Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies

Stay-at-home moms are another big reason for this besides the missionary experience. It is very common for Utah Mormon women to stay at home raising children.

The traditional full-time workplace totally disrespects that choice. SAHMs are not compensated for the hard work they do. It makes sense they would look for something part time to do to make a little money and think about something besides kids. But how can they do that in the traditional American workplace that expects 40+ hours a week and a resume with no gaps?

Many MLMs are built for SAHMs. They build on SAHM social networks and many of them are explicitly about making domestic life more bearable (kitchen gadgets, home goods, clothes, beauty and health products).

I think there’s a story here about SAHMs as a neglected overlooked and disrespected population, and how MLMs fill a need for them.

BTW, I hate MLMs generally, I’m just pointing out that Mormon missionary service isn’t the only thing attracting MLMs to Utah.

Is there any region of the world that respects SAHM besides Scandinavian countries? I feel like this is one of the most important issues we're facing today. Separating kids from their parents for most of the day after three months can't possibly be good.

>not compensated for the hard work they do

Really? Their SO pays for the mortgage that puts a roof over their head. Their SO pays for the groceries (i.e. food on the table). Their SO pays for the gas they use, the electricity they use, the internet they use, and so on. While this isn't the case for single stay at home mothers, to say "IT'S UNPAID LABOR" is just incorrect.

We should have part-time remote jobs (20 hours per week). Something like maintaining WordPress website or designing mock-ups with Sketch. Too bad these kind of jobs are rare.

To say they're not compensated is a fundamental misunderstanding of such a relationship, when it's really very simple: there is a pool of tasks that need to get done, and between the two partners there is a division of labor on who performs which tasks, often with at least a little overlap. If the person who works for pay happens to mop the floor at home, is that "uncompensated"?

Take a relationship where both people work, mine: My spouse does laundry. I go food shopping and cook. To say that either of us is uncompensated for those tasks is a complete misapplication of the term, and a gross oversimplification that attempts to reduce the rewards of effort to solely lie in the monetary realm.

Depends on the quality of the average parenting skills.

I would change "fill a need" to exploit. The reality is that these are women are underpaid as you say and have no other option than work for a multinational company with little or no compensation, just to pass time. A similar thing happens in third world countries, where MLM companies exploit the fact that many people cannot find jobs, and then provide "jobs" with no benefit and little hope of career improvement.

> Too bad these kind of jobs are rare.

MTurk is basically this, so they're far from "rare". They're just not very interesting for first-world workers.

You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, women are required by their society to stay at home, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.

It's a distortion of your statement, but I can't help but think that it is not far from:

"But slaves sometimes even got a little spending money!"

We can't all have that particular style of job, but we could move towards a work structure where 40 hours wasn't the gold standard of "full time". As we become ever more automated we could gradually ratchet that down. 4 days a week, or 6 hours a day. It's not like 40 hours was always the norm. Go back 100 years and people worked many more hours. I'm not sure why that downward trend stopped.

A big part of why they're not interesting is because they generally pay a small fraction of minimum wage. The median is about $2 an hour. So I don't think MTurk serves as an adequate example of the type of job the op referenced.

given the context of the article, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

If your entire social and economic network is built around the totalizing influence of (the conservative end of a) religious institution, and if that institution says that women should stay at home, then there's a de facto barrier to full participation in the labor force. So, the stay-at-home parent will be the woman.

Fortunately, there's a "way out" that there wasn't in previous generations: "just" leave the church. Unfortunately, saying that's far easier said than done is the under-statement of a century.

Not just skills, but also buy-in.

My mother was a SAHM by social convention, but it's not what she wanted for her life. She was miserable and it effected our lives deeply. She went back to work full-time (making more than my father even after >10 years out of the labor force). My younger siblings went to a well-run up-scale daycare with professionals who were passionate about child development and had none of the self-loathing/depression of a reluctant SAHM.

Suffice it to say: I need therapy and my siblings don't.

I think the social value of the SAHM is vastly over-estimated. It's basically a "good old days" lemonade and football fallacy.

Apologies in advance for the snark, but I find this statement equally valid:

> You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, men are required by their society to go to work, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.

So I reject your assertion that this is a relation of oppression, unless you are conceding that both members of the relation are equally oppressed (in which case, I would argue that nobody is).

>slaves sometimes even got a little spending money

Wew lad, I didn't realize you were an olympic athlete but you picked up those goal posts and rocketed 'em down field. Nevertheless I'll bite.

Average american mortgage: 1100$/mo Average food costs per month, with kids: ~350/mo. (Bit of wiggle room here, but I know plenty of stay at home moms that spend this or more on food.) Utilities: 150-200/mo, depending (water, electricity, gas) Internet: 40-80$/mo depending. maybe more Entertainment: differs from family to family so on, and so on.

What about future investments? A stay at home mother's work eases after a child hits their teens, because they can start helping out. Once they leave the house, things become even easier. Meanwhile their SO has been not only paying for everything this whole time, but also investing in their combined future via 401k, other retirement, etc.

Boy that sure is slavery!

No, I don't write like that. I'm fully aware of lack of choice and societal pressure. It is not strictly relevant to the "compensation" question. The imposition of the social order doesn't mean there isn't still just a set pool of tasks that have to get done, and each person does some of them. My partner can't cook and go food shopping to plan out meals. Not in their skill set. I have little choice in bearing that responsibility for my household. That still doesn't make me "uncompensated" for the task. The situations you speak of are just a matter of degree in that way, not a difference in kind.

You appear to be conflating value with compensation. Unfortunately society often seems to value the work done by the at-homeartner less. That is a different issue than compensation. The issue of compensation is personal to the relationship. To say one person is uncompensated completely ignores the fact that it is a partnership with a pool of resources and a pool of responsibilities. Sometimes there's more or less choice in involved in how those responsibilities are distributed, but dividing things into one person does this and gets this etc., acts as if there were two separate systems. There aren't. It's a relationship, a single system.

Much of the work done by stay at home moms pays less than minimum wage, though: Etsy stores, clipping coupons / general penny pinching, these MLMs.

I do think that the main difference is that the mechanical Turk work is just soul-crushingly boring.

This all sounds right from my observations. It's mostly women who get involved in MLMs. I would bet that most of them don't make money. I've known only one person to actually make a good living doing it.

I believe that the majority people dislike MLMs, but they may still participate to support their friend. Which also blurs the line between friend the customer uncomfortably.

I think it’s fair to say that, generally speaking, individuals conflate value and compensation, especially when it’s related to a job being done.

That feeling of performing uncompensated work is what OP is claiming MLMs are taking advantage of.

Now re-work your math replacing a SAHM with the cost of a maid, a cook, 24-hour childcare, a secretary, a phone answering service, on-demand car service, shopping service, and a butler and get back to us.

Again we move the goal posts, from "not compensated at all, they're slaves" to "not compensated enough, pay them the salary of 5 people"?

I don't have the effort to deal with these fallacies. I've made my points, feel free to forget them and take none of it to heart for the rest of your days.

Plus my husband is working today so I'm taking care of the kids and my 2 year old just spilled spaghetti everywhere :)

This inversion is a bit misleading: being able to work is how people achieve financial independence, and if society discourages women from seeking financial independence the result is obviously an imbalance of power between men and women.

Clipping coupons is soul crushingly boring as well. I also run an Etsy store as a side activity and make about $25 per hour, 5-10 hours a week. Median for all Etsy is still about minimum wage, which, again, is significantly better than MTurk @ $2 an hour. And I'd argue the high volume low margin work for Etsy stores looks every but as soul crushing.