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How Friendly are Family Friendly Policies?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Gloria H. Albrecht
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Abstract:

In the last two decades the composition of the labor force in the United States has changed significantly. Today, most employees are mothers or fathers of children under eighteen in families where both parents are employed or where the employed parent is a single mother. This represents a reversal of the older family ideal in which a father worked to provide income and a mother performed the domestic work that sustained families. The practices of business and much of the attention of business ethicists have assumed the older ideal. However, the wage work of mothers raises serious concerns about how business should view their parent-employees. Business has responded with family friendly corporate policies. This article analyzes these policies in light of two particular values: The social equality of women and the well-being of families. Finding current policies inadequate to meet these values, this paper calls for renewed ethical attention to the issues of time demands on employees and just wages.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , April 2003 , pp. 177 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2003

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References

Notes

1 Betty Fridan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Laurel Books, 1963, rev. ed. 1983), 334.

2 Arlene Skolnick, Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty. (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 103. Note, however, that this assessment of “women’s” problem was from the perspective of middle- and upper-income white women. African-American women had significantly higher labor participation rates throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

3 Eileen Drake, “A Legal Perspective on Work-Family Issues,” in Integrating Work and Family: Challenges and Choices for a Changing World, Parasuraman, Saroj and Greenhaus, Jeffrey H., eds.. (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1997), 123. Drake reports that parents with children under age 18 make up half of the workforce and that one-fourth of these are single parents. Catalyst reports that in 1995, sixty percent of married couples were dual-career couples. “Infobrief: Flexible Work Arrangements,” 7/25/99, Internet: Catalystwomen.org.

4 U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Women Workers: Trends and Issues (Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor, 1994), 1, 11; James A. Levine and Todd L. Pittinsky, Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family (Reading, Miss.: Addison-Wesley Co., Inc., 1997), 9.

5 Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), 171.

6 In my random review of ten business ethics textbooks published between 1997 and 1999, only four mentioned the issue of family-work conflicts or family-friendly business policies: John R. Boatright, Ethics and the Conduct of Business (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997); Rogene A. Buchholz and Sandra B. Rosenthal, Business Ethics: The Pragmatic Path Beyond Principles to Progress (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1998); John E. Richardson, ed., Business Ethics 99/00. 11th ed. (Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin/McGraw-Hill, 1999); and William H. Shaw and Vincent Barry, Moral Issues in Business, 7th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1998).

7 Julie A. Nelson, “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics,” in Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34. See also the discussion in William H. Shaw and Vincent Barry, Moral Issues in Business, 7th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing: 1998), 244–245.

8 See Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997); also, the National Partnership for Women and Families, internet: nationalpartnership.org; Mary Frank Fox and Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Women At Work (Mayfield Publishing Co., 1984); Carol Konek and Sally Kitch, eds., Women and Careers: Issues and Challenges (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994); Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works He Works: How Two-Income Families are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996); Judith Frankel, ed., The Employed Mother and the Family Context (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1993); and Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Avon, 1989).

9 Joseph H. Pleck, “Work-Family Policies in the United States,” in Women’s Work and Women’s Lives: The Continuing Struggle Worldwide, Hilda Kahne and Janet Z. Giele, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 248–275.

10 Ibid., 252–259.

11 The corporate office of Campbell Soup Co. provides on-site care and subsidized tuition. Proctor and Gamble has purchased rights to seventy-five percent of the spaces at two off-site locations near its corporate headquarters. See Shaw and Barry, Moral Issues in Business, 307–308. Other interesting initiatives are part of the Child Care Partnership Project, funded by the Child Care Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. For example, the Child Care Executive Partnership in Florida joins employer childcare subsidies with state matching funds to assist employees whose total household income is below one hundred and fifty percent of the federal poverty level. Internet: nccic.org/ccpartnerships/profiles/ccep.htm.

12 See Lynne M. Casper and Martin O’Connell, “State Estimates of Organized Child Care Facilities” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Division Working Paper #21, March 1998). Between 1977 and 1992 the number of childcare facilities nationwide has doubled and the number of paid employees in the childcare industry has more than doubled (190,000 to 468,000). See “Primary Child Care Arrangements Used for Preschoolers by Families with Employed Mothers—Selected years, 1977 to 1994,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Internet: www.census.gov/population/socdemo/child/p70-62/tableA.txt, 1/14/98. About thirty percent of the preschoolers of employed mothers are in organized childcare facilities (another 1/3 are cared for by another relative within the home, and another 1/3 are cared for in someone else’s home).

13 Harriet B. Presser and Amy G. Cox, “The Work Schedules of Low-Educated American Women and Welfare Reform” Monthly Labor Review, 120, #4 (1997): 25–28. These authors report that ten to twenty percent of nonemployed American mothers with young children do not seek employment due to childcare availability and affordability issues and that twenty to twenty-five percent of employed mothers would work more hours if childcare were not an issue. See also Carol Kleiman, “Child Care Key Reason Women Leave Jobs,” Times-Picayune, 1/20/91, G–1; and Sandra L. Hofferth and Nancy J. Collins, “Child Rearing and Employment Turnover: Child Care Availability Increases Mothers’ Job Stability” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, March 1997). An on-going study by The Merrill-Palmer Institute shows that women, regardless of job category, were more likely than men to report childcare related work disruptions and blue collar male workers were more likely to report child related absences than executive men. The most insulated from this issue are men in upper levels of management; Cabral, R., Brummit, G. and Levin, M., “Childcare Problems and Worker Productivity: An Examination of Gender, Occupational Status and Work Environments Effects” (Detroit: The Merrill-Palmer Institute, 1996).

14 Casper and O’Connell.

15 Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly, Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 56–61.

16 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chaps. 8 and 9, for this double impact created by the structural shift. Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt argue that most workers have experienced a deterioration in hourly wages since the 1970s. Specifically, “The real wage of the median worker was 4% lower in the first half of 1998 than in 1979; for the median male worker it was down 15%.” Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–1999 (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1999), 20 and chap. 3. Robert Pollin and Stephanie Luce argue that the average hourly wage for nonsupervisory workers peaked in 1974 at $14.23 compared to $12.24 in 1997. Robert Pollin and Stephanie Luce, The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (New York: The New Press, 1998), 4. While I am not specifically addressing the question of pension and health benefits in this paper, it should be remembered that workers in 1999 are less likely to have such coverage and more likely to pay an increased share of its cost.

17 A 1989 study by the Urban Institute found that children were spending an average of 34 hours a week in childcare; but for babies under one year of age the average was 42 hours. See Eric Schmitt, “Day-Care Quandary: A Nation at War with Itself,” New York Times, 1/11/98.

18 The Census Bureau reports that 10% of adult workers below the poverty line worked full-time, year-round jobs in 1995, the highest percentage since 1969. Albelda and Tilly, Glass Ceilings, 9.

19 One study indicated that 70% of U.S. corporations offer flex-time (working a full work week but with some flexibility in determining when those hours will be worked); 20% permitted compressed schedules in which work week hours are completed in four days; and 16% permitted working at home. However, most of this flexibility was available to managers and professional staff. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (NewYorl: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998), 58.

20 Felicia Schwartz, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” Harvard Business Review (Jan–Feb, 1989): 65–76. Schwartz did not use the term “mommy track.”

21 Hochschild, The Time Bind, 69–70.

22 Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Carroll Seron, Bonnie Oglensky, and Robert Saute, The Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1999) 5.

23 Ibid., 56.

24 Ibid., 134–136. See also Rochelle Sharpe, “Family Friendly Firms Don’t Always Promote Females,” Wall Street Journal 1/4/95, B–1. Sharpe reports that firms with the best family friendly policies have the worst record for advancing women. See also Jeanne M. Brett, “Family, Sex, and Career Advancement,” in Integrating Work and Family, Parasuraman and Greenhaus, eds., 145–151. Brett argues that the family structure that best supports career advancement is the traditional one of earner husband and at home wife.

25 Epstein states that “most part-time workers engage in it involuntarily …” (Fn.#7, 165). However, Mishel et. al …, estimate that one-fourth of part-time workers are actively seeking more hours. They also argue that the increase (between 1973 and 1997) in the share of jobs that are part-time (17.8 percent in 1997) is mostly attributable to an expansion in involuntary part-time employment. (247–248)

26 Janet C. Gornick and Jerry A. Jacobs, “A Cross-National Analysis of the Wages of Part-time Workers: Evidence from the United States, The United Kingdom, Canada and Australia,” Work, Employment, and Society, 10 (1): 3. Tilly points out that involuntary full-time workers are largely workers in skilled jobs whose employers fear that it is too costly to allow skilled employees to work part-time (since companies are more likely to continue providing benefits and high wages to these employees). See Chris Tilly, Short Hours, Short Shrift: Causes and Consequences of Part-time Work (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1990), 20.

27 Ibid., 4–5. See also Mishel et. al., 242–248; and Tilly, 9–12. Note that this includes studies that controlled for differences in industry, occupation, sex, age, and other characteristics. Part-time workers comparable in these characteristics with full-time workers still earned an average of ten–fifteen percent less per hour, for example (Tilly, 9).

28 Epstein, 100. Arne Kaellberg et. al., identifies “nonstandard” work as falling into three groups: Group 1 includes 58% of all nonstandard workers and 81% of all women in nonstandard work. It pays less than the regular full-time work of comparable workers. They estimate that the highest quality of nonstandard jobs (Group 3—generally contract workers paid more per hour than their full-time equivalents) employs 37% of all nonstandard workers and 63% of men in nonstandard work. Arne Kaellberg et. al., “Nonstandard Work, Substandard Jobs: Flexible Work Arrangements in the U.S.” (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute Study, September, 1997). Internet: www.epinet.org/studies/nonstandardes.html. Recent unionizing activity among well-paid temporary workers in the high-tech sector reveals employment issues faced even by Group 3 workers who “receive bare-bones benefits and have no job security or stock options,” “no pay on sick days,” and often are unable to take advantage of free in-house courses offered to regular employees. Yet, these “permatemps” may work years for the same company on a sequence of projects. Steven Greenhouse, “Unions Need Not Apply,” New York Times (7/26/99) C–1,14.

29 Hochschild, Time Bind, 169–170.

30 Silver estimates that only 2.1% of the labor force worked exclusively at home (1985). Hilary Silver, “The Demand for Homework: Evidence from the U.S. Census,” in Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home, Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 110.

31 Margrethe H. Olsen, “Organizational Barriers to Professional Telework,”in Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds., 216–217, 222. Olsen reports that most teleworkers are men of middle-income and upper-income levels.

32 The problem of technology permitting the blurring of boundaries for primarily in-house workers has received some attention. For example, Ernst & Young report testing pilot programs in which employees are given permission not to answer their voice and e-mail over the weekends and while on vacation and utilization committees are to redistribute work when an employee’s overtime is consistently reported at 50 to 55 hours. However, the main impetus for these small innovations appears to be the tight labor market and its stress on in-house workers. See Leslie Kaufman, “Some Companies Derail the ‘Burnout’ Track,” New York Times, 5/14/99, A–1 and C–8. Epstein discusses the problems that technology creates for the professional home worker in her chapter, “Technology and Part-time Lawyering.”

33 Epstein, The Part-time Paradox, 123–130.

34 See Hilary Silver, “The Demand for Homework,” in Homework, Boris and Daniels, eds.

35 Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 30–32. See also Louis Uchitelle, “At the Desk, Off the Clock and Below Statistical Radar,” New York Times, 7/18/99, BU–4. Uchitelle reports that the changing nature of work for people on fixed salaries is causing such people to work more than scheduled for no extra pay. He reports a Labor Department survey indicating that nineteen percent of the private sector workforce reports working 49 hours a week or more.

36 Hochschild, The Time Bind, 76 and 277, fn#10.

37 Ibid., 21–22. Hochschild reports that the company had announced its family friendly policies in 1985, yet by the early ‘90s less than one percent of the employees worked part-time or shared a job, only one-third of the working parents used flex-time, ninety-nine percent of working parents worked full-time and averaged 47 hours per week (26).

38 Keith H. Hammonds et. al., “Work and Family,” Business Week, 9/15/97, 96–104. See also Catalyst Report, 1992. “The Corporate Guide to Parental Leave,” internet: info@ catalystwomen.org. Researchers studied parental leave policies in 1500 of the largest companies based on annual sales. Responding companies knew little about the leave-related needs of their employees and had no evaluative instrument for existing policies. Limited part-time leave for some women was the most prevalent form of leave.

39 Drake, 126.

40 Ibid., 123–128, for a description of FMLA’s eligibility and coverage provisions.

41 Sheila B. Kamerman, “Parental Leave Policies: An Essential Ingredient in Early Childhood Education and Care Policies,” Social Policy Report, 14(2): 3–15, available at www.childpolicyintl.org.

42 Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994), chapter 2.

43 The Taskforce on Issues of Vocation and Problems of Work in the U.S., Challenges in the Workplace (Louisville: Publication Service, Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.], 1990), 19.

44 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995), 96.

45 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy,” in Origins, 16, #3 (1986): 1.

46 See Lotte Bailyn, “The Impact of Corporate Culture on Work-Family Integration,” in Integrating Work and Family: Challenges and Choices for a Changing World, Parasuraman and Greenhaus, eds., 209–219.

47 The exceptions I have found, with regard to just wages, are Manuel G. Velasquez, Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), 439; and Richard T. DeGeorge, Business Ethics (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999), 366–370. Both of these texts discuss the concept of just wages in chapters discussing employee rights. The concept of a just or living wage is, of course, quite central to the social justice teachings of the Roman Catholic tradition, beginning with the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and continuing through the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II. It is clear, however, that the two issues of time and income, essential to the labor movement for almost two centuries, mostly escape the attention of contemporary business ethics texts.

48 Ruth Sidel points out that in 1993 the majority of poor children in the U.S. lived in families where an adult worked. Moreover, if the original Orshansky formula was used again today to re-establish the Federal poverty line, a family of four, in 1990, would be considered at poverty level with an income of $22,500. Thus, millions of families are working, yet still poor. Ruth Sidel, Keeping Women and Children Last: America’s War on the Poor (New York: Penguin books, 1996), 72–74.

49 Solomon discusses the issue of time in a more philosophical context in a chapter on the meaning of work in Robert Solomon, Above the Bottom Line (Ft. Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 440–442. See Barbara Andolsen, The New Job Contract: Economic Justice in an Age of Insecurity (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998) for an ethical analysis of contingent work.

50 S. Prakash Sethi and Linda M. Sama, “Ethical Behavior as a Strategic Choice by Large Corporations: The Interactive Effect of Marketplace Competition, Industry Structure and Firm Resources,” Business Ethics Quarterly 8, no. 1(1998): 85–104.

51 Ibid., 92.

52 James K. Galbraith offers a different, highly pertinent description of business sectors and their relationship to competition and monopoly power, and the role of government policies with regard to wages—specifically the growth of wage inequality since 1970. James K. Galbraith, Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (New York: the Free Press, 1998).