This is more of a blog post than news…
I work at a manufacturing facility. It is a good entry-level job, especially once the production bonus starts kicking in. There are three workers on my team. Our main job is to cut and prepare the materials that the builders use to construct the products. After six months I became the senior guy on the team.
Well, that’s a little misleading, because Phil started after me but he had worked in the factory before. Like me, Phil is in his early 50’s.
Our company is quite large. We work in one of about five facilities in Oregon and the headquarters is in Indiana. As far as I know, none of the company’s numerous facilities are union. Health benefits are satisfactory. The company provides a 401(k) but offers no matching. There are no employee resource groups.
Recently I have worked for a handful of companies both local and national. I have also spent many hours looking for jobs. I feel confident that I understand the types of benefits most companies offer. That said, I would describe my current workplace as a low-benefits place that specializes in offering entry-level jobs to people who are simply willing to work and learn. There are no pre-employment screenings, other than a check to make sure workers are over 18 years old. Based on my observations, most workers stay less than a year.
Just a few days ago my supervisor gathered me and my co-worker together. “Phil’s dad fell and broke his hip, so Phil is going to have to take some time off to take care of him. His dad is in his 80’s. Phil has a brother, but the brother is not able to take care of the dad. It has to be Phil.”
Of course, we mainly asked about how this would be affecting us. The answer was we would both have to work harder to cover Phil’s absence, which had no return date.
But then the supervisor added, gesturing toward the factory manager’s office, “we’re meeting to see what we can do for Phil.”
Since Phil restarted after I started, I assume he had built up no more than about 10 hours of sick leave and no paid time off (PTO,) which is not credited until a year of employment. I also assume that Phil will earn no wages during his time off. In fact, he may simply be terminated and rehired when the care event is past (again, no idea when that will be.)
Is Phil eligible for federal family medical leave? Not according to the U.S Department of Labor website, because he has not worked for our company for more than a year. Maybe they can get around that by crediting him with the prior time he worked there. And although I do not know all the details about the broken hip, it sounds like Phil’s dad might not fall under the “serious health condition” qualifier. Anyway, FMLA doesn’t include pay – it just protects your job.
Oregon has a new paid family leave policy that might include him, but it appears that the same 12 months of employment is required and similar questions about what qualifies as a serious health condition might apply.
This whole scenario, still just a few days old, got me thinking about eldercare benefits. I know this is going to sound kind of like I am reinforcing stereotypes, but Phil is NOT the person I think most of us imagine when we imagine the dilemma of the worker needing to stop everything and care for an aging parent. Other than his age, he fits none of the stereotypes that I have, anyway.
He is an entry-level hands-on laborer, about as far from white-collar as you can get.
He is a man. I believe stats would back up my stereotype that most workers caring for parents are women. (They do…61% of family caregivers are women.)
Phil’s case highlights two of the issues haunting the problem of workers needing to care for parents.
First, although the potential benefits that could help Phil are typically packaged with parental benefits, this is really a different situation. Most working parents have a monthslong “warning” that the child is on the way, allowing for a sort of preparation of benefits. Not so with Phil. Although there may have been some reasonable possibility that his dad would soon need some sort of care (because of his age,) the fall and the broken hip happened suddenly. Also, most parents who take some sort of leave to care for their children can reasonably predict when they can return to work. In some cases, the amount of leave they have is designed to meet that timeline. Either way, at some point, the caregiving needs can be met elsewhere (in school, if nothing else.) Caring for an adult is different. If the care recipient is dying, who knows how long that will take? If they have broken a hip, recovery times can vary, and often new complications arise due to the immobility.
This open-timeline problem with Phil is evident to us workers who have to cover his duties. We definitely want to know how long we will be stretched thin!
Second, the concept of providing benefits for people who need to care for older parents rarely extends to entry-level workers at a non-union company. And I am just going to say it: those benefits are just not very blue-collar. If you imagine a family of working children suddenly facing the need to care for a parent who has fallen, the temptation to assign caregiving responsibilities to the least gainfully employed over the most gainfully employed is logical. However, it is the most gainfully employed who is likely to have the benefits that could really help.
When my supervisor indicated that the management would “see what they could do” for Phil, I am certain he meant finding ways to make sure Phil still had some money coming in. But Phil might also benefit from some less tangible support, such as access to groups of other caregivers or workshops to help him manage his stress. He strikes me as the typical man who might not realize how much that sort of support could help until he actually uses it. However, there are no options through our work to access that sort of support. Even though we are a huge national company that employs thousands, because most of those thousands are blue-collar workers, “soft” benefits like caregiver fellowship are not even on the agenda when the HR department meets.
Yet, Phil is the one who could really use those benefits.
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