from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- The Cult of the Child Revolt Against the Baby Fascists Breed or die, you otherwise worthless scum. The child-free are feeling ripped off by 'family-friendly' policies. Adele Horin explores the backlash, and how justified it is. The woman's outburst shocked her colleagues. "I am sick of this bloody 'family-friendly' stuff," she said. "I'm single, I've got a disability. I'm travelling back and forth from Sydney to Melbourne to do my job. But because I don't have children, I'm given no special consideration." The high-powered women executives gathered round the table were stunned into silence. Afterwards someone said, "Wow, wasn't she angry?" And according to Rohan Squirchuk, managing director of the Council for Equal Opportunity in Employment, who attended that meeting, her colleague had every right to be resentful. Single and childless people have elderly parents, dogs and cats, disabilities and hobbies, and a life outside the office. "But they're expected to hit the road," says Squirchuk. "There is an underlying resentment that [childless] people are scared to articulate. It isn't kosher to say, 'She's got paid maternity leave but I don't get anything for looking after my old parents.'" Are family-friendly workplaces cheating the childless? In the United States, a book called Baby Boon, by Elinor Burkett (The Free Press), has created a storm for its polemical attack on family-friendly workplaces that subsidise child care but not gym membership, grant employees leave to have a baby but not to write a book. "... history cannot look kindly on a nation that can protect its parents and children only by demeaning its childless citizens," Burkett writes, "by creating one set of rules for those who breed and a different set for those who do not." Across the Atlantic, the cudgels against family-friendly policies have been taken up by the London Daily Telegraph's associate editor, Alice Thomson, in a recent piece for The Spectator called, "The baby fascists". Attacking the Blair Government's policy of 18 weeks' paid maternity leave, and three months' unpaid leave for fathers, Thomson writes: "The real divide that has been created in the last three years [is] not North or South, town or country, gay or straight, but between the allegedly altruistic parent and the selfish singleton." Singletons, she continued, are "sick of pushy parents marching to the front of the queue, the frightening moral righteousness of the exhausted mum. Why should they subsidise squealing infants to go half-price on planes?" If Australia's single and childless workers harbour similar angry thoughts they are usually too polite to disclose them. Employers, union leaders and human resource managers are hard-pressed to recall occasions when childless workers have vented their spleen over family-friendly perks. That was why Squirchuk's encounter with her colleague's full-blown fury stood out in her mind. But scratch the surface of a single's politeness and complaints bubble up. "I've been rostered on five Christmas Days in a row," a colleague said. "I'm treated as if I don't have a family just because I don't have children." A woman with a dying mother in Melbourne wondered aloud why her firm, a large consulting company which provides three months' paid maternity leave, cannot extend a similar benefit to her. Instead her bosses have resented her occasional early departures for the airport. The mother who exits the office at five and avoids the Christmas Day roster is a source of irritation in some offices, as are parents who get priority for holidays in December and January, bring sick children into the office, or take the morning off for the school athletics carnival. "Quite a few people in quite a few organisations noted the resentment of their peers," says Dr Gillian Whitehouse, of the University of Queensland, who has carried out detailed case studies of organisations with family-friendly policies. "Burned in the minds of working parents were comments like, 'I can't take time off for my sick cat.'" But it would be wrong to overstate the resentment. "Mildly pissed off," is how Ed Davis, professor of management at Macquarie University, characterises the response. Australia's childless, it appears, have little cause to feel cheated. Australian workplaces are far from beacons of family friendliness. Parliament House in Canberra, the most notorious example, has a swimming pool but no child-care centre. And many women, it seems, believe they have no special rights as working parents and make no demands. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's 1999 inquiry into pregnancy discrimination, for example, found an unfortunate acceptance among women "that pregnancy is a personal choice and you can't have your cake and eat it, too". The enterprises that win awards for family friendliness are high profile but atypical. Only 4 per cent of enterprise agreements have provisions for job sharing, for example; only 3 per cent have work-from-home provisions, according to the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training at the University of NSW. Paid maternity leave, a measure of genuine family friendliness, featured in only 6.4 per cent of enterprise agreements, and some of those paid for just one week's leave. As well, in a workplace climate of "lean and long", workers often feel reluctant to avail themselves of the family-friendly policies on offer. "Who feels free to use them?" asks Ilene Wolcott, co-author of Work and Family Life (The Australian Institute of Family Studies). A survey of 750 solicitors in 1998 by Sandra Triulzi, of Acumen Alliance, for example, found a "huge reluctance" to use flexible policies. In a climate of mergers and acquisitions, the Y2K fear and the GST, "solicitors were working harder and longer, including solicitors with children", she says. Australian women have reacted to the dearth of family-friendly policies by bowing out of full-time work. Most mothers work as casuals or, if they are fortunate, in permanent part-time positions. The decision has cost them money, training opportunities and promotion. To what extent it is a choice, or simply a response to what is available, is debatable. Employers' heavy use of casuals has obviated the need for them to provide genuinely family-friendly policies for full-time workers. "Even a family-friendly company expects a huge commitment to the organisation and long hours," says Whitehouse. "Companies are not making big concessions." Australia's leading "family-friendly" companies, however, have become aware of the singles' backlash in the US and taken pre-emptive action. In the past two or three years, this vanguard has broadened family-friendly initiatives to cover single and childless people. Even the name "family friendly" has been ditched in favour of "work-life" programs. In these companies, people can get leave to take their cat to the vet in work time, or their mum to the hospital. They can get time off to train for the Olympics or the tenpin bowling championship, or to study. Enterprises as diverse as Australia Post, Hewlett-Packard, and Blake Dawson Waldron, a leading legal firm, have joined the work-life movement. As well, one of Australia's leading workplace consultancies changed its name this year from Managing Work and Family to Managing Work/Life Balance. "I got in before any backlash," says Barbara Holmes, the managing director. "I saw what was happening in the US." Australia Post last year extended some of its family-friendly initiatives to all staff in a bid to appear more equitable. For example, since 1994 staff have been able to take a few hours off on a "make-up later" basis to attend to family duties (including caring for parents). But now staff can take this short-term leave for any reason, providing their manager agrees. "You don't want an organisation to be making value judgments about a worthwhile way of living," says Claire McCuskey, Australia Post's human resource consultant. "You don't want to be saying, 'Your dog's not as important as Fred's son.' " Benefits such as "48/52" - 48 weeks' pay spread over a 52-week year to provide eight weeks' annual leave (including four weeks' unpaid leave) - part-time work, and three-year employment breaks, are available equally to all staff. Also, all staff can borrow five days of the next year's recreation leave - though two of them still must be used for family reasons. At Blake Dawson Waldron, parents led the push for more flexible work practices. But now the benefits have flowed to other workers. The Olympic swimmer Chris Fydler has worked as a part-time lawyer in a way that has fitted with his training. Paul Mallam, a partner, works four days to pursue his interest in painting on the fifth. And triathlon and karate enthusiasts have had flexible arrangements to pursue their sports. Not all the firm's 180 partners are equally willing or able to give their teams access to the flexible conditions, but the momentum is gaining. "Staff can elect to work from home for a certain number of hours and the firm supports that with a fax, printer, second phone line and laptop," says Lisa Chung, a partner in the firm. "It doesn't matter to me why a worker wants that flexibility." In some fields it is now considered impolite to ask valued employees why they want time off. "There's always been flexibility in the IT industry," says Hewlett-Packard's e-services manager, Katie Spearritt. "It's critical to our culture. In fact I'm working from home now, and I don't have children." If anything, a backlash to work-life policies may be in its infancy as some critics bravely assert that Fred's son is more important than Fran's dog. Don Edgar, an associate professor at the Centre for Workplace Culture Change at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, argues that the work-family policy debate has been hijacked by the work-life brigade. "... in recent years, we have seen the notion of a balanced lifestyle, the right to a life outside work, and 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' take precedence over a focused approach to the discrimination against workers [with] family responsibilities ..." he wrote last year in Flinders University's Australian Bulletin of Labour. "Definitions of 'family' have been stretched to include a pet dog, a group of friends and the local football club ... While there is nothing wrong with a demand for greater flexibility and encouragement of outside interests on the part of supervisors ... there is no inevitability about the obligations taken on. A child cannot be ignored; a parent with Alzheimer's cannot be left alone ... In contrast, playing a game of golf or two may be good for one's morale, but it is not an obligation as such." Edgar says that some feminist managers specifically refused to have work-family policies discussed because "many people don't have families". But he argued it is unlikely structural discrimination will ever be based on the existence of pets, groups of friends or the need to get some exercise. "You must have clear regulations governing the relationship between work and family," he says. "The well-being of children is of absolute importance. But who gives a damn if the cat is not fed on time?" For all the childless workers who resent parents leaving at 5.30pm for the child-care centre, there are others like Aaron Magner, an industrial officer with the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers' Union. "I don't resent parents leaving to pick up the kids; it's not as if they're going to the gym," he says. " It's our civic duty to ensure the next generation of children gets the greatest amount of care." And Blake Dawson Waldron's Chung, a mother of two, says her childless colleagues know how hard the juggling act is for parents. "They don't see it as the easy option," she says. "And some of them know, 'that could be me one day'." Squirchuk, reflecting on her single colleague's angry outburst, believes it should be employers in the firing line, not working mothers. It is the culture of long hours, not family-friendly policies, that breeds division in the workplace. "We all have needs," she says. "But employers have slashed and burned and got fewer and fewer people to do more and more work. That's the issue that needs attention." Sidney Morning Herald, June 24, 2000 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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