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Printed from The Vanier Institute of the Family's website at www.vifamily.ca. © 2007.
Family Policy Briefing Memos TO: VIF’s New ED and Board of Directors & Mr. or Ms. Smith on Elm Street Alfred Adler, the father of Adlerian (individual) psychology, offered the somewhat more practical and down-to-earth guide to the mental landscape than his one-time associate, Sigmund Freud. Adler taught that we could know ourselves much better if we simply came to terms with love, sex, work and money and how these four are related one to another. He wasn’t wrong. The challenge for most people today is to find enough time for love and enough energy for sex when we are increasingly addicted to our work through which we make the money with which to buy the goods and services that we think impress other people and, thereby, increase our sex appeal so that we might be loved. Phew! It really is all connected. Our Working Lives & Our Family Lives Some Facts
Yesteryear Less than a hundred years ago, your civic identity depended most on how your mother and father were known and respected (or not respected) in the community. Religious identity, political affiliation and life work were most often handed down from one generation to the next. Like father, like son. Like mother, like daughter. The family farm and the family business depended, in most cases, on an economic partnership. Individuals alone, most especially women and children, were economically vulnerable. In point of fact, the relative stability of marriages in the past should be attributed less to the idea of love and more to the fact that men, women and children achieved whatever modest degree of economic security they could because they lived their lives together – as part of a kinship group without which they could not prosper or, in some cases, even survive. Today Families seldom pass on, as they once did, land (or at least not much of it). Nor do they pass on capital (or at least not much of it). Nor, do they pass on a trade or a business enterprise. The most common and the most valuable legacy that parents give to their children is an education. This starts with the greatest gift of all – literacy – and goes on to include educational aspirations and an identity as consumer that can be fulfilled only after certain labour market credentials have been earned. Today, we are known (and we know ourselves) not by who preceded us but rather by what we have made of ourselves and by the immediate self-interests that the marketplace acknowledges and rewards through the jobs we perform. We are known by the labels we wear on our clothing, the brands we purchase and by our credit ratings. Today, in marked contrast to the past when kinship was essential to survival and security, individuals secure their economic well-being not because of their families but almost in spite of their family obligations and commitments. We are employed as individuals, not as mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters. Curiously, and somewhat tragically, we have succeeded in pitting the interests of employees and the interests of families against each other. The economy is largely blind to the fact that the most important reason people show up at the office or factory every morning is precisely because they want to provide not just for themselves but for their families. According to all the research, we are crunched for time, and stressed, anxious and depressed because we find it almost impossible to balance and coordinate the often competing demands of home and workplace. We live with incredibly frantic schedules and we live on the leftovers of human energy and commitment when we return home at the end of the day to what we say is the most important project in our lives. Work and Family Balance – An Impossible Dream? It is deeply ironic – even perverse – that Canada, as a nation that aspires to prosperity through innovation, is now burning out its talent at a very rapid pace?1
Do We Need More Evidence?
Women with young children and who are employed full time report the highest levels of stress as they attempt to juggle the two sides of their lives, both of which seem to ask for a full-time commitment.2 Although men too have begun to catch up with women – insofar as they too experience conflict between their family and work roles – it is still the case that women carry the lion’s share of home chores or domestic responsibilities, which are still perceived by many to be ‘women’s work.’ More encouraging is the observation that by 2002, Duxbury and Higgins were able to report that: …mothers and fathers who engaged in child care spent essentially the same amount of time each week in child care-related activities (the typical mother in the sample spent approximately 11.1 hours per week in child care while the typical father spent approximately 10.5 hours). Similarly, the men and the women in the sample with elder care responsibilities spent approximately the same amount of time per week in elder care activities (the typical man with elder care responsibilities spent 4.6 hours per week in their care while the typical woman spent approximately 5.2 hours).3 These observations suggest that the roles and responsibilities of men and women have been somewhat successfully renegotiated by recent cohorts in light of the dramatic increase in rates of female labour force participation and the unsustainable ‘double burden’ of earning and caring borne by women in previous years. This may indicate a significant advance but, lest we pride ourselves too much, we need to consider the various explanations suggested by the researchers in order to help us understand what has happened and why:
In other words, the evidence of a more egalitarian distribution of child care responsibilities observed in many young families today is not simply the consequence of more enlightened attitudes. It is also the result of the reductions in time devoted by mothers to caring directly for their children, an increase in the time men spend with their sons and daughters, and a general reduction in the time adults spend caring for children simply because they have fewer of them than did previous generations. We may have succeeded in divvying up the pie of child care responsibilities more equitably between mothers and fathers, but we have also reduced the size of the pie. Who Cares? Who Should Care? We already know that family members care about this evidence because they are the ones trying to keep all the balls in the air at once. And, if we are employers or union representatives, we should also care:
The conflict between work life and family life is not yet but should be equally evident to anyone who would advise our political leaders about the paths to prosperity because In today’s world, human brains – The management guru, Charles Handy, has written: In organizations such as investment banks, advertising agencies or consultancies, there is almost nothing there except … intangibles. The building is leased along with the computers, the cars are on contract and the carpets are worn down. If anyone buys the business, they are buying a customer list, some product brands and maybe some research, but mainly, the hope that the best people working there will stay with the new owners for the ride. You can put a price on these things, of course, but you can’t own any of them (except perhaps the brands and the research) in any true sense of the word. You can’t own hope. Those people assets which you have acquired and thought you owned could vanish overnight.7 The most important asset to any employer is the people who are able and willing to commit themselves to the corporate goals of their employers. No longer are we dealing with the three traditional factors of production as economists like to call them – land, labour and capital. There is, indeed, a fourth factor of production that is now, arguably, the most important. It is human capacity, which combines training, motivation, loyalty, health, imagination, capacity to communicate and emotional intelligence. What Can We Do? Much has been learned over the past twenty years about so-called ‘family-friendly’ policies and programs that have been developed and implemented by both private sector and public sector employers in recent years. Among those organizations that have learned important lessons about how to support employees as they balance the competing demands of their jobs and their families while still meeting the needs of shareholders, customers and clients are Delta Hotels, Lee Valley Tools, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, DaimlerChrysler, Statistics Canada, MDS Nordion, M & M Meatshops, VanCity Credit Union, Andrew Fleck Child Care Services.8 Other instructive examples of work/life balance initiatives that have helped to guide the Vanier Institute’s work and family programs have been drawn from the Royal Bank of Canada, Xerox, Ontario Hydro, Dupont, Bank of Montreal, Levi-Strauss, Manulife, IBM, Hewlitt Packard, Price Waterhouse, Macmillan Bloedel, Husky Injection Molding, Vancouver General Hospital, Western Glove Works (Manitoba), Nortel, and the Carleton Board of Education.9 Basically, these family-friendly policies fall into six categories: When We Work
How We Work & Job Redesign
Where We Work
Leaves and Compensation
Family Care Support Initiatives
Personal Health and Wellness Initiatives
The list is far from comprehensive but it is suggestive of the range of options – tested options – that have in some workplaces proven themselves to be of benefit to individual employees and to the bottom line. To be sure, some cost money. Others don’t yet can still make a significant contribution to improving the lives of individual employees and their families. And there are tools that can help us, as employers and employees (who are, quite frankly, in this together), to:
The issues embedded in the revolutionary restructuring of modern economies and the equally profound changes we have witnessed in recent years to the patterns of family formation and functioning confront us as individuals, family members, employers, community members and citizens. The tensions between work and family are not just personal issues which individual adults and their children can be expected to resolve on their own. Nor can individual employers, no matter how innovative, be expected to assume alone the burden of adaptation. Nor can families and communities be expected to simply “pick up the slack” at difficult moments with respite care, home-visiting and free babysitting. Instead, we shall genuinely have to work together. As parents, we shall choose our priorities. As employers and employees, we will assess our places of work from the point of view of the full range of responsibilities we assume on the job, at home and in our communities. And, as members of our communities and as citizens, we will begin to assess how policies and programs influence the ways in which families can and do fulfill their multiple responsibilities.
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