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Fiona Stewart

"Family Friendly Workplace Gone Mad"

The Age

August 16, 2001

Social engineering or progressive industrial reform? The move by the Australian Catholic University to provide one year's paid maternity leave to female staff is being heralded as a breakthrough in women's rights to parent and work at the same time.

But while the ACTU may think the university has set welcome new standards for family friendly work practices, there are more than a few women who would disagree.

And with male staff at the same institution to receive only three weeks' leave, it might take more than chaos theory or religious doctrine to explain this university's real agenda.

Ulterior motives aside, the point for childless and/or child-free women is that the whole family-friendliness debate is way out of control.

The family-friendly discourse seems the great delineator of "the haves" from "the have-nots". And being a "have-not" makes you automatically a second-class citizen.

At least this is the argument of American writer and journalist Elinor Burkett in her new book The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless. The question for us in Australia is: does she have a point?

For at least two decades now, family-friendly measures have been at the core of women's demands for the workplace. Paid maternity leave, work-based child care and parental flexitime have served as the bargaining chips - chips that have been intended to make women's lives that little bit easier.

And in light of men's resistance to doing any more on the domestic front, who can blame mothers for wanting the employer - and often the taxpayer - to pick up where husbands and boyfriends will not?

But encouraging women to combine kids and the job, at the expense of childless and child-free women, seems the wrong answer.

If you need convincing, just ask child-free women (and men) how they feel about shouldering the burden when "the haves" need time out for child-related concerns.

Ask them, too, how they feel about their inability to get the same time off for that book that is crying out to be written. Or for that Nepalese "I need to find myself" trek of discovery.

Like child bearing/rearing, both these activities have little significance to other people. Like child bearing/rearing, both are intensely personal yet potentially socially rewarding.

Burkett makes these points. "I'm sick and tired of being penalised for keeping my procreative instincts in check," she writes. "I'm weary of politicians who cast their `family-friendly' initiatives as pro-woman, conveniently ignoring the reality that 20 per cent of baby boomer women are childless by choice, and that our younger sisters and daughters are foregoing child-rearing at an even greater rate. And I'm impatient with hearing parents defend their privilege on the grounds that they are raising our collective future."

While Burkett goes to some lengths to say she is not "some monster indifferent to the plight of parents struggling to make ends meet while raising their kids", she does stand her ground. In doing so, she speaks for an increasing number of women in the industrialised world.

And her arguments are good ones. Who, for example, picks up the projects and clients of a woman who decides to have a baby? It is rare indeed for employers - especially in the private sector - to hire short-term replacement staff to carry the load. Instead, from law offices to architecture practices and dot-com companies, the workload baton is passed - not to outsiders, but to fellow workers who are already overloaded.

It is passed, too, when mothers and fathers insist on schedules that accommodate their domestic needs. When this happens, as Burkett notes, "it is childless workers who are left languishing on night shift".

With tensions mounting between the haves and have-nots, the magnitude of the challenge for staff workers and the employer alike is clear. Who will shoulder the additional work burden? Will one year's paid leave be available to staff for other equally important pastimes? And if not, why not?

Burkett concludes that the "childless (and child-free) are the last sleeping giant of American interest politics, and we're in danger of awaking". Let's hope the same can be said for Australia, whether or not the ACU (and the ACTU) knows it.