Work-Life Balancing Act? Congress Says 'No' on Safety Net

Close your eyes and picture the typical home-and-work high-wire act. For most of us it looks like this: a harried mom of two (or one, or three) coming in the house, bags of groceries in both arms, throwing off a suit jacket, peeling kids off her shins, checking her BlackBerry, trying not to let the pasta water boil over, and promising the report will get finished just as soon as the kids are asleep, dammit.

To complete many such pictures, there is often another acrobat in the picture: an equally overworked man also trying to balance it all.

Fact: The number of dual-income households has skyrocketed. Women now make up slightly more than half of the working population (compared to just one-third of it in the 1960s.) Today women are the main breadwinners in four in 10 families.

But as fantastic as it is to have more women in the workplace (and no one is arguing that it's not), our increasing and inevitable presence at the office has set up an often-unworkable equation at home. Kathleen E. Christenson, founder and director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's working families program, pointed out at a New America Foundation conference on workplace flexibility last week that though once it was two jobs, two adults (one for housework/childcare and the other the breadwinner) the new equation amounts to three jobs; two full-time breadwinners and the same amount of housework/child care. Everyone feels the pinch.

"The result is that, even if there is complete gender equity -- and probably in most families there is not -- there is one and one-half jobs per adult. The demands outstrip the resources. There is a structural problem," said Christenson. "Single-earner families have an even harder time."

All of which means that work-life balance (that awful phrase!) isn't just a woman's issue. Hasn't been for a long time. And flexible work scenarios are no longer about making grudging accommodations for women who dare to have a family and a job. A Time magazine and Rockefeller Foundation poll from last fall showed the majority of Americans believe that flexibility would help them be more productive in both realms of their lives. Eighty-five percent of Americans believe that businesses that fail to adapt will lose their best workers.

It's not just about child care (though, let's face it, child care is a tough one). It's about families searching for a way to find balance. The polling data show men and women want later start times, telecommuting and teleworking options, compressed work weeks.

The Obamas moved to recognize the issue, hosting a Forum on Work Life Balance back in March. At the event, the president urged Americans to see this as a gender-less problem -- and embraced telecommuting and mobile work options. (Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, noted dryly, however, that as great as the conference was, the White House also chose that day to announce an expansion of new offshore drilling, effectively burying this full-day conference in the news cycle.)

The New America conference last week was a bit of an "OK, what now?" moment. For all the new energy around the issue, Congress doesn't appear to be paying close attention to this massive social shift. "Flexible policies make employees more, not less, productive," Katie Corrigan, director of Georgetown University Law Center's Workplace Flexibility 2010, told the crowd. And yet, she noted, there is a "disconnect" between the reality of flexible work and the legislation on the ground. The Telework Improvements Act, which would have allowed federal employees to work from a remote location for 20 percent of their hours over a two-week period, was voted down by the House of Representatives the first week of May. Its unfortunate demise showed politicians aren't nearly as in sync with their constituents as these conferences would have you hope for. Almost makes you wonder, as Corrigan pointed out, whether they find it all "frivolous."

The Telework Improvements Act flew under the radar for a lot of us -- it would have affected only federal workers -- but as the blog Undress for Success noted: "The Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost $30 million to implement the bill over a five-year period. But when a snowstorm costs $71 million a day in lost government productivity" -- because there are no mechanisms in place for employees to work from home -- "it's hard to imagine why the bill was nixed. About 5 percent of government workers telecommute regularly, but 61 percent could." Based on their Telework Savings Calculator, if workers worked from home just one day every other week, as required by the bill, "the government would gain an increase in productivity by over $2 billion a year; save $6.2 billion in real estate, electricity, and related costs; and save $10 billion in absenteeism and employee turnover expenses." Altogether, party politics cost the treasury $15 billion.

Teleworking isn't perfect –--I know, I do it. I've got a two-bedroom apartment and a less-than-ideal child-care situation, in which I'm in hiding from the baby while I write, leaving her with a babysitter (whom she loves, thank God!) in the living room. But I know I'm lucky. I've got no commute, and while exhausting, I can finish my work after bedtime and if something goes awry during the day or I'm just missing the baby, I can pop out and see her. Any work-kid scenario can be hard. And yet, without a newsroom to go to, I've gotten as much or more work done this month -- this week -- as ever.

But if Congress can't grant federal workers the right to telework, even after the massive snowstorms brought D.C. to a halt this past winter, how are we going to win more family-friendly legislation?

"There is a big, huge disconnect between what people want and need . . . and how this is perceived as not a campaign issue," said Corrigan. "This is too big an issue not to be bipartisan. When you think about what it would take to move the workplace, and to adapt to these new realities, it will not be a one-shot solution. There is not one piece of legislation, no one, perfect business practice; this really does take a big push from multiple sectors -- the public sector . . . the private sector. . . and someone to capture the will of the people."