Who benefits from benefits?

Just to let you know, I already wrote a great Valentine's Day post about vaginas, but I'm saving it for closer to the actual holiday.

Now my post for today will probably seem boring. Perhaps I should have waited to tell you about it (I was just so excited!).

Well, anyway: I've enjoyed discussing childfree and childed issues with Brit Girl on her blog for the last little while. Recently, her post on the myths of parenting prompted a brief discussion about the benefits parents do and don't get from the workplace. I am writing this from a U.S. perspective, and Brit Girl is writing with an eye on Canada and the U.K. That may account for some differences in our opinions, but I'm not sure that it does.

I wrote:

One thing - despite all the pressure to reproduce - and I totally agree that this is a breed-oriented society - speaking from the U.S., we don’t do much to help parents. We act like we do, and we pay a lot of lip service to it, but when you get down to it, we’ve set things up so that parents who have jobs (which most parents need to have) are screwed, and their families are screwed.

This is not to say that the proposed solutions for parents in the workplace have always been great for cf people. I think we need a whole workplace revolution that will make *all* of our lives better. But I don’t think the U.S. really values parent-child or family relationships in general. I think it values the labor of employees, and that the encouragement of breeding is in part about creating a labor force and in part about gender roles.

Brit Girl responded:

...much more is done for people with children than for childfree people. While I will agree that the many work envrionments are not tailored around women bringing up children (and yes, this causes all sorts of issues for women who have to work and their families) at the same time many are bending over backwards to create more "family friendly" workplaces. They are doing this because they need to retain workers.

They need to be mindful that they need to support their workers, but they also need to be aware that if they don’t make a profit, the company will be gone.

Which is fine, except that family doesn’t mean person with no kids, or person who is single. It means people with children. People with children have - for example (at my company) - time off if their kids are sick, time off to go to parent teacher meetings, very good health benefits coverage extended to all dependents, subsidized childcare, on-site company childcare, time off if they are adopting kids, preferential tax breaks, tax credits and child benefit, a christmas party for workers children. During March break, childfree people can’t take vacation, because parents are on vacation.

Pregnant women can take up to a year off as maternity leave with all benefits and can return to their substantive grade. Their vacation entitlement remains untouched. This is also the case in the UK. When you consider that, some women are have vacation entitlement of 3-4 wks (depending on years of service) the time off is subtantial. (Vacation entitlement is more in the UK. I was entitled to 5 weeks/year). Employers cannot fill their positions, they must keep them open. Fathers are now entitled to paternity leave - though many don’t take it, mothers can opt to job share, flexible work, or work part time. PLUS there are many other ways government supports parents. In Europe, benefits for people with children are even more generous - depending on the country. Plus companies are sympathetic to parents when they have to dash out of the workplace to tend to a child, or attend a school function or a kid’s sports function. Not for the Childfree. I think you’ll find that even the US has many more benefits for parents as opposed to those without. So I think while it isn’t perfect, it’s more than lip-service.

Contrast that with what is provided for childfree people, or as mercurior says, young men (a pretty vulnerable group btw). We get no extra time off outside vacations and public holidays, even if we are taking care of a parent or a pet. There are signs that is now changing in larger corporations but it still is much less time than people with parents are able to take. Small companies may go under, they don’t have the same luxury of economies of scale. So, rightly or wrongly many won’t hire women.

We get no extra benefits. We can, of course, take a year off - but it will be without pay - unless we use our vacation time. We pay more tax than parents and get no tax breaks, no government support, no subsidized transportation, no subsidized elder care payments. And by the way, I work for one of the most family friendly companies in Canada, and one of the best employers, with over 50% of employees being women. Many in very senior positions. Might be different in the US, but I would guess that good companies still have more benefits for parents than non-parents. Generally we understand - children are demanding, but lately we’ve been getting fed-up at what we perceive as preferential treatment for parents.

And even if they try and make things more "family friendly" and "do more" for parents, childfree people will be even more marginalized as far as the workplace is concerned. In my opinion It’s already tipped far too much in parents’ favour - and we pick up the slack. As you said what’s needed is a more equitable solution - for childfree and childed alike.

I want to discuss these issues in more detail, and this may end up spilling over into another post. So to begin, I want to argue my original point - that while there is a clear expectation that we will all become parents, that the state of parenthood (motherhood, in particular) is a state to which we should all aspire, and that not wanting to be a parent is somewhat abnormal (note that I'm saying this is what's expected, not what I agree with), American society simultaneously withholds the very resources parents need in order to be good parents. And those resources are things like extended and paid maternity leave, flexible work schedules, decent pay, good and affordable health benefits, good and affordable child care, and, of course, JOBS that offer these things in the first place. Most jobs, of course, do not, and so these benefits are not available to the majority of the population.

I will say at the outset that these benefits should not be set up only with an eye toward what parents need. They should be available to all workers; instead of maternity leave, for example, workers should be able to get similar leave for any care-giving (and yes, I would limit this to care-giving or grief leave or something along those lines). Employers should offer flex time to all employees (and studies have shown that flexible work schedules result in employees who are more productive AND more loyal, so it would seem that this would be beneficial for employers). I hardly need to present an argument for decent wage and health insurance, right? I mean, we can understand why those would be necessary. And as for childcare - while I don't think it's crucial (or, in many cases, practical) for employers to provide childcare, providing the other things, like good pay and flex time, would allow parents to work with available childcare in order to find a good solution.

In other words, when we think about improving the workplace for parents, which is absolutely necessary, we should also be thinking about improving the workplace for all workers. Because while childfree workers may not face the same stressors as childed people, we could all benefit from a work environment in which individuals matter, in which employees are treated as if their lives outside the workplace are valuable.

One of the problems, though, is the sense I get, having participated in discussions re. stopping the tenure clock for new mothers (sometimes fathers) on the faculty, is that everyone is simply terrified that someone else might get something that would give them an unfair advantage.

I gotta be honest, here. To me, this sounds a lot like the people who argue that students with documented disabilities shouldn't have extra time to take a test because that gives them more time to write better answers - even when, as has been my experience as an educator - that extra time merely affords them time to laboriously do the work of almost completing the written exam. It isn't the thinking of the brilliant answer that takes the time, often - it is actually writing it down. And it's just small-minded to complain, when faced with a student making his or her way through college in this way, that he or she is getting something extra that someone else is not.

So, yes, at first I was a bit unsympathetic to this claim. And I'll add that, for new parents, parental leave is not a matter of having the time off to enjoy the baby. The experience of sleep deprivation alone is more intense than most people have experienced outside this situation. And then, for mothers, there are all kinds of biological issues to address, as well, as hormone levels change and so on. On top of that, we could argue that babies and mothers need to be together for at least the first several months for breastfeeding and bonding (no, of course I'm not saying that moms can't make other arrangements work). My point: maternity leave is not a vacation, and the time should not be offered up generally to people who want to take an extended trip. It should be offered for care-giving or for other monumental occurrences that necessitate a serious leave of absence.

I had a similarly unsympathetic attitude to those who begrudged parents the kinds of resources I mentioned earlier. But then I heard some stories from an unlikely source - a good friend, a feminist friend, and one who'd been very supportive of me when I had my son. This friend routinely was saddled with extra work due to the family responsibilities of a co-worker who frequently had to miss meetings and so on. And this is not right. Employers need to work out maternity and other leaves so that co-workers do not bear the brunt. It is the EMPLOYER'S responsibility to find temporary help to protect the other workers but also so that a leave does not pit employees against each other.

Let's move on. Brit Girl mentioned subsidized childcare. I may be wrong about this - I am open to being proven wrong - but I think, in cases where people argue that they should get the actual monetary equivalent if they don't use the service, that this is another case of "hey, it looks like someone else got something that I didn't get!" Subsidized childcare means a discount on a service. If you don't have children, why would you need that service discounted? Since childcare is still an expense, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that people without children be given a chunk of change equivalent to the discount. But I do think it's reasonable that they could be offered that same discount to be extended to other care-giving situations - childcare for nieces and nephews, in-home care for elderly parents, etc.

Brit Girl also mentioned time off - for sick children, for school meetings, for vacation. It is absolutely unfair not to allow all workers the same time off. Now - in my experience, when I have had emergencies come up, I was able to use my sick time or my vacation time or, sometimes, I would work through a few lunches to pay back the time I took. I think a more generous allowance of time off - for everyone - would be helpful in most cases, however. And when it comes to scheduling vacations, I'm going to take a hard line. Parents should not have their vacations given priority due to school scheduling. There is no reason that anyone *needs* to take a vacation, anyway (see? told you it was a hard line.). If it conflicts with school, too bad. There is ample time for that in the summer.

I also want to speak to the tax breaks. This actually really disturbs me because it's not an issue of, "oh, you have a kid? Hey, let me give you some money." It's an issue of, "oh, you have another mouth to feed/person to clothe/take to the doctor/etc. That's expensive. Let's arrange to lower your taxes slightly." Having a child means paying more money. The tax break attempts to ease this burden. Childfree people will still have more money at the end of the day, given equivalent income, than childed people. What's the problem? It's a lot like the single tax. The government used to give single people a break, realizing that they were paying more (for example, in rent) with relation to income than were married couples. But then the right wing got all freaked out about what they called a "marriage penalty" or "marriage tax," and guess what? Now there is no longer an eased burden for single people, who often continue to make less income than do dual-income couples. So the argument that childed people get a tax break doesn't really interest me. Figure out what it costs to take care of a child, and compare that to the tax "break," and see where you end up.

Finally: I think this business of comparing pets to children is particularly frustrating. They are not the same. And frankly, I thought they were, until I had a child. Now, I know saying that might make me sound like an asshole, but bear with me. I don't think that childfree people love their pets less than childed people love their kids. I do, however, think there is a qualitative difference in these relationships. Even if I'm right, though, it wouldn't matter, because the fact is, when you love someone or something, then you love them, and being told that your experience of love is different than someone else's is absolutely unhelpful. But I just want to make the point that saying - as a former friend once said to me - that she was in love with her new puppy, and she was sure I knew what she meant because I had a baby - is not going to win you any points with parents. (And really, how would you feel if someone said that to you about your boyfriend, or sister, or mom?) Nor is it going to help either of you understand each other any better.

One more point about the pet thing - I know exactly why someone who doesn't have a child would say this. I've felt it. I've said it myself. I'm trying really really hard to avoid saying, "you don't know until you experience it," but at the end of the day, that's all I can say. I'm sorry that sounds so patronizing - that is certainly not how I mean to come across.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me add that there's no reason why health benefits couldn't be extended to veterinary care for dependent pets, or leave to care for sick animals, and so on. I think perhaps I draw the line at a tax break for dependent pets, but only until we restructure our tax system to tax the wealthy and no one else. Then, I'd be fine with it, and I would certainly list my two cats along with my son as dependents.

I'm sure I have more to say, but that's all I can think of at the moment. Let the comments begin. (I mean, really. Let them begin. Delurk.)

UPDATE: Just as I went to post this, I noticed that Brit Girl had also posted something on this topic. There is good conversation afoot!