2006年NPR美国国家公共电台五月-What Is Mom's Work Worth?(在线收听

Ed Gordon: Mother's Day is this weekend and for those of you who take mom's hard work for granted, listen to this---a new report from website Salary.com crunched the numbers and came up with a fair wage for the average stay-at-home mother, raising one child under the age of five. The grand total: 134,121 dollars. For more on mom's worth, NPR’s Farai Chideya spoke with Bill Coleman, Salary.com’s Senior Vice President of Compensation.

Farai Chideya: Bill Coleman, thank you for joining us!

Bill Coleman: Hello!

Farai Chideya: So, what jobs do stay-at-home mothers actually do?

Bill Coleman: Stay-at-home mothers do a lot of jobs. And I think pretty much everybody in the audience knows most of the jobs that mom does, but for the purposes of our study, we asked moms what they do, how they spend their day in terms of, er, jobs that you would typically see in the classifieds. And we found a lot of mothers latching onto certain familiar-sounding jobs--laundry machine operator, housekeeper, janitor, also day-care center teacher. We also heard psychologist and, and CEO.

Farai Chideya: Yes, the CEO of the home! Absolutely! So how many hours a week do stay-at-home moms work on average, and how many hours of sleep do they get at night?

Bill Coleman: Stay-at-home moms on average tell us that they work about 91 and a half hours a week, which is a little bit more than 2 full-time jobs’ worth, and it leaves them about 6 hours and 40 minutes a night of sleep.

Farai Chideya: Now these women who stay at home, millions and millions of people, although less of a percentage than there has been in the past, also are contributing to the US economy. In what ways do stay-at-home moms contribute to both the current and future economy in the US?

Bill Coleman: One obvious way, that, that, the mothers contribute to the future economy is, is by, actually, er, raising the future economy. Mothers are also certainly participating in the economy in bringing their kids to stores and bringing them to camps, to soccer practice. All of those things are often at least money generating or money moving things, which help contribute to the economy. You know, in general, that, there is, a significant amount of the economy is driven by consumers, and mothers are consumers. They are also, some of the time, they are spending at home, and now they can be shopping online.

Farai Chideya: Why did you decide to crunch the numbers on what stay-at-home moms would make when, frankly, they are not going to make it, just by the virtue of being stay-at-home moms, they are doing all of this work either uncompensated or almost uncompensated?

Bill Coleman: The reason we did this study is, er, we've gotten a lot of feedback from people and people come to Salary.com all the time asking what should people in this job or that job get paid. And around this time of year, around mother's day, we do get a lot of questions from mothers, or from, from kids writing in asking what should a mom get paid. And although, it is not a, you know, it's not a salary that would ever be written, it's sort of a, fun, timely way to educate people in the way compensation decisions are made. You know, this year, we, we even created a novelty paycheck. So, so if you wanted to show mom what the paycheck would look like, you could do that, as a nice little thank you and happy mother's day.

Farai Chideya: A paycheck and hopefully some flowers to go with it. Thank you very much, Bill Coleman!

Bill Coleman: Thank you!

Ed Gordon: That was NPR's Farai Chideya with Bill Coleman of Salary.com.

--------------------
Words in NPR
--------------------
grand total: used humorously when you think the final total is small; 总数之和
classified: a small advertisement you put in a newspaper to buy or sell something; 分类广告
janitor: someone whose job is to look after a school or other large building; 看门人


  原文地址:http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2006/40822.html