with Mumsnet.com and Dad.info at the Immarsat Conference Centre, London
Monday 14 July
I’m delighted you are all able to join us to launch Working Better. Today marks the start of a substantial programme of work for the Commission as we grapple with the big questions facing people in their working lives. Challenges facing all of us, whether you are:
- A family struggling to balance work and caring,
- Someone looking after an older relative
- Older workers, not yet ready to retire but wanting to ease their work commitments
- Someone with a mental health condition seeking an adaptable way of re-entering the labour market.
- Employees who would like more choice and control over how they work
- Chief Executives, senior managers and bosses of small firms all of whom recognise the imperative of re-thinking how work is organised in the global economy. And for small firms, particularly, recognising their impact on the local community.
It’s worth saying straight off, this is about all of us. Not just those of us lucky enough to have well paid jobs, but men and women at the lower end of the labour market too. If you like:
- This isn’t about yummy mummies, it’s about all mums.
- It’s not just about creative types working from expensive home offices; it’s about people working on factory floors as well.
We live in the 21st century. We have a workplace often stuck somewhere in the 1950s.
Over the coming months, the Commission will take forward the debate about the future of work and the role of the workplace in people’s lives; the different choices available to men and women; and barriers to the development of flexible working and work-life balance in the British economy in the decade ahead.
The Commission wants to shift beyond a view of equality as just tackling disadvantage for minorities, to a wider notion of fairness that involves all of us in a society.
With the current tough economic backdrop - a credit crunch, a possible recession - some may ask, isn’t this talk of working better, work life balance and re-assessing the way we work a little indulgent when some people are worrying if they will have a job to go to at all in future?
We don’t think so. Some of the most successful companies in the world are leading the way on re-assessing how their workplaces operate. They are trailblazers, changing the culture of work. They are doing this to improve their businesses and prepare them for the tough times.
A harsher economic climate also strengthens the imperative to open up the global talent pool. Our answer to global economic turbulence cannot be to give up trying to improve work practices. Instead, we need to find answers that work for board room directors and entrepreneurs running small firms worried about the bottom line, just as much as it does for mums and dads worrying about fitting in the school-run.
We've got to understand the real-life choices that families, businesses and public sector organisations face. This isn’t a conversation we can just have with the government and policy makers – it is a conversation we all have to have, because it involves all of us.
We want to be bold and we want to be challenging, but we also want to listen – to families as well as to policy makers and experts. That’s why we are starting this consultation with mums and dads. I’m delighted that mumsnet and dad.info through their ‘Homefront’ consultation launched with the Commission today will involve families who are facing the practical decisions on how they balance work and life.
I’d like to pose a few questions. We don’t know all the answers though we build on a strong evidence base inherited from our predecessor Commissions. We really are coming to this with an open mind. Some of the questions may produce answers which challenge some accepted truths. But we wouldn’t need this forum or this debate if the answers were easy.
I’m going to focus on four challenges:
- Flexible working
- Choice – real choice
- the role of dads, and
- wellbeing.
My first challenge - flexible working or what the director of Opportunity Now calls agile working, is relevant to all of us, whether we have children or not. 200 years on from the industrial revolution why do the majority of people still work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday? Can we ‘work better’?
Many of Britain’s workplaces are still based on the idea we had of work 50 years ago. Turning up for work at the same office or factory every day, sitting at the same work station, clocking in and out – for 40 years before drawing your pension.
This rigid model persists, despite a marked shift in what many people actually do for a living.
Today’s concept of work means:
- Live to work: In the work life balance debate the emphasis is on how life and the family can fit around work, not the other way round.
- Being there: Productivity in too many workplaces is measured by presenteeism rather than what you deliver.
- Long hours: Early mornings and late nights are expected in high flying jobs. At the other end of the spectrum, low paid jobs mean people have to put in long hours or do two jobs to make ends meet.
This focus on work, presenteeism and long hours entrenches division of roles. Those who feel they have to commit everything to work (often men) against those who feel they want to create a better balance (often women). This division goes a long way towards explaining the persistent gender pay gap.
A different approach to work could mean:
Work to live: We work to provide a better life for our families – but when do we take the time to enjoy the rewards of work, to raise children or care for those closest to us?
Agility: We have an increasingly educated workforce but often we don’t trust them to take decisions about delivering outside strict office-based, 9 to 5 parameters.
The Right to Request flexible working may have been useful for families in finding a balance. But because these rights are only available to parents or carers they may have entrenched the divide between 'high fliers' and working parents. It's mostly women who have taken this up and that may reinforce existing patterns of gender inequality.
If it can work for mothers why can’t it work for others?
Finding new solutions to fit a modern world: The 9 to 5 model of working was based on a male breadwinner going out to work each day while his wife stayed at home to look after the kids. This was a great arrangement for employers who essentially got a two for one deal.
This model doesn’t work when both men and women work and when both want to balance caring responsibilities. And this doesn’t just mean children. It could also mean caring for a disabled partner or an elderly relative.
Choice: are people exercising a genuine choice when they decide between traditional and flexible working? If some employers consider employees who are not present in the office to be less committed (and therefore less eligible for promotion) then people will pick up on this and the choice is loaded against flexible working.
This can't be an agenda focused only on those in senior managerial occupations and middle-class mums. We have to recognise the increasing polarisation in the economy, and the reality that many workers, particularly women, are still in relatively insecure, 'long hours' occupations.
'Flexible working' has become synonymous with part time, low status work for mothers. But clearly agile working is about much more than this. It’s about fundamentally changing our approach to work. It’s about opening up the choices currently available to parents and to all of us.
My second challenge is about choice: what affects the choices parents make in balancing paid work and care? Is this genuine choice or has the decision already in effect been made by government?
The welcome increase in maternity leave over the last decade, the introduction of a small amount of paternity leave and the right to request flexible working has, in theory, increased choice.
But if a woman wants to choose a combination of working flexibly and caring part time the choice becomes very limited.
The key is for women to be able to maintain their occupational status after pregnancy. A recent survey of employers found that while two-thirds were perfectly happy for a female employee to return to work after having a child, only one-third were prepared to guarantee that it would be at the same occupational level as she held previously. A shortage of high quality flexible jobs mean women who choose reduced hours are also choosing reduced status, pay and career prospects, reinforcing the gender pay gap.
This is one of the major structural causes of the pay gap beyond the traditional concern with direct discrimination - women and men are not being paid different rates for the same job – they are taking different jobs after they have children.
That is a perfectly logical choice to make. But we want to know if it’s a genuine choice or a Hobson’s choice based on the limited opportunities available to women wanting to work full time but with compressed or flexible hours.
Employers refer to women being on the ‘baby track’. It’s a term that doesn’t get attached to men, and therefore doesn’t hold back their career progression because it is, almost exclusively, women who make this ‘choice’. There's not a lot of talk about ‘working fathers’.
It is worth remembering how far we have come in maternity rights. Jim Callaghan’s government in 1979 first introduced the right to maternity leave, but the right was limited to women who had 2 years service. It took 15 years before a European Union directive delivered the right to 14 weeks paid maternity leave for all pregnant workers. Since 1997 the increase in leave has been dramatic: 3, 6, 9, and next 12 months.
And what of dads in this family friendly push? For the first time ever the right to 2 weeks paid paternity leave has arrived. In the future men may be able to share the second six months maternity leave.
We have come a long way, but after winning all these gains is it worth asking, are we still on the right track?
The increasing leave entitlement for women seems hard to argue against, but I think it presents us with an inconvenient truth. Has public policy on maternity leave made too many assumptions about the choices families will make, and as a result entrenched the stereotype that it is women who do the caring?
This is a controversial point. It could be taken as an attack on a new right that many women enjoy and would resent being removed. But I said I would be challenging today and I think it is worth asking – has the extension from 6 months to 9 months in paid maternity leave (and the planned extension to a year) entrenched the position of women as the primary carer and therefore the parent who pays the career ‘penalty’ for having a child?
But I’m falling onto the trap of talking about this debate from the perspective of women. It takes two. So in my third challenge is – why don’t men take a bigger role in parenting?
The dads representing dad.info may resent the criticism implied in the question. Your very presence here tells me you are unlikely to be the type of dad who refused to change a baby’s nappy.
But the statistics don’t lie. Only one in five men takes advantage of the new paternity leave provision – two weeks off, paid at £117 a week. And flexible working requests come mainly from women.
This unequal sharing of caring has created a generation of Salt and Pepper dads. I mean fathers who are seen as good ‘seasoning’ for a family but not essential for parenting. As the American political commentator Kathleen Parker, in her book, Save the Males, described it:
'Interestingly, we seem to accept that children shouldn't be raised without mothers, but we regard the contribution of fathers as optional seasoning, as though children are little casseroles, especially tasty with a pinch of Dad, but guests will hardly notice if you leave him out'.
While the number of men taking up the right to paternity leave remains so low it may seem ridiculous to be arguing for dramatically increased leave periods. If men don’t take 2 weeks, why on earth would they take 3 months?
At this point I’ll come to the defence of dads – not least to win back half the audience I’m in danger of offending.
It’s not because dads don’t want to be involved. 40 per cent of men say they don’t take up the right because of financial pressures. The image of mum and dad both bonding with baby in the early months may be touching but someone has to pay the rent or the mortgage.
The central issue is that the economic penalty for fatherhood is too high. On having children, most men feel under acute pressure to increase their household income: and in fact, their working hours and pay rise.
Clearly mother and baby need to be together in the early months but what is the justification for the right to leave from 6 months still being seen as an issue in the main for women? At that point couldn’t it become ‘parental leave’, shared by mums and dads depending on the family circumstances? And the key is, for men at that stage, shouldn’t it be paid? Shouldn’t dads at least have the right to some paternity leave paid at 90% of their salary? That would mean that fathers would have the same right as mothers have before going onto statutory maternity pay of £117 a week. Yes, there would be a cost. And those costs need to be investigated: we'll do that in a report early next year.
But if it fundamentally changed the way mothers and fathers care for their children and fit their work into their life, might it be a cost worth paying? We don’t mean let’s have more public spending. That would be too easy to say and in the present climate unrealistic. But could public spending be re-prioritised to focus on giving real choice to every family?
I’d like to finish on a more philosophical note. It’s an attempt to move the debate away from the economic idea of families being little production lines, which exist only to produce the workforce of the future. I’d like to ask – where does wellbeing and our sense of community fit into this debate?
Because this is about more than pounds and pence, it is about happiness and satisfaction. What sort of society do we want to be?
We talk about the ‘penalty’ for taking time out of work to raise children and the ‘cost’ of motherhood. But are we forgetting about the other side of the coin? Are men paying the penalty by missing out on raising children? Or is the cost actually being borne by our children, who are picking up on the stress and hassle their parents go through as they strive to find a balance.
We realise there is a hearts and minds campaign to be fought to get across the benefits to children, families and society as a whole when fathers are more involved in caring for their children. It is a debate that needs to happen and we hope this consultation will help to get it started.
As I said, today is about starting a debate, not proposing solutions but asking questions:
- On flexible working, why not extend the right to request to all and introduce the Dutch model where every job is assumed to be possible on flexible terms? This would shift the onus onto employers to offer a business case against change.
- To ensure fathers also pay the ‘penalty’ of children, should we go down the path of compulsory paternity leave?
• To ensure dads play a bigger role – should we pay them?
There are issues with all of those possible solutions. That’s why we need this consultation, and your input.
Before I hand over to our panel and to you to discuss these issues, I’ll outline what the Commission plans to do next:
- we are going to listen to real people – through the Mumsnet, and dad.info consultations.
• we will also reach out to carers, disabled people, children, and older people – this can’t just be about parents, if we want to change the way we work it has to be about everyone and for everyone.
• we will listen to experts and learn from international comparisons
• we will work with employers to make sure this debate is grounded in reality not wishful thinking.
We will bring all this work together in a major report at the beginning of next year. The report will:
- make recommendations on if and how the law needs to change
• and identify how the Commission can encourage best practice and change culture in the workplace, leading to greater equality and a fairer society – what the Commission is here for.
We start all this from a solid base. The Equal Opportunities Commission, and the Women and Work Commission, made the case for transformation of work in a way no-one else in Britain had attempted before.
We are taking up that baton, to make a new argument fit for a modern world where caring is shared and work fits into life. So, lots of questions, no easy answers, I hope we can stimulate an interesting debate over the coming months and I look forward to hearing all your contributions.