Mothers Unite!: Organizing for Workplace Flexibility and the Transformation of Family Life

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American Mothers, American Troubles

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, a young woman named Michelle joined the law firm of Sidley Austin in Chicago, where she specialized in corporate transactions. The job offered more than an introduction to the complex world of legal analysis and maneuvering. When a handsome young summer associate came to work there, it took her only a little while to realize that she had met her romantic match.

With a partner whom she eventually married at her side, Michelle saw her career begin to rise as she moved on to challenging new opportunities. In 1991, after leaving Sidley, Michelle went to work for the Chicago mayor’s office; there she helped promote urban economic development in underserved neighborhoods. She then moved on to the Chicago Transit Authority to become head of the citizens’ advisory board. Later, she ran the nonprofit organization Public Allies, which trained young people for careers in public service by helping them secure internships. Following that experience, she went to the University of Chicago, taking a job in student services and initiating a new community-based program in order to enhance city-college interactions. By 2005, she had become vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

These career moves all ended in 2007, when the handsome young associate with whom she had fallen in love years ago at Sidley Austin—a man named Barack Obama—decided to run for president. With two young daughters, Malia, born in 1998, and Sasha, born in 2001, Michelle took a leave of absence from her job to help her husband campaign. When he became president, she permanently quit her paid job and declared her new employment intention to be mom in chief to her daughters.¹

Michelle Obama’s story is, in many ways, a common one: that of the modern American middle-class mother. Each part of her tale resonates with some trace of who we were in the past and who we are now. That is, some of us can relate to the young woman, fresh out of school, trying to make a name for herself in the competitive professional world. Others are drawn to her quest to fulfill her true passions, whether they be in the corporate or nonprofit world. Still others focus on, ponder, celebrate, and critique her decision to devote herself to her family in recent years by dropping out of the paid labor force.

Perhaps, though, what is most compelling about Michelle’s story is that it is intriguing not only because of these distinct parts of her life but also because of the compelling push and pull of the forces that emerged over the complete trajectory of her evolution as a modern woman. She faced decisions that many middle-class mothers must confront as they experience the birth and then the numerous stages of their children’s development. When, exactly, should they have children? If they are working, how much time should they take off? Should they even return to the paid workforce at all? If they do return to work, who will take care of their children? Can they even afford not to work? What is the best arrangement for them, their families, and their children? How do they know that they have made the right decisions?

What is also compelling about Michelle Obama’s life course is that it truly mixes the complex reality of personal and public decision making regarding if and how mothers pursue paid work in the United States. In this context, personal decision making means the range of individual choices mothers have within their reach about the future of their lives. Clearly, mothers make decisions about their educational and occupational pursuits all the time. With more resources at their disposal, such as a higher socioeconomic status and networking connections, many mothers have a broader array of choices that they can pursue. They can work in a demanding field, work part time, or not work for pay at all. They can purchase services that help them manage their lives, services such as high-quality child care and housekeeping assistance. Yet their stress levels may still behigh. Isolation, if they elect to stay at home, and feelings of being overwhelmed by paid work and family responsibilities, if they remain employed, are commonplace among this group of mothers.

Mothers with fewer resources on hand still have the ability to make personal decisions about paid work, but their choices are much more limited. Because they earn lower wages, staying at home with their children may not be financially possible. The jobs that they hold are likely to have few, if any, benefits and to require unpredictable or irregular hours. On the other hand, since child care costs are likely to be proportionately very high if they were to work in a low-wage job, staying at home might be the only option that they have. They would then need to rely on a partner, other family members, or public benefits in order to pay their bills. For these mothers, then, psychological, emotional, and physical strains can quickly emerge under the best of conditions.

Regardless of socioeconomic status, most mothers still struggle with whether the arrangement that they have ultimately established is most suitable for their families. Guilt on all sides runs rampant. Yet all of these mothers’ arrangements are debated by media pundits in a very different way under the label of the Mommy Wars. In this oversimplistic narration, personal decisions about a mother’s level of paid labor force participation are not complex all. Instead, they are made by one-dimensional characters who believe either that working for pay is better or that staying at home is better. Anyone who makes a decision that does not mirror her own is a bad mother.

While mothers with many and those with limited resources are both able to exercise a certain degree of personal autonomy over the structure of their work and family lives—and the media’s portrayal of the Mommy Wars almost exclusively focuses on these individual choices—it is important to recognize that public decision making can also expand or contract the scope of power they have over the nature of the paid work options they face as well. In this context, public decision making pertains to the range of opportunities and actions offered by firms, organizations, and all levels of government that can influence individuals’ lives. These can include critical initiatives in the form of child care options, health care benefits, and other types of employee assistance. However, in this book I am concerned with one central aspect of public decision making as it affects mothers’ opportunities in particular: workplace flexibility policy. And I ask a series of fundamental questions related to the potential for political activism to emerge on this issue: do women want to come together to build a new mothers’ movement on behalf of promoting more flexible work options? Can they? Should they?

What Are Workplace Flexibility Policies?

Simply put, workplace flexibility policies are any initiatives that provide workers with options regarding the structure of their work lives. More concretely, workplace flexibility can be broken down into three critical areas: flexible work arrangements; time-off options; and career exit, maintenance, and reentry pathways.²

Flexible work arrangements represent the first component of workplace flexibility. When these options are in place, employees exercise some control over the timing of their work day, their location of work, or both. Concrete examples include the provision of alternative work schedules (i.e., nontraditional start and end times or compressed workweeks) and advanced knowledge of overtime possibilities, predictable scheduling, and defined break schedules. Part-time work, job shares, or part-year work are also part of flexible work arrangements. Last, workers may also have the opportunity to work at home or at an alternative location. Research has consistently shown the benefits to workers of these policies. For example, employees are more likely to be engaged and satisfied with their jobs when they are granted these new options to manage their work time.³ Flexibility can also substantially decrease stress and burnout among workers and can actually improve concrete measures of physical health, such as lowering cholesterol levels. Health outcomes are thought to improve because workers have a greater sense of control over how their lives are scheduled in their totality.⁴ Finally, employees are likely to have lower degrees of work-family conflict and an increased sense of work-family balance, possibly also because of their enhanced autonomy over the management of their time.⁵

Time-off options represent the second element of workplace flexibility. Guaranteed short-term time off, for example, provides workers with the ability to properly respond to planned or unplanned events. Examples include attending a child’s school event, taking care of a personal illness, and addressing the illness of a loved one or a medical or home emergency. Also under this category are both episodic time off to handle recurring appointments or life issues (medical treatments, community service, advanced education) and extended time off to deal with an issue that lasts longer than five days but less than one year (taking care of a child or loved one, having a severe health issue, serving in the military). Shorter time off is beneficial for all workers, but especially for those working in low-wage jobs; those on the bottom rungs of the employment ladder in particular have little room in which to adjust their schedules to meet their own as well as their families’ medical needs.⁶ Of course, for longer periods of time off, the United States has in place the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave for workers in organizations with fifty or more employees. For those workers who do qualify, this leave, and probably leaves like it, enable mothers to return to their jobs without significant wage and career advancement penalties.⁷

Career exit, maintenance, and reentry pathways represent the last component of workplace flexibility. Workers use these policies to either decelerate or accelerate their careers when confronted with severe or time-consuming changes in their lives, such as new caretaking responsibilities or health care needs.⁸ Examples of exit and maintenance strategies would be opportunities for part-time work and continued education. Reentry pathways would include employer initiatives such as the active recruitment of those workers who may have been out of the workforce for a significant period or the creation of job fairs in areas where underrepresented workers live. These types of policies are especially important to mothers, who may prefer working part time to not working at all. Mothers also might have substantial gaps in their résumés if they have taken months or years off to raise their children.⁹

While there are clear benefits to employees from having workplace flexibility, research has documented significant gains to employers as well. More specifically, workplace flexibility options are central to attracting the best possible talent to a set of jobs.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, good workers want to be where such options are offered, valued, and supported. By extending such options, employers gain employees who are more committed to their work and, hopefully, are therefore able to retain them for longer periods of time. This retention is essential because the cost of finding new employees can be excessively high. Implementing advertising strategies, deploying headhunters, using human resource managers, and retaining relocation-assistance consultants can all cost firms significant resources. It makes sense, therefore, for firms to try to avoid these expenses. Indeed, research has documented that companies tend to retain strong talent when they create specialized initiatives that assist mothers who are temporarily leaving work and planning to return a short time later.¹¹

Employers also obviously care about absenteeism. Without dependable workers able to execute the tasks of their jobs on a daily basis, firms suffer in terms of their bottom line. This can be especially true for small companies, for which any missing worker can cause a disproportionate impact on productive output. While workers can be absent for various significant reasons, happiness and a sense of well-being at their place of employment can prevent unnecessary days off. Again, here, too, it makes sense for employers to be attentive to the workplace environment. Indeed, several studies have indicated that firms that offer more flexibility options have lower rates of absenteeism than those that do not.¹²

Yet American work culture is difficult to change, and employers have vocalized concerns about these policies.¹³ Many supervisors have grown up in a context in which all their employees are expected to be ideal workers, dedicated and available to their jobs 100 percent of the time.¹⁴ Believing in this ideal-worker ideology, these employers fear the reactions of their customer base should their workers not be physically present on a consistent, traditional basis. Some types of jobs may be ill suited for flexibility, for example, when employees must work as a team on a similar schedule toward a common goal. Furthermore, there are employers who are afraid of employee abuse of these new options and of their inability to properly monitor worker activities. Small businesses in particular may be wary of any type of time-off policies or worker exit and reentry policies because of the costs they might face in either holding jobs for these employees or in training new workers.

These fears are reflected in the relatively low levels of flexibility employers currently offer their employees. According to the 2008 Study of Employers by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to generating research about the modern, changing workplace, employers vary to an extraordinary extent in what they are willing to consider offering in terms of flexibility. For example, concerning flexible work arrangements, while 79 percent of employers allow at least some of their employees to vary their start and stop times, only 23 percent permit employees to work at home for part of the day. Likewise, for time-off options, 73 percent of employers permit some of their employees to take time off during the day to attend to personal matters, without pay, but only 47 percent allow their workers to engage in voluntary work during the work day. Finally, with respect to career exit, maintenance, and reentry, 74 percent of employers consent to some of their employees taking paid or unpaid leave to improve their educational level or skill set, but only 38 percent will provide some of their employees with a sabbatical from work (six months or more) and a guarantee to return to a comparable job.¹⁵ It is critical to note that these statistics also reflect employers’ reporting that they offer these benefits to some of their employees. When employers are asked if these options are offered to all or most of their employees, these numbers drop dramatically. Overall, these statistics demonstrate that there is clearly room for a dramatic expansion in workplace flexibility options for the great majority of American workers.

It is also important to note that to the extent that flexibility exists, it is primarily a benefit for workers with higher levels of education. This is true for several reasons. First, employers frequently view flexibility as a form of compensation, and thus the higher the level of education an employee has (and therefore the higher the level of his or her pay), the more likely that worker is to receive flexibility. Second, employers often have concerns about giving lower-wage workers flexibility due to fear of increased management costs. For example, in the retail or food sectors, personnel must be reliably on hand to meet the needs of a steady stream of consumers. When workers have flexibility, supervisors need to expend extra effort in making sure that schedules are covered. Overall, though, regardless of a particular employee’s level of education, workplace flexibility is clearly not a possibility for sizeable numbers of American workers.¹⁶

In addition to differences in who are actually offered these policies, there are disparities in policy uptake. On this point, studies have shown that men and women use flexibility policies at different rates. While there are many similarities between men and women—for example, research has shown that at incomes lower than $25,000 men and women use flextime at about the same rate—at higher levels of income, the sexes diverge. More specifically, men are more likely to use flextime when family incomes range from $25,000 to $74,999; interestingly, women assume higher rates at family income levels at $75,000 and above.¹⁷ Other scholarship suggests that men and women use flexibility policies at the same rate when they are childless or have adult children, but that women are more likely to use a subset of them such as job sharing, telecommuting, part-time work, and flextime when there are young children present in the home.¹⁸

While flexibility might be offered on paper, workers might be hesitant to use it. In fact, there is a strong work culture that promotes the notion of the ideal worker in the United States; this is the type of employee referred to earlier, heavily committed to her job and available to her supervisors twenty-four hours a day.¹⁹ So, companies may have both formal and informal policies that supposedly encourage flexibility, but workers may fear using them if they perceive that they will encounter some type of harm to their career in doing so, such as pay and promotion penalties. Flexibility policies must be viewed by workers as usable, without any supervisor retribution, for them to be helpful, but the reality is that many workers shy away from even broaching the topic within their organizations.²⁰

But what if mothers could come together as a unified group and demand flexibility? In this book I examine the interesting phenomenon of women joining the largest and most influential mothers’ organizations in the United States, groups that, although presenting different approaches to the issue of workplace flexibility, all implicitly or explicitly endorse it. Not surprisingly, groups with a higher percentage of mothers who work for pay tend to stress in their policy positions an activist role for firms and the government regarding workplace flexibility, while groups with more stay-at-home mothers tend to advocate more individual responsibility in establishing satisfactory work-life arrangements. Despite these public positions, however, little is known about group members’ true opinions on this critical employment issue. The puzzle that I seek to solve is whether support for workplace flexibility as a general principle can unite members across these divergent groups, potentially creating a viable mothers’ movement. If so, all these groups can then become vehicles for mobilizing action as they strive to make the lives of all American mothers more productive, sustainable, and meaningful over time.

Why Study Mothers Organizing in the United States?

The groups that are the focus of this study include Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS), Mocha Moms, Mothers & More, the National Association of Mothers’ Centers (NAMC), and MomsRising. Each group will be described in detail over the course of the next several chapters. First, however, it is important to lay out the proper contextual foundation for studying them. There are two main issues at stake: why this book focuses on mothers rather than both fathers and mothers, and why it examines mothers’ groups in particular rather than parents’ groups.

Workplace flexibility clearly affects both parents—mothers and fathers—and their ability to lead happy, satisfying lives. And undoubtedly, fathers have become more involved in raising their children over time, making workplace flexibility a critical issue for them as well. However, biology still demands that mothers carry children during pregnancy, and a significant number of mothers want to breastfeed after their babies are born. These realities require that mothers remain with their children for an extensive period after birth. Moreover, although fathers are contributing greater levels of care to their children, mothers still carry the disproportionate burden of responsibility in this area even after the breastfeeding years are over. On average between 2005 and 2009, for example, while fathers spent 1.22 hours a day doing household chores, mothers spent 1.98 hours. Mothers also spent 1.24 hours a day on helping and caring for household members, including children, in contrast to .87 hours a day for fathers.²¹ With family demands more predominantly experienced by them, then, mothers are more likely than fathers to press for change in the area of workplace flexibility. It is for these reasons that I examine mothers rather than both parents as agents of transformation in the realm of workplace flexibility. I also focus on mothers’ groups in particular rather than parents’ groups as the locus of such change. And why? Collective action in the form of group initiatives drives the restructuring of life in American politics. But notably, mothers more frequently than fathers organize in American politics in their role as parents. In fact, mothers organizing with one another on behalf of shared goals has a rich history across the American political landscape.²² In some cases, their campaigns have been very loud and visible, while in other cases, their mobilizing efforts have been more quiet and behind the scenes.

What were the largest and most geographically expansive mothers’ groups that preceded those studied in this book?²³ And what can be learned from them in their attempts to effect policy change? In the nineteenth century, a number of groups formed with the aim of helping both mothers and children confront the health and education issues of the day. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) was started