Walking the walk…
The new issue of Working Mother hit my mailbox yesterday, containing their new list of the 100 best companies for working mothers. I’m more than a little dubious about these lists, because there’s often a big gap beween the official company policies that are captured in these formulas and practice on the ground, especially around part-time work and non-standard schedules.
My sense is that if you have a supportive boss, you can often get flexible arrangements even if they’re not company policy, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck, regardless of what the manual says. I’d love to see data on what fraction of the workforce is taking advantage of these policies, broken out by gender (are they just creating a mommy track?), and on the career outcomes for people who work part-time or take extended leaves. I work for the federal government, which is overall reasonably family-friendly (with the glaring exception of ZERO paid parental leave), but I know people’s experiences vary dramatically from department to department and even office to office.
If any of my readers work at one of these 100 best companies and want to comment on what it’s really like, I’d love to hear your point of view.
Amy pointed out that in my discussion of flexibility on Monday, I didn’t talk much about stable flexible arrangements, especially shifted schedules. She’s right, and that’s ironic, as such schedules are very common in the Federal government. People love them, especially people who drive to work and want to avoid the utter craziness of DC-area traffic during rush hour. Working Mother reports that flexible hours are among the most common family friendly benefits, with 57 percent of companies offering flextime, and 34 percent offering compressed workweeks.
Of the benefits discussed in the study, the most common offered nationwide are dependent care flexible spending accounts, offered by 73 percent of all companies and mental health insurance, offered by 72 percent. (These figures are attributed to a Society for Human Resource Management survey, which I think means that it’s mostly large companies who were asked.) The least commonly offered benefits are take-home meals (3 percent), business-travel child care reimbursement (3 percent) and emergency/backup elder care (2 percent).
I’d also like to call attention to Corporate Voices for Working Families’ efforts to increase flexible working options for low-wage and hourly workers.
Many companies — even those that have very enlighted policies for their professional workforces — offer much less flexibility to their production and support workforces. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that only 47 percent of private sector workers have ANY paid sick leave. At a conference I attended, one woman explained how her company, a large food industry corporation, had just changed their policies so it was possible for production line workers to take less than a WEEK of leave at a time (but only if they could find someone to substitute for them on the line). I’m embarassed to admit that such a possibility had never occurred to me in my privileged professional position.
September 30th, 2004 at 9:13 pm
Elizabeth, speaking of elder care & backup care, what do you know about the Senate special committee on aging, headed by John Breaux? I was watching one of their meetings on C-SPAN during a pre-work run, and they were talking generally about post-65 employment, with reps from various senior/senior-employer groups there. The idea seems to be to make working past 65 as attractive as possible, with flex and PT schedules if necessary in a “step-down” approach to retirement, but nowhere in there did anyone mention the role grandparents play in childcare. I suddenly had visions of all the grandparents heading off to work again and leaving their middle-aged children wondering what in hell they were going to do for childcare now — especially emergency childcare. The picture’s mitigated somewhat by the fact that a lot of families are scattered across the country, and the grandparents aren’t babysitting anyhow; but particularly among lower-income workers, no grandma availability can mean no job.
I think there’s a broad misunderstanding about how childcare works — my guess is a lot of these guys assume that if the mother works, the child’s in daycare, problem solved.
September 30th, 2004 at 9:17 pm
oh…and on paid sick leave…
It’s a serious problem for wage workers, many of whom work multiple jobs and have very, very tight schedules. You can’t really ask someone to cover for you when you’re in that position because there’s no way you can reciprocate. Salvation can come in the form of a single, childless “hour hog”, but you can’t count on working with one of those in every job, and even when you get one you’re out of luck if your shifts coincide. So being sick’s not just about health insurance; it’s about the loss of income from work and adding to the impression that you’re unreliable and want firing.
September 30th, 2004 at 9:25 pm
sorry serial, last one. The reason I mentioned the pre-work run was the strangeness & novelty of the whole situation: here’s me, a 36-year-old mother in Iowa, catching a few pre-work miles on a home treadmill while watching a live Senate committee, where much grayer people are talking about the value of older workers. And I’m hitting the incline & thinking about who needs contacting re grandparents’ role in childcare, & how just maybe this could be a way in for putting some valuation on family childcare. Meanwhile, upstairs, my husband is making our daughter’s breakfast and playgroup snack.
Would’ve been a very odd picture 25 years ago.
October 9th, 2004 at 12:42 am
I work for one of the 100. The quote about my company is a joke. It says we have on-site daycare… yes, there is a daycare within walking distance of one of the buildings by the main campus. It holds 70 children under the age of 3. There are 55,000 employees. Their waiting list is over a year long. They are also the most expensive daycare around by several hundred dollars a month. If you are a working parent and have more than one child there, chances are your take-home salary is mostly negated by the cost of putting two children in daycare. It really humbles me, since I stress about having a second child in daycare someday and yet I make a pretty decent salary. How do lower-income families with children in daycare feel? Eesh.
It also lists as a benefit that is good for working mothers that a certain division has outlawed email on the weekends. #1 the division they list is so tiny I’ve never heard of it, I bet it’s fewer than 50 people and #2 that ‘benefit’ does nothing for working mothers and would be quite frustrating if I chose to work on the weekends and was chided for it.
Lesson learned: Don’t believe what you read, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
October 9th, 2004 at 1:20 pm
KC, have you called the WM reporter & told her this?