Life Balance

How much of a sincere effort do employers or supervisors have to concede to accommodate an employee who requests special treatment to allow him/her leeway in balancing work and family life? This speaks to the issue of social and/or individual responsibility. In that if someone elects to raise a family, bear children and take on the social and personal obligation to nurture those children, while at the same time contributing to society in other ways - by holding down a paying job, for example, should they legitimately and logically demand that others sacrifice on their behalf?

After all, if someone is tasked to perform their job through a certain time schedule and they find that schedule interfering with their plans relating to their home situation, someone else will have to absorb that schedule to ensure that the work gets done, if they don't. In this way the demands they make upon their employer for more flexibility than is generally offered to others, imposes upon the employer/supervisor the need to work out a new schedule, and upon others impacted by that new schedule, as well.

In satisfying the need of one employee, others are also affected. And what happens if all the employees in a certain unit, for example, call upon their employer or the supervisor tasked with working out satisfactory employment arrangements for all of them in recognition of private affairs, and in so doing the work itself is deleteriously affected?  Say, for example, these are not workers in the private sector, but the public one, paid by tax dollars to provide essential services to the public.

The public, anticipating that it will be served in an efficient and adequate manner to compensate for the loss of part of their own income, finds itself short-shrifted.  While the public service employee or employees if more than one happen to be accommodated, find themselves the beneficiaries of added benefits, the benefits to the consuming public have been shrunken commensurately. Either more employees have to be hired to make up the deficit, or those requiring special accommodation must be denied.

A new parent who also worked as a customs officer at Toronto's Pearson International Airport on a rotating shift, found the shift assigned to her inconvenient, after returning from maternity leave in 2004 following the birth of her child. Accordingly, Fiona Johnstone requested management to assign her a full-time, three-times-a-week 12-hour shift which would better jive with her childcare arrangements. Management declined, citing pre-existing workplace policies.

A 2010 Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruled that a new parent had the right to work her preferred shift; she was not obligated to accept the one her employee assigned her to. That ruling was appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal which found itself in agreement with the Human Rights Tribunal ruling. Ms. Johnstone's managers made an effort to respond to her request, allowing her to work three days a week for 10 hours, with a fourth day of four hours.

Which special arrangement seeking to accommodate her need, still did not satisfy this employee, which was when she brought her case to the rights tribunal. She was determined that her rights as an employee had been violated. Her employer, the Canadian Border Services Agency, was to be brought to its knees, to understand that an employee could pull rank over other employees on the basis of family responsibilities.

And they were. So where does that leave all those other people with similar and often more stringent difficulties in balancing the demands of private and public life? Many people have found themselves in such a difficult position due to a lack of flexibility that they have chosen to seek other employment in deference both to their personal need and to the acceptance that employers must be able logically to anticipate a certain level of cooperation from employees.

Employment is an aspiration, a needful adjunct to a successful life, a means to pay the bills, it is not considered a human right. And no employer is obligated to provide for any employee what that employee might consider to be an ideal situation for their working requirements meshing seamlessly with their personal obligations. When that occurs it is serendipitous, or because the employee sought a job that would offer the flexibility they sought.

The ruling by the Federal Court on the heels of the decision by the Ontario Human Rights Commission is an infringement, an intrusion, on the workplace that is unwarranted. There are certain rights of workers that must be upheld by law, and they are; a safe working environment, equality of opportunities, and a decent working wage, the latter accomplished through negotiations between employer and worker representatives.

If people wish to become parents and to raise families and complement and complete their lives in such a manner that is a private matter.  Society gains by it, and society makes specific efforts to reflect its appreciation; there are tax benefits to parents, and the social contract provides for the education of children, as well as additional social benefits through community centre activities and other like programs.

Co-opting an unwilling employer to make additional sacrifices to satisfy the perceived needs of a parent struggling to accommodate limited time to both workplace and home obligations, is not part of the social workplace contract.