I know what you’re thinking, because I had the same initial reaction, since I don’t regularly tune in to Congressional hearings either. But I encourage you to take a spin, because this turns out to be interesting, relevant testimony for all of us who work. Each statement is mercifully short. I found myself captivated by the simple human drama and the compelling logic of the facts and the stories that were told.
Two House representatives testified; one Republican (Judy Biggert-IL) and one Democrat (Rosa DeLauro, CT). The former explained why she favors addressing certain deficiencies of the Fair Labor Standards Act with the addition of a comp time option for private sector workers, and the latter advocated for the Healthy Families Act, legislation she has co-sponsored with Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to provide a minimum threshold of seven paid sick days for the 57 million American workers who do not currently have that basic right.
The Congresswomen are followed by representatives of three employers, two of whom have large, national (in one case, global) work forces. The other is a small but obviously enlightened employer (Marlin Steel Wire Products in Baltimore) which is in a very competitive market, struggling to recruit and retain dedicated employees, so goes the extra mile to keep them. Melissa Lindsay is a bookkeeper with Marlin, and her testimony describes what a great work environment she enjoys, which includes a family-friendly organizational culture that gives her the flexibility and support she needs to be a successful mother and wife as well as a hard worker. Marlin illustrates the point that you don’t have to be a large employer to look for ways to partner with your employees to achieve success at work and at home.
The two large employers are a study in contrasts. One is my alma mater, KPMG LLP, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. Barbara Wankoff, director of Workplace Solutions, testifies about the measurable impact of support for work-life effectiveness on productivity, recruitment, retention and the bottom line.
The second huge employer is Wal-Mart, described as the antithesis of family-friendly in the testimony of a former employee, an optician with two very young children with special needs who described herself as “pushed out” of employment at Wal-Mart by not one but a variety of people policies designed to cut benefit costs by forcing employees to choose between their job and their family, such as “open availability scheduling” and a highly punitive attendance policy. “They used to talk about family values, but they didn’t seem to actually care about family,” says Missy Quarberg in her testimony.
The sixth and final speaker is Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, of MomsRising.org, which she describes as a “new, fast-growing online grassroots organization that promotes and advocates for family-friendly polices, whose members are moms and everyone who has a mom.” She argues that it is time for our policies to catch up with the modern American family.
The testimony provided distills down to these core issues:
Of the 20 most competitive economies in the world, the U.S. stands conspicuously alone in not requiring the provision of any paid sick days to employees.
Only a few other countries out of 173 don’t provide any paid leave whatsoever for new mothers. Our peers with whom we share this distinction? -- Papua, New Guinea, Swaziland and Liberia.
To put it in numbers, about 57 million American workers do not currently have the basic right of taking a sick day with pay without fear of losing their job.
The largest single employer in the U.S. today may be actively reinforcing this uniquely American stance by penalizing employees for taking time off from work for medical, family or other personal reasons.
Ironically, the bottom line benefits of supporting workers in their work-life juggling act are shown time and again to be positive. Ask “employers of choice,” whose stock values outperform family-unfriendly publicly-held companies by 3-4 times.
If you care about seizing the opportunity to catch U.S. policies up to the modern American family, not to mention the threshold policies of the rest of the world, consider involvement in (or at least keeping your eye on) what’s going on in Congress. For starters, we need to ensure that this hearing does indeed become the first in a series, as Chairwoman Woolsey indicates. There is no mention of future dates, but the link takes you to a place where you can sign up for an informative newsletter.
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