Family Friendly Workplace Benefits: Policy Mirage, Organizational Contexts, and Worker Power

Abstract

The general purpose of the paper is to expand our understanding of how and why employer-provided benefits and resources that support the obligations and commitments of workers to their families are more or less available in the workplace. The specific objectives of this paper are threefold. First, it considers the limitations of a public policy approach to family benefits in the workplace through a brief review of the background and impact of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Second, it identifies a cluster of "family friendly" workplace benefits and uses several divergent theoretical approaches (e.g., neoclassical economics, dual economy, segmented labor market) as the basis for predicting and exploring the impact of organizational factors on the availability of benefits to workers. Third, using a labor-process, production control, and class interest perspective, it explores the relationship between variations in worker power and the availability of family friendly benefits. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of our research findings in terms of offering a more complete understanding of the policy, organizational, and power factors involved in shaping workers' access to family-friendly benefits. We also conclude that future research investigating the intersection of work and family issues would be well served by the development of structurally-informed theoretical approaches that offer insights into the links between work and family spheres of activity and that stimulate the formation of hypotheses concerning this topic.