Framing Flexible Work

Over at Half Changed World, Elizabeth asks whether policies to promote flexible work—both part-time work and more flexible hours or locations for full-time workers—"should be framed as about caregiving or not" and outlines the pros and cons:

The arguments against making this a conversation about caregiving are:

• As long as flexible work is seen as a special privilege or accommodation for a limited population, it will be stigmatized—the mommy track.
• Moreover, special privileges create resentment among those who don't get them -- this is where you hear the stories from childless workers who complain that their colleagues with kids race out the door at 5.30, and assume that they're always available to work late.
• If we truly believe that business should only care what you achieve, not when or where you do it, this should apply to everyone, regardless of the reason they desire flexibility.

....

The argument on the other side is that we shouldn't be afraid to say that caregiving is important. In the US, we often treat having children as a sort of expensive hobby -- something that people do for their own pleasure, and that doesn't incur any societal obligations. If it takes up all their time and money, they should have known what they were getting into. So, I have real misgivings about going down a path that says that it doesn't matter whether you want time off to care for a child or a sick parent or to train for a triathlon, write a novel, or sleep off your hangover.

I prefer a "targeting within universalism" approach to flexible work: all workers should have more flexibility at work, and additional protections/benefits should be available to certain categories of workers like caregivers, veterans, volunteers, etc. I don't have any problem with saying that caregiving is important, and don't believe government needs to be neutral about caregiving. But flexible work is about more than caregiving—it should be about improving people's quality of life by allowing for a better balance between work and the rest of one's life pursuits, including, but not limited to, caregiving.

Flexible work is also about "the eternal centre-left values of liberty, equality and solidarity." Liberty isn't something that stops at the door to the workplace, that's why we have a variety of basic protections for workers. As a nation's productivity and wealth increases, the freedom of its people should also increase.