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Family-friendly work policies can also benefit employers
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Since early last century, when progressive scholars began to compare Western and Chinese civilizations, mostly to the latter’s disadvantage, they could always conveniently cite the plight of Chinese women: arranged marriages, sometimes prenatal; child-rearing and domestic duty as women’s only occupation; concubinage; bound feet — and the list can go on.
Their fate was pathetic against the Western view of women as independent and “emancipated.”
As we know today, that emancipation has also been driven by capital, with its celebration of efficiency, aspiration to success, and the needs of engaging surplus labor in production and then consumption.
Now in many areas women in China are holding up more than half the sky. For several years now, we have had more female college students than males and more female master’s degree candidates than their male counterparts.
Still, production and consumption cannot be the sum total of human existence, in spite of the effort encouraging that view.
From time to time we need to look beyond what the market dictates, and renew our attitudes by simply getting biological.
In “The Importance of Living,” Lin Yutang observes, “Insofar as 90 percent of mankind are husbands or wives and 100 percent have parents, and insofar as marriage and the home constitute the most intimate side of a man’s life, it is clear that that civilization which produces better wives and husbands and fathers and mothers makes for a happier human life, and is therefore a higher type of civilization.”
Regardless of how the pursuit of success, independence and equality were, and still are, celebrated, many women are learning to balance their domestic duty and their work.
In “Mothers Unite! Organizing for Workplace Flexibility and the Transformation of Family Life” (2013), author Jocelyn Elise Crowley explains why mothers want flexible workplace options, how conflicts between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers have kept women from effectively advocating “workplace flexibility,” and how a “mothers’ movement” could galvanize change.
Workplace flexibility
According to Crowley, a Rutgers professor of public policy, although women begin their careers on par with men, they often have to drop out of the workforce to raise children.
And when they return, sometimes they must cope with employers’ unreasonable expectations about their full-time availability.
Workplace flexibility can solve the problem by giving working parents a variety of ways to set up their schedules. This flexibility falls into three categories:
1. “Flexible work arrangements” — These might include starting later in the work day, part-time work, having a “compressed workweek” that adds up to a certain number of hours, job-sharing or working remotely.
2. “Time-off options” — Such options allow working parents to attend a child’s school event, take sick time or have leave to care for a loved one. The US Family and Medical Leave Act grants workers up to 12 unpaid weeks off and a return to work without “significant wage and career advancement penalties.”
3. “Career exit, maintenance and re-entry pathways” — These policies offer workers options for coping with life changes. Alternatives might include providing re-entry assistance or offering part-time work when an employee can’t work full time.
Such flexibility is necessary because bringing up children is in every sense a work no less important than bringing up GDP or assembling the latest iPad on the Foxconn assembly line.
Since our policymakers are more accustomed to think in economic terms, children and non-working women easily become invisible, hence the urgency for awareness that mothers should not suffer economically for raising children, if only because children are the future workforce.
Mandate needed
As the book observes, “Some women found that, once they became mothers, their eyes were really opened to the ways in which public policies seemed to be stacked against them in their caregiving roles.”
In China, the kindergartens and primary schools are dismissed generally much earlier than their working parents can pick them up, and families have to rely on their own resources in having their kids picked up. Such resources include the grandparents, the ayis, cram sessions, etc.
A few weeks ago, the municipal government issued guidlines that students need not go to school when air pollution reaches a certain level, but they forgot to mention who will watch the kids at home.
Flexibility can actually mean more productivity for employees who don’t abuse it and get more work done.
In big cities like Shanghai, such flexibility can spare employees the ordeal of rush-hour commuting.
Such policies also can benefit employers, attract the best talent, inspire loyalty, cut absenteeism and build retention.
It might be a problem for employees filling lower-wage jobs in retail or food service, where unscheduled absences are disruptive, and that’s more reason why government should weigh in by mandating it, or subsidizing it by providing a variety of financial and tax incentives.
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