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Welcome to the liveblog of the BlogHer '10 panel: Change Agents: ROYO - Screw Work/Life Balance, We Need Work/Life POLICY! Click here for more info.
This panel took place on Saturday, August 7 at 1:30 pm and ends at 2:45 pm Eastern time.
When Michelle Obama visited the Department of Labor early this year, she extolled the balance of family-friendly workplaces. But when will things really change? There is a small but powerful group of women and men online, such as Stephanie Wilchfort and Morra Aarons-Mele, who are broadening their reach and blogging about how to change the way all Americans, men and women, work. We’re talking about shifting the conversation from one about work/life balance, since those inevitably reflect a struggle to adapt current family realities to the old world where one parent worked, one stayed at home. Change is hard – but bloggers have a platform from which to advocate, persuade and activate. Discuss how to harness our power as bloggers to change one of the most fundamental parts of our lives.
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TWITTER: #goodwork
We want results from this session. Our goal is to leave the session with two, actionable things that we, as bloggers, can do to improve work-life policy.
Morra's been blogging for six years. Came into the work-life stuff as a woman in the tech field. Then she had kids and work really changed.
Stephanie's been blogging for a year-and-a-half. She anticipates being in the corporate environment for the rest of her career. Since she had her son for years ago, and finds that wanting to achieve high career goals, and finds that as a mother, she has faced incredible challenges and barriers. She blogs about women, work, and the politics of motherhood.
Morra:
As a mother with my own company, I feel that I should have all the flexibility in the world. Except instead, I find myself incredibly overworked -- always responding to people at all hours. So we're going to talk about boundaries, too.
Anita from Moms Rising (momsrising.org): We advocate for policies that we know would support family economic security and well being. Paid sick days, paid family leave, open/flexible work policies. There's a lot happening at the federal and state level, and we try to get the word out about what's going on. We need to let our legislators know that we support these activities.
Personal story from a Moms Rising member: She wrote to us to say that because she wasn't able to afford sick time from her job, her child sustained permanent hearing loss. It was preventable, but she would have lost her job to have him cared for.
Paid family leave is another issue near and dear to our hearts. Paid leave is related to being able to breastfeed. It's also related to mortgage issues. It's absolutely critical.
Stephanie: Two things that are also critical for us to pay attention to.
1) Technology infrastructure. We can't work from home if our technology isn't available or working.
2) Transportation policy. Commuting is an enormous drain on our resources.
We need to think about these issues when we're thinking about our work-life and family policy arena.
Cali Yost doing audience poll about work-life flexibility. She has worked with companies on work-life balance/flexibility for 15 years. Went from male bosses giving moms some flexibility sometimes. Then it started to become policy, and then it started to piss off the men. Then it became evident that work-life flexibility impacts everyone, because everyone has a life. Having a policy on your company website is useless. It doesn't deal with the realities.
Morra: Obama said, "Never again will the Federal Government shut down because it snows."
Cali: As you think about what you can do, educate yourself about the benefits to the business. Flexible workers impact the business's ability to function. It's NOT about women who need a special thing. To advance the conversation, we need to talk about how to make it about everyone, and about business needs.
Morra: We need to stop framing this in terms of parenting.
AUDIENCE
Audience Question: Class issues related to this discussion: service workers can't work flexibly or from home. How do we make this something that is shared, not just for white, middle-class women?
Stephanie: Flex schedules are not going to work for every job. There are a host of OTHER policy issues that help
