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The Scene Of America’s Discontent: Work And Life

The Scene Of America’s Discontent: Work And Life

Recognize this woman?

She’s sandwiched between the needs of aging parents and the demands of young children. Her frustration is palpable. She’s fed up with her employer’s inflexibility over her schedule and with her boss’s attitude that equates motherhood with undedicated slacking off.

True, her schedule has to accommodate occasional doctor’s appointments and school events for children, as well as the emotional rollercoaster of watching her parent’s health decline. But she has a full-time career and a track record of success in a business that she dearly loves.

Guess what. This woman is now a man.

Among the more interesting findings of a new report on work/life conflicts is the dramatic rise in lawsuits by men who feel discriminated against as they try to manage it all. Welcome to the workplace, gentlemen.

It’s a sad commentary on gender, but the fact that men are increasingly being moved to sue their employers over family responsibilities will help change attitudes and policies. And they have to change.

The massive rise in discrimination lawsuits involving family responsibilities like child care, elder care, and maternity and paternity leave is “the biggest challenge employers never (saw) coming,” according to Cynthia Thomas Calvert, the author of “Caregivers in the Workplace.”

More fathers than mothers now report work/life conflict, according to the study, which was conducted by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings.

That shift is reflected by an astonishing 269 percent rise in lawsuits decided in the last decade that involved family responsibilities. The 4,400 cases studied cost employers nearly a half-billion dollars in verdicts and settlements between 2006 and 2015, yet these likely constitute only a fraction of what actually went through the courts.

Most of these cases go forward through a patchwork of protections. But Calvert also points out that no federal law exists that explicitly bans discrimination based on family responsibilities.

The majority of cases studied involved pregnancy and maternity leave. But men, as their numbers grow as caregivers, are now fighting attitudes that working women have long faced. WorkLife Law, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on ending employment discrimination against caregivers, runs a hotline, and 25 percent of the calls are now from men.

Increasingly, it is fathers who are offended when denied a plum assignment based on the perception that they won’t be as committed to their company. Now it is men who are angered that they are denied paternity leave or are passed over for promotion because they spend time caring for a disabled child.

A lot of the problems are the result of employees being penalized at work not for their actual job performance but based on assumptions and biases that too often are not recognized — at least until the lawsuit is filed.

Calvert’s study shows that the complaints occur in virtually every industry and at every level of employment, including top managers. And all races and genders were represented in the cases studied — although racial bias can further complicate workplace assumptions about how employees with family duties will or should behave.

Most employees will at some point in their careers become a caregiver. The study found that of the 43.5 million adults who gave unpaid care to either an adult or a child with special needs in 2014, nearly a quarter were millennials.

It’s tempting to believe that the country is sorting these issues out and heading in a better direction, that the gains of technology and awareness of our aging population are causing workplaces to realign policy and practices.

In reality, we are in the midst of ideological battles about work in general. Consider the fights over efforts to strip workers of their right to collective bargaining, debates about the minimum wage and the growing gap between what CEO’s earn and the salaries of everyone employed beneath them. The relationship between work and life is in turmoil in America.

So much of modern politics skirts these issues. However, judging by this 44-page report, they are urgently important to most voters. Forget the culture wars, Donald Trump’s bluster and Hillary Clinton’s email server. The concerns of the average voter are closer to home and work. Yet who is speaking for families struggling to manage it all?

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2016, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Thrifty Traveler: How To Search For An Authentic Spiritual Getaway

The Thrifty Traveler: How To Search For An Authentic Spiritual Getaway

By Myscha Theriault, Tribune News Service (TNS)

Finding time to feed one’s soul is something many struggle to incorporate when it comes to work-life balance. So it should come as no surprise that religious retreats are often as preferred a travel choice as romantic weekends or girlfriend vacations.From Saudi Arabia to Sedona, spiritual getaway options are as diverse as the people who seek them. Here are some tried-and-true methods for making sure you book an authentic one.

Lifestyle: Traveling to any place where spirituality is the local lifestyle is a sure shortcut to authenticity. Just ask any world traveler who’s ever spent time on the island of Bali, in Indonesia. Whether you’re making your way to the mother temple or attending one of the dance ceremonies in the cultural center that is the town of Ubud, it doesn’t take long to realize that this place is the real deal. Ditto for Peru’s Sacred Valley.

The spiritual practices of your destination don’t have to match your chosen religion in order to provide a powerful sense of understanding. While the faith practiced in Saudi Arabia isn’t my own, I did notice something undeniable when I visited the country on an exploratory business trip some years ago. Putting it into words has proved difficult over the years, but I am confident it was directly related to the system of prayer.

While other Persian Gulf countries have the same call to prayer schedule, with small mosques available in nearly every public building for those who wish to pray at the designated times, the kingdom takes it to an entirely different level. Prayer time in this country means commerce and other activities literally shut down so spirituality can be practiced like the priority it is for the local people. As a visitor who was there for more than a month, what I started to notice and appreciate was how powerful and profound those times of day were for my personal meditation. It’s something I’ve yet to experience again anywhere else, though I’ve tried repeatedly to re-create it.

Location: Remote temples and monastery experiences are certainly the gold standard celebrated in the cinema. However, they do tend to be suited to a different type of travel, where excursionists have the time to disconnect from the grid and commit a significant amount of time from their itineraries to get to and experience the sanctuary in question.

For those trying to carve out a bit of time in the family vacation itinerary for some religious reflection, choosing less remote locations that are still slightly removed from the day-to-day hustle and bustle is an affordable and workable solution. For stark desert beauty that provides solitude along with adventure potential for the rest of the family, Jordan’s Wadi Rum is tough to beat. If you happen to find yourself in northern Italy, the sanctuary of the Madonna Della Corona is also an excellent choice. A stone church built into the side of Mount Baldo, the structure is an engineering marvel unto itself. The view is stunning, and it’s a great stop on a day drive through the area. Picturesque mountain meadows, wineries, castles and other fun stops can be worked into the trip as well, depending on the route you choose.

Heritage: There’s a reason ancient religious sites remain pilgrimage destinations for modern-day travelers. People feel something when they arrive. Whether it’s a palpable energy suitable for deep meditation, a connection to the culture responsible for its creation or simply a chance to reflect upon whatever practice brought awakening to countless people over the ages, a site’s history plays a significant role in the spiritual nature of a traveler’s experience.

England’s Stonehenge and New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon are certainly two of the more famous options, but there are lesser-known options which are equally powerful. For example, the pre-Incan stone towers of Sillustani near Puno, Peru, provide more than enough cause for contemplation, as do the ancient Native American petroglyphs carved into a remote boulder in the middle of Minnesota’s massive Lake of the Woods. The fact this boulder is still used by the local Ojibwe as an offering site as it has been for generations speaks volumes about its authenticity.

(Myscha Theriault is a best-selling author and avid traveler. Having just finished a yearlong trip throughout the United States with her husband and Labrador retriever, Theriault is busy planning her next long-term adventure. Readers can keep up with her adventures on Twitter by following @MyschaTheriault.)

©2015 Myscha Theriault. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Moyan Brenn via Flickr

 

Meditate For Success

Meditate For Success

We ambitious strivers seeking guidance from fitness pros, decluttering experts, and TED talks often find the day divided in two unequal parts. Three-quarters goes to overworking. The remaining quarter is for countering the ill effects of overworking. We do the latter not necessarily to nurture our souls but to boost performance during the working hours.

You see, overworking and stress slow our productivity. Herein lies a paradox.

Relaxation, vacations, and a good night’s sleep could be seen as key to personal well-being. But gremlins have taken a wrench to our puritanical brains and put dollar values on our inner peace and repose. They are now a means to goose our output.

Consider the advice to get eight hours of sleep a night. Good sleep leaves one feeling refreshed, less depressed, less stressed. But it also has a utilitarian purpose. It boosts our performance at work. Thus, we use apps to ensure we’re maintaining eight-hour sleep periods incorporating five REM cycles.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the numbers: Sleep deprivation costs the U.S. economy $63 billion a year in lost productivity.

We seek techniques to do more per unit of time. For example, there are articles on how to “optimize” a three-day weekend. (To think, Americans used to have three-week vacations.)

Our employers are famously ungenerous with paid vacation. But many of us don’t even use the time we’re given. A study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association estimates that in 2013, Americans left 429 million paid vacation days on the table.

Why? Some said their workload is so heavy they can’t afford to get away. If they don’t complete their assignments, they may not have a job upon returning.

The travel association is now selling vacation time as a tool to raise the gross domestic product. If workers used all their available time off, the study says, U.S. business revenues would rise by $160 billion, and tax collections would rise by $21 billion.

Meditation, the great teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn tells us, is “for no purpose other than to be awake to what is actually so.”

But suppose it helps us better focus our attention. Wouldn’t that make us more useful worker bees? Sure.

A Google executive told Bloomberg TV that “wisdom traditions like yoga and meditation help us operate better.” He noted that the most important technology we have is the human body and brain. Yoga and meditation help us, he explained, “optimize this technology.”

Thanks to Google’s yoga program for its employees, he added, “there’s been a huge impact on both people’s productivity and culture.”

So yoga has become a get-ahead tool. Small wonder yoga teachers see participants aggressively jostling for mat space in their classes, according to The Wall Street Journal.

There’s also a smartphone app that lets students follow the instructors of their choice. That way, if a star yoga teacher is not going to lead a particular class, they don’t have to waste their time on a B-lister.

What healthy habits don’t do for productivity, drugs will. Many American workers are apparently taking medications for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder solely to improve their output at work.

Taking these stimulants can cause addiction, anxiety and hallucinations, but for intense competitors, they are jet fuel. As a woman in her late 20s told The New York Times, they are “necessary for survival of the best and the smartest and highest-achieving people.”

We really can’t blame health advocates for toting up the economic benefits of more relaxed living. That’s often the only argument anyone notices anymore.

Meditation improves concentration. Heck, let’s meditate — and medicate — to better meditate. It’s the American way.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Balint Földesi via Flickr

White House Holds Summit On Work-Life Balance

White House Holds Summit On Work-Life Balance

By Kyung M. Song, The Seattle Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Monday hosted its first White House Summit on Working Families, part of a national dialogue about how to update workplace policies for modern families that is already reshaping wage and work laws across the country.

The summit brought together academics, executives, labor leaders, and others on ways to encourage cultural and political shifts to enable employees to earn sustainable wages and to better juggle the clashing demands between work and home.

The daylong event, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., was meant to help fuse a patchwork of local, state, and federal rules and laws into broader national strategy. The focus on working families also is a key part of the Democrats’ agenda heading into the 2014 midterm elections this November.

Among Monday’s speakers was Makini Howell, an owner of Plum Restaurants, which operates several vegan eateries in Seattle. Howell said Seattle’s new $15-an-hour minimum wage ordinance and mandatory paid sick leave rules are a part of a compact that can benefit both employers and employees.

Employers “can care about the advancement of working families and still make a profit,” Howell said, to big cheers from the audience. “If you have a worker that dedicates five, 10 years of their lives to my success … why not pay a sick day?”

High-powered working parents offered candid stories about ways they balanced their professional and personal lives — or not.

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recalled sitting in a business meeting 28 years ago, two weeks away from her due date and in desperate need of a bathroom break. The workplace back then wasn’t much hospitable for pregnant women, so Jarrett fibbed about her reason for bolting from the room.

Jarrett rued that the United States remains almost a sole exception around the world in lacking mandatory paid maternity leave. A survey of 185 countries and territories by a United Nations agency last month found that only two other governments — Oman and Papua New Guinea — do not pay a portion of a new mother’s lost income or require employers to do so.

Mark Weinberger, Chairman and Chief Executive of EY, a global accounting and professional services firm once known as Ernst & Young, said he once bailed out of a business dinner in China in order to keep a promise to be with his daughter during her driver’s exam.

Weinberger believes it’s imperative for businesses to embrace policies that help retain committed employees. He said 60 percent of EY’s worldwide workforce of 180,000 are members of Generation Y, people mostly in their 20s. Nearly 40 percent of those millennials, Weinberger said, would leave an employer that isn’t flexible about schedules, family leaves, and other matters.

Weinberger said such wishes transcend gender.

“Women don’t want to be singled out, and men don’t want to be left out,” he said.

The summit was sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Labor, and the White House Council on Women and Girls.

It follows a series of actions by the Obama administration and Democrats to promote, among other issues, higher minimum wages, pay parity for women and universal preschool.

In February, Obama signed an executive order to raise the federal minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour, to $10.10 an hour on Jan. 1 for employees of federal contractors, ranging from defense companies like Boeing to janitorial and food-services firms.

Photo: dcJohn via Flickr

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