Friday, March 10, 2000
Union says working women struggle
Survey: Couples juggle shifts
BY DERRICK DePLEDGE
Enquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Tension over work, the trials of pregnancy, even the memory of painful kidney stones evaporated last Thursday when Trey Michael arrived in Jennifer Dorsey's life, healthy, if a few days sooner than the doctor predicted. “He's just beautiful,” she said.
The assistant produce manager at Kroger and her husband, Donald, a carpenter, are figuring out what to do with Trey when she returns to work in eight weeks.
Day care is not attractive. Grandparents have limits. Quitting would mean losing the family's health insurance, so Mrs. Dorsey is thinking about split shifts. She'll work weekends, when her husband can baby-sit, and divide the rest of the week between day and night shifts to reach the 36 hours necessary to keep her insurance.
“We thought we'd try it and see how it works for a month or two,” said Mrs. Dorsey, who lives in Cleves. “But how long do we want to do this? I don't want to be in this situation when Trey gets a little older. I don't want to miss the dinners or the evenings. It's the only time my husband and I have to sit down and talk about our day.”
A survey released Thursday by the AFL-CIO found that 46 percent of working women who are married or living with someone have different work hours than their partners.
Most of the 765 women interviewed by Lake Snell Perry & Associates have regular Monday-to-Friday workweeks,
but 28 percent routinely work at night or on weekends. A sample of 150 women in Ohio found similar results, with 41 percent working shifts at odds with their spouse or partner and 23 percent assigned to nights and weekends. The national survey results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The labor union is using the findings to back its demands for equal pay, paid medical leave and greater health care and pension coverage for the growing number of women in the workplace. The survey, conducted by telephone in January, found that women who earn under $25,000 a year, single women and women with a high school education or less are the most likely to work irregular hours.
Women make up 46 percent of the work force, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and 74 percent have full-time jobs. More than half of married couples have dual incomes; 64 percent among couples with chil dren under 18.
“Women are struggling to balance their families' work schedules at home, and then facing unequal pay and a lack of benefits once they get to their job,” said Karen Nussbaum, director of the AFL-CIO's working women's department. “That will affect how they vote.”
Frank Coleman, a spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said organized labor has vigorously fought federal legislation that would promote more flexibility for workers trying to balance job and family.
Republicans have proposed giving workers a chance to exchange overtime pay for extra time off, for instance, or juggle work hours over a two-week period instead of the traditional 40-hour work week.
Government employees and some in the private sector already have similar choices, but labor unions have resisted the ideas as potential corporate assaults on overtime pay and the 40-hour week.
“They are talking out of both sides of their mouths,” Mr. Coleman said. “It's the unions themselves that have opposed flexibility in the workplace.”
Julia Stokes, a stocker at Meijer in Dayton, Ohio, always has preferred the late shift. Her husband, Robert, worked days before he retired as a carpet buyer for Lazarus. “Normally, when he was leaving, I was coming home and when he came home I'd usually be asleep,” she said.
The Dorseys have no interest in that kind of lifestyle.
“We usually spend Sundays together doing stuff,” Jennifer Dorsey said. “We both golf. Everything happens on the weekends or at night, so it's going to be hard if I have to work.”
Some of her friends who work and have children often talk about what they might be missing.
“I don't want it to be like, "Is my baby going to walk today? Is my baby going to talk today?'”
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