative. In many cases, for professional middle-class jobs, employers subsidize moves by paying for move expenses and transaction costs associated with home sales and purchases (Worldwide Employee Relocation Council, 2005). Commonly, professional middle-class and upper-middle-class employees are relocated or asked to relocate repeatedly, "sometimes as often as every two or three years and, on average, every five to seven years" (Eby & Russell, 2000, p. 44).Hodson et al. (2002) contend that "frequent transfer is a technique firms use to train managers and initiate them into the company" (p. 313). Employers are so interested in maintaining a mobile workforce that they have formed committees, councils, and lobbying organizations that serve to research barriers to relocation; devise strategies to encourage relocation; reduce the attendant costs; and follow legislation that can impact relocation. These initiatives include the Worldwide Employee Relocation Council (ERC); national organizations like the Canadian Relocation Council; statewide organizations, such as the Kentucky Relocation Council; and regional, city-wide, or community-wide organizations like the Chicago Relocation Council.According to the Worldwide ERC, one trade association for individuals and businesses with an interest in workforce mobility, there are approximately 500,000 corporate-paid employee relocations within the U.S. each year. There is no available data on how many of those 500,000 moves involve children, but estimates say that about 80 percent of relocated employees are married (Eby & Russell, 2000). Using a conservative estimate of an average of two people being moved in each case, we can calculate that this phenomenon affects at least one million people each year including moved employees, spouses, and their dependent children.When families are moved to a new community to facilitate a job change for one member of the family, the other members of the family are affected in a variety of ways. There may be some benefits from the move, but there are also costs. An employee's family members must give up their previous home, including the physical dwelling and the surrounding community with its offerings or lack of offerings of arts, activities, stores, scenery, etc. Also, they give up a sense of familiarity, and they give up the close proximity to individuals and organizations with whom they were connected and from whom they drew varying levels of resources such as companionship or support. In some cases, this effect is large. In other cases it is small. And the effect often differs for different members of a family. The cost may be high or low depending on the degree to which the community and its accompaniments factored into the family member's life and the degree to which it was currently meeting the family member's needs. A feminist approach to examining the topic reveals the ways in which these costs are highly gendered. …