The recession is posing new challenges for work family advocates.  In the current economic climate, what’s the role for work family advocacy?  It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this is a time to hunker down, to focus on basics, to wait until the economy improves to address work and family needs. 

But that’s the wrong conclusion.  The flexibility to meet family needs is not a “frill.”  It’s core to workers’ job security.

In October, the US unemployment rate topped 10 percent for the first time since 1983.  (In my home state of Michigan, the rate exceeds 15 percent.)  Payroll employment has fallen by more than 7 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.  In percentage terms, that represents a loss of one out of every 20 jobs in this country – much steeper even than the losses we experienced in the back-to-back recessions of the early 1980s.  Nearly one in ten mortgages is at least a month in arrears.  Many workers’ retirement accounts have taken devastating hits.

Whether or not they’ve personally experienced job loss, working families feel the pervasive sense of insecurity.

Combine pervasive insecurity with inflexible workplaces, and the result is an environment in which a family illness or childcare breakdown confronts workers with impossible choices.  Some will lose their jobs.  Others will be forced to act in ways that jeopardize the physical well-being of the people they love – leaving a sick child home alone, for example. Add pandemic flu into the mix, and inflexibility becomes a threat to the public health.

When workers win more flexibility to meet their family needs, they also win more job security.  As union activists, we need to continue to educate, agitate, organize and bargain for family-friendly workplaces.

Linda Ewing
Director, Research Department, UAW
LEARN WorkFamily Advisory Committee Member