My Meet the Press Minute

It started just like every Sunday morning, watching Meet the Press. I picked it up when David Gregory was getting into the Shriver Report, A Woman's Nation, with Valerie Jarrett (Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls) along with Maria Shriver and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress. This was an unexpected and welcome possibility, the second half of Meet the Press devoted to women's issues. Valerie acknowledged that by thanking David for devoting so much of the program to the topic.

However, it didn't take long for me to take off my woman hat and put on my business owner hat. Once I saw where this seemed to be going, I let out the deep sigh that over the past twenty-eight years has been reserved for the ongoing tangle of complex business issues that balance the privileges of ownership with its responsibilities.

It seems that our society is changing in ways we have already been experiencing but now are borne out in real numbers. We are fast approaching a time when women will outnumber men in the work force. Existing labor policies are outdated, according to the study, and reflect a time when breadwinners were predominantly men with a spouse at home. Now in most homes, single parent or otherwise, all available parents are working outside the home. So it is concluded that we need new, family friendly employee benefits such as paid family leave, flexible hours, and employers who are supportive of the complex pressures on working mothers, in particular, because we still seem to be at the point where mothers have more responsibility in the home, no matter if they do make more than their spouses.

Maria stated we can all agree that it is best if a parent is home when children get out of school at 3 pm, so flexible hours are in order. If a child is sick, the parent should be allowed paid time off, because no family can afford to give up paid work days to stay home with a sick child. And then there is the need for time off for elder care as well.

Let's flip the coin to the other side for a moment. So many small businesses have lost the battle with the tough economy, and others are hanging on doing the best they can with less income, perpetually rising costs, and increasing pressure from competitors who will do just about anything to wrestle away clients. My company's staff is lean and dedicated, most with years of longevity in our high stress industry, and I pride myself on being an understanding, fair and loyal employer. We have the standard policies but are always willing to listen to individual requests for time off due to family or personal concerns. But I cannot imagine how we could manage flexible work hours as a policy and still get our jobs done. What do I tell the client who calls at 3:45 PM asking for their manager or accounting contact? "I'm sorry, she has left to pick up her child from school." Who does the work of the employee who misses 2-5 days because her child is sick and then she gets sick as well? And if I am to be required to pay for those days off, how do I afford to pay whomever does that work during those days? It has been my experience that if you quietly allow one worker "mom" to come in early and leave early each day, you immediately have 5 more who want the same benefit. Obviously everyone can't work those flexible hours when your business operates on an 8-5 schedule, so now I have a morale problem, or perhaps even a discrimination claim from childless workers who feel they are being penalized by not being offered the same benefit. And if I give the unmarried male worker more responsibility and more pay because he has greater availability and is willing and able to put in the longer hours, I am accused of contributing to the problem of women being discriminated against in the workplace.

As a woman business owner, I am sensitive to the challenges of combining motherhood with career. I have done it all my life. We decided that my husband would quit his lawyer job while I built the business so that he could be home with our two young sons. It was tough financially for a long while but we felt the sacrifice was worth it. After our sons left home, my husband joined the business full-time. But I admit that it was frustrating to hear David Gregory get personal and state that this study was about his own life and family. He referred to his wife by name as a prominent trial attorney, suggesting that they both had demanding careers with three children and how challenging that could be. Instantly imagining what a prominent trial attorney and the moderator of NBC's Meet the Press must make in combined income, I somehow didn't feel his case was a fair reflection of the social issues being discussed considering they could probably afford a live-in nanny for each child. But I am being asked to accommodate families who, in some cases, choose two parent careers, even though they could afford to live on the income of one of those careers, which in theory could force the family of a small business owner into the necessity of two incomes due to the sheer cost of the requested workplace changes. There are millions of workers employed by small and medium size businesses that are not Chase Bank, for example, that apparently has $3.6 billion in third quarter profits to work with. Perhaps they can afford flexible schedules and paid family sick days. Most of us simply cannot.

And while I am being so politically incorrect as to challenge a study urging employers to accommodate the changing needs of women in the workplace, let me also have a go at health care. I don't have to offer health insurance to my employees, but I want to. I pay 75% of the employee coverage which has now ballooned to well over $300 per employee. It is a huge corporate expense to offer a decent plan to my workers. Annual increases have been staggering over the years but somehow my clients are not all that sympathetic when I ask for contract increases to offset the constantly growing costs. They have their own costs. So every year, the increases have to be absorbed.

Nothing would please me more than to offer the benefits recommended in the Shriver Report to all my employees, male and female. But somehow I feel at this point that it would be better to insure they continue to have jobs and not join the nearly 10% of the population who is unemployed. I can do that by remaining competitive, being a fair and decent employer, and caring about them as people. That is the best I can do for now. I sincerely hope that this national conversation will eventually include the rights and challenges of everyone in the workplace, including small business owners who collectively represent a significant portion of our country's employers and who struggle every day to be good at it.

 

 

Comments

[bluevase]

The idea is to squash small business. USA is only for big business, big banks -- you know, too big to fail. Every street in Europe has one small business after the other. They don't want Big Boxes over there.

[k k]

I don't quite get the argument of the author. Being a small business owner means being creative/flexible. Have you spoken to your employees and laid out options? Some people will do give and take - maybe less salary for health benefits? Work share, Blackberries, Skype? Does an employee have to be in the office to take that phone call from that client asking for the "manager or accounting contact"? What if that person quit or died? How would you answer the question then? No one works 24/7. Is there truly no one in the business who could answer the question? This also implies that you have customers that aren't happy with the "can person X give you a call back tomorrow" response.

It's amazing that with all the technology available small business owners insist that they can't move away from traditional ways of a running a business. Many laws don't apply to owners with less than 50 employees anyway , those employees understand what they are signing up. But why not, as a owner, work to either increase tax breaks, or push for a reduction in costs that would make it feasible for you to offer benefits? Instead of saying "people shouldn't ask for these things that I can't afford. They should be happy to have a job". If that job can't not help you take care of the very things having a job should help you take care of, it isn't much of a job is it?

[Ppossom]

Bravo!
Unfunded government mandates are destructive.

[RexOzone]

medicare for all and sundry.
we can afford to offend the conglomerates.
we're the U.S. ain't we?

[COPerez]

The real answer to these dilemmas is a change in how we see work in this country.

In Europe oftentimes you call in the afternoon and the product manager HAS gone home because he/she's on flexible hours. Or their child is sick. Many civilized countries - which our health care outcomes has already shown we are NOT a member of - have generous vacation, personal time, family leave benefits. Many people have never lost sight of the fact that we "work to live, not live to work."

There was a statistic from a few years ago that 25% of American workers don't take their vacation. NOT that they don't take all of their vacation, but that they take NO vacation at all even though they are eligible to. Several Europeans and Canadians that I know laughed out loud at that and asked what kind of fools were these people.

Indeed, what kind of fools are we?

[aacrane]

Amen to that! I wish I could afford paid time off for sick employees or their family members. And I wish I could afford to pay for their health benefits. And I wish that I had the income to pay all my bills! I guess the only good part is that I'm a "small business" and many of these proposed regulation haven't made it down to company's with less than 10 FT employees. But what happens when they do? My bottom line is negative for the second year in a row. Looking at the cost JUST for some version of mandatory health care coverage/sick day coverage/elder care coverage will either put me out of business or cost me an employee so that I can even attempt to pay for it. It shouldn't be so hard!