Balancing Acts : Family Leave’s Great for Families--Others Want Time for Themselves

The Family Leave Act that President Clinton signed into law so triumphantly last Friday is intended to help new parents who want to stay home with their babies, as well as workers who need time off to care for ailing relatives.

But what about the employee who simply feels burned out? What about the wage-earner who fantasizes about an intensive course in Near Eastern languages or longs to spend three months climbing the Himalayas?

The latter is a favorite scenario of Dana Friedman, head of the Families and Work Institute in New York. Friedman likes to introduce the mythical mountain-climber as an example of the way “work/family” concerns are fast regrouping under a broad sobriquet known as “work/life.”

The new term--and the philosophy behind it--has been adopted by a growing number of employers nationwide; even the U.S. Department of Labor uses it.

No one is promising paid time off for non-medical purposes. But Friedman and others say the work/life trend reflects a changing dynamic between workers and the workplace. The career ethic of the ‘80s, Friedman maintains, is giving way in the early 1990s to a self-fulfillment ethic in which “you forget about all those sacrifices you made in the 1980s because you want to be able to derive some quality of life.”

For some working people, this may mean time off to attend step-parent support groups--or it may mean time off to work on an oil painting.

Says Ellen Bankert, of Boston University’s Center for Work and Family, “What you’re seeing among employers is a growing sensitivity to the fact that not everybody has a family.”

Adds Liz Lonergan, benefits director at Ben & Jerry’s in Waterbury, Vt.: “I think people are definitely looking for ways they can have a job, a decent salary, good benefits and a life,” whether they are part of a conventional--or even unconventional--family or not.

“Everyone deserves” this mix of personal and professional equilibrium, Lonergan says. “But it’s hard to find.”

The term work/life takes account of a growing sense of diversity in the work force, according to the handful of experts who study the interaction of personal and professional lives. This is 1993, they point out, and many Americans have come to accept the idea that family can encompass a myriad of living arrangements. Work/life, they say, makes an attempt to accommodate the balancing act that employers and employees alike are performing as they juggle demands in all areas of their lives.

Moving toward the more comprehensive label of work/life may just be “a pragmatic necessity,” in the view of Arlie Hochschild, author of a book about working parents called “The Second Shift.” Hochschild, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, says the new nomenclature helps reduce “envy in the workplace from those who don’t have families to care for” and strengthens “alliances among alternate groups,” such as childless couples and unmarried couples.

The very word family has “traditional connotations” that automatically exclude significant segments of the work population, says Ted Childs of IBM. For that reason, says Childs, who carries the cumbersome title of director of work force diversity programs, “I don’t talk about work/family.”

He does talk about work/life, and at IBM, that means “how you balance your work and personal life, whatever it is.” Maternity leave is part of the employment package; other leaves for less routine situations are granted on a case-by-case basis. “The preponderance of situations do involve people” needing time with others--like spouses, children, elderly relatives,” says Childs, but some cases may be “as simplistic as (caring for) a pet.”

Lonergan says the idea of paid sabbaticals for mountain climbing--or whatever--has been “kicked around” at Ben & Jerry’s for some time with no resolution. “We have given people time off, unpaid, to do something like go off and travel,” she says. “They go into a kind of suspended animation where we pay their health benefits” but nothing else.

Childs says that conferring work/life leaves comes down to a question of equity. And equity, he says, “shouldn’t mean treating everybody the same way. Equity should mean responding to the individual need.”

As an example, Childs cites the “once-in-a-lifetime” possibility in which an employee would ask for paid time off to compete in the Olympics. More than likely, Childs says, “we’d do it.”

On the other hand, he points out, “individual need” does imply a degree of value judgment.

“If you’re going to ask for time off to have a child, I’m going to respond differently than I would if you who ask for time off to go climb the Himalayas,” he admits.

“You don’t have any choice about having that child,” he says, but pursuing a long-postponed personal dream may not be something an employer is obliged to accommodate, even under the aegis of work/life.

“If I’m pressed into a corner, I’m going to prioritize,” Childs said.

Fran Rodgers, president of Work/Family Directions, a consulting company in Boston, says that what makes her uncomfortable about work/life is the possibility that time off for family purposes might lose the respect it has struggled to attain.

“If you have one guy who wants to take time off to play golf on Friday afternoons and another who wants to volunteer in his kid’s school, there just is a difference,” Rodgers says.

As an employer and as a researcher in the field of work and family--and as a working mother herself, “I recognize that you can’t always control the needs of a family,” Rodgers says. “It becomes a judgment issue.”

Because judgment is so intangible, “the way I think about it, there is an enormous pressure on companies and on the labor force toward flexibility,” Rodgers says.

“If we think in terms of judging people by their results, by the way they get their work done, then we won’t need all these distinctions,” Rodgers says.

Whether the heading is work/family or work/life, Rodgers says, the next step is “to see flexibility as a tool to do business, as opposed to a favor to be meted out.”

With vocabulary--and, presumably, attitudes--changing so rapidly, “I do sense that we are at a new phase,” Friedman says.

For example, she says, “you can have a very generous yearlong leave,” paid or unpaid, “but if you’re never going to get promoted again after you use it, what’s the point?”

“It’s all still very new,” Friedman says. “People are mixing it up and trying to get a handle on it.”