"Working for Balance"-A Family Friendly Work Life
Thursday, August 21, 2008SUSIE GHARIB: A hot button issue for many American businesses and employees is whether to pay workers for sick days. A Federal law is now being considered that would give all full-time workers seven days of paid sick leave each year. A number of states are also looking at making paid sick days a standard employment benefit as well. And that's because the U.S. is the largest industrial nation not requiring employers to provide paid maternity and sick days. As we continue our series, "Working for Balance," Erika Miller reports on how some companies are finding that offering family-friendly policies makes good business sense.
ERIKA MILLER, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Like many parents, Sabine Salandy found it difficult to balance work and family responsibilities after she gave birth to her daughter last year. She left her job as a policy analyst four months ago and now cares for 17-month-old Elise at home. A big issue was not being permitted to work a more flexible schedule.
SABINE SALANDY, MOTHER: I was allowed to work home on one day, on Fridays, but that was not enough. I was exhausted from the commute. I'm tired and cranky and I couldn't concentrate on motherhood.
MILLER: Many labor advocates say it is harder to be a working parent in the United States than it is in most other high-income countries. For example, most European nations grant workers the right to work part time, although employers can typically challenge that arrangement. And outside the U.S., nearly all affluent countries give workers the right to paid parental leave. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of U.S. private sector workers do not get any paid sick days. Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute says the lack of a national sick leave policy is what really makes the U.S. family unfriendly.
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ, LABOR ECONOMIST, ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE: A hundred and forty five countries around the globe offer some kind of paid leave, including all industrialized nations and over 100 other countries provide a month or more of paid sick leave. So we really are in this remarkably unique position.
MILLER: The U.S. does have the family and medical leave act, which covers serious illness and pregnancy. It requires companies to grant employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave and it does not apply to all companies. The U.S. is also the only high-income country that does not mandate any paid vacation days or any paid national holidays. The average U.S. worker in the private sector gets a total of 15 paid days off, half of what French workers get. There are many theories as to why the U.S. lags in these areas. One is that Americans generally prefer less government involvement in their personal lives, supporting free market employment principles instead. Political science and sociology professor Janet Gornick also says many Americans view long work hours as a badge of honor.
JANET GORNICK, PROF., POLITICAL SCIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY, THE GRADUATE CENTER OF CUNY: There's a long tradition and it's also very active today of valuizing hard work and hard work means long hours at work and Americans work the longest hours of almost any industrialized country -- nearly 2,000 hours a year. So when we talk about measures to shorten peoples' work hours and to give them the right to shorter schedules, some people think that's sort of un-American.
MILLER: However, some labor analysts, like James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation, oppose government mandated benefits. He says minimally regulated labor markets are a key reason the U.S. is one of the richest, most productive countries in the world. He also believes leave laws, whether paid or unpaid, are bad for most workers.
JAMES SHERK, LABOR POLICY ANALYST, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION: All employers care about is the total compensation they pay to their workers. They don't care about what form that takes. If you have the government requiring that they get more paid leave, they'll get more paid leave. But they're going to have less cash wages. They'll have less retirement benefits or the labor costs will otherwise be brought down.
MILLER: Many companies choose to offer family friendly benefits, even though they're not required by Federal law to do so. They say it helps attract and retain workers in a competitive labor environment. A flexible work arrangement helped IBM keep software architect Cait Crawford after she moved to New Hampshire for quality of life reasons three years ago. Since then, she has been commuting to this New York office a few times a month.
CAIT CRAWFORD, SOFTWARE ARCHITECT, IBM: Balance is a time and equilibrium thing. So, there are times when you would look at things I'm doing and say, no, you are working all the time and it's not balanced and there are times where you look at what I'm doing and say, when are you getting work done. But I think IBM and myself and my family have achieved that work/life balance as best we can.
MILLER: Crawford is one of the 40 percent of IBM workers that do not have assigned offices. Randy MacDonald, head of IBM's human resources department, says encouraging schedule flexibility also boosts employee morale and job performance.
RANDY MACDONALD, SR. VP, HUMAN RESOURCES, IBM: People recognize that they can't do the things that they need to do in a normal, traditional work setting, but we give them something unique. Their satisfaction goes up, people feel more productive.
MILLER: Sabine Salandy hopes to eventually find a productive and satisfying work-from-home position. But for now, she has found one benefit to not working -- spending quality time with her daughter. Erika Miller, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Teaneck, New Jersey.
