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157 8 WILL THE REAL FAMILY-FRIENDLY EMPLOYER PLEASE STAND UP Who Permits Work Hour Reductions for Childcare? Robert Hutchens and Patrick Nolen The problem of balancing work and family life is particularly onerous when an employee wants to work fewer hours to deal with a family crisis. This is probably easiest for an acute crisis for which a couple of days off are required. More complicated are long-term problems, such as a sick or injured child who requires several months of care. This chapter examines how employers react to an especially difficult familywork issue: an employee who wants to move from full-time to part-time in order to care for a young child. One reason to examine movements from full-time to part-time is that they seem to fall outside the purview of the existing literature on family-friendly policies. The focus of this literature is principally on formal policies such as maternity leave, paternity leave, and leave beyond that required by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Empirical work is often based on an index that combines several different “familyfriendly ”policies, declaring employers with high values of the index“progressive.”It is not at all clear how these progressive employers would deal with an employee who wants to move from full-time to part-time in order to care for a child. The situation may be more a matter of informal practice than formal policy. Indeed, organizations with codified formal policies may be precisely the kinds of employers who do not permit such a shift from full-time to part-time. Of course, both formal and informal policies and practices can play a role in alleviating work-family tensions, and both are thereby good topics for investigation. It is surely not the case that formal policies are always superior. There are, for example, situations where individual circumstances are more easily addressed through informal mechanisms. Formal policies may be adopted, not because they are more effective, but because organizational size renders informal mechanisms unwieldy. 158 ROBERT HUTCHENS AND PATRICK NOLEN Moreover, it is interesting to examine how ideas that have been tested using data on formal family-friendly policies can be extended to less visible employer practices; that is, practices that, while family-friendly, may not be included in the employer’s written description of personnel or fringe benefit policies. Thus, this chapter analyzes establishment-level data on whether an employer is willing to accommodate an employee who wants to reduce hours in order to care for a child. In this chapter we seek to understand what types of employers permit such a reduction in hours and whether employers who permit such a reduction tend to also offer more formal family-friendly policies, such as paid maternity and paternity leave. The Literature The existing literature on employer responsiveness to work-family issues often focuses on employer-financed benefits or services. For example, an organization that provides onsite daycare or pays for daycare away from the workplace is reasonably viewed as responsive to work-family issues (Goodstein 1994; Ingram and Simons 1995; Osterman 1995). Fringe benefits such as paid maternity and paternity leave are also important (Galinsky and Bond 1998; Ingram and Simons 1995). Finally, a responsive employer has formal policies that assure flexibility in hours such as flextime or parental leave for infant care (Galinsky and Bond 1998; Trzcinski 1991). There is no question that such policies identify family-friendly employers. One worries , however, that this emphasis on formal policies and fringe benefits could bias results toward large organizations. Smaller organizations may use informal practices to address similar work-family issues. Indeed, smaller organizations may have the luxury of addressing each employee’s situation individually, and thus may not require formal policies. Such worries are reinforced by the frequent use of indexes of family-friendly policies. For example, as their dependent variable in a multivariate analysis, Ingram and Simons (1995) use an index whereby an organization is ranked as most responsive to work-family issues when it provided a “dependent care service” as well as a “flexible workplace option.” To satisfy this criterion, the firm must have a formal policy that pays for a benefit or service. Goodstein (1994) and Osterman (1995) use a similar index in their work. Although the indexes in some of these studies apparently include informal practices, such practices are viewed as inferior to more formal policies. Ingram and Simons (1995), for example, treat unpaid paternity leave as a type of work...

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