A socialist looks at Marissa Mayer

Tithi Bhattacharya, Socialist Worker  - Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, a company currently worth $20 billion, is the mother in question, and alongside creating this private nursery for her own child, thus combining parenting and work, as the boss of the company, she has decreed that no Yahoo employees may work from home. It goes without saying that for any employee parents, there will be no purpose-built, fully staffed nurseries attached to their work cubicles.

Mayer's decision to ban workers from being able to work from home goes to the heart of the debates around women's liberation: How important is class in shaping gender? Why is it so hard for the vast majority of us to combine domestic labor, including parenting, and workplace labor? How can someone like Mayer, who clearly understands the need to combine the two kinds of labor, turn around and ban that possibility for her employees?

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