From: sawicky at epinet.org (Max Sawicky) Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 12:03:54 -0400
My fearless leader Eileen Appelbaum (EPI Research Director) appears in this.
mbs
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> July 31, 2001
>
> Contact: Lisa Meredith or Edie Emery, Goodman Media International
> (703) 837-9500
> lisa at goodmanmedia.com
> edie at goodmanmedia.com
>
> "JUGGLING WORK AND FAMILY" EXAMINES CLASH BETWEEN JOB DEMANDS AND NEEDS OF
> PERSONAL LIFE
>
> -- Two-hour PBS broadcast on September 16, produced by Pulitzer
> Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, spotlights family-work tensions
> and need for change --
>
> (Washington, D.C.)--If June Cleaver were raising her family today, she
> would be three times more likely to have a paying job than to be a
> stay-at-home mom. In today's fast-paced economy, where 24-hour service,
> the technology explosion and a global marketplace have fueled a frenetic
> work pace, the calm world of "Leave it to Beaver" seems as obsolete as
> black-and-white television. In fact, studies show that Americans are
> working longer and spending less time with their families than ever
> before. Experts assert that a massive social transformation has taken
> place and insist that far-reaching changes are needed to protect the
> American family.
>
> Juggling Work and Family, a breakthrough two-hour special by Pulitzer
> Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, takes a close-up look at the
> agonizing choices that Americans face - between making a living and having
> a life. The two-hour documentary airs Sunday, September 16 at 9 p.m. on
> PBS stations nationwide (check local listings). Among its findings:
>
>
Working couples lost an average of 22 hours a week of family and
> personal time between 1969 and 1996.
>
>
The American family is shrinking under pressure of work, says former
> Labor Secretary Robert Reich - fewer people getting married, fewer
> children per family, and couples waiting later for their first child than
> 30 years ago.
>
>
In 2000, 65 percent of married couples had both partners working, an
> increase of more than 75 percent since 1975.
>
>
Nearly seventy percent of women with children under 18 are in the
> workforce, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
>
>
>
> In the two-hour program, correspondent Hedrick Smith talks with Americans
> from the executive suite and Silicon Valley offices to hospital OR's and
> hotel housekeeping, about how they handle the challenge of demanding jobs
> and the need to raise a family or look after aging parents. In compelling
> detail, individuals describe personal problems that embody the universal
> plight of parents sacrificing sleep and time with each other as they race
> to keep pace with their jobs and try to care for their families.
>
> "These are tough issues that are troubling people nationwide," says
> correspondent and executive producer Hedrick Smith. "Spending too much
> time on the job and too little with the family has become a chronic
> problem in America, and this problem is forcing its way onto the national
> agenda. The choices are excruciating. People don't dare slight work for
> fear of losing their jobs, and so they squeeze their personal lives. We
> found some businesses, even a union, that are finding ways to ease the
> strain. But there's far from a consensus on how public policy might be
> changed."
>
> "If you view women as entering the workforce in order to help the country
> maintain its standard of living, maintain its industrial prowess, then you
> have to ask the question, 'what do we need to do to facilitate these women
> entering the workforce?'" states Eileen Appelbaum, research director of
> the Economic Policy Institute. "Then the answer is 'we have to make sure
> they have...the supports that they need to make it possible for them to
> work and also to do a good job raising their children.'"
>
> Juggling Work and Family includes corporate spokespersons and experts
> discussing work-family tensions and proposing ways to alleviate them. "We
> still organize work as if we had a nation of housewives and housewives who
> were happy to be home, who had no career aspirations. We have a work
> system that doesn't fit with our family system," says law professor Joan
> Williams, co-director of American University's Gender Work and Family
> Project. "We need to change something."
>
> Williams and other experts propose policies like a shortened work week,
> social insurance to cover paid family medical leave, subsidized day care,
> and early learning centers for children as young as three. Even business
> executives and consultants agree. "You're going to have to have
> private-public partnerships.... That will involve employers, may involve
> local and state governments, even federal government, with legislative
> support," says business consultant Phil Mirvis.
>
> Juggling Work and Family highlights several progressive companies and one
> leading union to illustrate local solutions: flexible work schedules, job
> sharing, telecommuting and employer-provided day care centers or parental
> subsidies. In the documentary, corporate managers concede that family
> friendly policies often work better for salaried employees, and experts
> note that hourly workers also lack the financial resources for other
> higher quality options available to their white-collar counterparts.
>
> Organizations investigated in the documentary include:
>
> BAXTER INTERNATIONAL
> A global leader in medical supply and research based in Deerfield,
> Illinois, Baxter International is also a leader in institutionalizing
> flexible work schedules at the professional level. In the finance
> department, corporate treasurer Steve Meyer manages a staff with wildly
> varying schedules that includes part-time workers and telecommuters.
> When global financial expert Marguerite Fernandez tried to quit after her
> third child was born, Meyer urged her to stay and to set her own work
> terms. Fernandez proposed a 22-hour week telecommuting from home. Meyer
> agreed. "I think I work even harder because I appreciate having this kind
> of flexibility," says Fernandez, who did so well in the short-week
> schedule that she earned a promotion and won a major corporate award.
> In Baxter's testing labs, longtime employee Joanne Pederson was struggling
> to care for her terminally ill mother. A supportive supervisor allowed
> Pederson to work just four hours a day, after hours, while sympathetic
> co-workers pitched in to help. "The benefit to the company," says
> Pederson's supervisor, Karen Kirby, "is that it allows a person to take
> care of those things at home first, and then be able to come into the
> workplace and know that they can focus 100 percent on what is happening at
> work."
> But flexible hours aren't possible in every work situation. In Baxter's
> production plant, all employees must work the same hours to keep the
> assembly line running on schedule. For Betty Olsen, who cares for her
> wheelchair-bound son who suffers from spina bifida, missing work on short
> notice is a chronic problem. Olsen credits the Family and Medical Leave
> Act, passed in 1993, with soothing her fears of losing her job and
> ensuring that she can take time off when her son's medical needs demand
> it.
>
> HEWLETT-PACKARD
> In hard-driving Silicon Valley, computer stalwart Hewlett-Packard
> pioneered a flexible work environment several years ago. In the early
> 1990's, work/life issues became a priority, spearheaded by former CEO Lew
> Platt, who lost his wife to cancer, leaving him with two young children.
> "Suddenly, I found out firsthand that these were not 'women's issues';
> these were issues of being a parent," says Platt in the film. Today,
> Hewlett-Packard encourages flexible work hours, job sharing and
> telecommuting. Platt saw flexibility as the key to retaining talented
> employees in a competitive business.
> The program follows Shelly Smith, a senior marketing manager and
> mother of two young boys, who job shares with another high-powered
> executive. Working three long days a week allows the women more time with
> their families, but they each still work about 40 hours a week. Job
> sharing has allowed them to stay on the fast track without investing the
> usual 70-hour work weeks.
> For the Tresham family, the solution to raising their children
> without costly daycare is to work alternate shifts. Dave Tresham works
> evenings assembling Hewlett-Packard server computers. HP can afford to
> give him and other workers a flexible schedule because each computer can
> be built individually by one technician. Dave heads off for the night
> shift when his wife Nancy comes home from her day as a travel agent. "He's
> single mom during the day, and I'm single mom at night," she says. The
> downside is that the parents get little time together, and experts warn
> this tag-team work schedule leads to higher rates of divorce.
> Not all jobs at Hewlett-Packard can be adapted to a flexible
> schedule. For Charmaine Crumer, a computer service engineer who must be
> available for emergency computer breakdowns at banks, airlines and other
> HP corporate customers, the pressure is relentless. "Always between work
> and home, I feel like I have to choose," she says. "I'm torn between
> whether am I going to be a team player or am I going to be a mother."
>
> BOSTON LAWYERS
> When Claire Smith was a law student, she pictured herself "doing it all" -
> having a challenging career at a big law firm and a family, too. But once
> she became a mother, she felt the job pressures increase and saw her
> career prospects dim. "I left home at 6:45 a.m. and came home at 7 p.m.
> every night and saw my daughter for only a half an hour per day," she says
> in Juggling Work and Family. "And I spent 50 percent of my weekends
> working." After four months, Smith joined a growing exodus of highly
> qualified, talented professionals. She quit.
> While 90 percent of big law firms have part-time work policies on the
> books, only about four to five percent of lawyers work part-time because
> they fear they will jeopardize their careers, according to a report
> published by the Women's Bar Association of Massachusetts in 2000.
> Another report by the Boston Bar Association asserts there is a clash
> between the changing demographics of the legal profession (50 percent of
> today's law school graduates are female) and the culture of big firms,
> which values long hours and 24x7 availability to important clients.
> Nancer Ballard, chair of the committee that researched the bar
> association report, claims that lawyers like Smith are not examples of
> personal life crises, but evidence of the need for fundamental change.
> Says Ballard: "These reports point to a phenomenon of the way we structure
> work, which is incompatible with having a personal life."
>
> THE UNION AND THE NEW YORK HOSPITALS
> Michael Lancaster is a man with two essential jobs, and, like millions of
> working class Americans, he doesn't have enough time or money to cope with
> both. He's an operating room support technician who works long hours and a
> single father raising three girls on $35,000 a year. His older two are in
> college, and Michael has custody of the youngest, a four-year-old, whom he
> is raising on his own. Balancing tuition costs with finding reliable,
> round-the-clock child care for his preschooler is a stretch. Overtime work
> helps him keep up financially, but it cuts his parent time dangerously
> low.
> Lancaster is not alone. Hospital employees are one of the nation's
> largest concentrations of working parents with tough work-family problems.
> Rank-and-file workers - medical technicians, lab workers, admission clerks
> and health aides - work odd hours and weekends and are often required to
> work extra shifts in emergencies. They face special difficulties in
> finding child care or family support because of their unpredictable work
> schedules.
> To help them manage, Local 1199 of the Service Employees
> International Union won an unprecedented demand in 1989 by getting New
> York City hospitals to contribute to an employee child care fund for the
> union's 200,000 members. The $9.5 million fund supports 8,000 children a
> year with subsidies for infant day care, after-school and Saturday
> programs for school-age kids, summer camp, and college prep classes for
> teens at New York University.
> At first, high school senior Dwane Jones balked when his mother, a
> registered nurse, used the 1199 fund to sign him up for NYU's Upward Bound
> program, which offers academic mentoring, SAT prep and help with filling
> out college applications and scholarship forms. But Dwane was surprised
> by the sudden academic success that came from working with a small, caring
> staff. "I've gone up in every subject," he says, "and my SAT scores went
> up 200 points." In the fall, Dwane will take his newly honed academic
> skills and confidence to college.
>
> MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL
> Hotel giant Marriott International depends on hourly workers to present
> its corporate face to its customers. Doormen, bellhops, desk clerks and
> other rank-and-file workers earn less than $10 per hour, but they deal
> most directly with hotel guests. To maintain high morale among these
> frontline workers, Marriott is forging new ground in corporate America to
> help the personal lives of its hourly employees.
> Ten years ago, Marriott housekeepers would walk off the job during
> the summer because they had no childcare. Replacing them was difficult.
> "The issue was surfacing as a major business issue for the first time,
> rather than a personal life issue," says Donna Klein, vice president of
> Diversity and Workplace Effectiveness. Marriott responded by building
> child-care centers and offering subsidies for the staff. While employees
> like Ethiopian couple Abraha Meaza, a front doorman, and his wife Etinish,
> a housekeeper, both based in Washington, D.C., consider the subsidized day
> care a boon, most other hourly workers did not take advantage of the
> arrangement.
> Their reluctance prompted Donna Klein to investigate further. She
> discovered that the hourly employees, many of them foreign-born, faced a
> host of challenges beyond child care. To help workers meet these needs,
> Marriott established a multi-lingual employee hotline that assists workers
> with a multitude of problems from housing and transportation to substance
> abuse, domestic problems and legal issues.
> "It may be finding them a resource in the community and then actually
> hooking them up to the resource and acting as an advocate to help them
> obtain that," explains Heidi Guy of Ceridian WorkLife Services, based in
> Philadelphia, which helped create and staff the hotline for Marriott.
> Just under 10 percent of Marriott's 135,000 employees have used the
> service.
>
> A major outreach component for the documentary includes a "Juggling
> Work and Family with Hedrick Smith" Action Kit, a package of materials
> created to spark discussion of the issues among community groups and other
> involved parties. The package features a discussion leader guide with a
> VHS cassette of video excerpts from the program. The kits can be ordered
> by calling (800) 277-0829 or emailing: mreap at scetv.org. An interactive
> Web site can be found at www.pbs.org/workfamily.
> Juggling Work and Family is produced by Hedrick Smith Productions in
> association with SCETV. Hedrick Smith serves as executive producer and
> correspondent. Pauline Steinhorn and Paulette Moore serve as producers of
> the program. Cliff Hackel and Carol Slatkin are editors. The special is
> funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York.
>
> # # #
>
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