First, Work

At a June 23, 2000, conference on “Work and Family Issues” sponsored by the Industrial Relations Research Association, Susan Green, a U.S. Labor Department official, announced that the Clinton Administration supports the Family and Medical Leave Act largely because the law can help “to increase the labor force attachment of parents.” Well, now we know.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote articles and testified before Congress in support of what became in 1993 the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows certain employees (primarily those in firms of 50 or more workers) up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to care for newly born or newly adopted children, or to care for seriously ill family members. I believed then, and still believe, that employed parents deserve the legal right to time off to be with newborn children. My main complaint was that the bill did not go far enough. Twelve weeks is almost nothing. Six months struck me as a more realistic starting point. And for parents who want to take more time off - say, from six months to five years - I wanted policy makers to promote options such as part-time work, job sharing, graduated re-entry following parental leave, and job training credits and job preferences (not guarantees) for parents returning from longer-term leaves. Finally, I favored a one-time doubling or tripling of the child’s dependent exemption in the federal tax code during the year of birth or adoption, so that new parents would enjoy a modest “baby bonus” that would make it financially possible for more parents to stay home for longer periods of the baby’s early life.

But none of these changes or supplements to the 1993 law have been adopted or even seriously considered, for two reasons, one obvious and the other less so. Each of them would cost money and most of them would require greater government regulation of the private sector. That’s the obvious reason. The less obvious - until now - reason is that the Clinton Administration wants to go in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of empowering new parents seeking to reduce their commitment to the paid labor force, the Administration explicitly seeks a policy that will “increase the labor force attachment of parents.”

In her presentation, Susan Green spells it out quite plainly. Take your 12-weeks-or-less to do things like “figure out what to do with respect to child care,” then go back to work. That’s the whole point. That’s why the Clinton Administration, looking at the growing revenues in state unemployment insurance funds, recently proposed that states use some of this money to provide partially paid leaves of up to 12 weeks. What about using this or other money to permit longer leaves, or to encourage other workplace reforms that would enhance family time? Don’t hold your breath. As Ms. Green makes clear, the Administration’s core goal is not family policy at all, in the sense of policy aimed at supporting family life. Their primary goal is workplace policy - specifically, a back-to-work-quickly policy for new parents.

Here’s my new rule of thumb. Whenever I hear someone proposing a “work-family” policy, I’m going to find out which comes first, work or family. Is the underlying vision to free up workers to be better parents, or to free up parents to be better workers? Is full-time parental care of young children viewed essentially as a good thing, worthy of recognition and even support, or as a bad thing, slightly embarrassing, and therefore to be reduced to a bare minimum through social stigma and financial disincentives? Most work-family spokespeople today - with the exception of Susan Green, who is at least consistent - rhetorically embrace family while substantively embracing work.

In most of Europe, I am told by scholars who follow these matters, the “work first” approach, aiming explicitly to “increase the labor force attachment of parents” and thereby institutionalize through law the two-earner family, is so dominant that any alternative is not even part of the discussion. Meanwhile in the U.S., if Democrats have so clearly adopted a pro-corporate, every-parent-at-work strategy, what about a pro-child, give-parents-a-choice alternative from the Republicans? Don’t hold your breath. As I’ve tried to show in previous letters, Republican leaders are increasingly devoted to that version of supply-side economic theory in which any adult not in the labor force, including a mother at home with her baby, is viewed as a drag on the economy, something very close to a social problem. There is virtually no difference today between Democrats and Republican on this issue. First, work.

First published Summer 2000.