The Power of the Changing Work Force
Just in time for Mother’s Day the House of Representatives last week passed a Family and Medical Leave bill that would allow employees to take 12 weeks unpaid time off to care for a newborn or adopted child, or a parent or spouse, without endangering their jobs.
But the White House said President Bush would veto the bill if it gets through the Senate and comes before him.
What’s going on? A big trend for the ‘90s--the importance of work and family issues--that is being obscured by politics.
The House bill is opposed by small-business groups, which don’t like Congress mandating benefits that big companies can afford more easily than small firms. But the bill is supported by big firms--the so-called Fortune 1,000--because they would rather cope with a uniform federal law that would apply to all competitors equally in every state.
So the House bill would exempt 95% of the nation’s 8 million businesses, but still would apply to more than half the work force by covering companies with 50 or more employees and all federal, state and local governments.
But even if Bush vetoes the bill, companies large and small are going to have to offer family leave and other new and varied benefits if they want to keep employees in the ‘90s. Because the forces driving the legislation are those that will preoccupy business throughout the decade: change, diversity and looming labor shortages in the U.S. work force.
Women will comprise 12 million of the 19 million new entrants to the U.S. labor force in this decade, rising from 45% of the total at present to 47%.
And the proportion of black, Hispanic and Asian workers will rise to 26% of the work force, from 21%.
But the most important change will be scarcity of new workers as the labor force grows much more slowly in the ‘90s than in the past two decades.
Faced with change and shortages, many companies are already offering help with family issues. American Telephone & Telegraph allows up to six months unpaid leave. IBM offers a personal leave of up to three years, during which health benefits remain in force, employees can work part time and are guaranteed a full-time job upon return.
Marriott, the chain that employs 230,000 people in hotels and food service outlets, asked employees two years ago what they wanted. In response, it now offers a pretax savings plan to finance parental leave--unpaid leave being no luxury to many people--as well as discounts on child care and seminars on parenting. Like most large companies, Marriott offers extended unpaid time off--with continued health benefits--beyond the required maternity leave.
US Sprint, the telephone network with 16,000 staffers, allows employees to share jobs--splitting duties and days at work--or to work flexible hours for many reasons, not necessarily child rearing.
Such benefits are called women’s issues, but “family” is a more accurate term because the common concern is modern family life--two-earner couples or single parents raising children and caring for aging relatives. Recognition of such needs is new, even if the problems aren’t. And work and family issues are often subject to rhetoric and misunderstanding. There’s a fond belief, repeated even by experts, that in past centuries women stayed home and men worked.
But that’s not true. In past centuries, both men and women worked on farms--and worked until they dropped. It is only for a historically brief period in this century that the idea of keeping women in the home took hold--and it’s doubtful that anybody asked the woman for her opinion. Women at the higher end of the social scale worked: Frances Perkins in 1933 was the first Secretary of Labor. And at the lower end, domestic servants were a constant 5% to 6% of the U.S. work force until World War II. (Domestics are 1% of today’s work force.)
In any event, that war brought women back into the general work force and they never really left, even though television in the 1950s portrayed the American woman as a homebound spouse--June Cleaver of “Leave It to Beaver,” Alice Kramden of “The Honeymooners” and Lucy Ricardo of “I Love Lucy.”
By contrast, today’s TV mothers go out to work--Claire Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” and Roseanne Conner on “Roseanne.”
Yet despite their years in the work force, women still get short pay. Median weekly earnings for retail sales workers, for example, are $304 for men, $208 for women. Among editors and reporters, men make $589 a week and women $442. Women do better in light manufacturing--earning $254 a week to $287 for men. And among lawyers and MBAs, women earn 82 cents for every $1 of male wages--the differences in part reflecting seniority in the profession but also the big money that men haul down from top partnerships and executive positions.
Trends for the ‘90s? A sure bet is that those wage gaps will close--and those executive positions will open up. Or else talented employees will go elsewhere. Recent surveys by Opinion Research and Wick & Co., a management consultancy, show women leaving corporations faster than men--not for family reasons but to seek opportunity--or out of frustration with the lack of it.
In the new decade, companies that let talented people get away will decline, and those that motivate and keep employees will prosper. The equation is that simple, which is not to say that solving it will be easy.
Catering to a diverse work force takes time and money--there is no one program to suit all of today’s workers. Hiring temporary replacements for workers on leave will be a boon to firms such as Manpower Inc., but an added cost for companies pressed to economize. And family issues promise new demands for medical benefits, just when all of business is determined to cut medical costs.
So there will be tension--which is not to say it might not be creative. Thanks to labor shortages, employees may finally be judged on competence and not gender or race. It can happen.
Recall that when the Hubble Telescope was in trouble, two skilled mission specialists were alerted to go out in a spacewalk and fix it: Kathryn D. Sullivan and Bruce McCandless.
No big deal: When jobs need doing, you get people who can do them.
