A Child's-eye View of Work-family Policies

I want to give you a brief, child's-eye view of work-family policies today as they exist in corporate personnel policies and in current public policies. And in presenting this child's eye view, I also want to recount how these policies are almost universally described by corporate executives, work-family consultants, and employee representatives who design and implement them.

The phrase you hear most frequently is "win-win"; these policies are good for the workers, they are also good for the company. Vice President Gore, a couple of weeks ago in an important speech before the Democratic Leadership Council, put it this way: "The negative old conventional wisdom saw family-friendly policies as a drain on the bottom line. It was kids vs. profits. But now we know that good policies that support families in the workplace are good for business too. Governing from that situation creates a win-win situation, particularly for working moms whose schedules can become a battleground. And we now know that businesses that respect and accommodate their workers' responsibilities to their families have less absenteeism, less turnover, higher longevity and higher profits." I've heard this kind of description of these policies many, many times and I think that was an eloquent summation of it from the Vice President.

But from the point of view of children, that description is inaccurate. I want to propose an alternative description that I believe more accurately describes the challenges that we face in this area as parents, as workers and as public policy makers. Because from a child's point of view, what we have today is not one cluster of policies called "work-family" that share essential traits, but rather two clusters of policies -- two separate kettles of fish -- that in fact are quite different and in some ways opposite from each another in their design, effect and impact. Let's call them Group I and Group II.

Group I policies are designed to free up parents to spend more time as workers . Examples include commercial or paid child care support in all of its various forms, direct and indirect.

Group II policies are designed to free up workers to spend more time as parents. These include part-time work, flexible working hours, compressed work weeks, job sharing, working at home, and leave policies, including family and medical leave.

Now, which type of policies are the most common and widespread today? Both are present, but it is fair to say that the most extensive and important of these policies are group I policies - freeing up parents to spend more time as workers.

Which Family Gets the Subsidies?

Which policies are the most reinforced and subsidized by public policy? Here it's an open and shut case. Group I policies are singled out, with no exceptions that I am aware of, for public policy subsidy. For example, the dependent care tax credit is a public subsidy for work-related child care expenses. So are corporate-sponsored programs which allow workers to pay for child care with pre-tax dollars.

And if you look at the current public policy proposals of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, you get the same thing. They propose a significant expansion of the dependent care tax credit, again for child care-related working expenses, as well as a big increase in indirect subsidies in the form of tax breaks for employers who create child care programs. All of these subsidies that currently exist and that are being proposed are intended to free up parents to spend more time at work, which is in fact the growth area out there, driven by virtue of corporate decision making and public policy decision making that tends in this one general direction.

Whatever else you think about these trends -- good or bad or undecided -- it's evident that there is no harmonious convergence of interests among the parties. It is most emphatically not a win-win situation. It is a tradeoff. There are choices being made, and less of one thing means more of another.

In his speech, the Vice President correctly said that the policies he supports lead to less absenteeism. He is right. They do lead to less absenteeism - at work! But when you have less absenteeism at work, you have more of it at home. So the "win-win" notion, I think, obscures as much as it reveals, especially if we are looking at it from the child's point of view.

Another program being promoted and expanded is child care for sick children. These programs have cute names, such as "Chicken Soup." Take your mildly sick child to this type of center and you never have to miss a day of work. "Win-win." I can understand how this is a win situation for employers, who can rely on their workers never missing work. I don't see how it is a win situation for the child, who instead of staying home with mom or dad when he is sick, goes off to "Chicken Soup."

I saw another example recently relating to forced overtime. A friend of mine did some interviews with a big company in Washington, DC. He talked to the guys in suits who put out press releases about how wonderful these family-friendly programs are. They told him that one of the great things about the company is that the company executives, by paying for child care for their workers, had eliminated the barriers to overtime. "We've got that covered now." No more barriers to overtime for our people.

We ought to stop and think about that for a moment.

What does it mean for families, for workers and the labor movement, and for public policy? From the point of view of children, we need to recognize that there is a conflict here. There is a struggle being waged for the time and attention of parents. On one side you have employers, and on the other side you have children. Parents are in the middle. That's the conflict.

Who is winning the struggle? The employers are winning. Who is cheering the winning side on? The Democratic Party. They want more subsidies for this kind of policy.

It used to be only Republicans and free market zealots who would go around saying that whatever is good for business is good for ordinary people, and that there is no conflict of interest here. Now, in the name of this false version of work-family policy, we're hearing Democrats say that there is no conflict here, that it's "win-win."

It seems to me there is an issue here for people in the labor movement. Historically, trade unions have been less afraid than a lot of people of the notion of conflict of interest, and less afraid to defend family life against the encroachments of employers and against the relentless logic of the market economy.

Why wouldn't it be a good rallying cry to say we want a better deal for our children? The polls I've seen suggest that these options of part-time work, flexibility, generous family leave, graduated re-entry, job sharing, and so on, are very popular with a lot of workers, both those who are now in unions and those who could be. So these are popular programs. Instead of allowing them to fade off into second class status with no support from public policy, they should be put forward as worthy alternatives to the status quo. These alternatives won't get that much support from many employers, because it's much easier for them to do the other and because it's often in their direct financial self-interest to do the other.

Somebody needs to say: We want to defend family life. We want to defend our commitment against the relentless encroachments of commercial values and the market-based economy, and against the relentless demands of employers who want all of our time, all of our commitment. We want time to take care of our children.

There is nothing really new about this, it's the oldest social struggle there is. The old language for this was class struggle. And I think that the best purpose of class struggle today, if you want to use that kind of term, is to defend family life and protect our children. Thank you.

David Blankenhorn

David Blankenhorn is founder and president of the Institute for American Values, a private nonpartisan organization devoted to research, publication, and public education on issues of family well being and civil society. Mr. Blankenhorn has co-edited four books of scholarly essays: Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family (1990); Seedbeds of Virtue: Sources of Competence, Character, and Citizenship in American Society (1995); Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America (1996); and The Fatherhood Movement (forthcoming, 1999). In 1994 Blankenhorn helped to found the National Fatherhood Initiative, serving as that organization's founding chairman. He also serves on the board of the National Parenting Association. In 1992, he was appointed by President Bush to serve on the National Commission on America's Urban families. A frequent lecturer, Mr. Blankenhorn's ideas have been cited in Time, Newsweek, the Economist, and elsewhere and his articles have appeared in scores of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Public Interest. He has been profiled by the CBS Evening News and other news organizations, and has been featured on numerous national television programs, including Oprah, Eye to Eye, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, ABC Evening News, Equal Time, and C-SPAN's Washington Perspectives. Mr. Blankenhorn graduated magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard and in 1978, he was awarded an MA with distinction in comparative social history from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

Discussion: Are Working Hours Becoming Excessive?

John Zalusky (Labor Consultant):

We work more hours per year than any other economy in the world. We even exceed Japan. We're almost the laughing stock of Europe, when they see how hard Americans work. We now have the figures for manufacturing hours of work, which is a good proxy for regularly-scheduled hours of work. They show that hours worked are at an all-time high in the United States, and that has been the case for almost a year. What does this mean for the future of work? Are we turning out to be a sweatshop economy?

John Schmitt (Economic Policy Institute):

The numbers show that sometime in the late 1980s we surpassed Japan as the economy that works the most hours. An important reason is the huge increase in the amount of hours that women work. Men's hours have increased, but so have women's. I think some of the earlier panelists who spoke about work-family issues can attest to that.

Morton Bahr (Communication Workers of America):

Excessive overtime has been a problem for a hundred years in the telecommunications industry. We always knew it was a problem, but it had never risen to the level that people were ready to do something about it. But in the 1998 round of bargaining, the issue became serious. In the two-week strike at US West, for example, one of the major issues was mandatory overtime. Now, during the life of the new contract with US West -- and it is one of the best in the telecommunications industry -- mandatory overtime will be reduced each year until it gets down to 8 hours a week. Here in the Washington, DC area, it's a different kind of problem, particularly for women workers, because they were installed in the so-called female jobs which required working consecutive weekends. We made a breakthrough here that some may laugh at, but for the people impacted, it was a big breakthrough. Now they cannot not be assigned more than two weekends in a month.

During each new round of bargaining we chip away at this problem. I recently announced at our convention that those companies which don't correct the problem between now and the next round are going to be faced with strikes. And at that same Christmas dinner at the White House, the chairman of Bell South told me, "I heard your message and if you check with the vice president, you will see we are hiring rapidly to begin to alleviate the problem." Such change requires membership support. Unless members are suffering to the point that they are willing to stand up and say, "enough is enough," and give the leadership the muscle to make change, it won't happen.

Discussion: Do Workers Want to Spend More Time as Parents?

David Jessup (New Economy Information Service)

A question for David Blankenhorn. There was a book describing research to find out how parents reacted to a workplace that went out of its way to be sensitive to family needs. The author discovered to her dismay that given the choice, parents found the workplace so much more congenial than staying at home and raising their kids that they preferred to stay at work. Are we in a situation here where parenting is going by the wayside, and if that continues, society will be paying a terrible price?

David Blankenhorn (Institute for American Values):

The Arlie Hochschild book, The Time Bind,has some truths in it, but we'd had a consistent assault for decades now that says the only game in town is work. We have had a hollowing out of community, a hollowing out of family. Everyone is supposed to go off and be an isolated worker in the workplace -- that's where you get dignity; that's where you get respect from your fellows. So it shouldn't surprise us that some of these upper-income workers that Hochschild interviewed are saying, "Sure, I'd rather be at the office than home with the kids." Arlie Hochschild makes an important and sad point about the kind of cultural deterioration that we are experiencing.

Yet there is an opportunity for recovery. There are many people, some in unions and some who should be, who say, "I'd like the opportunity to have my job, but also to have the flexibility to 'cheat' on it when I need to for the sake of my family." So spending time with family is not unpopular. You don't have to worry that nobody wants to do this thing. Fathers as well as mothers would like some new policies that give them more choices. The people who are reluctant about this idea are employers, because what's good for them is to buy the time and energy of their employees, lock, stock and barrel, and not have to put up with the aggravation of having them take too much time away from the job for family life. And I think that it would be appealing and interesting if more unions and political groups would cut across the grain and do something positive to advocate this type of genuinely family-friendly policy.

Herb Magidson (American Federation of Teachers)

I agreed with much of what David Blankenhorn says, but instead of unions pushing for "family values," the labor movement should simply represent what workers want, in all their opinions. For those workers who want to spend all their time at work, we should help them to get early childhood care in their offices, because that's what they want. For those who want to be part-time workers and spend more family time, we should help them as well. In other words, the labor movement should not be seen as determining what workers should want, but rather as representing them in whatever they decide they want.

David Blankenhorn (Institute for American Values):

I agree that a new social engineering can't represent the true interests of workers in their diversity. However, if we raise these issues directly, the current mix will shift.

Suzanne Granville (AFL-CIO Women's Department):

Arlie Hochshield's book Timeline was the follow-up to another book called The Second Shift, which describes what women face when they come home from work and they have their home work to do as well. There were several important lessons from that book, one of which was that even in a corporate culture where the union has bargained for work and family policies, those policies may not be fully utilized.

We need to encourage workers to take advantage of these benefits and change the culture which holds that the employer and work comes first. There are a number of policies that contribute to David Blankenhorn's model of giving workers more time to parent or take care of family obligations, including welfare reform and urban policies seek to provide affordable housing closer to where you work, so that there is less commute time. We need to look at all of those policies and analyze how they are impacting workers and families.

Very, very few workers see their work-family lives as in balance. When we talk to working women about this issue, they say it's a constant juggling act, in which some piece may fall and bump them on the head at any moment. We need to figure out which of those balls up in the air has greater priority. The way to do this is to get more people into unions so they can bargain for the policies that people feel they need, whether it's better child care because they are in a shift work situation and need that flexibility, or whether it's a return to work policy so that they can spend more time with their kids until they are in school.

Morton Bahr (Communication Workers of America):

On David Blankenhorn's presentation, I think we have to put things in perspective. The Ozzie and Harriet family died in early 1970s, and the drive toward a two-wage earner family began. It arose out of need as well as self-fulfillment. And the demand that the second wage earner -- in most cases the woman -- was making at that time was for a decent place to leave the child during work. That's what we were hearing; that was the need at the time. In 1989-1990, the CWA and IBEW made a breakthrough with our AT&T contract. We were the first to have a policy on what was called family issues, or family values. Right afterward, I contacted Lynn Martin, who was the Secretary of Labor. President Bush had already vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act. I sent Lynn Martin the statement of AT&T, and said, you ought to circulate this to your friends because it's good business. Because what it said was that AT&T is now in a competitive marketplace, and if it doesn't do the job right some other providers are going to do it. AT&T said that it hadn't been paying attention to what the unions had been urging for years, but then it finally realized that it didn't want an employee dealing on a $50 million account while he or she is worrying about a sick child or a sick mother at home.

So it was that view that drove them to make these kinds of changes. Our first priority was for on-site day care centers where you would be able to see your children during the day. We also got leave for adoption purposes, including money, because when the Iron Curtain came down, it was suddenly easier to adopt kids. People were going to different places in the world to adopt children.

Later, after these initial demands had been realized, the next wave of demands came, which was to spend more time with their family. So then we began to work on flex-time and family leave. So I don't think it was wrong in the way that it developed. We met the first need, which was, "I want to work, or I have to work." It went from there to, "I want to take care of my family."