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Juggling Work and Family Juggling Work and Family focuses on the increasing tensions between job and home life. The traditional family with a stay-at-home mother and working father has been replaced by the growing number of single parents and families where both parents work outside the home. In this fast-paced new economy, Americans are feeling the stress of working more and have less time than ever for their children and for each other. From hourly employees to managers, from production line workers to professionals, this program will take a look at how working parents in various industries across the country are trying to juggle work and family. The show explores how companies and unions are seeking to ease the work-family conflict with child care centers, subsidies, and alternative work schedules that include part-time work, job-sharing, and telecommuting. Experts analyze the problems, address solutions, and pose the question: what else can be done? BOSTON LAWYERS - Discovering
"You Can't Have It All" BOSTON LAWYERS
"I left home at 6:45am and came home at 7:00pm every night and saw my daughter for only a half hour each day and spent fifty percent of my weekends working,” Smith explained. “So after four months I decided to quit." Smith is part of a hidden but large-scale exodus of talented, skilled and highly qualified women from demanding professions like law, medicine, scientific research, teaching, and business, where rising young professionals are expected to produce at their maximum during exactly the same years when they are producing and raising offspring. At about the time Claire Smith was exiting the job market, the Boston Bar Association produced a report which described the clash between the changing demographics of the legal profession – 50% of law school graduates today are women – and the culture of big law firms in a city like Boston which puts a premium on long hours and 7x24 availability to demanding clients. Generally, the report found young associate lawyers in big firms were putting in an average of 2000 "billable" hours a year, which translates to 50-65 hours a week. One result, says Nancer Ballard, chair of the committee that researched the bar association report, is that women and men are both leaving the big law firms in order to be more involved parents. Another report in 1999 by the Women's Bar Association examined part-time work arrangements in the legal profession and found that although 90% of the big firms have part-time policies on the books, on average only 2-3% of their lawyers actually use part-time work arrangements because they fear that doing so would jeopardize their careers. Theoretically part-time is supposed to mean from 32-34 hours a week, but in fact, it works out to 35-45 hours a week, or what most would consider a full-time job. "If people were able to work what they really wanted, the percentage of part-timers would be at 28%," Ballard claims. Ballard asserts that figures like these underscore the fact that lawyers like Claire Smith, feeling trapped between work and family, do not represent isolated personal problems for which individuals must find a solution but a structural problem with legal careers. "These reports,” Baxlard asserts, “point to a phenomenon of the way we structure work, which is incompatible with having a personal life." Claire Smith and Nancer Ballard say that part-time is rarely practical and part-timers are frequently shunted off the career track. The best way to get ahead is to show commitment to your career by working long hours as Rajeev Balakrishna does at Goodwin Procter, one of Boston's leading legal firms. Once his son was born, Rajeev was able to pursue his career because his wife Rachna, also a lawyer, gave up her full-time career at another big law firm and took a job working in the legal department of a company where she could control her hours better. "The expectation here is about getting work done in the time-frame the client wants it even if it is unreasonable," says Rajeev Balakrishna, "If you have two people working, I don't think both can become partner or get to the top of any profession AND raise a family." Regina Pisa, Managing Partner at Goodwin Procter, explains that the legal field faces increasing pressure from corporate clients to be available and responsive around the clock. Technology has made it possible – with cell phones, faxes and emails – for clients to demand an instantaneous response. Like most firms, Goodwin Procter offers part-time, though Pisa herself admits they fall short. "All the firms say the right things and intend the right things, but we fail in the execution of them,” Pisa admits. “What happens at 5 pm when you get a fax that needs to be responded to immediately? We stumble in the day-to-day execution." The traditional work culture at big city firms make it an uphill battle for working parents who want to participate in their children's lives and have a meaningful legal career at a big firm. And many are choosing to sacrifice money and ambition and to opt out of the big-time career or to step down to less stressful work for more reasonable employers. HEWLETT PACKARD
Initially, each feared having to give up the Silicon Valley fast track to take care of small children. But over the past three years they have worked out the wrinkles of job sharing and won the trust of co-workers and their boss. Each works three 10-to-14-hour days each week, earning three-fourths pay and benefits. That gives them two days off for family, and still, they’ve kept moving up the corporate ladder. Karyn and Shaun Collins, both long time technical project managers at Hewlett Packard, took the opposite strategy. They got off the fast track and put family first. Two years ago, after the birth of their son Michael, both sacrificed higher pay and career advancement to spend more time together. “I don’t feel ambitious,” says Shaun. “My priority right now and for always is my family.” Shaun telecommutes; Karyn works three-fourths time. Recently, they decided to cut their costs – and the pressure on Karyn to work so many hours – by moving out of high-priced Silicon Valley to an HP facility outside Sacramento where housing and living are much cheaper. Karyn plans to cut back further on her work and have another child. Hewlett Packard’s family friendly policies are largely the creation of former CEO Lew Platt, who suddenly discovered the pressures of parenting when his wife died of cancer, leaving him with two daughters, then 9 and 11. “Like everybody else I thought that these were women’s issues,” says Platt. “And suddenly I found out firsthand that these were not women’s issues; these were issues of being a parent.” As CEO, Platt pioneered flexibility in the workplace. “There’s a war underway for talent,” he explains. “And clearly there’re a lot of really, really capable women out there so you’d better build an environment where they can really thrive.” Platt’s epiphany still reverberates throughout HP today, where Carly Fiorina is Chief Executive Officer and both men and women take advantage of flexible work hours, job sharing and telecommuting. But it’s not always easy carrying out Platt’s strategy. Customer service engineers, for example, are on call round-the-clock, seven days a week, rescuing crashed and ailing computers for HP’s big corporate customers. Charmaine Crumer says she is constantly torn between heroic 911 calls and raising her two daughters, Caitlyn and Caren: “For me I feel it’s conflict, it’s a struggle,” Crumer says. “I’m torn between whether I am going to be a team player or I am going to be a mother.” Confronted with high attrition and low morale among its customer service engineers, HP management turned to Barbara Miller, a work-life trouble-shooter, to run a workshop. The workshop provided a safe haven where the engineers could move from complaining about how work is ruining their private lives to forging ways to work better together as a team and share the burden of their crazy schedules. Yet another strategy is enabling parents to work opposite shifts. At HP’s plant in Roseville, California, many of the 800 workers have flexible start and stop times that are the result of creative managing of the production process. Workers are cross-trained in many skills so that each one can build a computer individually. They are not tied to an assembly line. Dave Tresham, a computer assembler in Roseville, took 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.” That’s been crucial to caring for their children. But there’s a price: Nancy and Dave don’t get to see each other during the week. So periodically, they have a family meal during Nancy’s lunch break. But experts caution that working split shifts over the long run takes a toll on marriages. BAXTER INTERNATIONAL
"Ten years ago there were two to three percent using alternative work arrangements," says Alice Campbell, director of Baxter's Work Life department, which was created in 1990. "Five years ago there were five to six percent; now there are fifteen to sixteen percent. " In the finance department Corporate Treasurer Steve Meyer has replaced the traditional 40-hour week with custom-made schedules for most of his staff. Only eight of his twenty employees work regular 9-to-5 days. The other twelve have flexible, custom-fit schedules – some work part-time, some telecommute, some do a combination of both. When Marguerite Fernandez handed Meyer a resignation after her third child was born, Meyer would not let her quit. She had become a real expert in handling high stakes financial transactions on global money markets, yielding important savings for Baxter. Sensing her family needs, Fernandez had trained a replacement but he was killed in an automobile accident just before taking over her job. Meyer begged Fernandez to stay and to set her own conditions for continuing to work, even if it meant only coming in to the office once a month. Fernandez set very tough conditions, and Meyer accepted. With a new baby and two young children she said she could work no more than 22 hours a week – and only from her home. "The easy answer would have been -– oh you don't fit the traditional work week, it's time you find something else and I'll find somebody," says Meyer. But for him there is no question that the inconvenience of allowing employees flexibility in their work schedule is far less of a problem than losing talented employees and having to find, groom and retrain new people. Even at part-time, Meyer pointed out, Fernandez did so well that she earned a promotion and won a major corporate award. She works extra hard for the privilege of being able to there when her son gets home from school. Technology is a boon for this kind of flexibility. Laptops, email, voicemail, and faxes make it easy for people to work from home. But for 15,000 Baxter employees with jobs in their production plants, these high tech advances don't help them at all with balancing work and family. They are tied to assembly lines with critical time deadlines that typically demand them to work over holidays, through bad weather, and in spite of personal challenges at home. "The flexibility piece is clearly working better for white collar jobs. Hourly is still a challenge because of the line you have to fill," admits Work-Life Director, Alice Campbell. At Baxter's production plant just north of Chicago, Jim MacMillan oversees the production of IV bags used in hospitals. "We start to fill those bags at 7:30," says Macmillan. "We have to have x amount of people to do that. If we don't have x amount of people, we'll not be able to complete that. We don't complete that, we don't stay in business." Employees still get written up if they are more than five minutes late to work. But Macmillan has more leeway in letting them off the hook if they get stuck in unexpected traffic or letting them take a part-day off if the assembly line breaks down. But year-in, year-out, there's not much flexibility for production workers like Betty Olsen, who has the chronic problem of caring for a 28-year-old son partly paralyzed by spinal bifida, and confined to a wheel chair. In years past, Olsen worried frequently about losing her job when she had to miss work on short notice to care for her son. Today, after 20 years at Baxter, Olsen sings the praises of the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed by Congress in 1993, for protecting her job and insuring that she can get time off when her son's medical needs demand it. Right next door at Baxter's testing labs, some units - free of the pressures of a relentless assembly line- have more flexibility for their front-line workers, and managers feel they can be more accommodating. For Joanne Pederson, a documentation specialist in the quality assurance unit, flexibility in her work schedule and a supportive atmosphere where co-workers picked up the slack, was vital in helping Pederson through the personal trauma of caring for her cancer-stricken mother, during her last six months of life. Pederson was allowed to cut back to four hours a day and to work at night, so she could care for her mother 12 hours a day. For Joanne Pederson, being allowed to work in a way that fit her needs during this crucial time was important, both financially and emotionally. It was also a wise move for the company. "The benefit to the company," says Pederson's manager, 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 of their attention on what is happening at work because they have already taken care of those things that are happening at home." MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL
"The issue was surfacing as a major business issue for the first time, rather than a personal life issue," recalls Donna Klein, Vice President of Workforce Effectiveness. One Marriott approach was to build community child care centers. The one in Washington, D.C., is a boon for employees like a couple from Ethiopia - Abraha Meaza, a front doorman, and his wife Etinish, a housekeeper. With a subsidy from Marriott, they pay only $52 a week for their three-year-old daughter’s day care. Because other agencies share the cost of the day care center, Marriott’s staff only gets eight slots at the center. It barely begins to meet the need. With employee surveys and focus groups, Klein discovered that Marriott's hourly workers, many of whom are foreign born, have vastly different needs from the predominantly Anglo, upper middle class management. So Marriott switched its strategy. Instead of spending millions on day care centers, it created an employee hotline staffed by trained social workers to help its hourly workforce with a multitude of problems ranging from housing and transportation to substance abuse, child care, and legal issues. "It may be finding them a resource in the community and then acting as an advocate to help them obtain that," says Heidi Guy at Ceridian WorkLife Services, the company that helped create and staff the Marriott hotline. By offering its services in several languages to cope with Marriott's culturally diverse workforce, Marriott says the hotline has been used by almost 10% of Marriott's 135,000 employees. Carmen Pizarro, who had trouble concentrating on her job at the Renaissance Hotel front desk in Times Square because she couldn't find child care for her baby, says the hotline rescued her. For six months she and her husband scoured the yellow pages and kept running into long waiting lists and other problems. Within a week after trying the Marriott employee hotline, Pizarro found a day care provider two blocks from her home. But Vice President Donna Klein says there is still a long way to go. "As a country we still don't know what the long-term solutions are for our working families, " says Klein. "We recognize that we – corporations – cannot do it alone. We have to have a lot of other kinds of support services available in the country in order to continue to rely on working families for our productivity." LOCAL 1199 AND THE
NEW YORK HOSPITALS
"If you are working poor, if you are middle-class in this country, you're basically left to fend for yourself,” says Carol Joyner, executive director of the child care fund for the New York City hospitals. “No one cares that the child care expenses you pay represent about 20 percent of your take home pay. It's a huge chunk.” It was a rumble of complaints about child care from rank and file hospital workers that forced their union to make an unprecedented demand to New York City’s hospitals in 1989 to provide millions of dollars for an employee child care fund. At first, management said no. But Dennis Rivera, president of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, and Debbie King, the Executive Vice President for Negotiations, stuck to their demand. With 200,000 members, Local 1199 has clout. But it took something akin to divine intervention to get the childcare fund established. It took Cardinal John O'Connor, the Catholic Archbishop of New York, to bless the idea and give orders for the 17 Catholic hospitals in his Archdiocese to accept the union demand. Three years later, other hospitals joined in, and now management as well as labor touts the childcare fund as a great innovation. No one knows its value more personally than Michael Lancaster, a medical technician at St. Vincent’s Hospital and a single dad strapped with college tuition and living expenses for two older children and daycare for a four-year-old daughter whom he is raising on his own. "Things are pretty tight financially,” says Lancaster. "It's not easy." He relies on the childcare fund’s subsidy to help pay a baby-sitter to watch his daughter while he works what are often irregular shifts in the hospital operating rooms. Today the fund receives $10 million annually in employer contributions, which support 6,000-7,000 children a year. Union members receive 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. Probably the most unusual and most visionary of Local 1199’s program is the college mentoring program for teenagers, designed to lift their sights, boost their performance, and also keep them out of trouble on weekends, when working parents often worry about them. Take Dwane Jones, a typical high school senior. When his mom, a single parent and registered nurse with two jobs, enrolled him in the special college prep course at New York University funded by the 1199 Child Care Fund, Dwane had no interest in going to school on Saturday. So his mother drove him to NYU to make sure he attended. Like other students, Dwane got academic help, SAT prep, advice and help on filling out college applications and scholarship forms, plus the kind of caring attention from the small teaching staff that enables teens to flourish. To his surprise Dwane got caught up in the program, enjoying the camaraderie as well a 200-point boost in his SAT scores. "I've gone up in every subject,” he says with pride. With increasing self-confidence and academic success, Dwane found the doors opening for him to college interviews and selection. In another 1199 childcare program, Gloria and Sheref Eroglu saw their two school age boys blossom last year at a summer camp partly subsidized by the childcare fund. It eased their minds to know where their boys were every day and to know that they were involved in supervised activities, rather than at home watching television. The jolt for the Eroglus came when they learned that this year they would not get the same subsidy because Local 1199’s Child Care Fund cannot afford to finance the needs of all the 35,000 eligible children among the union members. In fact, generous as it is, the childcare fund can only support about 12% of its union membership each year. This summer, for lack of funds, the Eroglus may have to settle for poor quality or unreliable child care arrangements, putting stress and worry on them while they’re at work. And Michael Lancaster will be forced to get a second job if he loses his childcare subsidy, leaving him even less time to spend with his young daughter. "Unfortunately what happens in our society," says Union President Dennis Rivera, "The employers say, 'It's not my responsibility to take care of your kids.' Then the state says, 'It's not my responsibility to take care of your kids'." But Rivera believes that it's clearly in the best interest of both state and employers to help these working families be productive, contributing citizens. So Rivera is gearing up to tap state resources and to press employers to increase their contribution to the childcare fund so that every union member who needs this benefit can have it. From our stories, you see that some individual employers and their workers have made progress in easing the pressures of work on the family. But much more remains to be done. Specialists who study work-family issues assert that the great majority of workers with major family obligations get very little relief from the demands of work. “This is not a matter of individual choice, individual priorities, this is a structural problem,” says Joan Williams, law professor at American University. “Men as well as women in this country are really caught between two very closely held ideals. One is the ideal worker, the responsible committed worker, and the other is the way we define the responsible committed parent or family member. People really feel a clash between these two ideals.” This conflict is built into how work was organized in the first half of the 20th century, says Eileen Appelbaum, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Men moved from the farms into the factories, while women ran the household and cared for children. But after 1970, when millions of women - especially mothers - joined the workforce and took full-time jobs, no one was left in most homes to care for the family. That had to be done before or after both parents’ jobs, creating what scholar Arlie Hochschild of the University of California at Berkeley calls “the time bind”. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says the American family is shrinking – parents are literally having fewer children and having them later in life – because of work pressures. There’s no going back, the experts say, not only because most families now need two paychecks, but also because the American economy needs women as 46% of the labor force to help power our economic growth and sustain our standard of living. To experts like Appelbaum and author Ann Crittenden, this means America must develop a better social safety net to support working parents – benefits to help women the way that back in the 1930s, social security, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance helped insure men’s income if they lost their jobs, were disabled, or retired. There are numerous proposals for major reforms
Many corporations now say they cannot shoulder the whole burden of supporting working parents. Business consultant Phil Mirvis advocates private-public partnerships. A few states like North Carolina have launched public-private programs like “Smart Start” to provide early learning centers/day care for pre-schoolers. But so far, little has been done at the national level specifically targeted to help working families. What’s needed, Professor Williams declares, “is a change of cultural attitudes and norms and also a change of work structures. We have a work system that doesn’t fit with our family system. We need to change something.” |
When
Claire Smith was in law school, she thought she could "have
it all" – pursue an ambitious legal career at a big law
firm and raise a family. But shortly after her first child was born
she discovered it was impossible. Her career prospects dimmed, her
job pressures increased and she felt thrust into a difficult choice
between a challenging career and raising a family. In frustration,
she stopped practicing law entirely. 
A
decade ago, it was rare for hard-driving computer nerds or rising
corporate managers to work part-time or to job share. But in today’s
battle for high-priced talent, Hewlett-Packard is willing to give
these flexible workday alternatives a try, and it finds plenty of
takers, like Shelly Smith and Suzanne Thomas, two highly skilled,
high-powered marketing managers and young mothers.
Baxter
International, a global leader in developing therapies for people
with life threatening conditions, has also become a leader in institutionalizing
flexible work arrangements. Today a growing number of Baxter's 40,000
employees work alternative schedules. Some managers have become
so flexible that the 40-hour work-week and the eight-hour day are
looking as obsolete as the Model T. 
Enter
a Marriott hotel and the first person you meet is a bellhop or front
desk clerk. These front-line employees – along with housemaids,
waiters and other hourly workers earning eight to ten dollars an
hour – are Marriott’s public face. Marriott relies on
their well-being and high morale. So when work-and-family problems
showed up ten years ago in difficulties with recruiting, and housekeepers
walking off the job in the summer because they had no child care,
that got management’s attention.
In
the modern American economy, one of the largest concentrations of
working parents, with tough work-family problems, can be found in
the nation’s hospitals. These are the rank and file employees
who make hospitals operate - medical technicians, lab workers, admissions
clerks and health aides. With patients needing care 24 hours, these
employees - mostly women - not only have to work odd hours at night
or on weekends, but often they cannot leave at the end of their
shift because of medical emergencies. So juggling work and family
becomes an acute problem for them because of the lack of affordable,
reliable childcare when they need it.