 |
  
|
| Meet The Characters |
|
Michael Lancaster - Single Dad
After her birth, Michael took two weeks of maternity leave from his job at St. Vincent’s Hospital to secure sole custody of Mylaka from her mother. Since then, Michael has experienced the full force of single parenthood – the 2 am feedings, changing diapers, doing laundry, preparing meals, all while holding down his job at the hospital. “It was really amazing, I am telling you. It was really something to get into bringing up a baby by yourself, as a man, as a father,” Michael says. While it may be a challenge to work 18-hour days, to worry about daycare and to struggle with the family’s bills on just $35,000 a year, Michael loves his daughters and fully embraces the rewards of being a dad. “The greatest joy in my life is having my kids, that’s my life,” says Michael. “The greatest frustration is not providing as much as you would like to.” Michael’s union helps him with that frustration. Local 1199 of the Service Employees International provides subsidies to healthcare workers in the greater New York City area to help pay for infant and toddler daycare, for summer camps when school is out, and for a Saturday teen tutoring program at New York University. The fund, born of the union’s progressive and aggressive collective bargaining more than a decade ago, keeps Michael afloat financially by paying him $1,600 a year toward his daycare bill, which can run as high as $7,000 dollars a year. If he didn’t have the fund, Michael says he would be forced to get a second job, and he feels that would put a strain on his relationship with his daughter. “It would separate me and Mylaka,” he says. “Because the bond that we have now is really good. And being I am her only parent, it is gonna be really rough. Your relationship with your children spreads apart because of the fact that you are not there.”
Joanne Pederson/Caring for a Dying Parent
Joanne took care of her mother during the day, every day, then worked four hour shifts at night each week, tracking the results of thousands of blood samples. “It is very hard, it’s very stressful,” says Joanne. “It is not just physically tiring, it is mentally tiring. Twenty-four hours a day your mind is going as far as, ‘what do I have to do for mom? what do I need to do?’ But you have to be strong for the rest of your family. You have to hold up and can’t let your guard down.” Baxter International, one of America’s leading makers of hospital IV solutions and other health products, is known for institutionalizing flexible work policies. Nearly sixteen percent of Baxter’s 40, 000 employees use alternative work arrangements. Manager’s raises are based in part on demonstrating their openness to flexibility. Joanne’s manager Karen Kirby understood well Joanne’s need for a shortened work day because Karen’s husband has been battling non-Hogkins lymphoma for the past five years. “I think that we are starting to realize and understand that you can’t get the best from your people if you don’t also recognize that they are more than what they are when they are at work,” she says. Karen feels that flexibility must build on a relationship between managers and employees. She says Joanne’s work was flawless even during the darkest days of her mother’s illness and points out that Joanne even went on to receive a promotion. “She was still the conscientious worker that she’s always been,” says Karen. “And when she was promoted it was because she deserved the promotion.”
Betty Olsen — No Room for Flex-Time on the Line
The rules are strict at Baxter’s assembly plant. Managers keep close track of absences and lateness. Repeated attendance problems bring written warnings and the risk of getting fired. Betty needs flexibility more than most workers. She has a chronically ill 28-year old son, who is paralyzed by spina bifida, a birth defect that causes a breakdown in the spinal chord and vertebrae, and periodically she needs to take time off on short notice to care for him. In years past, Betty worried about losing her job when she had to miss work on short notice to care for her son. “There’s been times where Jimmy had to have emergency surgery and I had to miss work and it was held against me,” Betty says. “It was hard because you worried about losing your job but yet you had to be with your child.” Today, after 16 years at Baxter, Olsen says the policy that has made the biggest difference to her was not Baxter-inspired, but government-mandated. She sings the praises of the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed by Congress in 1993, which insures Betty can take to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year when her son is ill, without losing her job. “It's just great, because that's one of the big things you don't have to worry about -- is losing your job. You're with your family. You might be missing pay; but, hey, you're with your family taking care of them. And you still got a job to go to,” she says. Betty has not lost her job, but her situation is still stressful. She has been forced to use her sick leave and vacation time to deal with her son’s illness, so over the past 20 years, the Olsen Family has never had a real vacation or time off together to relax.
Shelly Smith and Suzanne Thomas/Job Share Partners
Shelly works the first half of the week, Suzanne the second half. They overlap on Wednesday. Both women are expert at making the job seamless, with one picking up exactly where the other leaves off. The arrangement, which the women compare to a good marriage, gives them each two days off to spend with their preschool-aged children. Hewlett Packard has been a pioneer in offering employee flexibility. Besides job sharing, HP workers can take advantage of flexible start and end times, telecommuting, part time and many other alternative work arrangements. From corporate headquarters to the factory floor, employees are supported by work-life policies designed to help meet the needs of a diverse work base. But often employees do pay a price for job flexibility and free time – hectic schedules and long work hours. Like many working parents, Shelly Smith starts her workdays early. From the moment she gets up she is on the move, always with one eye on the clock. After the whirl of getting her two boys ready for daycare with the help of husband Neal, she bundles the kids into her car, drops them off at pre-school, and hits the road for a traffic-filled commute to Silicon Valley. Shelly’s car is her office on wheels. She spends her hour-long commute on the car phone - in meetings, responding to messages and sending voice mail. “There’s just not enough time to do it all,” Shelly admits, “you know, I have an 8:30 phone call that I’ve got to start making from my car and it’s now 8:25 and I’m still in the daycare center trying to drop my child off, and he doesn’t want to be dropped off.” Suzanne Smith and Suzanne Thomas both routinely work 12 or more hours a day in their three days at the office. Together, they average 70 or 80 hours. Both women are rising through the ranks in the competitive high-tech industry and are familiar with the effort it takes to advance a career. Suzanne Thomas chuckles as she talks about the long hours, “ It can get to ninety hours a week,” she concedes, “But everybody in Silicon Valley does that at times; that’s not unique to us.” From the moment Shelly Smith pulls out of the HP parking lot and eases into homeward traffic, she is on her car phone, tying up loose ends, leaving detailed messages for her job partner, listening in on late meetings, setting up future projects, and finally, calling home to check on the family. Tonight, as on most nights she works, she’ll get home after her children are asleep. Shelly feels that if she leaves the fast track at this stage in her career in the technology industry, she may not be able to catch up later. The dilemma between missing out on a fulfilling career and missing out on her family is often on her mind. “Every once in a while I get a little bit frustrated where I’ll sit there and go, you know, gosh darn it, this isn’t that important. Why am I still here at work? Why don’t I just get home, get to the kids?”
Dave and Nancy Tresham/Split-Shift Couple
The couple’s split shift has been crucial to caring for their two pre-school children and the key to their ability to budget their money. Cutting out a daycare for their son and daughter saves the couple around $1000 each month. The significant savings is a major step in their plan to purchase their first home. But there’s a price: Nancy and Dave don’t get to see each other during the week. Dave works at the HP Roseville plant testing and repairing computers from 4pm to midnight. His wife Nancy leaves the house at 7:30am for her travel agency, returning at 6pm. Dave rises at 7am, looks after the kids until 3:45pm when a friend with comes over to baby sit until Nancy gets home at 6pm. Periodically the family gathers for a meal during Nancy’s lunch break. Experts caution that working split shifts over the long run takes a toll on marriages, but Nancy and Dave see this is as temporary and necessary sacrifice they need to make for the good of the family. While the couple sees little of each other, Dave Tresham remembers enjoying time with his own father and cherishes spending time with his children. Almost every day the three go on a nature outing, and there is playtime and the opportunity for lessons that will help them once they reach school. Even though the number of fathers who are primary caretakers of young children is growing, it is still rare for dads to spend the majority of their time caring for small children. Dave realizes that his role as “Mr. Mom” is new for men. “My father was there after work. He went to the sports with us, and he spent a lot of time with us,” Dave recalls, “But spending time with the kids all day? No, not too often. It’s quite a bit different than when I grew up.”
Etinish and Abraha Meaza/Desperate for Daycare
Working in the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week service industry requires that they both work occasional weekends. This schedule can pose real problems when it comes to finding reliable childcare for their two-year-old daughter Eyerusalem. For a while, the couple was able to cobble together an arrangement in which a babysitter cared for their daughter during the week and friends helped pick up the slack on weekends. That all fell apart when the Meaza’s babysitter left the area. The couple’s efforts to find consistent, affordable childcare proved unsuccessful, and even forced them both to call in sick on several occasions when they could find no one to stay with the baby. They were reaching the end of their ropes, when Etinish heard that Marriott was helping to build a new downtown DC childcare center, five blocks from her job. She got her daughter on the list, but she faced a final hurdle – the childcare complex would not be open for a few months. Discouraged, Etinish left her job and took her daughter back to Ethiopia with her.Several months later, the childcare center opened so that Eyerusalem now enjoys structured activities aimed toward school readiness and learning. Thanks to a subsidy from Marriott, the childcare center only costs the Meazas $52 a week. Since the center is only open Monday-Friday, the couple still rely on friends for occasional weekend babysitting, but, according to Abraha, life around the Meaza household is much happier thanks to the childcare center. “We like it…Economically it’s afford[able]…They will take care of the baby very good. So we have confidence…We need this.”
Claire Smith/“You Can’t Have It All”
During her third year with the firm, Claire found out she was pregnant. She was excited about becoming a mother, yet still in love with her job and she assumed that she would go back to work full-time after the baby was born. She took several months off for maternity leave and eventually found a nanny she could trust with her daughter, Mollie. "I don't think you can ever prepare yourself for what it's like until you have a child,” she says. “And after she was born I thought, ‘Well this is gonna be a little trickier than I thought. I don't know if I can do five days a week. I think I might be more comfortable with four.’" Claire went back to work on a reduced schedule (80% of full-time), working Monday through Thursday. The days she worked she did not see her daughter much at all, leaving home at 6:45 a.m. before Mollie was awake, and arriving home after 6:30 p.m. or 7 p.m. And nine out of ten Fridays she ended up working from home. What made the situation even more difficult was that she saw a change in the type of cases she was given. One case took her out of the office three days a week, not a good situation in a profession where face time with partners and colleagues is important. For another case, which had been going on for twelve years, she had to write a summary judgment motion with a time deadline that seemed impossible to meet unless she spent every night in the office. The pressure intensified even further with the birth of her second child. Claire agonized over what to do and eventually decided to quit, becoming part of a hidden but large-scale exodus of talented and highly qualified women from demanding professions. Many are frustrated by the conflicting expectations of producing at their maximum for work during exactly the period of life when they are producing and raising offspring. While Claire is fortunate that she has the option to stay home with her kids because her husband can support the family on one income, her freedom is bittersweet. Claire misses the courtroom. "I had such an amazing experience in law school and I had such an amazing experience my first three years in the workforce. I was doing what I loved doing." |
Operating
Room assistant Michael Lancaster is a single father of three, trying
to keep afloat despite low pay and long, grueling hours in a New
York City Hospital. Michael and his ex-wife share custody and expenses,
including college tuition, for their two daughters, Tamara and Jeanine.
Michael has raised another daughter, 4-year-old Mylaka, on his own
since he delivered her at home when she was born. 
For
Joanne Pederson, a document specialist in the quality assurance
unit of Baxter International, flexibility in her work schedule and
a supportive atmosphere where co-workers pick up the slack, has
been vital. Pederson had to care for her cancer-stricken mother
for the last six months of her mother’s life, and she says
she would not have been able to handle the emotional and financial
toll of the trauma if her employer hadn’t allowed to work an
abbreviated schedule.
Although
Betty Olsen works for Baxter International, a company with a reputation
for family friendly policies, there is not much room for flexibility
among her and her fellow production workers. Baxter’s CEO has
four kids and encourages managers to be creative in helping workers
manage their lives. Managers and professionals thrive under these
policies. But the pressures of the relentless assembly line in the
Drug Delivery Unit where Betty works, make her story different from
high-level employees in the company who do not need to be physically
present to perform their jobs.
It’s
Thursday and Shelly Smith is at the beach with her kids. But she’s
not a stay home mom – she’s got a demanding job with Hewlett
Packard, one of Silicon Valley’s founding high-tech firms.
Shelly has traded the five-day-a-week, nine-to-five grind for a
“job share”. Shelly and her partner, Suzanne Thomas each
work three days a week as marketing managers for Hewlett Packard.
Dave
Tresham works the night shift at Hewlett Packard in California,
at the company’s factory in Roseville, just outside Sacramento,
and he’s a daytime Mr. Mom. As a computer assembler, David
takes advantage of HP’s flexible approach to avoid the high
costs of childcare for his two pre-school children. Tresham works
the night shift while his wife, Nancy, works as a corporate travel
agent during the day. “He’s single mom during the day,”
she explains, “and I’m single mom at night.” 
Etinish
and Abraha Meaza came to the United States from Africa eight years
ago looking for a new life. Abraha left his first job on the advice
of friends who told him Marriott International was a good company
to work for. Etinish soon followed suit and now both work for Marriott
hotels. Abraha works afternoons and evenings as a bellman at a Marriott
hotel in downtown Washington, DC. Etinish works the day shift as
a housekeeper at the Renaissance on Capitol Hill, cleaning 16 rooms
a day. 
When
Claire Smith graduated law school in 1995, it never occurred to
her that she couldn't do it all – be a mother and have a challenging
legal career. She was hired by one of Boston's top law firms, Goodwin
Procter (formerly Goodwin Procter & Hoar). During her first
three years with the firm in the litigation department, she had
the opportunity to work on a couple of high profile cases –
a federal espionage trial and a Boston murder case. She loved the
work and the challenge, putting in whatever hours were needed to
do a good job. 