Unpaid caregiving work is everybody's business
This post is not about municipal politics. But you should still read it.
A recent Linkedin post by the Library of Parliament recognized the important work of caregivers and highlighted the importance of offering workplace accommodations to employees with caregiving responsibilities:
Discrimination based on family status was my very first experience of the job market. I had graduated from law school in 1999 at age 26, pregnant with my third child. A year later, I was interviewing for a federal MP in Hull who told me: “Why would I hire you? Your children are going to get sick, you’ll miss a ton of work. You might get pregnant again…” This interview was life-changing. I realized that if I joined the workforce, I would always be accountable to an older man on the way I raised my children. Someone would be in a position to question whether my kids were sick enough to stay home, or whether I should stick with an inadequate childcare provider. I would always be watching my back, assessing my family’s footprint on someone’s bottom line. This didn’t seem fair to my children or to me. I decided to become a stay-at-home mom and that’s where I was for most of 25 years. Now 50 years-old with 9 children and a divorce under my belt, I am at the start of my career, trying to wrangle the lack of agency that comes with an entry-level job with the supersized demands of children with special needs, and the attitude of a middle-aged woman who has been her own boss for most of her life.
My observation from 20 years ago about being accountable to an older man for the way I raise my children turned out to be only partially true. I have worked for two men and two women in my short career and the men were far more accommodating than the women. I encountered a lot of accommodation fatigue at the City of Ottawa before my position was eliminated by my (female) boss. I have strong opinions about workplace accommodations based on caregiving responsibilities.
Workplace accommodations based on family status is a touchy topic. Our culture remains deeply patriarchal. While women are now protected against gender-based discrimination, they overwhelmingly take the brunt of discrimination based on family status. Women are closing the gap on pay parity as long as they can do the same job at the same level of performance as their male counterparts. When caregiving responsibilities prevent women from performing at work, their poor performance is cited as the reason why they are not advancing in their careers, not the crushing burden of unpaid caregiving work.
The need to offer workplace accommodations to people suffering from physical or mental limitations is generally accepted. Where it is not, employment standards legislation and Common Law have long established the duty to accommodate employees to the point of “undue hardship.” When it comes to limitations placed by unpaid caregiving work, the equation is flipped and we expect caregivers to accommodate the workplace to a point of undue hardship: workplace accommodations are often granted on a temporary basis in reaction to a crisis. We continue to view family obligations as a personal choice and their accommodations as an unfair advantage given to parents.
My workplace allows me to flex my time to go pick up my children at school midday, as long as I work an hour later in the evening. While I truly appreciate the flexibility, it is not an accommodation: it merely pushes the toothpaste to a different part of the tube. It allows me to displace the neglect of my caregiving responsibilities from a time when it is not permitted (school pick up) to a time when it is (supper time). If I had a physical or mental health condition that required an hour of treatment every day, the hour would be covered with no other expectation than a medical accommodation form.
This stings because the need to accommodate caregiving responsibilities at work is nothing but the result of our failure to properly fund and support professional caregiving work. The time I take to pick up my children at school is the cost of unavailable childcare. The time I take to get to and from an eye appointment is the cost of poor transit. The time I take to wait at an urgent care clinic for routine healthcare is the cost of not having a family doctor. The strain this puts on my work is directly related to our unwillingness to pay for more clinics, more healthcare providers, and better transit. Caregivers are not cutting corners at work, they are filling in the corners that we continue to tear in the social fabric when we demand low taxes and stable services in a time of increasing need.
When the industries that permit women to work fail due to poor working conditions, low pay, or program cuts, natural caregivers pick up the slack, often with minutes of warning. Their poor performance is everyone’s poor performance.
As someone with caregiving responsibilities, what would I like to see in the workplace?
👏 A recognition that while things have gone back to normal in many industries post-COVID, they are still far from normal in the industries that allow women to work such as childcare, education and transit, including school buses. This has a direct impact on women’s ability to show up and stay at work.
👏 A recognition that COVID-19 public health measures have caused an unprecedented youth mental health crisis and that parents are the front line workers of this pandemic. What does a youth mental health crisis look like for a parent? It looks like hospital visits in the dead of night, police and child protection involvement, psychiatric follow ups, outpatient services with long waitlists and inconvenient schedules, travel to and from appointments, isolation from friends and family, and a deep emotional exhaustion that impacts their cognition and judgment. It also looks like a lot of absenteeism from school and work.
👏 A recognition that empathy fatigue among colleagues and managers working with caregivers is real and reflected in poor performance reviews. HR departments should be wise to the fact that caregiving responsibilities not only affect an employee's performance but also their colleagues’ and managers’ perception of their performance. In other words, our poor societal acceptance of caregiving responsibilities may make a parent’s job performance look worse due to empathy fatigue.
On International Women’s Day I attended a breakfast where the City’s first female General Manager Wendy Stephanson gave an address. I love Wendy. I tried to start a campaign to fire all the men and have Wendy Stephanson and Donna Gray — the City’s General Manager of Community and Social Services — appointed as Mayor and City Manager but democracy got in the way. Wendy concluded her remarks by noting that when she was born her mother had to quit her job, reminding us of how much progress we had made. Yes Wendy, women can be GMs. But we still quit our jobs when we become mothers, hamstrung by the same societal expectations that stopped our mothers in their tracks. Only today, we make the decision ourselves.
What we have gained in agency, we have lost in visibility and recognition.
Have you read Other Feminisms? I think you might like it. https://open.substack.com/pub/otherfeminisms?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android