Spousal Supports Provided by Employers (2008)

Author: Michelle Janning , Whitman College- Department of Sociology

Date: August 2008

Basic Concepts and Definitions
The term Spousal Supports Provided by Employers, or employer-based spousal supports, refers to the formal and informal policies and norms in paid workplaces associated with the provision of benefits, recruitment, hiring, and retention of partners and spouses of already-hired employees [see Encyclopedia entry, Recruitment http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/encyclopedia_entry.php?id=251&area=All]. Research on the subject tends to cluster around several occupational categories in the U.S.: academia, science, military, and multinational businesses that require international relocation [see Encyclopedia entry, Developing a Work/Life Strategy in a Multinational Enterprise (MNE) http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/encyclopedia_entry.php?id=3814&area=All]. Perhaps because academics commonly have partners who also hold advanced degrees, or because it is in academia where the interested researchers are clustered, the experience of academic couples appears as the most discussed and researched topic associated with employer-based spousal supports.

Spousal supports provided by employers are related to, but differ from, the traditional notion of nepotism. Nepotism is broadly defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as favoritism in employment based on kinship. The hiring of any member of one’s family can be defined as nepotism, whereas spousal supports provided by employers refers specifically to spouses or partners, and can include benefits besides paid employment. Nepotism is sometimes viewed negatively as a set of special favors for the family member of an already-hired employee, suggesting the hire was made purely based on family connections and not based on job qualifications. Even though kinship-based hiring occurs in the contemporary American labor market, nepotism has questionable legal status. To practice nepotism would actually violate policies that exist in many companies. In contrast, the use of employer-based spousal supports, though still controversial (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000) and not fixed in its implementation (and to some critics, legally questionable because it is similar to nepotism), seems to afford more legitimacy in some occupational circles, because the benefits offered to a spouse or partner of an employee are done presumably because that person is qualified, and because it is in the interest of the employer to accommodate dual career couples in order to attract and retain employees. Further, increasing numbers of organizations are establishing formal policies to deal with the accommodation of spouses and partners in a legal and mutually beneficial way. The creation of benefits for qualified spouses and partners of employees is currently seen as important by employees themselves (Chadud et al., 2007), and is increasingly likely to be included in an organization’s list of family-friendly policies. Thus, to implement a spousal support policy is increasingly seen as legitimate, while supporting a policy of nepotism (or at least the use of that specific term) is increasingly seen as outdated. Because of increasing numbers of women in the paid work force, and because of the increased difficulty of recruiting and retaining employees due to their partners’ or spouses’ careers or jobs, spousal or partner supports provided by employers have become part of the lexicon surrounding family-friendly policies [see Encyclopedia entry, Family Friendly Workplace http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/encyclopedia_entry.php?id=232&area=All].

The types of support that constitute employer-based spousal supports vary from passive to active help for the partner from employers, including benefits such as paid or unpaid positions within a firm, health insurance, child care allowances, unemployment compensation, job training, informal arrangements (such as volunteer opportunities and introduction to supportive social networks), on-site privileges (such as fitness center membership), financial allowances, circulation of resumés, language training, psychological counseling, and work permits. Examples of offerings for the spouse or partner of an employee range, for example, from medical benefits, to a guaranteed temporary part-time job. The spouse or partner could be offered a list of job openings or contact people from the hiring institution’s human resources office, or a stipend to learn about employment opportunities in the local area.

For those couples who end up receiving benefits that come in the form of paid employment for both partners, the employment can take different forms and be labeled accordingly. A common term associated with employer-based spousal supports is coworking, which is when spouses or partners end up working for the same employer (Moen & Sweet, 2002; Moen & Sweet 2004). Sometimes this comes in the form of job sharing. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, job sharing is when “two (or more) workers share the duties of one full-time job, each working part-time, or two or more workers who have unrelated part-time assignments share the same budget line” (http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/workhours/jobsharing.htm). Typically, according to the same source, the arrangement of job sharing, regardless of occupational category, is individually negotiated between an employer and employee, since the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) [see Encyclopedia entry, Fair Labor Standards Act http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/encyclopedia_entry.php?id=230&area=All] does not address job sharing in any official manner. In other circumstances, coworking couples may work for the same employer, but in different divisions or lines of work.

The timing of the spousal or partner hire, in cases where the benefit is paid employment, can affect the way that hire is labeled and viewed by other employees. The terms trailing spouse, trailing partner, and trailing family have emerged in everyday language, online resources, and academic research (for a list of relevant online articles on this subject, see the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium’s website • http://www.socalherc.org/site/761/res_dualcareer.cfm). These refer to the notion that the spouse or partner who was not initially hired has followed the new employee, and is therefore seeking a job after the couple’s decision to accept the first position (or will take the first position if a job is found for the trailing partner). While the term trailing spouse used to refer specifically to wives, it is increasingly common that husbands and male partners of employees are trailing their partners and trying to find jobs of their own [see Encyclopedia entry, Career Prioritizing in Dual Earner Couples http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/encyclopedia_entry.php?id=6473&area=All], especially in fields where women are being actively recruited such as Physics (McNeil & Sher, 1999).

Importance of Topic to Work and Family Studies
As Sweet and Moen (2004) articulated, “[m]ost workers in the United States, as well as other developed countries, are married to other workers; the dual-earner arrangement is the new ‘normal’” (268). Couples where both partners work for pay continue to represent a growing proportion of the American workforce, and issues surrounding accommodating dual-career couples are increasingly part of the list of concerns among potential job applicants (Chadud et al., 2007). In order to better handle logistics and scheduling of work and family demands, some couples intentionally seek out employment from the same employer (Moen & Sweet, 2002). Accompanying spouse and partner benefits are clustered in an increasing number of occupations, and the population of dual-career and dual-job partnerships is growing, especially among professionals. More women have entered the paid workforce than ever before, often entering with high education levels and career-specific professional skills. Because of this, the career strategies of couples have changed to attempt to accommodate this new kind of work-family pattern. The breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage is less common than in the past. Workplace policies that are meant to ensure or enhance gender equity have become normative, or at least are part of the discourse surrounding good business practices. Providing spousal support in the form of paid work for an employee is one way that employers are demonstrating recognition that the traditional model of hiring without consideration of the family of employees is outdated. In addition, regarding one type of spousal benefit, equality in career prioritization between husband and wife is “one of the motivations for forming and maintaining a coworking relationship” (Sweet & Moen, 2004: 267). Thus, the impetus for creating workplace policies that support dual-earner marriages and partnerships is occurring at both the employer and employee level.

Despite the increasing numbers of couples where the partners’ careers matter equally, and despite workplace policies that promote gender equity, the topic of benefits for spouses affects men and women differently. It is still more likely that women in dual-career couples subordinate their career goals to their spouse’s or partner’s. In many occupations, by employers and employees alike, women’s careers are not seen as important or as lucrative as men’s careers, and it is still more common for a husband’s career to require the wife and family to move along with him. Further, women are more likely than men to interrupt their job or career training (or the job or career itself) in order to take on family responsibilities, thus rendering them less likely to be in a primary wage earning position (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000). Therefore, the challenges associated with being a trailing spouse are more common for women, making gender a salient variable in terms of spousal supports provided by employers.

The overlap of paid work and family life is an important part of the everyday experiences of all families. Work and family role conflict, spillover, and the permeability of the boundary between work and family are all important concepts in relation to these kinds of benefits. In particular, dual-earner couples who share employers or occupations (or both) may experience this overlap in unique ways, from finding empathy in a spouse who has the same kind of occupation, and therefore the same kind of work demands, to avoiding conversations about fellow employees if a spouse works at the same workplace (Janning, 2006; Janning & Neely, 2006).

In addition to being relevant for dual-earner couples’ everyday lives, the provision of spousal supports by employers matters at the institutional level, specifically for the retention of highly skilled members of certain professions. If, for example, a physicist couple cannot find two jobs that satisfy their career goals, they may choose to leave the profession entirely. The lack of opportunity for spousal or partner benefits when both partners are highly qualified, therefore, creates a risk for the entire profession (McNeil & Sher, 1999). Alternately, the challenge of satisfying dual professional goals can place a strain on couples’ relationships and thus increase risks of divorce and marital dissatisfaction.

Finally, as traditional notions of paid work change into new kinds of work such as telecommuting and web-based entrepreneurial ventures, it may be the case that increasing numbers of portable careers will affect both the supply and demand for these kinds of benefits. If a spouse can work from anywhere, then the provision of benefits for him or her from the other spouse’s employer will either be unnecessary, or will take a form that has not yet been encountered.

State of the Body of Knowledge
Research focusing on employer-based spousal supports comes in more forms than traditional academic sources. Increasingly, online resource pages, newsletters, firm-specific documents, and governmental reports, among others, can serve as important sources for scholars interested in how and whether these kinds of policies are being enacted. For example, work/life balance issues for employees laboring abroad and their families are addressed in online documents from companies that provide strategies for employers who are likely to hire people from abroad. These sources tend to report statistics on the concerns of employee spouses (e.g., finding support networks, adjusting to a new country, finding housing, securing health benefits for children, figuring out a new social status); cite spousal dissatisfaction as a growing cause of aborted assignments and poor employee performance; and provide advice on success factors for spousal adjustment (e.g., formal help from the employer, access to technology, being part of a community of expatriates) (http://www.norfolkmobility.com/whatsnew/NI_trail_spouses.htm; McNulty, 2002; Grove & Hallowell, 1997).

The provision of educational and employment support for military spouses is discussed in detail in reports published by the U.S. Department of Defense. Recently, the Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Labor jointly created Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts (CAA), which provide funding for training and educational opportunities for military spouses in careers that are portable and would work well with the highly mobile military lifestyle (U.S. Department of Defense, 2008). Unemployment benefits for trailing military spouses are also offered, but these vary by state (Jowers, 2002).

The research is more plentiful on studies of scientist and academic coworking couples • those who seek employment in the same college or university, or the same geographic area. Only one in four American colleges and universities have policies for hiring spouses (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000; Sweet & Moen, 2004), yet one study estimated that as much as 35-40% of faculty members in the U.S. are married to other academics (Astin & Milem, 1997). Research on coworking couples tends to fall along two substantive areas: institutional factors (who has policies, and how they work), and couple-level experiences (what family lives are like for coworking couples). The following paragraphs outline the research as it relates to these two subjects, and to their intersections.

Challenges associated with the provision of spousal/partner support for employees are both economic and social, and affect both employers and employees. From the point of view of an employer, to recruit high quality job candidates is difficult and expensive, and to provide wages and benefits for two employees may not be part of the initial available funds for an employer to offer. In particular, academicians and scientists refer to the increasing likelihood of encountering a couple who wants two positions in the hiring process as the “two-body problem,” whereby the growing number of academic couples are increasingly likely to look for two professional jobs in the same geographic area. If no suitable job is available for one or the other partner, a desirable candidate is likely to reject a job, or leave the job after a short time if the partner is able to find employment elsewhere (Wolf-Wendel et. al, 2000; McNeil & Sher, 1999). Dealing with a high turnover of recent hires, therefore, can be an economic cost for institutions that are unable to provide any sort of compensation or position for a qualified spouse or partner of a desirable candidate. This is especially likely for small firms that have less financial capital available for creating benefits and new positions for spouses and partners (Sweet & Moen, 2004). The couple’s economic well-being is compromised, too, because, put most simply, living on one income, or piecing together one and a half incomes, is more difficult than living on two wages.

Interestingly, the social challenges of employer-based spousal supports for employers and employees occur both when suitable benefits are not made available, and can also occur when benefits are offered. Employers whose firms do not offer a policy concerning spousal benefits have expressed that this absence may make employees resentful. One reason for this is that, if a couple is hired without a policy, others may view this hire as conducted purely on an ad hoc basis (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000). While the stability of the couple’s relationship before the hire matters in determining the quality of their relationship after the hire, workplace influences can affect how well the couple deals with such things as the stigma of being a trailing spouse, the questioning of colleagues about one member’s qualifications, or the view from colleagues that they have received special treatment. All of these workplace stresses can impact the marital relationship, just as any job demands can affect family life. This is especially true at firms where there is no clear policy allowing for spousal supports, because any benefits received are seen as unique or idiosyncratic. Interestingly, it may also be the case that for companies that do have clear policies, resentment from employees can present itself in the form of diminished morale, fear that individual departments or segments of the firm may lose autonomy in hiring practices, concerns about nepotism or favoritism, and perception of a lack of funding (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000).

Researchers have also noted many benefits of implementing spousal or partner benefits, especially for the couple. Satisfaction with family life can affect how well one does at work, and vice versa. Sweet and Moen (2004) found that some coworking academic couples experience enhanced work-family roles. Specifically, the women in coworking couples where both spouses have advanced degrees have higher levels of marital and family satisfaction than their non-coworking counterparts. And, the men in these couples have less negative family-to-work spillover than their non-coworking counterparts. Overall, coworking has a positive effect on work-family integration, and on both work and family success individually. More generally, benefits of providing support may come in the form of employee satisfaction (Bowen 1988), spousal empathy (Janning 2006), potential retention of highly qualified employees (and therefore less turnover), and even perhaps physical and psychological health, especially if medical benefits are part of the package of support. Perhaps it is fair to assume that if both members of a couple are supportive of the workplace that financially provides the couple with earnings and benefits, then their work-family lives will presumably be more satisfactory than people who wish their employer would provide more.

Despite the relative newness of providing benefits for spouses and partners of employees upon relocation, employers are increasingly likely to recognize that family circumstances affect an employee’s productivity and devotion to the employer. After this recognition, however, the implementation of policy to provide benefits to spouses and partners depends on an organization’s financial resources, its ethos and morale surrounding family-friendly policies, its level of geographic isolation, and its likelihood to encounter individuals who are seeking these kinds of benefits.

Implications for Research and Practice
Future researchers on the subject of spousal supports provided by employers may find that branching outside of the academic research on academic coworking couples will shed light on the topic. Calling attention to occupation-specific benefits and challenges of spousal supports provided by employers matters tremendously, because these occupational categories are sometimes classed and raced. While it may be true that high-achieving highly-educated spouses face challenges to getting satisfactory employment, they do possess resources and skills that give them access to more information about opportunities than would be available to someone who worked in a low-income job. In addition, the type of benefit offered can affect what research questions are asked. For instance, the experience of finding a job for a spouse may drastically differ from the experience of finding informal social networks for a spouse who is staying home with children. Yet both of these experiences would be classified under the umbrella of spousal supports provided by employers.

Future work-family researchers can benefit from understanding experiences for coworking couples, because it is policies and practices surrounding these couples that shed light on the fact that work-life career strategies are variable depending on the workers’ and families’ circumstances, and that work-family and career development are not individual processes, but contain “interlocked paths” (Moen & Sweet 2002: 482) that account for the experiences of all family members (Gerson & Jacobs 2004).

Policy implications are notable because employer-based spousal supports are often arranged on a case-by-case basis, particularly for academics and international businesspeople. Because of the idiosyncratic, and therefore unpredictable, under-funded, and governmentally unsupported, nature of these kinds of benefits, proponents of employer-based spousal supports argue for several policy options. These options range from specific organizational level policies to federal legislation.

Because of the increase in dual-career and dual-job couples in many occupations, and because of the increased recognition that satisfying these couples is more likely to increase employee retention and satisfaction, some workplaces are creating positions that deal directly with partner accommodations. Thus, a helpful addition to a company would be hiring a part-time relocation specialist with knowledge of local companies and organizations (McNeil & Sher, 1999; Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000).

In addition, it would be beneficial to investigate, at the organizational level, whether the type of position may affect how recruitment happens. For instance, benefits for spouses of entry-level applicants will likely differ from those offered to applicants for positions with more seniority (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000). More specifically, Mannix (2001) suggests teaming up with nearby similar organizations to develop a common pool of job openings. For colleges and universities, seeking out long-term money to fund these kinds of positions is desirable (McNeil & Sher, 1999; Wolf-Wendel et al., 2000). In terms of military policies, the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Labor’s Career Advancement Accounts (CAA) could be expanded to provide increased funding for the training of military spouses for portable careers.

For those organizations that develop a clear policy that allows for employee-based spousal supports, consistent communication with constituents about the reasons for having these policies is crucial in order to facilitate buy-in and consensus. As mentioned previously, arrangements such as job-sharing are conducted on a case-by-case basis between an employer and employee. Resources about these opportunities for dual-career couples who both want employment are found within individual employers’ documents and online information. Thus, making the availability of benefits that come from an employer-based spousal support policy public, via job announcements, a firm’s website, and within-firm newsletters will be helpful. And finally, evaluation and oversight (http://www.advance.vt.edu/Measuring_Progress/Dual_Career_Interviews/Dual_Career_Handouts.pdf) at the organizational and individual level of these kinds of spousal and partner supports, once implemented, are important in order to establish that the policies are having the desired effect.

In terms of practice, perhaps the most important change that is needed is to form a common vocabulary that encompasses all types of employer-based spousal supports that is accurate. Researchers at Virginia Tech (http://www.advance.vt.edu/Measuring_Progress/Dual_Career_Interviews/Dual_Career_Handouts.pdf) have advocated for a linguistic shift from “accommodation, two-body problem, trailing spouse” to “dual-hire, initial hire, second hire.” Even the term “spousal supports provided by employers” linguistically excludes domestic partners, and would therefore be more accurately named spouse and partner supports provided by employers.

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