SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WORK AND FAMILY : Trying to Succeed on the Job and With the Family
Since the dawn of time, families have divided their labor into two types: hunting and gathering.
Sometimes their duties overlapped, but in general, the hunters battled snarling freeway traffic, ferocious bosses and impersonal institutions while the gatherers picked up the dry cleaning, shopped for groceries and drove the children to soccer practice.
It can hardly be news to anyone that as droves of gatherers joined the hunt over the past two decades, the established patterns of work and family have been suddenly and inexorably altered.
It is undeniably the most dramatic social change of the past 20 years: By the year 2000, half the work force will be women and 60% of all new workers will be women.
The politics of this transition are complex and sensitive--at home, at work and in Washington, D.C.--not only because thousands of years of roles have been overturned but also because the upheaval is fraught with necessity and guilt and shifting notions of fuller lives, the work ethic and what the United States is all about.
We came to the early days of this revolution filled
with bravado and deception. I remember informing my employer-to-be 10 years ago that there would be no worrisome conflicts with me leaving my 7-month-old child at home when I returned to work. No sireee. I had a “housekeeper.”
What did we know then about child care that so often doesn’t work out? About how children get sick unpredictably, how day-care centers charge you for every minute past 6 p.m. or how we would bear the same sorts of responsibilities for ailing parents?
Telling the truth in some workplaces still equals career death. But, bolstered by a groundswell of concern for families, some people, including bosses, now feel safe to call in with the facts: We need to take a few hours off for our families’ needs. A small victory, but an important moral one, suggesting as it does that we are human beings first, hunters next.
Parents are revamping the work landscape. More and more workplaces are made up mostly of women, men with working wives and other workers who have to pick up the slack when their day care falls through.
Everyone can see it. Who hasn’t witnessed parking lot scenes of children being shifted from car to car or overheard desperate phone calls to therapists, sitters or latchkey kids?
Similarly, preoccupation with work and its more rapid pace has transformed the nature of “home.” What was once a haven is now a pit stop.
There are almost 11 million children under age 6 whose mothers are working. For these families, finding affordable, convenient child care is their largest problem, according to Edward Zigler, director of Yale University’s Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. Sadly, despite the varieties of child care available, he grades the overall quality no better than a C-plus.
And there is the thorny problem of who will do the gathering. You see more men pushing grocery carts and showing up at school plays these days. But studies show that most often the division of labor resembles the view of this 13-year-old girl: “You just don’t see your dad doing things like cooking or doing laundry. It’s sort of entrenched that your mother should do these things. It’s kind of hard to imagine your dad doing them, even if your mom works.”
In poll after poll, stressed-out mothers--and increasingly fathers--say they would gladly trade off salary for work flexibility. “They want a better quality of life. They want balance,” says Dana Friedman, co-president of Families and Work Institute in New York. We want more time to find quality day care, to supervise our kids, to monitor their homework, to read to them, to play.
Despite years of public debate, Americans have only recently begun to come up with workplace and government solutions. At the root of our society’s reluctance are fundamental beliefs that family problems are the responsibility of individuals and that “family-friendly” initiatives, such as flex time, will compromise the work ethic. Regardless of productivity, managers still value “face time” in the office, particularly seeing employees working late, Friedman says. Employees who seek or use family-oriented programs are often seen as less committed.
Some, like Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), put part of the blame for the reluctance to change on a traditional male-dominated hierarchy that believes any recognition of working women’s problems would mean “there will be no warm dinner on the table again.”
Considering the current state of our economy, it is unlikely that working parents--except for those who feel their jobs are secure--will make demands on their employers for solutions: day care, flex time, working at home and job sharing.
Blistered by Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s recent comment that U.S. workers are “lazy,” many companies may be more reluctant than ever to look at family-support programs, Friedman says.
Yet of 188 Fortune 1000 companies the Family and Work Institute surveyed, 67% indicated some interest in family initiatives. Forty-six percent had entered what the Institute calls stage one of family support programs--low-cost efforts like parenting seminars or dependent-care assistance plans--but were still viewing such support as a “woman’s benefit.” Nineteen percent were in stage two: substantial commitment with “work family managers” and other policies. And only four companies--Johnson & Johnson, International Business Machines, Corning and Aetna Life & Casualty--were in stage three, with comprehensive policies to institutionalize family support policies and hold management accountable for maintaining them.
The government has been equally slow to respond. Unlike other industrialized Western nations, the United States has yet to adopt a national family-leave policy. (California now has mandated, but unpaid, family leave, so most people at the lower salaries cannot afford to stay out very long.) In 1990, national child-care legislation authorized more than $2 billion for child care. But supporters like Zigler say that even if the money is appropriated, it will have little real impact because the need is so much greater.
So parents--no longer content with the “juggling act”--are groping toward their own solutions whose catchy names don’t adequately describe the dilemmas involved. Some will continue “serial parenting”--one parent working a day shift, another a night shift--so they can avoid the expense of day care. But they miss a coherent family life.
There is evidence that some are trying “career sequencing”--postponing full-time work altogether when children are small. But that, some studies show, is a bit of a Catch-22, with career setbacks upon their return.
The National Commission on Children, while stressing that parents are primarily responsible for balancing their work and family lives, also recommended last year that government and private employers establish family-oriented policies and practices--including family and medical leave policies, flexible work-scheduling alternatives and career sequencing without discriminating against workers returning from raising their children.
Most often, proposed solutions to work/family conflicts are framed as “bottom line” issues, justified by increased productivity that will help the United States compete in a global economy.
Studies at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power suggest this is true. Since 1985, its work/family programs have grown to include everything from near-site child-care centers to breast pumps, a newsletter for parents, support groups geared to parents with children of certain ages and beepers for male field workers whose wives are expecting.
The company spends $500,000 a year on these programs, and “for every dollar we spend on family care programs, we return $2.50 to the company in documented savings,” says Beverly King, human resources director.
But most companies with comprehensive programs do not evaluate them that way, Friedman says, so “other companies are left to guess.”
A few employers cite stories from workers whose stress has eased substantially as a result of support. They simply say it was the right thing to do.
“Large corporations have the resources,” King says. “They simply have to think about what their workers need.”
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WORK AND FAMILY
Editor: David Olmos
News Editors: Larry Snipes, Paul Whitefield
Art Director: Sandy Kay
