During our production of Juggling Work and Family, correspondent Hedrick Smith talked with several experts about the changes in public policy that could help working families cope better with the tensions between job and home.

The experts on our panel included Eileen Appelbaum, labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.; Ann Crittenden, economic writer and author of “The Prince of Motherhood”; Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute of New York; Donna Klein, Vice President, Marriott International, Inc.; Phil Mirvis, business consultant, Washington, D.C., Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and professor at Brandeis University; and Joan Williams, professor of Law at American University in Washington.

In their discussion, the experts jumped off from the stories in our program about several companies, Hewlett Packard, Baxter International, and Marriott International, and Local 1199 of the service Workers International Union. These specialists see important roles for community groups, state and federal governments, and professional associations as well as employers and unions. They had proposals on such issues as child care and early learning, paid family medical leave, public-private partnerships, new social insurance, and a shorter work week.

What follows are excerpts from our interviews and discussions with these experts:
The Need for Social Engagement
A Debate over State Programs for Early Learning
Objections from Employers, Politicians
Paid Family Leave
Shorter Work-Weeks

The Need for Social Engagement

Hedrick Smith: Whose responsibility are these problems?

Phil Mirvis: These are everybody’s problems. If you’re unable to or you know worker in the hospital is unable to, to spend sufficient time with the children to make them ultimately productive citizens or help to make them productive citizens, all society will suffer. And the economy will suffer.

Eileen Appelbaum: Well 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?’ Then the answer is ‘we have to make sure they have daycare, that if their children are really sick they can stay home with them. That they have adequate leave policies that uh, they are able to take off when their children are born so that they can have maternity leave.

Corporate leaders like Donna Klein of Marriott feel a direct stake in resolving work-family issues because the American economy faces a long-term labor shortage. Spurred by Donna Klein, about 20 major corporations have formed a coalition to push for new public policy initiatives.

Donna Klein: Corporations cannot do it alone. A decade ago, we thought maybe we could. As we have learned and gained knowledge and gained experience, I think we are now at a point …that we recognize that we have to have a lot of other kinds of support services available in the country in order to continue to rely on uh working families for our, you know, our productivity.

Phil Mirvis: I think that it’s unquestionably you’re going to have to have private/public partnerships if you want to solve a problem in a community and that will involve employers, it may involve local state, even federal government with legislative support and so on. But it, it is seen as a partnership.

Some experts saw important cues for social action in the partnership forged by Local 1199 of the Services Employees Union and the Greater New York Hospital Association. Each year, New York hospitals put up about $10 million to finance a child fund that pays for infant and toddler day care, after-school programs and teen mentoring for about 7,000 children in Local 1199 member families.

Eileen Appelbaum: The examples that we’ve seen clearly show us that we can’t solve the problem by having something that works for just a few kids. What we need are solutions that work for large numbers of children, for large numbers of working people.

Employers are very proud of the fact that they are helping the children of their employees get ahead. And employees, whether they have children getting ready for college or not, are proud to work someplace where the employer feels that way.

Joan Williams: It’s inspiring and it shows you what can be done in our current context where frankly the government isn’t doing much. The 1199 example shows the kinds of things that should be done, should be done by unions, should be done by local governments, should be done by state and federal governments as well.

A Debate over State Programs for Early Learning

Ann Crittenden: This (PBS) program is mostly about how business needs to adjust by offering more viable part time jobs or offering shorter work-weeks or offering more paid leave for this, this family obligation. I also happen to think social policy needs to adjust by providing, for instance, early education for young children.

Donna Klein: As a country, we are far behind every other industrialized country in the world. There is no industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have a systematic system of child care. And that is not saying we need to have a national solution. But that does say that we need to have increased recognition of the issue from the federal government, state government and employers throughout the country.

Joan Williams: Well I think of France where they have a very well established system of um, of child care schools that almost 100% of the children attend by age three. Well-baby services are delivered through the schools. Enrichment activities are delivered through the schools. Parents fight to get them, their children into these day care centers, whether the mothers are at home or not. …That would certainly offer parents, both of whom have to work full time, far better options than the options they have in the United States.

back to the top

Objections from Employers, Politicians

Phil Mirvis: It’s tricky though. Many have, have sort of said why don’t we Europeanize America with these kinds of policies and everything will work out well. The two pieces I hear from executives as well as politicians is, is no, We’re certainly by no means ready to adopt under the social structures and governmental influence that you find in many of the European countries. So there’s no appetite for it politically.

Hedrick Smith: There’s no appetite for copying Europe or learning from Europe?

Ann Crittenden: Well there’s no appetite among executives. There’s plenty of appetite among mothers.

Phil Mirvis: What we haven’t had is the politicians getting in front of the parade and saying yes it’s a social issue.

Rick: Do you see politicians moving on these issues?

Ann Crittenden: I think a lot of political leaders are starting to move on this front, particularly state governors such as in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, we’re seeing the beginning of public education down to the age of 4. I could see it going down to the age of three because we need, we know we need better educated kids.

back to the top

Paid Family Leave

Several experts saw a need to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 which protects the jobs of workers like Betty Olsen of Baxter International (link to Baxter story summary). Her oldest son has a chronic illness, requiring her frequently to take medical time-off. The law protects her job, but all Betty’s sick leave and vacation time for 20 years has been consumed by her son’s illness. So she and her family never had time of together just to relax.

Hedrick Smith: What do we as a society do for somebody like Betty Olsen? Can she carry this burden? Can Baxter International, her employer, carry this burden?

Robert Reich: Ultimately we’re going to have to have paid family leave. If somebody has a sick child or a medical emergency or a very sick parent they have to attend to, they should not be penalized by having to use up their own limited, very limited, vacation time or get docked their pay. Most advanced industrial countries, in fact virtually every advanced industrial country except the United States, has paid family leave for emergencies.

Appelbaum: When men entered the workforce we introduced disability, we introduced survivor’s benefits. We have social insurance to deal with those situations. We have not recognized that families now depend on two incomes and that we need to put in place the same kinds of social supports for women and mothers working, that we put in place when fathers and men went to work.

Ann Crittenden: We need a universal rule, I think, for let’s say paid leave. We don’t have paid leave in America. No parent can get a paid leave as a right. It could be taxpayer financed. It could be a combination of employer-employee contributions. You could do it by using the state unemployment fund or you can do it using temporary disability… there are a lot of ways to finance it …The point is we need to do it.

back to the top

Shorter Work-Weeks

Several experts also saw the need to change America’s wage and hour laws. They consider the 40-hour week and the eight-hour day as outdated and too rigid for the modern workforce in which roughly two-thirds of married parents both work and more than 75 percent of single parents work full time.

Appelbaum: The eight-hour day, the forty-hour week, the mandatory overtime was not a problem as long as there was someone at home who could deal with the requirements of the family. But once you have two people working, once you have all the available adults, in single parent families there may be one person working, but you have all the available adults in the workforce needing to conform to the requirements of employers. Then the stresses are taken out on the family because there’s no way that you can shift them.

Hedrick Smith: So what has to change?

Joan Williams: It’s very simple. You have to start from the heroic assumption that people have children, that people have parents who are going to be ill and you have to build that assumption into the work force at a systematic level so that if somebody’s mother is ill, of course she leaves to take time out for her mother to care for her mother, and she doesn’t have to worry about being fired because she does so.

Ann Crittenden: We haven’t changed the work-week since the 1930s. That’s when the 40- hour week was set up. You know 70 years later we’re working more than 40 hours a week. The typical manager works closer to 50 hours a week than 40. Many working mothers are working 80 hours a week…I think we need to limit working hours.

Appelbaum: I would propose that we shorten the work-week to 36 hours and that we achieve it in the following way. That we have people work five eight-hour shifts one week and four eight-hour shifts the next. This then averages out to 36 hours and it gives an assembly line worker a paid day off every other week. I think that that would go a great way towards resolving a lot of the tensions that families are under.Joan Williams: It’s a structural problem. It needs a structural solution. Part of it has to do with businesses rethinking the way that, that they structure jobs.

Hedrick Smith: So what you’re really talking about is a change of mind set. A change of cultural attitudes and norms.

Joan: It’s a change of cultural attitudes and norms but it’s also a change of work structures. We need to rethink how we organize work. 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. We need to change something.

A good source for comprehensive overview of the problems surrounding work-family, ways to reframe the public debate and possible solutions, is the Sloan Foundation’s Integrating Work and Family Life by Lotte Bailyn, Robert Drago and Thomas A. Kochan.

To order: Go to http://lsir.la.psu.edu/workfam/ or http://mitsloan.mit.edu/iwer

Check out our suggested readings page for more good sources on the work and family debate.

back to the top