Child-Free Employees See Another Side of Equation

By David Kirkpatrick
April 1997

It's a question that might seem odd to many, as they struggle to get their companies to set up flexible schedules or subsidize child care or embrace paternity leaves.

But, in fact, it's a question that childless workers are increasingly asking these days. Some feel burdened by family-friendly policies -- by parents who run off to baseball games, by co-workers who take three-month maternity leaves, while the childless beg for an extra day to do Christmas shopping.

Childfree Network, a national organization based in Citrus Heights, Calif., has brought together about 5,000 men and women without children who resent "parents who think they've done something truly special" by having a child, says founder Leslie Lafayette. Members say that they deserve equal treatment and that they speak for countless others cowed into silence by a "a culture of breeders."

"How do you speak out without sounding like you hate kids?" asks Ms. Lafayette.

Recently, however, even some women's organizations have come to sympathize with the network's concerns. "Companies we held up as models a few years ago because they were accommodating to working parents or offered child-care benefits, we're now saying they are not going far enough," says Marcia Brumit Kropf, a vice president at Catalyst, a New York research group. "Their policies are pitting one set of employees against the other."

Ms. Kropf notes that several companies, including Xerox Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Motorola Inc., have set a new standard by offering a menu of flexible work arrangements and a variety of "personal" rather than specifically parental benefits.

To get a closer look at the often unspoken workplace tensions about parental benefits, The Wall Street Journal invited a member of the Childfree Network to join a conversation at the headquarters of a company that offers an array of "family-friendly" benefits: Lost Arrow Corp.'s Patagonia clothing company in Ventura, Calif.

The participants were:

• Mike Mesko, who works in forecasting and analysis at Patagonia and sends his daughters Alexa and Lindsey to the company's nursery school and day-care programs.
• Christine Mesko, a clinical nutrition manager at Columbia Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks, CA.
• Lu Setnicka, a spokeswoman for Patagonia.
• Ann Price, a member of Childfree Network who founded Motek Information Systems Inc., a Los Angeles software company, after working for a decade as a computer consultant at General Electric Co.

MR. MESKO: Patagonia offers maternity and paternity leave with pay for eight weeks, which you can split up as you choose. When we were having our first child, we felt a lot of anxiety. It was nice to know that the paycheck was still rolling in, and I was able to stay home for two months and not worry about that at all.

With our second child, Lindsay, born 2 1/2 years ago, I had more responsibility at the company, and being a parent had became old hat, so to speak. So I took two weeks initially -- Christine had a C-section and it was a little more difficult in the beginning -- and after that I worked four-hour days for the next 3 1/2 months, to accumulate my two months of paid leave.

That was fantastic. Everybody basically pitches in, so I was getting support from co-workers, taking work home, and then I was able to pick up my daughter at lunch, go home and have the rest of the day to help out, be with both my kids and just relax.

Now they are both in Patagonia's day-care programs here about 50 yards away.

MS. MESKO: After the first baby, I even wrote Patagonia a letter because I could not believe the benefits we had for bonding. So many fathers these days are so stressed they feel that they have to take second jobs. We were able to relax.

I definitely could not do my job as a clinical manager the way I am supposed to if we did not have Mike's benefits from Patagonia. Because he takes the kids in the morning, that means I can get in early and I can leave late whenever I need to. Also, child care is expensive, and I don't know that we would be able to afford it. Other people in our area pay $750 a month or more, and we pay only about $400 for Patagonia's day care because it is partially subsidized.

MR. MESKO: For Christine and other women especially, support like Patagonia's allows a much more extensive choice of career paths, particularly if they want to be players in upper management. Without the child-care support we have, it is a very stressful juggling act, always.

We also have flexibility when we have a sick child. At most companies, when you have a sick child, you have to take a vacation day or bring him to school because you don't get paid to be home. Here it is pretty much normal to just get your child from the child-care program and go home. You can take one of your sick days, or part of a sick day. It is almost like getting an extra week of vacation.

MS. MESKO: I think parental benefits make employees more productive. They don't have the stress and anxiety of, "Oh my God, I am going to get fired." And it saves time, too. For example, last week, Alexa was having a really, really hard day, and I thought Michael was going to have to take her home. Instead, he came downstairs and took her out to lunch. Instead of him losing the whole rest of the day, he took her back after lunch and she was happy as a bee for the rest of the day while he stayed at work.

None of these things will ever happen at Columbia, though. It's a for-profit hospital, and they just don't think it's profitable. When you have a baby, if you want to go without pay for the four-month family leave, that is up to you. But in my position, I just can't take that much time.

MS. PRICE: One question comes to mind immediately: What kind of child-free employee benefits are comparable to this? It sounds to me that as a child-free employee, my annual vacation will be discriminated against in this organization.

This gentleman would get two months if his wife got pregnant, but I would get nothing, except my annual vacation. I would want the same opportunity to go away for two months for whatever personal reason -- whether my gay lover is suffering from AIDS and I needed to be with him; or whether I had a child and had a hysterectomy afterward or a terrible -- heaven forbid -- a terrible experience in labor. It wouldn't matter; I would want the employer to give all employees the same opportunity. I think you are neglecting a portion of the population.

When I started out at General Electric, I was one of the first women to work in computer consulting. I had been an accelerated student, I graduated high school at 16, I was very aggressive.

At GE, I was put into a fast-track program, and I was very successful very quickly in corporate America. But I learned to be successful at their rules. It was considered career suicide for a woman to have children. I love children -- I raised my younger sisters from an early age and put them through college -- but when I got married 13 years ago, I told my husband that our marriage was contingent upon the fact that I wouldn't have children.

At the same time, in some ways, GE, like Patagonia, favored people with children -- or rather, men with children. There were almost no other women. During the period when I was in a hiring position, I was always advised to pick the prospective employee who had children, because obviously he would be more stable and more reliable. Employees with children would be more motivated to work because of the financial encumbrance on them. Child-free couples were encouraged to take assignments that required more travel or longer commutes because there were other people with children who were given a break.

I thought at the time it was a very equitable solution, but today looking back on it I think it was incredible discrimination against the child-free people. I don't resent the people with children; I just resent the policy.

At my own company, I have tried to create equitable benefits. We have one-month annual vacation for every employee. People who have children get to use it the way that you did. People who don't still get an equitable alternative in the same amount of days.

MR. MESKO: I have been here for seven years and no one talks to me about that stuff. We also have many people in this company that take advantage of this 10 or 15 years down the line. It may not be now. Everybody looks at it as a part of the attractive benefits package here.

MS. MESKO: I don't think employees who are childless could care less that this is happening for us.

MS. PRICE: I think there are a lot of child-free employees who keep their complaints to themselves because of the culture around them.

Take the example of our bookkeeper. At her previous job, she says she always felt she had to pick up the slack for her counterpart, who took an administrative position instead of a more demanding job so that she could have more time for her children. It would be day No. 36 that her counterpart was asking, "Would it be OK if you stayed late or cover the phones for me even though you really should be going home now? Because my child is sick." Or, "Nobody came to pick my kid up," or, "There is a problem with the nanny," etc., etc.

The bookkeeper felt that it was really abusive. What's more, she felt that there was no opportunity for reciprocity. She couldn't say, "I have a private errand to run, would it be OK if I left?" There would be a hundred questions: "What kind of private errand? Is it the dentist? Is there a medical problem? Is it going to impact your work somehow?"

But, naturally, with a person raising a child, there are no questions. It would be politically incorrect to say, "What do you mean? Is it going to affect your work that you have a child?"

Recently, a new employee coming with me to a conference asked me if she could take a later flight than the rest of us so that she could put her children to bed. She got less sleep so that she could spend quality time with her son. How good was that for her job? I don't know. Her plane ticket cost the company twice as much as an earlier flight. At the end of the conference, I decided to leave early for a business reason, and she asked if she could go home early, too, to be with the children.

I said, "If you have a personal reason to go home, that's fine. But just say you have a personal reason. I don't want to hear about your kids. I don't want to let that enter into the psychology or the calculation of dealing with your requests. Everyone deserves the same treatment."

MS. SETNICKA: I think you are actually touching more on a performance-related issue than something impacted by child-care policy. If an employee is absent excessively, we look at it in terms of his or her responsibilities to the job. We would need to figure out ways to bring the employee's performance level up to where it should be.

There is a limit of two paid maternity or paternity leaves. After that, you can take a leave but without pay.

MR. MESKO: The question of equality is a confusing one. No one here is sitting down and saying you have used "X" amount of your benefits. It's a foreign thought to me even to be comparing it, dollar for dollar. People rarely take advantage of all of their leave and vacation. Managers always encourage it, but you cannot make people do it and some people don't take it. You don't get the sense here that there is a lot of pressure or intensity, but people perform. People have very high expectations of themselves and of each other.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Patagonia offers other benefits that have made the company notorious among members of Childfree Network as well, such as a grant of up to $2,500 to help with the cost of adopting. They also talk about Patagonia's lactation-support services.

MS. SETNICKA: Lactation-support services is a child-development staff here that support moms who want to breast-feed or continue to breast-feed. One of the great values of having an on-site infant program that will take infants as young as two months is that you can breast-feed as long as you want. There is a room set up upstairs with a breast pump, fridge and rocking chair. Some of the women who have their children in off-site programs might store their milk. We provide support to new moms who may be having difficulty with breast-feeding.

If you are in a meeting, and your baby needs to eat, the caregivers will bring the baby to you in the room. Women are breast-feeding around the office all the time. But if a woman uses a bottle she is not treated any differently.

MS. PRICE: But she doesn't get the benefits.

That's almost like the company dictating to its employees. Your company has made a decision on what is the right way to live and wants to choose it for its employees. Anytime that you give one employee benefits or finances, for adoption or for breast-feeding or anything that does not apply to a child-free employee, you are saying that we don't want you here if you don't have kids. There are a lot of people out there who don't agree with that logic. Your policies are clear discrimination.

At our company, most people would be freaked out by breast-feeding at the office, even if they just thought it was going on in the other room. People wouldn't be able to deal with women walking around with babies nursing. Do you think there is no employee in this organization who thinks, "That baby is crying again next to my desk. I can't concentrate. I've got my own stress. My boyfriend just left me. Why do I have to deal with this? Somebody just put a cork in that kid's mouth"? There is nobody who works here that feels that way?

MR. MESKO: I'm sure people think lots of things, just like they might think that their co-workers are getting on their nerves for any number of reasons. What's attractive about Patagonia is that we are offered a really generous benefits package and none of us probably uses it to the fullest. I rarely go to the doctor, but I'm not going to want an added benefit in some monetary way because someone else uses her medical benefits more.

MS. MESKO: You have to look at the other things that a company offers. Columbia offers tuition assistance for students. They get $750 a year, and that could add up to quite a bit.

MS. SETNICKA: We'll show you the cost-benefit analysis. We subsidize these programs, because it saves money, in tax deductions, reducing absenteeism and recruitment costs. And it gives parents peace of mind.

MS. PRICE: If you're going to set aside money for benefits, at least give employees a list they can choose from. Say, "Here's $10,000, and you can use it to take maternity leave, you can get fertility treatments, you can adopt, get a boob job, buy a breast pump, get your teeth whitened, take a course in the university, go traveling somewhere and find yourself," or whatever list of things your company feels it can support. I'm just trying to say that there are people who are not in this equation. My issue is only that all employees -- whether they are women or men, or are pregnant, or in a wheelchair -- all employees should get the same benefits.

MR. MESKO: It's just the family-friendly culture of our company. Nobody says you have to work here.

MS. PRICE: You're telling me child-free people aren't wanted here.