Caring For The Caregivers

It's not news that caregivers in the United States have it rough. The United States has the unique distinction of being one of only four countries [1] that don't guarantee any paid leave to new mothers. We're keeping company with poorer nations like Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland, and one other industrialized deadbeat, Australia. Finding affordable child care is an ongoing challenge. Then, there's that whole damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't bind [2] American mothers find themselves in regarding work. What is news to many—and quite good news—is the flurry of activity aimed at changing these realities.

At this week's Take Back America conference [3], activists talked about the success they're having transforming workplaces—from white collar to blue collar. AFSCME is organizing many of the people who provide support to working parents, state child care employees [4]. Some local branches of SEIU offer a child care fund [5] to help families <!--StartFragment --> "in reconciling their work and family responsibilities." The co-founders of CultureRx talked about the innovative family-friendly policies [6] , like flex time and optional meetings, being implemented at Best Buy's corporate headquarters, which they strongly believe could be replicated in many other environments. Finally, Joan Blades and Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner reported on their grassroots movement [7] to make motherhood and family issues top priorities for lawmakers and communities.

All this was crammed into a single hour-long workshop session. The time constraints left unanswered many questions about where to start if you want to launch one of these projects in your workplace, how existing projects can work together and what kind of public policy is necessary to nurture and institutionalize these projects. From the enthusiasm of the presenters to the interest of the audience, it's clear we've reached the point where we need an entire 3-day conference devoted just to this topic.