Hedrick Smith, Executive Producer and Correspondent
Paulette Moore, Producer
Pauline Steinhorn, Producer

Interview with Hedrick Smith
Executive Producer and Correspondent

Q. What interested you in this topic?

A. For several years, I’ve been interested much more in the real problems of people’s lives than the issues politicians are debating in Washington. My team has done programs on teen violence, health care and education. We chose work and family because there’s hardly a problem in people’s lives today that is bigger and more challenging than the tension between work and family, between job and home. People are literally going crazy with the time bind, trying to manage the needs of their families and integrate them with the demands of an ever faster economy which operates around the clock, seven days a week.

Q. You used to be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. How did you move from covering the world for a newspaper to reporting on family issues through television programs?

A. Well, I began as a reporter in the field, reporting on civil rights in the South, reporting on the daily lives of Russians, what life was like in Egypt and in the Arab world. As a foreign correspondent, I always saw my job as communicating the fabric, the texture and the feel of the lives of ordinary people to my readers. After years of covering the policy debate in Washington, I see myself now as returning to my roots as a field reporter.

Q. How did you move from the print medium to electronic––specifically television?

A. Actually through books. I moved from daily reporting to doing magazine articles to book writing. You can’t write a book without in-depth reporting. You stick with a subject for a long period in order to immerse yourself in it, to master it. Good book writing means good storytelling. The same with documentaries – in depth reporting and good storytelling. So someone at PBS suggested I turn one of my books, The Power Game, into a documentary series, working with a very experienced producer, Phil Burton, who was formerly with CBS Reports. So that’s how I began. I moved into documentary production through writing books and then turning the books into documentaries.

Q. Can you summarize the social changes that have caused so many women to be in the work force today?

A. Actually, the real issue is not just so many women, but so many mothers and so many fathers being in the workforce. There are two basic reasons for that. First, as a country, we need all these mothers in the workforce for economic growth. Forty-six percent of our workforce today is women. If we didn’t have women in the workforce, we would not have the growth rate or the standard of living that we currently enjoy. We can’t afford to operate without them. Second, most families can’t afford to operate without a second income. It’s economics that are really driving the situation.

Q. After hearing everything the experts had to say, where do you believe the biggest burden to craft a solution falls? With families making individual sacrifices? With corporations? With the government?

A. We have to understand that this is no longer an individual problem. This is a social problem. Every major institution in our society is probably going to have to get involved. Part of the problem is that we’ve put the burden on the family, we’ve put the burden on the individual. And it is not an individual problem. Society needs to have all these people in the workforce, and so society as a whole has to help them manage.

We need to change social policy. For example, The Family and Medical Leave Act protects the jobs of people who have to take time off to deal with family and medical emergencies. Before, without that protection, they risked losing their jobs, and some people did lose their jobs. Now, they get unpaid leave. So there’s an example of where social policy has to step in. Sometimes, you need social policy that says, “This has to be done.” Now, people are saying that emergency leave should be paid leave, not unpaid.

Q. Were you surprised, either positively or negatively, by anything you uncovered in the making of this documentary?

A. For me, there were several stark surprises. First, it’s not women in the workforce that has really changed the issue; it’s mothers in the workforce. Women without children under 18 are largely doing much better and getting closer to being comparable to men in pay and career prospects. But mothers have a totally different predicament, as do fathers who get really engaged in the raising kids or caring for elders. People with continuing family responsibilities have a much bigger problem than the rest of us.

Second, I discovered that it’s a structural problem. If you lock people for their entire careers into a 40-hour week and an 8-hour day, you’ve put the entire burden of coping with the work-family overload on them. We should be more flexible in our concept of how much people work at different periods of their lives and make adjustments, so they can put job first or family first at different stages of their careers – without sacrificing hope of good pay and advancement.

Third, we artificially created the idea that somebody who works at home taking care of the family and the children is not “working” because no cash changes hands. If you had to pay somebody to do that same job, then that’s work. And it should be counted as such. They’re creating value for our whole society. That means an enormous change in attitudes, and probably in our laws.

Fourth, the level of pay makes a huge difference in how well people can cope with work-family tensions. The problems that a high tech manager or professional faces in coping with daycare, after school programs, summer camp or mentoring for teenagers, on a family income of $100,000 and up, are totally different from the problems confronted by a hospital attendant or a hotel worker with a family income of $30,000–$50,000 per year. As a society, we have to take that into account and help the low-end families more.

Fifth, labor unions, which have been pushed aside in the public consciousness as social problem-solvers, can and do play an extremely important role in helping deal with work-family tensions. For me, the program with Local 1199 in New York was a real eye-opener.

Q. How did you find the organizations that you profiled?

A. Some of the contacts grew out of our work on a previous program for PBS called “Surviving the Bottom Line,” which told about how the middle class was dealing with the new economy. But most of our initial contacts came through experts in the field of work-family issues.

Q. Did you come out of this project with a different view of the issues than you had going in?

A. Oh yes. No question about that. As many people do, I used to see this as a problem to be worked out by the individual employee and employer. And I came out of it realizing that this is our society’s problem. I moved from feeling that it was the responsibility of individuals and families, to feeling that many different agencies and institutions have to be part of the solution. I also came to realize the dimensions of the problem. Half of America’s workforce are people with kids under the age of 18, plus another untold percentage who are in the sandwich generation, people with elders to care for. Now when half of your society or more has a significant problem, it’s a social issue – and it needs society’s attention and support.

Q. What do you want people to take away from the film?

A. That very understanding - that to deal with the problems of work and family, we are going to have to see that this is an important issue for our whole society. If viewers take away the understanding that this is a big issue that requires big solutions and that it’s going to take a long time to work it out, I will feel that the film accomplished something.

Q. Were there any individuals in the program who struck you, who really stood out to you?

A. Yes. I was really impressed by a number of people - the problems they have to confront, sacrifices they are making, the new approaches they are trying. Take Michael Lancaster, an operating room support technician in the New York hospital. He’s a single dad, raising three kids––one, a four-year-old––on his own, working very long shifts, on very modest pay. He takes his work and family responsibilities very seriously, and for him just to keep afloat is impressive. That’s a life I hadn’t seen up close before.

Karen Kirby, a supervisor at Baxter International, a health supply firm, impressed me, because of her understanding that one of her workers needed to work half time for several months in order to care for her mother, who was dying of cancer. Karen’s empathy and Baxter’s flexibility were crucial to helping this family at a time of critical need. Old ways and old thinking would not have solved that problem.

I was really struck by the imagination of the program created by Local 1199 in New York for mentoring teenage kids. Like many other people, I thought of child care as a service for infants and toddlers. But as a working parent, you have to worry about your kids when they’re out of school, particularly on weekends. For the union to have worked with New York University to create a Saturday mentoring program for teenagers to boost their academic standing and to help them get into college is really an innovative notion of “child care.” But for parents with kids under 18, it’s a critical need.

I was impressed with Lew Platt, who rose through the executive ranks in one of America’s largest corporations thinking that child care and family issues were mainly the worry of women, but who discovered, when his wife died and left him with two kids to raise on his own, that it was not a gender issue - and was honest enough to admit that. Then he took his personal epiphany and used it to drive more flexible policies through Hewlett Packard.

Donna Klein of Marriott International and her willingness to learn impressed me. Most of us come at problems with ideas drawn from our own experience and our own level of society. Donna Klein discovered that relatively low income hotel workers, most of whom are recent immigrants, don’t need and want the same things that upper-middle-class, highly-educated, native-born Americans need. Their needs are different. Donna was smart enough and tenacious enough to adapt. So she devised a hotline that was more responsive to the needs of rank and file workers. I think that’s impressive.

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Paulette Moore
Producer

For a career-focused woman who had never been able to reconcile how to have a family while charging ahead in a demanding job, my work on PBS’s upcoming “Juggling Work and Family” has been an eye-opening experience.

My coming of age in the mid-1980’s came at a time when successful women uniformed themselves in modified men’s suits, spoke men’s jargon, got on men’s teams and played by men’s workplace rules. Women felt lucky for emerging opportunities and a little tenuous about their ability to stay, so they were not about to “whine” about taboo “female” subjects like home and family that could indicate a lack of complete dedication to their job.

The “supermom” phenomenon was in full swing as I found my way professionally, and all around me I witnessed working mothers who were successful on the job – and quietly dying inside. They had full time responsibilities at work and full time family at home, with no voice for or validation of their angst about the fact that there didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to make it all happen.

Faced with that reality, I chose what I thought was the “other” option for a woman who wanted a big job. I would not have kids. I often joked that I might consider offspring if I could have a traditional wife. The facts seemed clear; for me having a career and having a family was not a viable combination.

Fast-forward fifteen years to a gathering of work-family experts in a Bethesda hotel at the kick-off of this project. Work-family experts? I didn’t know such people existed. I must say my first reaction to their messages about flexible work, flexible schedules and family- friendly policies was knee-jerk and alarmed.

“Don’t you know you undercut the power of women when you start droning on about this stuff?” I thought as one expert after another, including several credible women, spoke about the need to change the ways we work. I had learned my “feminist” lesson well through the years that the office was no place for working out family issues. I considered children a matter of individual choice; the difficulties, logistics and responsibilities then, were something individuals quietly handled themselves. Otherwise, anarchy would reign, no work would get done and women could just take some very big steps backwards on the equality timeline.

It didn’t take long, though, before the “a ha!” moments on work and family started coming at me fast and furiously. Eileen Appelbaum of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that when men left the nation’s farms to enter the workforce en force, lawmakers, unions and corporations realized that the fabric of family life had changed. If the male wage earner was disabled or died, his family was in big trouble. The solution was a series of social supports: Social Security, disability insurance and workman’s compensation to help shore up the family.

A ha! It suddenly became clear that right now the U.S. is smack in the middle of another migration of new workers. For the past 30 years, women have been leaving home for the workplace. Once again, that move is changing the fabric of our society. But this time, we have not put in new social supports to help families cope with a situation that is perhaps more disruptive, due to the fact that now two parents are away much of the time.

That first “a ha” gave way to broader thinking on the entire subject of work and family. I realized their needs to be far, far more creative and thoughtful options for working parents than: 1) dealing with the responsibilities of having children on their own and in private or 2) choosing not to have kids at all. When millions of individuals (and corporations for that matter) struggle with the same problems in the same way, every day it becomes by definition a social issue.

That was the piece that I was missing. Work-family issues affect men, women, single, married, those with small children, teens and those with aging parents. It is time we all recognize that balancing work and family has become one of the most urgent social and economic issues in our nation today.

And that is where, for me, “Juggling Work and Family” became so much more than a series of individual “coping” stories. This show has emerged as an opening of the dialogue for social change.

“Juggling Work and Family” documents companies’ success in helping managers and their failures in assisting hourly workers. It profiles a union’s ground-breaking programs to help parents cope with kids of all ages, from infants to teens. Not to be ignored is the recurring, implicit message: you may talk about balance and flexibility until blue in the face, but unless workers and managers trust and respect each other, no amount of work-family policies on a company’s books will really make a difference.

I am relieved to report that the country has come a long way since I came of age in the 1980’s. The workplace jargon, the uniforms and the teams have all changed. I personally no longer think women or men discussing kids, soccer or the PTA meeting at work is a threat to their professional power or status.

Truth is, I now could see myself as one of those telecommuters on a conference call with sticky kids crawling all over my home computer. It is exciting to watch a movement from the inside, in real time, as it unfolds. A ha!

Let the dialogue on work and family begin.

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Pauline Steinhorn
Producer

As a journalist, I have always prided myself on keeping some distance from my stories. That was easy when the subject was the home front industries created by World War II, or vocational teachers at a Brooklyn high school. When the opportunity came to produce “Juggling Work and Family,” I knew that remaining objective would be a challenge. As a working mother with a 16-year-old son, a 9-year-old daughter and a busy husband, I secretly hoped to find answers to my own juggling act. I discovered that parents around the country, whatever their profession, economic strata or family situation share similar experiences.

Many of us still believe that we can have it all. We love our work and our family but feel that the rush of time steals the ability to be fully competent in both arenas. Joan Williams simplified the language with her terms “the ideal worker” and “the ideal parent.” All of us want to be Super Mom or Super Dad, fully available for work and also for our children. Unfortunately, as the parents in our documentary have found, that’s impossible. And after jobs and kids, there is little time left for spouses and friends, and even less time for ourselves.

My appointment book accurately shows my personal time squeeze. Along with my work appointments and to-do lists, there’s the “second shift” activities: chauffer to dance class, swim team practice, baseball practice, violin lessons, scouts, and driver’s education class; cheer enthusiastically at sports events and school concerts; go grocery shopping; drop off the laundry; participate fully in PTA meetings; go to synagogue; volunteer for community service and more.

The list may be different, but every working parent I meet feels the bind.

All of us have made compromises and can teach each other a lot about how to balance work and family. I now understand that a lot of experimenting takes place before you finally find what works. Boston attorney Margaret Crockett changes her workload regularly depending on her personal needs. Some years it may be 80% of full time; other years, she works 60%.

David Tresham tried numerous work schedules before he settled on the 4:00 PM to midnight shift. He’s home with his pre-school children during the day, while his wife Nancy works banker’s hours as a corporate travel agent. Although the strain on their marriage is immense, this short-term solution will only last another two years until Allie and Fischer are both in school. Then, as Nancy said, “We will go back to being normal.”

“Normal” in the world of juggling work and family is different with each career and each family. However, there is a universal experience that all mothers share. They all said, without fail, that they didn’t expect to feel the way they did after their babies were born.

For Karen Collins, a young child prompted her family to put their house up for sale and move to a community where the reduced financial pressure will allow her to leave her job.

For Shelly Smith, Hewlett-Packard’s job-sharing marketing manager, it resulted in a compressed workweek. Sharing a job hasn’t dramatically reduced her hours in the office but she feels comfortable cramming the 35 – 40 hours required for her job into three days and having the luxury of being with her children the other four days of the week.

Rachna Balakrishna decided to leave the pressure and prestige of big law firm life to work as part-time counsel at ManuLife insurance company.

Of course, many women and men feel comfortable remaining full-time workers. They find their own way of managing the conflicting responsibilities of work and home.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned in the process of producing “Juggling Work and Family” is that there are many solutions. Over the course of my 16 years as a parent, I have worked on-track, jumped off-track and then back on, tried working part-time and at times full time – whatever seemed to make the most sense given the financial needs of my family, the emotional needs of my children, and the flexibility of my employer.

I have just finished a long period where the balance has been heavier on work than on family. Fortunately, I have had no time to shop, so I have saved a lot of money and can now afford to take some time off. I’m looking forward to picking up my daughter from school, preparing a simple family meal, meeting a friend for lunch and working in my garden.

I am reminded of a comment from Emily Duncan, Hewlett-Packard’s Diversity Director, “What one might need when you have two small children at home may be very different than what you need when your children are gone or if you have aging parents or if you decide you want to take a sabbatical and go back to school. So at different phases of your career life, your needs change.” I would like to add that at different stages in our careers, our personal needs change. At this time, I need to slow down and experience the life that exists around my home. When my ambitions or financial needs push me, I will be back at work, remembering everything I learned from the generous people who let us into their lives and homes for “Juggling Work and Family.”

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