|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 31, 2001
Contact: Lisa Meredith or Edie Emery,
Goodman Media International
(703) 837-9500
lisa@goodmanmedia.com
edie@goodmanmedia.com
"JUGGLING WORK AND FAMILY" EXAMINES
CLASH
BETWEEN JOB DEMANDS AND NEEDS OF PERSONAL LIFE
-- Two-hour PBS broadcast on September 16, produced by Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, spotlights family-work tensions
and need for change --
(Washington, D.C.)—If June Cleaver were raising her family
today, she would be three times more likely to have a paying job
than to be a stay-at-home mom. In today's fast-paced economy, where
24-hour service, the technology explosion and a global marketplace
have fueled a frenetic work pace, the calm world of "Leave
it to Beaver" seems as obsolete as black-and-white television.
In fact, studies show that Americans are working longer and spending
less time with their families than ever before. Experts assert that
a massive social transformation has taken place and insist that
far-reaching changes are needed to protect the American family.
Juggling Work and Family, a breakthrough two-hour special
by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, takes a close-up
look at the agonizing choices that Americans face - between making
a living and having a life. The two-hour documentary airs Sunday,
September 16 at 9 p.m. on PBS stations nationwide (check
local listings). Among its findings:
• Working couples lost an average of 22 hours a week of family
and personal time between 1969 and 1996.
• The American family is shrinking under pressure of work,
says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich - fewer people getting
married, fewer children per family, and couples waiting later for
their first child than 30 years ago.
• In 2000, 65 percent of married couples had both partners
working, an increase of more than 75 percent since 1975.
• Nearly seventy percent of women with children under 18 are
in the workforce, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
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.'"back to the top
Juggling Work and Family includes corporate spokespersons
and experts discussing work-family tensions and proposing ways to
alleviate them. "We still organize work as if we had a nation
of housewives and housewives who were happy to be home, who had
no career aspirations. We have a work system that doesn't fit with
our family system," says law professor Joan Williams, co-director
of American University's Gender Work and Family Project. "We
need to change something."
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.
Juggling Work and Family highlights several progressive companies
and one leading union to illustrate local solutions: flexible work
schedules, job sharing, telecommuting and employer-provided day
care centers or parental subsidies. In the documentary, corporate
managers concede that family friendly policies often work better
for salaried employees, and experts note that hourly workers also
lack the financial resources for other higher quality options available
to their white-collar counterparts.
Organizations investigated in the documentary include:
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.back to the top
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."
back to the top
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."
back to the top
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.
Juggling Work and Family is produced by Hedrick Smith Productions
in association with SCETV. Hedrick Smith serves as executive producer
and correspondent. Pauline Steinhorn and Paulette Moore serve as
producers of the program. Cliff Hackel and Carol Slatkin are editors.
The special is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York.
|
