Aging Parents : Elder Care: New Benefit for Workers
Jim West had a serious family crisis and didn’t know what to do.
His 74-year-old mother was diagnosed in January as having Alzheimer’s disease, and she was living in Charleston, W. Va., where she had no friends or relatives to help her. West, who made his home hundreds of miles away in Boca Raton, Fla., knew little about the disease or how to care for someone with it. He was afraid he might have to take days or weeks off work to deal with the problem.
Fortunately, West discovered that his employer, International Business Machines, last year began offering a nationwide counseling and referral service to aid employees in finding care for elderly parents and relatives. With that help, it took him only a three-day trip to arrange for his mother to move into a West Virginia retirement home.
Called First-Class
“It was a first-class service,” said West, a 44-year-old manager with IBM. “They really helped me get through a difficult time.”
West is among the first of a growing number of workers enjoying what some labor experts say could become one of the fastest-growing employee benefits of the 1990s: Elder care.
Companies such as IBM are discovering that as people live longer, elder care is becoming just as important an employee benefit for many workers as child care. Surveys show that from one-quarter to one-third of all workers shoulder responsibility for elderly parents or relatives, and such duties often bring on stress that detracts from job performance.
Some other big companies--including First Interstate Bancorp, American Express, Stride Rite, and Travelers Corp.--are including some sort of elder care option or insurance in employee benefits programs and expect them to pay off in increased productivity and peace of mind. Until recently, these programs had been offered primarily by government employers.
Model Program
In what some labor experts are hailing as a model for such benefit programs, American Telephone & Telegraph over the weekend agreed with its two largest labor unions on a contract that includes a series of elder care provisions. The package includes generous leaves of absence, counseling and referral services, so-called “flexible spending accounts” that allow employees to set aside pretax earnings for elder care, and money to augment existing elderly care programs nationwide.
“Any company that wants to remain competitive and attract and keep good workers has to have a forward-looking family-care policy as part of its personnel policy,” said Francine Zucker, public affairs director for the Communications Workers of America, the union representing AT&T; employees that negotiated the contract.
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank, “With the aging of the work force, corporate support for elder care may become an important employee benefit of the 1990s.”
The importance of the issue is not lost upon some members of Congress and state legislators. At least two bills pending in Congress would require companies to offer unpaid leaves of absence for employees wishing to attend to the illnesses of dependents, whether elderly or children. The Bush Administration and the business community, however, generally oppose requiring companies to allow such leaves, urging instead that they be voluntary programs.
Mandatory programs have been proposed in several states, but only one--Connecticut--has enacted such a law.
Nobody, however, disputes the demographic shifts that highlight the importance of elder care issues.
The graying of America has created a growing “sandwich generation” of people--many older baby-boomers in their 40s--who must care for both parents and children simultaneously, creating for some a tremendous financial and emotional burden. For the first time in history, the average married couple have more parents than children, some experts say.
New Definition
The definition of dependent care these days has expanded to include caring for the elderly as well as children. In 1987, there were nearly 30 million Americans over the age of 65 and 12.2 million over age 75. By the year 2020, the Census Bureau projects, the elderly population will have nearly doubled, representing more than 17% of the population.
But increased mobility in society has often placed workers miles away from elderly parents, creating difficulties in providing care. In addition, the rise in two-earner couples places greater burdens on both husbands and wives to balance work with dependent care duties.
The increase in women in the work force poses particularly tough challenges. Women have been the traditional care givers for elderly relatives, said Diane Piktialis, a vice president at Work/Family Elder Directions Inc., a Watertown, Mass., firm that provides elder care referral services for IBM and several other large companies.
Today, the average woman will spend more time (18 years) as the daughter of an elderly dependent parent than as the mother of a dependent child (17 years), some researchers estimate. Some say women with careers are on a “daughter track.”
A recent survey of employees nationwide, conducted by Fortune magazine and John Hancock Financial Services, showed how providing for aging relatives can hurt job performance. It found that 38% of those with elder care responsibilities had to take unscheduled days off, 37% had late arrivals or early departures, and 30% reported being absent periodically.
Fortune and John Hancock also surveyed executives in the nation’s 1,000 largest companies. About 60% noticed work-related problems among employees caring for elders.
Other surveys have shown that as many as 10% of workers providing care for elders quit their jobs each year, and that the average care giver spends 10 hours a week in those duties, missing an average of five working days a year.
Employee Sacrifices
Some experts say that many more “sandwich generation” workers will be forced to quit jobs, take extended leaves or forgo promotions or training opportunities. This could strain employers already suffering from a shortage of well-educated and qualified workers because of other demographic shifts.
Many companies’ responses to these problems still are simply conducting studies. Some, such as Pitney-Bowes, Wang Laboratories and Florida Power & Light, sponsor seminars or health fairs on aging issues, according to Hewitt Associates, an employee benefits consulting firm.
Other firms are beginning to offer more direct services.
Stride Rite, a shoe manufacturer, is expanding its child care center at its Cambridge, Mass., headquarters to include a day care center for elderly parents as well. Seniors at the center may share games and other activities with the youngsters. The center was set up after the company found that a quarter of its employees provided care for aging relatives, with an additional 13% expecting to do so within the next five years.
“It was clear this was an issue we really needed to begin addressing,” said Karen Leibold, Stride Rite’s director of program development.
Companies such as First Interstate Bancorp, American Express and Harnischfeger Industries in Milwaukee are offering long-term care insurance to employees seeking security against rising costs of nursing home care. Workers typically pay for the premiums through payroll deductions.
Several firms, including IBM, Travelers, Aetna Life & Casualty, Arthur Andersen & Co., Colgate-Palmolive and Johnson & Johnson, offer or plan to offer counseling and referral services. By calling a toll-free number, employees and their families generally can get information on community resources that can address their aging relatives’ long-term care needs.
Personal Touch
Jim West, the Florida manager with IBM, said the service he used through the company even had a representative visit his mother in a retirement home on two separate occasions as a follow-up once she was placed there.
In recent days, the condition of West’s mother has deteriorated, so he says he is again using the service to find more intensive care for her.
“It would have been more difficult for him to find a good agency without that kind of service,” said Jim Smith, an IBM spokesman. “It would have taken a lot of phone calls, a lot of different visits.”
Companies such as Travelers and PepsiCo also provide flexible hours or flexible spending accounts. And various companies allow leaves of absence for employees to take care of elder or child dependents.
IBM offers employees up to three years of unpaid leave, with full health and medical benefits during that period and a guaranteed job upon their return.
AT&T;’s plan, part of a new contract awaiting ratification by its unions, will allow workers to take up to one year of unpaid leave within every two years of employment, while maintaining seniority and being guaranteed their old job or an equivalent one. Workers will receive full medical and dental benefits for the first six months of that year.
And in what may be the first action of its kind by a major employer, AT&T; also agreed to establish a $5-million fund providing seed money to enhance or establish child or elder care facilities in communities where its workers are located.
“A company that pays a lot of attention to family care, whether for newborns or older people, is a company that is probably going to attract the kind of bright, caring people we like to have into the 20th Century,” said Burke Stinson, an AT&T; district manager.
