An Interview with Jody Heymann
By Gloria Tower and Judi Casey
Tower: The title of your book is Forgotten Families. What does the term "forgotten families" mean to you?
Heymann: The title comes from the realization that within the global work-family dialogue, many families have been utterly forgotten. While issues of working families have been much more readily considered in Europe, the US, and industrialized countries, we haven’t paid much attention to work-family concerns in the rest of the world.
Forgotten Families reports on global studies we conducted over the course of a decade. It includes survey data from 55,000 households in seven countries and five regions, in-depth interviews of 1,000 families in six countries and five regions, and examinations of public policies in over 170 countries. While research has been conducted previously in North America, Europe and comparatively across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this is the first study of its kind on a global scale.
Tower: Can you discuss what you refer to as the ‘perfect storm’ of shifts in globalization and how these shifts have altered the global working climate?
Heymann: The perfect storm refers to three simultaneous dynamics. Alone, each of these three events could have provided a moment of opportunity for global families, but together they have created enormous rifts.
The first is the dramatic changes in the global labor force. In every region we studied, we found that men left their homes to enter into the industrial and post industrial labor force, and were followed soon after by women. Over the past 40 years, then, you see marked increases in women’s participation in the global labor force. For instance, in the Caribbean, women’s participation rose from 26% to 38%, in Central America from 16% to 33%, and even in the Middle East, where policies discourage women from working, participation rose from 17% to 25%.
Secondly, women’s increased participation in the labor force occurred simultaneously with rapid urbanization throughout most of the world. This shift toward urbanization could have provided opportunities for families to exit poverty if family care giving supports were in place. Instead, it has taken adults away from extended family and their support networks.
The third piece of the perfect storm is economic globalization itself. In order to protect their bottom line, companies outsource their labor to other countries, which results in competition between countries for the worst working conditions. This last piece of the perfect storm poses the greatest challenge to companies and governments when attempting to improve their labor conditions.
Tower: What is the impact of these changes on working families?
Heymann: Our in-depth interviews illustrate the problems and risks families encounter in caring for their children. Globally, the number of children being raised in households where all adults work is enormous. We estimate that there are 930 million children under the age of 15, and 340 million children under the age of 6 currently being raised in households where all adults work. More than one third of families have left a young child home alone and nearly two fifths have left a sick child home alone, or have sent them to school or daycare. Of these children left home alone, two thirds suffered accidents or emergencies when their parents were at work and one third developed behavioral or other developmental problems. The substantial impact is detailed in Forgotten Families as well as how the impact varies from country to country depending on the policies in place to mediate it.
Tower: How do the impacts differ between industrial and developing countries?
Heymann: The severity is definitely worse in the poorest settings. For instance, while in the United States, we met families who left their six year old twins home alone before they went to school; in Honduras we met families who left their two year old home alone all day. While in the United States there were families whose school aged children burned themselves on stoves when they were home alone after school; in Botswana and Honduras, there were children who died in fires while home alone cooking. At the same time, while the severity of impact between countries may differ, many stories are similar around the world.
Tower: In your book you explore how limited childcare options and lack of accessibility to early education affects working families. Can you describe some specific conditions that affect children’s development?
Heymann: When parents don’t have paid leave from work or flexibility at work, children are at risk of not receiving their immunizations on time and getting well check ups. This also limits the ability of parents to care for their children when they are sick. We know from US data that parents who have paid leave are five times more likely to care for their children when they get sick, and we now have data from other countries showing the extent to which paid leave makes an enormous difference for parents and their children.
There is also a developmental impact both in the preschool years as well as in the school age years, which is illustrated through our US data. Children are 17% more likely to score in the bottom quarter on math for each hour that their parent works in the evenings, and children are nearly three times more likely to be suspended from school when their parents work at night. Internationally, as well, we witnessed a huge impact on how evening and night work impacts parental support of school-aged children and their success in math.
Tower: How could specific changes in both the workplace and policy arena make a difference in the healthy development of children worldwide?
Heymann: I think the encouraging part is that when countries are doing well by their kids, you see rapid improvement in outcomes. For instance in Mexico, Vietnam and Botswana, we looked at the number of children who were left alone or in the care of young children. The greatest number was in Botswana where no public childcare supports were available. Here, 48% of children were left alone some or all the time. But in Mexico this number was reduced to 27%, because the social security system in Mexico provides childcare to workers in the formal sector. In Vietnam, as well, where childcare is provided publicly, the number of children left alone dropped to 19%. Of course this number is still far more than one would want, but is a clear indication of the impact of available childcare.
Tower: What solutions exist to allow working parents to care for their sick children?
Heymann: Forgotten Families looks at global solutions as well as the problems, and without a doubt, the policy that makes the biggest difference is paid sick leave. When exploring how likely parents were to leave a sick child home alone or send them to school or day care sick, we found that 32% of parents did this in Botswana, 27% in Vietnam, where paid sick leave is available, and 18% in Mexico where paid sick leave is combined with childcare through their social security system.
Casey: How prevalent is sick leave in the world?
Heymann: Over 150 countries right now have paid sick leave and more than 120 of those provide a week or more annually. The United States is a rare exception in not guaranteeing any paid sick leave and the numbers of children being left alone were in fact higher in Baltimore, Maryland than those reported in Mexico and Vietnam. This is why legislation is currently under consideration in the US Senate and also in states across the country. In other ways, the United States is also quite an outlier. We looked at paid maternity leave in 168 countries and the only four countries that do not have it are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and the United States. As well, at least 96 countries around the world guarantee paid annual leave, 98 countries provide a mandatory day of rest each week, and at least 84 counties have a maximum length to their work week. The US offers none of these guaranteed protections and is very far behind in terms of developing measures to ensure essential paid time off for their workers.
Casey: But we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world. How is there not more outrage, more mobilization around this?
Heymann: There absolutely should be more calls for change around this issue as it is having a devastating effect on many families. There are some families who are fortunate enough to have the resources to get by, but many families cannot. The assumption in the US has been that the private sector will fill the gap, but in fact, more than half of middle class families and more than three quarters of low income families cannot rely on their employers to provide any kind of paid leave. So, the private sector is not filling the gap and benefits are actually declining with each decade rather than increasing. I think people have not been aware of what an incredible outlier the United States is by global standards, and believe that the US could not afford to compete if it provides these benefits. However, these global statistics illustrate that the US could absolutely afford to successfully compete while providing basic decent working conditions because the overwhelming majority of our competitors have developed ways of doing so.
Tower: How does the global working climate affect men and women differently? What are some potential solutions?
Heymann: I think that there are a couple of different things that can be said about men’s and women’s experiences. First, the global working climate is a problem for both men and women. A man that I interviewed in Honduras, for example, lost his job when he took time off to care for his son who had pneumonia. However, he not only lost his job but was blacklisted from being hired for any other factory job. Boys as well as girls are also affected. While much of the care giving gap is filled by girls who are pulled out of school to care for young children, boys are taken out as well, especially when there are no older girls in the family.
That having been said, the care giving burden falls more on women, as our in-depth interviews reported in Forgotten Families illustrate. Forty-nine percent of women, compared to 28% of men, reported that they lost pay or job promotions, or had difficulty retaining jobs because of the need to care for sick children. Also, when paid and unpaid work were considered together in dual earner households, 69% of women in Brazil, and 87% of women in Mexico reported working over 60 hours each week, compared respectively to 33% and 52% of men.
Tower: In addition to paid leave, what are potential solutions to reduce these differences?
Heymann: One solution is creating the care giving supports that we need, such as early education, childcare for children ages 0 to 5, after school programs for school aged children, supports for the care of the elderly, and making sure that the workplace has the leave time needed by working families. This can partially be accomplished by offering schedule flexibility, but the basic rights of paid sick leave, paid annual leave, and paid time are also essential. This is a critical issue not just for those concerned with work and family, but for all those who support the UN Millennium Development Goals that were agreed upon by nations around the world. We are not going to see gender equity in earnings and changes in the workplace burdens of responsibility until we address these goals.
Tower: What are some popular myths that are impeding global support for working families and how do we debunk them?
Heymann: It’s worth mentioning a few briefly here. The first is that ‘we don’t know what works.’ However, there are reams of studies showing the benefits of paid maternity leave, the benefits of paid sick leave, childcare, and access to quality early childhood care and education. While there is much we still need to learn, there is a great deal we already know about what works, which is reviewed in Forgotten Families in a chapter focused on the myths and the evidence. We could absolutely learn more about how to provide benefits better, but we know enough already to act.
The second myth is that ‘what works can reach workers in the formal sector but not the informal sector.’ Because the informal sector is generally not governed by standard labor laws, it is indeed harder to provide benefits to workers within this sector. For example, it is a real challenge to get paid sick leave to someone who works independently selling goods in the market or to someone who independently cleans homes. However, many countries provide paid parental leave as an insurance system that can reach the informal sector. Additionally, countries can provide public childcare and paid parental leave in the form of income support at the birth of a child. So, there is in fact a great deal that can be done for the informal sector.
The third myth is that ‘there is no affordable solution’ or that ‘only certain countries can afford the solution.’ But on a country by country basis, the costs of implementing these solutions are self-scaling and align with their economies. In poorer economies, for instance, childcare will cost far less to provide than it would in a more industrialized country because its cost is linked to wages. Similarly, in order to provide a week of paid sick leave, the minimum wage would require an increase of approximately 2%, scaled to the country. As we’ve seen in Vietnam, where they incorporate childcare and paid sick leave into national policy, there are in fact ways to find affordable solutions around the world. What we cannot afford is to do nothing about this situation.
A fourth myth is that ‘individual countries have no choice.’ However, countries can and do move as individual actors and there can be great improvement. For example, when we started our study, the US was not alone among countries in the industrialized world that did not provide paid maternity leave. Both New Zealand and Australia had little to offer at that time, but by the end of the study New Zealand offered paid parental leave and Australia offered leave combined with a check at the birth of a child, equivalent to six weeks of median wages.
The last myth I would like to mention is that ‘there is no way to move forward globally’ because there are such different views around the world and such different experiences. However, our interviews clearly show an enormous commonality in the global experience both with regard to shared stress around childcare and shared consensus around possible solutions. So I believe there is both a commonality of problems and shared beliefs around solutions. What we haven’t seen is the actions that are needed to raise the floor of decent working conditions for families worldwide. But this is possible. A decade ago, for instance, the problem of forced labor was much more widespread than it is today. While this problem has not been eliminated entirely, it demonstrates that labor conditions can improve. However, the world has set their expectations unthinkably low; we need to raise the bar of working conditions to a decent level for all families.
Tower: What actions can individuals, workplace practitioners, and policy makers take toward creating more humane global working conditions?
Heymann: One thing people can do is ask their governments to hold accountable the international organizations responsible for humane working conditions. The International Labor Organization has many conventions guaranteeing decent working conditions and they’ve made important strides. However, independent reporting on whether governments are rising to these standards has not yet been implemented. Your readers can ask the global organizations to hold all countries accountable for decent conditions and can also ask that the US not compete unfairly by allowing some of the poorest working conditions in the world.
In order for change to occur, I think it’s going to take people who care about the issue making their representatives in city, state, and national governments know that this is an urgent priority for their own country and the global community. I don’t think working conditions will change until those voices are heard. And if you care enough that you’re working in this field as your day job, remember that you have a special experienced voice when you call your legislator to ask for policy changes. The fact that you are working on these issues in your employment setting does not mean that you can’t or shouldn’t work on them in the public sector as well. It means you have more expertise to bring to the movement as a citizen in your private life.
Casey: Given that some of our readers are workplace practitioners, how have employers responded to some of these suggestions about how we need to raise the bar?
Heymann: The majority of companies that raise the bar of working conditions do so for professional employees at the top end of the income scale, not for low wage or low skill workers. While the number of companies that raise the bar across the wage spectrum may be few, we have found them and they are doing remarkable things in every sector! We have a separate study that’s currently in progress of companies around the world that have been raising the bar for all of their employees while economically succeeding, so be sure to check back with us in six months.
Tower: What else would you like people to know about Forgotten Families ?
Heymann: Overall, it’s worth reading the stories in Forgotten Families, especially for people who have spent most of their time working either in the US or in Europe. I think hearing the voices of families is really the best way to understand how common the problems are and also where they are different. We have a lot to learn from one another, not just about the policies that are successful, but also about the problems we face and how not to replicate them. There are global lessons we can learn about the tensions faced by the most vulnerable families and it was through hearing these personal stories that my views changed about the global nature of work-family problems. While statistics are important, I believe it is the personal stories that will change others’ views as well.
Visit the Institute for Health and Social Policy's web site at http://www.mcgill.ca/ihsp/.
To contact Jody, please e-mail jody.heymann@mcgill.ca.
Please note that if you order Forgotten Families from Oxford University Press at http://www.oup.com/us and use the code #23954, you will receive twenty percent off the cover price. If you are interested in using the book for a class, you may receive a free copy while supplies last. Please e-mail Kate Penrose at kate.penrose@mcgill.ca with your name, address, and the name of your course.
See also Graphic: Working Conditions and Child Care and Additional Resources Related to Poor Working Families.
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