KEY POINTS:
Let's be honest about work/life balance: managers hate it.
It's grim out there. A good friend of mine has just been made redundant. She is a talented, high kickin' kind of gal. If I were her employer she would probably be the last one I would pick to
get the boot - I'd jettison a saddo with a low metabolic rate. But my friend has children and worked three days a week, despite pressure to go full-time, so apparently she was fair game.
It's pointless to complain if a company has to lay people off; them's the breaks. The most recent employment figures showed a drop of 29,000, or 1.3 per cent, in the number employed, the steepest quarterly fall for 20 years. But you can kick up a fuss if the first out the door are mothers who work part-time, regardless of their productivity. "I work as an account assistant and have been made redundant twice [this year]," says one glum mother on the Mumsnet site.
Employers hate, loathe, despise, abhor and detest letting staff work flexible hours. They know this is not entirely rational but can't help themselves. They pay lip service to the idea of flexible working - so they will look like one of those trendy workplaces where people wear polo-necks and make espresso, but frankly, they don't like it one bit. Employers can't bear to lose control over their staff and so are threatened by anyone who doesn't fit into the prescribed hours. Asking to work non-standard hours is a sign of insubordination. So when the chance comes to downsize, first to the guillotine are those uppity part-timers.
Enlightened management is supposed to care about results, rather than box-ticking and desk-sitting. But there is a gap between the formal question-answering and what really happens. The EEO Trust reports that 35 per cent of New Zealand workplaces offer flexible working but a third of workers think they will experience negative impacts if they adopt flexible working - such as "difficulty in progressing in their career" - and many are unwilling to even raise the topic.
The skew-whiff thing is that if employers are looking at productivity, mothers are the very staff they should be keeping on. Find me a mother of toddlers and I will show you someone who can power through a day's work in six hours if afterwards it affords the chance to sit down with a coffee on her own. Without Thomas the Tank Engine.
* * *
I used to think getting a book published was the highest of accomplishments. Now, not so much. Since the barriers to entry went down, and the internet allowed everyone to write longer and longer pieces, the status of becoming an "author" has been eroded. We are all guilty of over-writing. Have you read any books lately that made you think "that would have been a really good magazine article"? Or perhaps a pamphlet. As lefty commentator Kevin Drum noted about one of his own. "Seymour Hersh? He's great. You could also cut every one of his pieces by at least 50 per cent and lose exactly nothing." I could write a book about this, I guess. Or maybe just a paragraph.
deborah@coneandco.com
