In the two-hour program, correspondent Hedrick Smith talks with Americans from
the executive suite and Silicon Valley offices to hospital OR's and hotel housekeeping,
about how they handle the challenge of demanding jobs and the need to raise
a family or look after aging parents. In compelling detail, individuals describe
personal problems that embody the universal plight of parents sacrificing sleep
and time with each other as they race to keep pace with their jobs and try to
care for their families.
"These are tough issues that
are troubling people nationwide," says correspondent and executive producer
Hedrick Smith. "Spending too much time on the job and too little with the
family has become a chronic problem in America, and this problem is forcing
its way onto the national agenda. The choices are excruciating. People don't
dare slight work for fear of losing their jobs, and so they squeeze their personal
lives. We found some businesses, even a union, that are finding ways to ease
the strain. But there's far from a consensus on how public policy might be changed."
"If you view women as entering
the workforce in order to help the country maintain its standard of living,
maintain its industrial prowess, then you have to ask the question, 'what do
we need to do to facilitate these women entering the workforce?'" states
Eileen Appelbaum, research director of the Economic Policy Institute. "Then
the answer is 'we have to make sure they have…the supports that they need to
make it possible for them to work and also to do a good job raising their children.'"
Williams and other experts propose
policies like a shortened work week, social insurance to cover paid family medical
leave, subsidized day care, and early learning centers for children as young
as three. Even business executives and consultants agree. "You're going
to have to have private-public partnerships….That will involve employers, may
involve local and state governments, even federal government, with legislative
support," says business consultant Phil Mirvis.
BAXTER INTERNATIONAL
A global leader in medical supply and research based in Deerfield, Illinois,
Baxter International is also a leader in institutionalizing flexible work
schedules at the professional level. In the finance department, corporate
treasurer Steve Meyer manages a staff with wildly varying schedules that includes
part-time workers and telecommuters.
When global financial expert Marguerite
Fernandez tried to quit after her third child was born, Meyer urged her to
stay and to set her own work terms. Fernandez proposed a 22-hour week telecommuting
from home. Meyer agreed. "I think I work even harder because I appreciate
having this kind of flexibility," says Fernandez, who did so well in
the short-week schedule that she earned a promotion and won a major corporate
award.
In Baxter's testing labs, longtime
employee Joanne Pederson was struggling to care for her terminally ill mother.
A supportive supervisor allowed Pederson to work just four hours a day, after
hours, while sympathetic co-workers pitched in to help. "The benefit
to the company," says Pederson's supervisor, Karen Kirby, "is that
it allows a person to take care of those things at home first, and then be
able to come into the workplace and know that they can focus 100 percent on
what is happening at work."
But flexible hours aren't possible
in every work situation. In Baxter's production plant, all employees must
work the same hours to keep the assembly line running on schedule. For Betty
Olsen, who cares for her wheelchair-bound son who suffers from spina bifida,
missing work on short notice is a chronic problem. Olsen credits the Family
and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993, with soothing her fears of losing her
job and ensuring that she can take time off when her son's medical needs demand
it.
HEWLETT-PACKARD
In hard-driving Silicon Valley, computer stalwart Hewlett-Packard pioneered
a flexible work environment several years ago. In the early 1990's, work/life
issues became a priority, spearheaded by former CEO Lew Platt, who lost his
wife to cancer, leaving him with two young children. "Suddenly, I found
out firsthand that these were not 'women's issues'; these were issues of being
a parent," says Platt in the film. Today, Hewlett-Packard encourages
flexible work hours, job sharing and telecommuting. Platt saw flexibility
as the key to retaining talented employees in a competitive business.
The program follows Shelly Smith,
a senior marketing manager and mother of two young boys, who job shares with
another high-powered executive. Working three long days a week allows the
women more time with their families, but they each still work about 40 hours
a week. Job sharing has allowed them to stay on the fast track without investing
the usual 70-hour work weeks.
For the Tresham family, the solution
to raising their children without costly daycare is to work alternate shifts.
Dave Tresham works evenings assembling Hewlett-Packard server computers. HP
can afford to give him and other workers a flexible schedule because each
computer can be built individually by one technician. Dave heads off for the
night shift when his wife Nancy comes home from her day as a travel agent.
"He's single mom during the day, and I'm single mom at night," she
says. The downside is that the parents get little time together, and experts
warn this tag-team work schedule leads to higher rates of divorce.
Not all jobs at Hewlett-Packard
can be adapted to a flexible schedule. For Charmaine Crumer, a computer service
engineer who must be available for emergency computer breakdowns at banks,
airlines and other HP corporate customers, the pressure is relentless. "Always
between work and home, I feel like I have to choose," she says. "I'm
torn between whether am I going to be a team player or am I going to be a
mother."
BOSTON LAWYERS
When Claire Smith was a law student, she pictured herself "doing it all"
- having a challenging career at a big law firm and a family, too. But once
she became a mother, she felt the job pressures increase and saw her career
prospects dim. "I left home at 6:45 a.m. and came home at 7 p.m. every
night and saw my daughter for only a half an hour per day," she says
in Juggling Work and Family. "And I spent 50 percent of my weekends
working." After four months, Smith joined a growing exodus of highly
qualified, talented professionals. She quit.
While 90 percent of big law firms
have part-time work policies on the books, only about four to five percent
of lawyers work part-time because they fear they will jeopardize their careers,
according to a report published by the Women's Bar Association of Massachusetts
in 2000. Another report by the Boston Bar Association asserts there is a clash
between the changing demographics of the legal profession (50 percent of today's
law school graduates are female) and the culture of big firms, which values
long hours and 24x7 availability to important clients.
Nancer Ballard, chair of the committee
that researched the bar association report, claims that lawyers like Smith
are not examples of personal life crises, but evidence of the need for fundamental
change. Says Ballard: "These reports point to a phenomenon of the way
we structure work, which is incompatible with having a personal life."
THE UNION AND THE NEW YORK HOSPITALS
Michael Lancaster is a man with two essential jobs, and, like millions of
working class Americans, he doesn't have enough time or money to cope with
both. He's an operating room support technician who works long hours and a
single father raising three girls on $35,000 a year. His older two are in
college, and Michael has custody of the youngest, a four-year-old, whom he
is raising on his own. Balancing tuition costs with finding reliable, round-the-clock
child care for his preschooler is a stretch. Overtime work helps him keep
up financially, but it cuts his parent time dangerously low.
Lancaster is not alone. Hospital
employees are one of the nation's largest concentrations of working parents
with tough work-family problems. Rank-and-file workers - medical technicians,
lab workers, admission clerks and health aides - work odd hours and weekends
and are often required to work extra shifts in emergencies. They face special
difficulties in finding child care or family support because of their unpredictable
work schedules.
To help them manage, Local 1199
of the Service Employees International Union won an unprecedented demand in
1989 by getting New York City hospitals to contribute to an employee child
care fund for the union's 200,000 members. The $9.5 million fund supports
8,000 children a year with subsidies for infant day care, after-school and
Saturday programs for school-age kids, summer camp, and college prep classes
for teens at New York University.
At first, high school senior Dwane
Jones balked when his mother, a registered nurse, used the 1199 fund to sign
him up for NYU's Upward Bound program, which offers academic mentoring, SAT
prep and help with filling out college applications and scholarship forms.
But Dwane was surprised by the sudden academic success that came from working
with a small, caring staff. "I've gone up in every subject," he
says, "and my SAT scores went up 200 points." In the fall, Dwane
will take his newly honed academic skills and confidence to college.
MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL
Hotel giant Marriott International depends on hourly workers to present its
corporate face to its customers. Doormen, bellhops, desk clerks and other
rank-and-file workers earn less than $10 per hour, but they deal most directly
with hotel guests. To maintain high morale among these frontline workers,
Marriott is forging new ground in corporate America to help the personal lives
of its hourly employees.
Ten years ago, Marriott housekeepers
would walk off the job during the summer because they had no childcare. Replacing
them was difficult. "The issue was surfacing as a major business issue
for the first time, rather than a personal life issue," says Donna Klein,
vice president of Diversity and Workplace Effectiveness. Marriott responded
by building child-care centers and offering subsidies for the staff. While
employees like Ethiopian couple Abraha Meaza, a front doorman, and his wife
Etinish, a housekeeper, both based in Washington, D.C., consider the subsidized
day care a boon, most other hourly workers did not take advantage of the arrangement.
Their reluctance prompted Donna
Klein to investigate further. She discovered that the hourly employees, many
of them foreign-born, faced a host of challenges beyond child care. To help
workers meet these needs, Marriott established a multi-lingual employee hotline
that assists workers with a multitude of problems from housing and transportation
to substance abuse, domestic problems and legal issues.
"It may be finding them a
resource in the community and then actually hooking them up to the resource
and acting as an advocate to help them obtain that," explains Heidi Guy
of Ceridian WorkLife Services, based in Philadelphia, which helped create
and staff the hotline for Marriott. Just under 10 percent of Marriott's 135,000
employees have used the service.
A major outreach component for
the documentary includes a "Juggling Work and Family with Hedrick Smith"
Action Kit, a package of materials created to spark discussion of the issues
among community groups and other involved parties. The package features a
discussion leader guide with a VHS cassette of video excerpts from the program.
The kits can be ordered by calling (800) 277-0829 or emailing: mreap@scetv.org.
An interactive Web site can be found at www.pbs.org/workfamily.
