Flexible working just benefits middle class women who have the luxury to consider 'work life balance' - AIBU?

[Waferbiscuit]

We had a flexible working policy at my current and last workplace. In both I managed a large (20+) team of mostly women across various grades. Flexible working - normally reduced hours or term time hours, compressed hours and wfh - was available but my general observation has been that these initiatives mostly benefit the middle class.

Reduced hours has primarily been taken by people on higher grades who can afford to work part time - virtually all the grade 7 and 8 women in my team now work part time. Those in grades 3 and 4 can't afford to reduce hours and so are still in full time often providing the continuity in the office and sometimes picking up the work of those who aren't in. A few at lower grades came back from mat leave after 6 months because they couldn't afford the drop in pay. Wfh until recently was only given to senior staff so again was exclusive and that caused a situation where senior staff weren't present and more junior staff were required to be around.

Flexible working is starting to create a chasm between the haves and have nots - those who like to go one about the importance of their work life balance in the company of women who have no choice but to work full time and can't even contemplate work life balance.

Aibu to suggest we need to rethink flexible working so it benefits all?

tbh, a lot of people (mainly women) who work less than full hours do so, because the cannot afford child care.

I have friends who returned to work early full time - but they are all higher earners. If you ear NMW or just a bit above, childcare is prohibitive.

Skills are acquired through hard work

I find it quite offensive to say that staff in low paid roles aren't skilled. Do you really think that carers are unskilled? Or retail staff who need to know about the products and work with fairly complicated ordering systems for example? None of this work is "unskilled".

The way people talk about 'hard work' sometimes, you'd think they were crawling on their knees, digging tunnels with their bare hands and literally working their fingers to the bone.

Lots of people work hard, in the sense of turning up on time, doing their work, being reliable, learning to use new software/change management techniques/communication techniques etc, working as a team with their colleagues/taking professional exams.

None of that necessarily equates to earning more money. Even the lowest paid jobs in 2020 expect ten times as many skills just to get to the interview stage than was the case a generation ago. Everyone wants skilled workers, no one wants to train them.

"tbh, a lot of people (mainly women) who work less than full hours do so, because the cannot afford child care.

I have friends who returned to work early full time - but they are all higher earners. If you ear NMW or just a bit above, childcare is prohibitive."

Yes, but then there is somebody making up the shortfall isn't there. Either a DH or the state in the form of benefits. Independent women on low pay can't afford to go part time.

Skills are acquired through hard work

And training/qualifications.

Think this is due to longstanding inequalities affecting who is in different roles.

And it's very hard to study for formal qualifications when you're on a low salary because they are so prohibitively expensive, so it's a bit of a catch 22 situation.

If two equally talented, equally hardworking people get entry level jobs at the age of say 21 with two different companies and one offers training and assistance to study, whilst the other doesn't, the gap between one person's skills and experience and the others will open up within a very short space of time. And since you use the skills in your current job to apply for your next one, if your employer won't let you learn new skills you're trapped. It's a tactic that a lot of companies use to prevent their staff from leaving.

That's true gwen but the OP very much couched part time working, which she conflated with flexi, as something that's the preserve of those with a well earning partner. It isn't.

Obviously there are people who couldn't afford to work part time, but equally the total failure to take any notice of those receiving top up benefits and those who are limited to part time because of childcare does rather suggest OP doesn't have much understanding of how things work outside her own narrow strata. A bit unfortunate in a post essentially complaining about pointy elbowed middle classes!

I can so relate to this. I work in an admin role. One senior director achieves her work life balance at the expense of mine, or tries to. Emailing me and texting me at all hours to change meetings and so on. When her childcare is a problem she appears to expect me to change mine to suit her. She has no boundaries.

Does anyone else notice that 'middle class women' always seems to be used in a pejorative sense. Like 'middle class women' are the enemy somehow and anything that might help them in any way is manifestly wrong. Why is this do you think?

What about 'middle class men' OP? Or are you quite happy that they continue to retain all the privilege of never having to even consider fitting work around childcare.

Flexible working means my dh (definitely not middle class or privileged, he is an hourly paid cabinet maker) could reduce his hours to provide our eldest ds with the support to get to school that the LA cannot give and thus mean he has an attendance in the high 90s rather than the low 30s. It also means I can do weird hours to ensure we have enough to live on now my dh earns too little to pay tax on. So no. You're wrong and BU.

I have thenavigator. It's the same school of thought that argues middle class women advance in their careers by exploiting the labour of women childcare workers and cleaners, as though the males who father these children and live in these houses are somehow uninvolved.

Long before kids, on low pay, I did work somewhere that provided you worked core hours of 9.30-3 you could work the rest of your hours flexi, and you could save up to 3 days worth to take off as leave but it had to be booked 2 weeks in advance on a proviso there were enough staff in. I used to mop up the slack of the school holidays work from people with kids, and invariably work masses of extra hours and have lots of term time off (where I worked another job). Sometimes in the summer holidays I'd be asked to work extra to cover - but as this took me above the 3 days worth you could hold in hand, they would allow it to be paid as overtime. It was great because I was saving at the time.

So I think you're wrong.

If I could not work flexibly or part time I wouldn't be able to work at all. So YANBU to want those options available to more. YABVU to think that they shouldn't be available to some unless they are available to all.

I had a senior role and high salary and zero flexibility when returning to work - despite years of exemplary performance it all went pear shaped resulting in me leaving. More junior members always had requests for flexible working accepted. I ended up retraining for 3 years at uni to gain flexibility and a better home/life balance.

My working class, single mum, very able, quite well paid colleague got it. She was very well regarded. She looked after her mother one day a week for shopping and cleaning for several years before her mum died. Was hard going for her. No doubt the money was missed, but her brother lived abroad and she was it. Other colleagues were so jealous of her. It's a great perk during the caring years but it's no picnic.

@Gwenhwyfar “Plenty of people work hard in unskilled or low skilled jobs“ this is the one point that a lot of people on here don’t seem to be able to grasp. To them, if you “work hard” you will automatically rise through the ranks and achieve a highly paid, highly impressive career. They just cannot accept that lots of people don’t have careers, they have jobs. They see these people every single day in the supermarket, the coffee shop, doing the recycling, cleaning windows, delivering goods, and yet they still somehow don’t acknowledge that they exist as a workforce. I don’t know who exactly they think are going to fill all these roles if the lazy arses doing them just worked a bit harder and got promoted to CEO 🙄.

@gingersausage great post

Yeah there are a lot of posts on here from people who have no understanding that working more and harder doesn't necessarily facilitate a better financial situation. You see it in so many discussions: SAHPs, childcare, benefits reform, income caps for SH tenants, loads of issues.

Well said gingersausage.

We need more men to request it, and we need more men to be noted as the point of contact if our children are sick at school.

Fighting for feminisim, womens rights etc is great and to be encouraged but WHEN THERE IS A PARTNER who is just as capable to be called to pick a child who is sick up from school, or to have to take time off work to arrange childcare and "Ooh cant be Him Indoors cos he's the main breadwinner, in a ver ver important job is all goes quite pear shaped...

My experience was very different as it was largely people in lower grades who took advantage of flexible and part time working. Those in the highest grades were afraid to take it in case it made them seem uncommitted.
I don't know what your solution would be. I think it's important for part time and flexible work to be offered. I don't understand why people should be resentful of people working part time either. They sacrifice part of their salary to do so and again in my experience in general employers get more than they pay for with part time staff as they are usually more productive and work more hours than they are paid for.

Well I don’t know where you work but there are a fair amount of working class people in more senior roles in my organisation who are flexiworking. Unless your organisation discriminates on class for promotions it’s not a class issue.

@MarchDaffs but obviously the fathers are entitled to careers by virtue of their maleness don’t you know? Why even bring it up? Women are the only ones responsible for upholding the sisterhood, nothing worse than a sex-traitor 🙄

Inconsistency is the main challenge.

In the public sector, flexible working and part time working is common and seems to be available to everyone.

Private sector can be patchy. I have personally experienced more flexible working (being able to WFH, vary hours, ability to attend appointments without formal time off) at senior level, whereas part time working is more common in lower levels.

My view is in senior roles its easier to do the role flexibly therefore you don't need to drop hours. Someone in a lower grade, who needs to be in the office at fixed times or has to use physical equipment in the office has to drop hours as there is no flexibility to vary times of work or work away from the office.

There's no easy solution to making flexible working available to all. It really is role dependant. I think anyone in an operational role (like admin, processing, call centre) will struggle to get flexible working as there will key hours to cover and likely that you will need to be in the office to do it. Like the call centre example above - if you take card payments over the phone there are regulations to protect data (PCI DSS) so you can't just let people work from home as there would be a fraud risk (like people writing down the card numbers).

Of course some of this could be overcome with technology, but its expensive and firms don't want to invest when they know people need jobs and will have to accept the terms.

Another pitfall I have seen for part time workers, is going back to full time when kids have grown up. I personally have seen a few requests for this refused recently due to budget and also because they have recruited other full time staff so don't need to offer the part timer more hours. Mean you can be stuck in a part time role when you don't want to be.