Getting Back On Track

The New Republic rolls its eyes at the latest installment in the Mommy Wars saga. They point out, rightly, that women are working, and it's time to figure out how to help families deal with the very real problems that arise when family life hits the corporate life in a head-on collision.

The New Republic brings in some heavy handed, clumsy class thing, which I'll just leave out. Let me just say that women work for a variety of reasons, not just necessity. Stay at home parents tend to be in lower income families. Most of the reforms the TNR cites would only help women in upper income positions.

But whatever. Reforms are needed to help protect families and kids. TNR provides a nice summary of where we're at:

The primary governmental protection for workers with new babies (read: women) is the Family and Medical Leave Act (fmla), signed by President Clinton in 1993, which guarantees just twelve weeks of unpaid leave to those who work for employers with 50 or more workers. Some companies offer paid maternity leave at their discretion, but not the federal government. It requires employees to use their sick leave instead. 

On April 7, Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Tom Davis, and Steny Hoyer--recognizing that "the current policy isn't very family-friendly"-- reintroduced the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act, which would guarantee federal workers six weeks of paid leave to care for newborns or adopted babies. This would be a symbolically meaningful step. Let's hope it doesn't suffer the same fate as the Balancing Act, another working-mother-friendly bill that, among other things, offers increased paid fmla leave, an additional $500 million in child care subsidies, and incentives to encourage telecommuting. Representative Lynn Woolsey first introduced the bill in February 2004 and reintroduced it last April to silence from the Republican leadership. 

It comes as no surprise that aid to working parents isn't Congress's first priority: Business has been understandably unenthusiastic about the calls for increased benefits, flex-time, and other working-mom "perks." In a corporate culture that values face time and late nights at the office, suggestions of flexibility are reflexively dismissed as a drain on productivity. But, slowly, this culture has been changing--often as companies realize the brain drain of moms-in-flight. Ernst & Young, noticing a high turnover rate among its female employees, piloted a project in the mid-'90s that allowed all workers to telecommute; the firm's percentage of women partners has since tripled. Other corporations, including Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, have created new reduced-hour jobs designed for working mothers. With women now constituting 46 percent of the U.S. workforce and receiving more college degrees than men, there are clear economic incentives for businesses to develop similar third-way options. 

But the real roadblock isn't economic; it's cultural. Republicans have long denounced federal funding for child care as a threat to the American family, as Richard Nixon argued in his veto of a 1971 bill to establish a national child-care system. Never mind that, during World War II, in response to the influx of women into the workforce, the government funded centers that offered working moms not only child care but also laundry service and packaged hot dinners. Thirty-five years after Nixon, the view persists that for the government to legislate on behalf of working women is to take sides in the culture wars. And this is the most grievous damage the mommy wars have wrought. The upper-class dilemma of whether women should choose to work or to stay at home--and the moral weight of that choice--has dominated the discussion. But how about the moral weight of working-class parents who must work and can be "one sick child away from being fired," in the words of a recent report issued by the Center for WorkLife Law? It's time to get real. The cultural revolution has already occurred. The real threat to the American family is the policies that lag behind it.

Comments

[Amy P]

Just out of curiosity, how many mothers and children were served by those WWII era daycares, and who were they? How did families qualify? Also, what age children did the centers take?

[dave s]

I just finished Woman at the Washington Zoo. There are a lot of reasons Marjorie Williams' death was a tragic shame, but somewhere in there is that her voice would be so helpful in the Mommy Wars.
I suspect that requiring more and more generous parental leave would result in less and less willingness to hire women on the part of for-profit employers. And, yes, women whose wages are not much higher than what they would have to pay for day care are going to factor that in - day care help is going to go to accountants, not fast food workers. Yet another government assist for the middle and upper classes.

[Amy Pruss]

"I suspect that requiring more and more generous parental leave would result in less and less willingness to hire women on the part of for-profit employers."

That may be what has already happened in Sweden.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10682392/site/newsweek/

"But no paradise is without its paradoxes. In Sweden, the biggest one is this: while the government has done much to improve the lives of women, it has also created a glass ceiling for them that is thicker than that in many other European countries, as well as in the United States. While state-funded child care and extremely long and cushy maternity benefits (480 days with up to 80 percent of pay) make it easy to be a working mother in Sweden, such benefits also have the effect of dampening female employment in the most lucrative and powerful jobs. In Sweden, more than 50 percent of women who work do so in the public sector—most as teachers, nurses, civil servants, home health aides or child minders, according to the OECD. Compare this to about 30 percent in the U.K. and 19.5 percent in America. "Private-sector employers are less willing to deal with the disruption caused by very long maternity leaves," says Manuela Tomei, a labor sociologist with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. "Gender discrimination in Sweden may be more subtle, but it is very much there.""

[Laura]

Oh, I have a lot of problems with this little piece, but I want to get back to talking about the politics of work-family balance and thought it was a good way to get back in.

My problem with the piece.... There are a lot of reasons that there has been so little political discourse or legislation about family-friendly workplaces. Sure, the cultural conservatives haven't supported daycare, but the unions have also been major roadblocks to creating more opportunities for part time worker. Until recently, feminists have not supported most work-family reforms, except federal funded daycare. They had other priorities, including abortion rights and ERA. There has also been major worries about creating mommy-track jobs. Wealthier families with two working parents were able to afford top notch care for their children.

Yeah, no clue about the post-WWII daycare centers. I'll have to find out.

[Amy P]

After I posted, I was looking around, and saw something about 400,000 preschool age kids being served, and a description of a showplace type daycare center on-site. But I don't know how accurate that is, or if the description of the one daycare fairly describes what was available elsewhere. And of course, civilization was hanging in the balance!

[jen]

My issue with maternity leave is that we continue to reflexively view it as something an individual's employer needs to cover. That's just ridiculously expensive for any one employer to cover, and it takes very specific circumstances for it to be budget-friendly for the employer.

IMHO paid maternity leave should be covered in the same way that unemployment is covered: via a central governmental program, completely separate from your employer. Supporting new families and taking care of future taxpayers is a societal burden. The only way to make sure employers are not trying to avoid this burden (read: not hiring women) is to make it cost-neutral for them.

[Ailurophile]

I worry that "family friendly" will work out to mean, "nuclear family friendly ONLY." People without kids have families, too. Not to mention that just about everyone wants some kind of a life away from work.

It would backfire tremendously, IMO, for there to be flexibility and benefits for people with kids, but singles and childless couples still expected to be slaves to the company.

These kinds of reforms that TNR is proposing could benefit all kinds of people. For instance, I believe there is a crying need for decent part-time work with benefits. Not just parents, but many disabled people would benefit. Right now the choice for many disabled is to work a full week which they may not have the stamina to do, or collect Social Security or SSI - and most disabled people really don't like having to do that. A third option, of working 20 hours or so a week and being able to have health benefits, would see many more disabled people in the workplace.

Workplace reform is badly needed, and it should be for *everyone.*

[Laura]

Well, some work-balance reforms should certainly benefit all workers; universal healthcare and increased part time opportunities would make everyone happy. Both other reforms should be aimed at people who are caring for babies or aging parents. Maternity and paternity leave is something that a single, dependent-less individual should not qualify for.

I think you are right that to really to get some political traction on the work-famiy balance policies that you have to expand the number of beneficiaries, but I think you lose some of the urgency of these programs by going too far. After all, parents need to take a day off from work to care for a sick child, not to go skiing. Parents are still working at home, but they are doing another kind of work.

[KC]

"Stay at home parents tend to be in lower income families." -- tend? Meaning what? 51 percent? Where does "lower income" stop and "middle income" start? Nice generalizing but I don't know that you can back it up.