No Fair!

By Kathy Boccella
July 16, 2000

Who wouldn't want to work for a company that was so sympathetic to the needs of working parents?

Mathew Giltner, for one.

"Guess who has to pick up the slack when so-and-so is pregnant and can't work a full day," griped the 36-year-old military man from Hunterdon County, N.J. "Then there's always Bring Your Child to Work Day. That's a lot of fun when you show up at your desk and two young children are going through it and playing with your stuff."

As you may have guessed, Giltner doesn't have children, and like an increasing number of childless people, he feels he's being cheated by a family-friendly society that caters to the needs of working parents. People who don't have children 18 and younger account for 62 percent of workers, yet some say they're treated like second-class citizens.

It's not that they don't like children, these non-parents say. But they do resent government programs, corporate policies, and the cultural fascination with the young that elevates parents - breeders, they call them, and their offspring spawn - above the childless.

"When you grant a benefit to one person or group and deny it to another person or group, it's unfair," said Jerry Steinberg, "founding non-father" of No Kidding, a social group for the child-free with 46 chapters worldwide. He founded it in 1984 because, he said, "very few people were willing to go public with their child freedom."

Steinberg would hardly seem to be part of a maligned and ill-treated segment of society. By his own account, he and his wife lead quite a nice life in Vancouver and enjoy raising dogs instead of children.

But the idea that he and other childless workers are subsidizing parenthood makes the mild-mannered English professor goes ballistic.

"Parenthood is now a choice . . . and I'll be damned if they're going to dip into my pocket daily to pay for the choice that they made."

Steinberg says he has experienced firsthand the hardships of working among the "child-burdened," as he calls them: parents slipping out early or coming in late to work, or skipping after-hours staff meetings in order to get home to their tykes.

"They're having quality time with the kids on our dime," he said, "because essentially we're subsidizing that."

Even more annoying, meetings were often interrupted by his boss' children calling her on her cell phone. After several disruptions, he told her to turn off the phone or adjourn the meeting.

Child-free workers say they get tapped more often to work holidays and overtime because they don't have "families." When former waitress Kim Stahler insisted on taking Christmas Eve off after working the holiday for 10 years at a Red Lobster in Reading, her co-workers with children were incensed.

"Non-parents were expected to give parents [holidays] off. But after a while, I said it was time for me to enjoy my family," said Stahler, who is married and is now a public-library director.

The same coworkers could get out of work just by saying they couldn't get a babysitter, she said. "What could they [management] do? They were afraid to say anything," she said.

In a provocative new book, The Baby Boon (Free Press, $25), Elinor Burkett shows how far family-friendly policies have gone. She argues that the childless are getting a raw deal - less money and poorer benefits than the mothers and fathers they work with.

How? Start with tax code, which she doesn't like because it provides a $500-per-child deduction, tuition tax credits, and child-care write-offs. She also disapproves of the Family and Medical Leave Act, property taxes to support schools, and private companies that offer benefits just to attract parents.

"If these things were done on the basis of financial need, I probably would have shut up. But it's doing nothing for poor women and a lot for upper-middle-class women," said Burkett, a former history professor and Miami Herald reporter who grew up in Bala Cynwyd.

Though she describes herself as an upper-middle-class, overeducated, baby-boomer feminist who came of age in the '60s and chose a career over children, it wasn't personal experience that led her to write the book. Rather, it was revulsion at what she considered the family-fawning rhetoric of politicians in the 1996 presidential election. She came to believe that, because she had no children, she had been written out of the political equation.

Though the non-parents in her book often come off sounding, well, childish, complaining about kids' making noise in a supermarket, for instance, the book also gives concrete examples of inequities at work: companies' paying health insurance for a parent that's worth up to $500 a month compared to about $200 a month for a childless worker, or parents' getting free child-care worth up to $5,000 a year, while someone taking care of an elderly parent may get nothing.

(Columbia University has gone one step further, recently announcing plans to create its own private school in which half of the seats would be reserved for children of faculty, a perk intended to attract top-notch professors.)

"The problem is, in creating family-friendly workplaces, we have given companies the right to define which employees' private lives are more important than others," said Burkett. "If we live in a society that respects diversity, we have to respect the diversity of all family types."

And that includes single people and married couples without children - which, Burkett said, are expected to become the most common types of U.S. households by 2005, according to the Census Bureau.

Though her book suggests there's a war brewing between those with children and those without, others say the childless are neither cheated nor resentful.

"The majority of American workers do not agree with Elinor Burkett," said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and founder of the National Parenting Association who co-wrote The War Against Parents.

Ellen Peskin, a childless health researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Scheie Eye Institute, thinks parents need more help not less. At Penn, perks such as flex time benefit everyone.

"Whatever the workplace does to help people to have a more livable life is a good thing," Peskin said. "Why do I care if somebody comes in early and leaves early to get their child, or works at home a day, as long as they're actually working?"

A 1997 study by the Families and Work Institute found that 60 percent of workers said they would not resent their employers' providing work-family benefits that did not benefit them personally.

Most companies provide benefits that apply to all workers, not just parents, said Kristin Accipiter, a spokeswoman for the Society for Human Resources Management. Twenty-nine percent of its members offer some child-care benefit, from relatively low-budget referral services to big-ticket items such as on-site day care. The same percentage also offers what's referred to as cafeteria benefits, allowing employees to pick the benefits they want up to a fixed dollar amount.

While a parent might spend it on day care, a single worker might go for a company car or health club membership.

"The real problem is the need of all workers for flexibility and choice, whether they have children or they don't have children," Accipiter said.

Hewlett also thinks Burkett ignores the fact that without children, "society would cease to exist."

"We're all stakeholders in the well-being of other people's children. . . . If you're a child-free person, and you're 70 years old, odds are you will be relying on other people's children, not just to pay Social Security tax, but to mow the lawn. . . . You need young people in this society. In a way," she said, "child-free folks are free riders on the efforts of parents."

Contrary to Burkett's world view, Hewlett believes we live in a "very, very parent-unfriendly society," noting that the average maternity leave in the United States is 4.5 weeks versus five months in Europe and that 20 percent of families with children live in poverty compared to 6 percent of childless families.

She probably won't convince Giltner and those like him. Though he owns a restored Victorian in New Jersey, a vacation home in the Adirondacks, and a four-seat airplane that he and his wife race all over the country, sometimes he still feels slighted.

Take those parking spaces at the mall that are reserved for pregnant women and toddler-towing moms. The strapping military man doesn't see why he has to park further away just because he doesn't have children.

"I park there all the time," he said with a chuckle. "I'm smart enough not to have children, so I feel I deserve the privilege. Besides, women who have just had children are usually complaining about putting on weight, so they could use the exercise."