| Fixing
the time divide
Work-life experts and
caregivers' advocates usually prescribe a comprehensive package
of policy remedies for America's time conflict. These recommendations
generally fall into three broad categories: caregiver supports,
working time regulations, and job and earnings
protections.
Since nearly all family-friendly
policies intend to promote better integration of work and family
life by reducing potential earnings loss and occupational costs
associated with unpaid caregiving, most could be classified as "caregiver
supports." However, I use the term more narrowly to describe
benefits and regulations designed to improve the economic security
and well-being of men and women who devote substantial time to unpaid
carework and who may, or may not, also have paid employment. This
group of policy solutions cuts across income and occupational groups
and includes Social Security benefits and disability coverage for
non-employed caregivers, welfare policies and regulations which
provide for unpaid caring work as a social good, refundable tax
credits for family caregivers, guaranteed child support for lone
parents, low- or no-cost quality healthcare for all children and
adults, living wages, affordable housing, top-notch public education
plus continuing education and vocational training for adolescents
and adults, respite care services for individuals caring for frail
and disabled family members, full consideration of the value of
the primary caregivers' contribution to a couples' earnings and
assets when parents separate or divorce, adding unpaid carework
to national productivity measurements, and excellent, affordable
childcare for everyone who wants and needs it.
If we could implement
any or all of these policies (which, to put it mildly, is something
of long shot given the present political climate in the U.S.), it
would definitely improve the quality of life and financial security
of millions of individuals -- primarily women and mothers -- who
sustain the nation's economy and social order with an invisible
stream of unpaid carework. These types of policies have also been
shown to reduce child poverty -- and of course, the United States
has the dubious distinction of having highest rate of child poverty
among very wealthy nations. However, caregiver supports alone won't
resolve the conditions underlying our time crisis, even though they
would make it less costly to women and families. Nor would these
policies automatically resolve the gender divide, since caregiver
supports typically aim to reduce the detrimental effects of the
status quo on unpaid caregivers without interrupting the conventional
organization of paid and family work.
The next layer of policies
to mend America's time divide are family-friendly working time regulations,
which include the elimination of compulsory overtime, caps on overtime
hours for waged and salaried workers, the controversial proposal
of making all but the top-earning 10 to 15 percent of professional
and managerial workers eligible for overtime pay, guaranteeing the
right of all employees to reduced and flexible work hours, establishing
a minimum number of paid vacation days for all workers, and (my
personal favorite) legislative enactment of a shorter standard workweek.
It should also be noted that this package of regulations would benefit
most workers throughout the life course, not just parents and other
caregivers. And if we look at the practice of caregiving in the
broadest possible sense, such as philosopher Joan Tronto's definition
of care as an activity that "includes everything we do to maintain,
continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well
as possible," it's clear that workers other than parents and
family caregivers potentially have many opportunities and obligations
to give care.
But given the dominant
narrative of winner-take-all individualism in America's popular
and political culture, legal and lay interpretations of "at-will"
employment, and well organized resistance to imposing additional
restrictions and costs on business owners, proposals for more worker-
and family-friendly working time regulations seem boldly utopian
in their scope. In fact, despite an unprecedented number of public
comments opposing proposed changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act
that substantially redefine the categories of workers ineligible
for overtime pay, the Bush administration recently pushed through
the revisions in an effort to protect business owners from expensive
lawsuits resulting from FSLA violations.
However, family-friendly
working time regulations could have the greatest effect on correcting
the existing disparities between "living to work" and
"working to live," mothers and fathers, parents and non-parents,
and more-educated and less-educated workers. Establishing and enforcing
more stringent restrictions on working time would reduce employers'
incentives to overwork salaried employees by making it more
costly, and might ultimately contribute to a healthy shift toward
a more qualitative, rather than quantitative, method of assessing
on-the-job productivity. If most or all of these regulations were
put in place, it could potentially -- but would not inevitably --
make men's average working hours, both in terms of paid work and
caring work, much closer to those of women. But any way you slice
it, setting more humane limits on employers' entitlement to their
employees' time would free up more hours for all working people
for caregiving, civic engagement, learning and fun.
The third critical group
of worker and family supports are job and earnings protections,
such as disability and unemployment insurance, workers' compensation,
job-protected paid parental and medical leave, minimum paid sick
leave for all U.S. workers with the guarantee that sick days can
be used to care for an ill child, and regulations requiring employers
to provide proportional pay and opportunities for advancement to
workers who work less than full-time. Jacobs, Gerson and other work-life
experts also recommended making it less cost effective to under-employ
workers by requiring employers to provide all employees with the
same level of benefits, regardless the number of hours they work.
Included in this subset of policies are laws prohibiting sex and
pregnancy discrimination in pay, promotion and hiring. Activist
seeking legal remedies to work-life conflict have proposed petitioning
state legislatures to add language barring discrimination against
parents and family caregivers to their human rights statutes, which
could be another critical step toward making the jobs and earnings
of working parents more secure.
As dismal as the social
policy outlook is for America's families -- especially compared
to more generous family-friendly provisions available to workers
and caregivers in most other economically developed countries --
job protections are one area where the United States has made minor
progress. Although it took ten years and a number of significant
compromises to pass, The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees
workers who work a minimum number of hours in a 12-month period,
and who work for a business with fifty or more employees, 12 weeks
of unpaid job-protected leave for child birth and infant care, or
for their own serious medical condition. Unfortunately, the FMLA
presently covers only a little over half of all private sector workers
in the U.S. And because it only provides unpaid leave, many workers
can't afford to take leave when they need it, or can't afford to
take the longer leave needed to recover from a serious illness or
childbirth. The FMLA does allow fathers to take paternity leave,
although new fathers are less likely to take family leave than mothers.
Anecdotal reports and some qualitative studies suggest that men
are still hesitant to use family-friendly policies offered by their
employers because they fear pay and job-related penalties.
On the brighter side,
California recently enacted a paid leave law and many paid leave
advocates are confident more states will follow suit in the next
decade. Still, with new studies indicating paid leaves longer
than 12 weeks reduce infant mortality and improve children's developmental
outcomes — but shorter and unpaid leaves do not — it's
once again clear that the best thing the U.S. has to offer working
parents is still too little, and too late.
According to recent,
nationally representative surveys, a strong majority of American
adults support implementing paid family and medical leave. Fewer
than 10 percent of American mothers strongly agree that our society
is doing "a good job" of meeting the needs of families,
and an overwhelming majority feel that improving the quality and
affordability of child care, enabling fathers to spend more time
with their children, and promoting greater financial security for
mothers should be a national priority. So it doesn't seem to be
the drift of public opinion that drives the government's
apathy toward the chronic time deficit of American workers and families.
We're then left with
a question: When realistic policy solutions seem so far out of reach,
what can the time and caregivers' movements do to heal the time
divide? If you're at all familiar with books and studies by social
researchers about the gap in U.S. family policy and its disastrous
consequences for women and children (and I've read dozens), then
you're probably aware that the experts tend to reach the same conclusion.
America could look a lot more like Canada, or France, or
Finland without sacrificing its commitment to the free market system
and foundational ideals -- in fact, American families would undoubtedly
be healthier and happier if we took a page or two from the playbook
of peer nations who do more to protect workers' family time and
enable maternal employment. It's not actually an aversion to increased
social spending that makes America more work-friendly than family-friendly,
these scholars argue, but our national leadership's astonishing
lack of political imagination and will.
While it's patently clear
that America can and must do a much better job of supporting its
caregivers and families, I think it's essential to acknowledge the
complex cultural and historical factors that make comprehensive
family policy such a low political priority in the U.S. Let me go
out on a limb here and suggest that in the big picture of world
history, America is still a new nation. Our culture is characterized
by a single-mindedness about doing things our own way -- sort of
like a stubborn toddler, but we have more dangerous toys at our
disposal and global clout. I believe the root of the contemporary
time crisis is that America has not yet figured out what it means
to be a caring society, or whether or not we want to be one.
So while we spread the
word about the time it takes to be a caring society, we should also
be mindful about the time it takes to build one. I find
it both ironic and troubling that in our speeded-up culture, progressive
activism has become intently focused on quick wins and the ephemeral
solidarity gained by a click of the computer mouse. When we identify
"time" and "care" as urgent social issues --
even when we focus our action agenda on a few straightforward policy
solutions -- we're tapping into ideological currents which are powerfully
resistant to change. We're challenging some of the most fundamental
beliefs that underpin our social and economic order. Taking back
our time -- time for life, time for care, time for community --
may take a little while.
I have great faith that
we're already on the right track. After all, in the last 250 years,
we've managed to establish, at the highest level of law, that all
men and women have inalienable rights -- although considering the
degree of racial, gender and economic inequality that still plagues
our society, there is plenty of unfinished work that deserves our immediate
attention. It only took 80 years to recognize women's right to vote,
and a somewhat shorter period of time to acknowledge married women's
right to their own earnings, property and children. It took about
six decades, start to finish, to outlaw child labor, and since their
was a strong national commitment to training up the future workforce,
making publicly-funded education mandatory for all American children
was actually accomplished with relative speed (although, clearly, we
haven't worked out all the bumps in that road yet).
It wasn't until
1938 and the humanitarian crisis caused by the Great Depression
that we began to implement basic work-hour protections and Social
Security benefits to ensure that adults who could no longer work because of
old age or disability would not spend the remainder of their lives
in destitution and despair. It wasn't until 1978 that we caught
up with the idea that it's not really fair to let employers fire a
woman just because she's pregnant. Well, okay -- maybe America is
slightly behind the curve compared to countries like Denmark and
Sweden. And at this very moment, radical forces in our government
are attempting to roll back much of the aforementioned progress.
But as a society, you have to admit we've come a long way. If we
persevere, surely we can keep plodding our way toward social justice
-- and social justice ultimately requires that we recognize time
to care as a fundamental human right.
mmo
: october 2006 |
