Thoughts on Workplace Flexibility
Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Brian Reid.
I’ve been looking at the flow of news out of today’s Forum on Workplace Flexibility at the White House, and I’m no closer to being satisfied than I was 48 hours ago.
Here’s where I come down on the issue: there are two ways to make flexibility a reality. The first is that you change the laws to make damn sure that workers have some baseline protections when flexibility is a necessity. This is where paid leave is important. This is where paid sick days are important. And — unless I missed something — there were no solid proposals offered today for doing that.
That’s an opportunity lost.
The second is that men have to be involved. And when I say, “involved,” it needs to be acknowledged that men need flexibility for themselves, not flexibility for their wives, not flexibility in a business-decision sense. When President Obama said, ” Workplace flexibility isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s an issue that affects the well-being of our families and the success of our businesses,” he only gets halfway there. Unless and until men get personally invested in the fight for workplace flexibility, “flexibility” will continue to be a niche issue that’s easy to pass off as a narrow “mommy” concern. We need Daddy Wars in order to take this issue to the next level.
But all of the official stuff around today’s meeting implied that what we’re dealing with is still a mommy concern. The very first paragraph of the official report from the Council of Economic Advisers on this issue notes that women are now half of the labor force “… yet, children still need to be taken to the doctor.” Immediately, the issue is framed as one that arises from the decisions of women.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t talk of solutions. There was a ton of talk of solutions. (The Fork did a great job of outlining the ideas put forth.) But I didn’t hear much that was novel. Again, the solutions aren’t rocket science. It’s the implementation that’s tricky. And not just implementation at the top, but the work required to make flexibility a value that every boss on down the organizational chart subscribes to. Those problem bosses exist all over the place. And they weren’t watching today’s webcast.
I’m hoping that today was the first small step in continuing to build this dialogue. But time is going to tell, and it’s not clear to me how this momentum gets sustained.
There was one bright spot. The highest-ranking at-home dad in the nation, First Gentleman of Michigan Dan Granholm Mulhern, spoke at once of the breakout sessions and made clear that the language and focus of the discussion has to be broadened to men (and what’s best for the kids). This is not about gender, he said. And he’s right. Absolutely right.
Of course, I can even be cynical about that. Google News tells me that there were well in excess of 100 stories written about the event. Not a single one cited Mulhern. The struggle continues …
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Workplace Flexibility Jumps to the Top of the Agenda (Kinda)
Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Brian Reid.
Tomorrow, the White House will host a Forum on Workplace Flexibility in which the President and the First Lady will “will discuss the importance of creating workplace practices that allow America’s working men and women to meet the demands of their jobs without sacrificing the needs of their families.” It’s a great sentiment, and I’m sure it will be an event that is long remembered by many.
Ellen Galinsky, who runs the Family and Work Institute, sees the meeting as a culmination of a decades-long fight for flexibility. Dooce will be there. So will outsourcers and gurus from the results-only work environment world. (Actually, the Twitter-o-sphere is kind of split on whether having Heather Armstrong at the White House is really cool or really dumb. My invite was apparently misplaced.)
Regardless of who says what, I’m pretty sure that we’ll wake up Thursday morning to a world in which work-life choices are still tightly constrained. Most dads will hit the snooze button a couple of times, then truck off to their 8-hour-plus workweeks. A growing handful will prepare for a day at home with the kids. And there aren’t now — and won’t be on Thursday — many other options available. There is still no paid federal leave. Sick days aren’t guaranteed by law. And getting fired for putting family first is neither reason for surprise or, it seems, for sympathy.
In short, I don’t expect high-quality, state-run childcare to suddenly emerge. I don’t expect European-style paid parental leave policies to get floated. I don’t even expect Obama to make good on his campaign promises to expand FMLA. All I want is a serious effort to get paid sick leave instituted. That’s all. It would be one small — one tiny — step for flexibility. And it’s not going to happen. Not in this Washington, not in this economy.
You can host all of the flexibility summits you want, but words only get you so far.
(UPDATE: The whole thing will be streamed to the Internet from the White House site. I still haven’t seen a list of speakers. I’m not sure I’m up for watching it, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts.)
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Time for the Annual AHD Stat Attack
Posted on 29. Mar, 2010 by Brian Reid.
It always sneaks up on me, but the folks at the Census Bureau have again dropped their annual at-home dad statistics numbers for me to chew over. (This is a bit of an overstatement: the Census actually puts out a whole bunch of stuff under the title “Familes and Living Arrangements”. If you want the at-home dad numbers, it’s cleverly hidden in table FG8, in cell H7. The press release also mentions the stat.)
This year, the number of at-home dads is 158,000, which is a bump from last year’s 140,000. Last year was likely a statistical hiccup, and this year’s stats are much closer to other recent years. As I say every year, when you’re dealing with numbers this small, it’s hard to discern year-to-year differences, but when viewed over a longer time period, the trends become clearer.
Each year, it’s important to look at the caveats. The number of at-home dads actually counts only dads who are exclusively at home for 52 straight weeks without looking for work and whose spouse was fully employed for all of those 52 weeks. If you work part-time, you’re out. If you went to school, you’re out. Needless to say, this undercounts the number of at-home dads by at least an order of magnitude, and in today’s increasingly flexible work environment, the difference between the actual number of at-home dads and the number of dads meeting the official definition is growing each year. It would not be absurd to say that there are in excess of 2 million at home dads, though the (legitimate) math you’d have to use to get there is quite different than what the Census folks offer.
The obvious question is what impact the recession is (or isn’t) having on these numbers. And the short answer is: I have no idea. The numbers are gathered in March and stretch back 52 weeks, so they certainly don’t capture the full extent of the joblessness we’ve seen (though it captures a lot of it). Some of this may be driven by the fact that a lot of guys who are nominally at-home dads are beginning to look for work, therefore ruining their “eligibility” for at-home dad status. In an uncertain economic time, the number of job-hunting AHDs no doubt swells. But I’m no demographer, so I’m always open to theories. Next year should prove interesting: those stats are being nailed down as we speak.
(Interestingly, the number of at-home moms was down 200,000, the second straight drop of that magnitude. Again, the number of at-home moms is under-counted, too, for the same reason. It does suggest that even as the number of parents at home rises, fewer and fewer at-home parents can afford not to spend at least a little time testing the job market.)