Work and family agenda faces tough climate

Strong public support
To activists, the Election Day result in Milwaukee was a measure of the strong public support for work/family measures. The sick-day proposal was opposed by Mayor Tom Barrett and the city’s Association of Commerce, but it passed overwhelmingly with 69 percent support.

Milwaukee businesses with 11 or more employees will now have to provide nine paid sick days per year for full-time workers. Smaller businesses will have to provide five paid sick days.

The Association of Commerce intends to challenge the new law in court.

“This ordinance sends a strong message that Milwaukee is not open for businesses and is a huge red flag for any company looking to locate business or jobs here,” said the association’s president, Tim Sheehy.

However, the alliance that promoted the ordinance had some business executives in its ranks, including Margaret Henningsen, a vice president of Legacy Bank, which she and two colleagues founded in 1999 to serve inner-city neighborhoods.

She says her bank, with many mothers among its 37 employees, has thrived by offering generous family-friendly benefits including paid sick days.

“We’ve always tried to work with our employees when they need time off — it’s almost punitive not to pay them,” Henningsen said. “If they know they’re not going to lose that money, they’ll be loyal to the company. ... They don’t abuse it.”

More working mothers
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, who co-founded the grassroots, Internet-based group MomsRising three years ago, says policy-makers need to push harder for family-friendly workplace practices reflecting the fact that three-quarters of mothers now work.

“Our labor policies haven’t caught up,” she said. “Kids and mothers are falling through the cracks, and in a time of economic crisis the pressures will only get worse.”

Beth Wolter of Lakewood, Colo., a mother of four, is now a municipal employee whose job often brings her in touch with hard-pressed working parents. But she remembers her own struggles as a single mother, starting out with a public service job while raising three small children.

“In my first year, I didn’t get sick leave,” she recalled. “My kids got every illness under the sun. I nearly lost my job, constantly calling in — I was missing two, three days a week, not getting paid.... I had to beg them to keep me on.”

She says many parents are now in similar plights.

“You have three kids who get chicken pox, one after the other, and you have to take off that time,” Wolter said. “If you leave the kids alone, you get accused of neglect. But pretty soon, you hear, ‘We’re going to have to let you go.’”

Fired for being ill
While working mothers are the focus of the work/family campaign, working fathers — and single people — also are playing a part.

Asha Carter, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, became active in the paid-sick-day campaign in part because of her indignation at being fired from a temporary job at an auto parts plant when she was seriously ill one day and came in late.

“It’s a problem for singles, working parents, low-wage workers, everybody — it’s universal,” said Carter, 23, who’s majoring in women’s studies and hopes to serve in the Peace Corps.

The business community’s opposition to the Milwaukee sick day ordinance — and the wariness in New Jersey and Washington state over paid family leave — suggests that any upcoming attempt to pass federal mandates will meet with strong opposition as long as the economy is ailing.

Some workplace experts are urging apprehensive employers to consider cost-neutral or cost-saving options that would provide employees with more schedule flexibility so they can better tend to family needs.

“If a company sees its revenue down, it could start with voluntary part-time work — people reducing their hours to 90 percent, 80 percent,” said Kathleen Christensen, who directs the Workplace, Work Force and Working Families program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

During the presidential campaign, Michelle Obama often talked about her personal interest in improving conditions for working families. She was a high-level administrator at the University of Chicago Medical Center before taking leave to help her husband’s campaign, and has identified work/family balance as one of a handful of issues atop her priority list as first lady.

Ellen Bravo, the Milwaukee author/activist, hopes to see other signals from the Obama White House.

“I hope the administration has more people who have a real family life — maybe have a high-level office that’s a job share,” Bravo said. “They’d be making a statement that you don’t have to give up your family to be in this administration.”

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